The Dyirbal people of a place now named North Queensland, Australia, had no doors in need of opening, at least not until sometime after 1863, when the processes of colonial “discovery” and “settlement” began and their lives were forever changed.

But this is to begin the way colonizers have traditionally started their understandings of the colonized, by bewildering absences in the other’s meaningful world. We are going to turn this habit of observation and orientation to knowledge around the other way, to look for things that “they” have and that “we” native speakers in the English-dominated universe of digital modernity do not. This, in order to find out some things about ourselves.

One of these things to be found in the meaning-making practices of Dyirbal people is finely specified, and thus acutely felt, relations of transactivity.

ŋayi wulŋuru bula bundabunda

ŋayi dagu bundabunda

ŋayi wulŋuru bula bagal-ŋa-nyu

ŋayi wulŋuru dagu bagal-ŋa-nyu

The two of them can be heard making a big noise

The scrub hens are making a big noise

Two birds are making a big noise clapping their wings

Scrub-hens are making a big noise clapping their wings⁹⁶

Jimmy Murray – his Anglicized name – sang these words at the last corroboree or traditional communal meeting in October 1963.

It was nearly two centuries after first contact with the British colonizers, one century after their settlements began in the region, and now the end of a tradition tens of thousands of years old. By the time linguist Robert Dixon recorded the song, there were only about one hundred speakers of Dyirbal. They had managed to retain their language and social practices where other, neighboring peoples had lost theirs, mainly because their country was rainforest, good for them but hard for the colonizer to turn to his modern use.

All the peoples of North Queensland knew at the time that Captain Cook and his crew had been past in their ship in 1770, stopping for seven weeks in the mouth of a river Cook named after his ship, the Endeavour River. They were there to make repairs after the ship had been damaged on coral reefs. But it took the Dyirbal longer to find out that in his moment of “discovery” Cook had also claimed Australia for the British Empire. They found this out with a vengeance after 1864 when the Queensland settlers established a port at a place they called Cardwell. The first sugar plantations appeared soon after, using slave laborers captured in the South Sea Islands.

Neighboring peoples would sometimes walk for four or five days to a corroboree, which could last for up to a week. This was not a society that needed a great deal of time to work for subsistence, perhaps an average of twenty hours per week, leaving a great deal of time for purely “cultural” activity. The Dyirbal people spoke six different dialects, and other peoples attending the corroboree would be speakers of mutually unintelligible languages. Everyone, however, was multilingual.

Jimmy Murray’s song was one of hundreds in the Dyirbal repertoire. On the page, we have presented it as a poem, and using phonetic and orthographic practices developed by linguists in order to turn first or indigenous peoples’ speech into writing. This means that the text presented here is many steps removed from the meaning-reality to which it now refers.

It is also isolated into a single meaning form, text. This never happened – Dyirbal poems were always sung. They were always danced, and by a number of dancers in unison. The dancers were painted in red, yellow, and white clays. They used props to support their performance – feathers, branches, tools, ritual objects. Boomerangs were clapped and skin drums tapped to a constant beat. Deeply synesthetic multimodality was the norm, in contrast with the world of literacy where for half a millennium at least we have artificially struggled to isolate forms of meaning.⁹⁷

In the corroboree, each song/poem/embodied performance references a single image – mating scrub hens about to build their nest, or some other meaningful animal, natural, or human phenomenon. Songs have two or four lines, each “line” has either nine or eleven syllables. In performance, the lines are repeated in complex patterns a dozen or so times. In Jimmy Murray’s singing on October 26, 1963, the four lines were performed as follows (numbers reference the four lines; commas are stops for breath; equals signs are where the song stops to repeat): 131, 314, 1313, 1331, 3141= 313, 1141, 4141= 141= 3232= 323, 2323.⁹⁸

Many song-poems are a single clause,⁹⁹ which means that a lot of meaning turns on the nuance of its transactivity. When we parse this song-poem, it consists of several clauses elaborating upon a single event from several different perspectives of transactivity. Much is known from shared context. Singers and hearers would know by multimodal transposition into everyday experience that wing clapping happens at nest-building and mating time. Nor is the wider narrative explicit, at least there is no narrative to be found in speech alone. The narrative is deeper and pervasive. It is what surrounds, in the contextualized meanings of totemic animals and places, and in the cosmology of past and present, of people and nature.

A scrub hen may be a living person and a spirit ancestor. The living person is, by transposition, the spirit ancestor incarnate. The meaning of one is the meaning of the other. The singers and the listeners know this in the hearing and the seeing. This is the origin of the universe, where animals are spirit ancestors who created the world in its various aspects. This is law in the form of moral rule and its juridical application. This is personal identity for people so named or associated by totem. This is homage to material life in the bountiful rainforest.

The colonizers created a word in English to capture this cosmology – unsatisfactorily – the “dreamtime.”¹⁰⁰ With the sense-making resources we have in a modern world of fractured institutions and alienation from nature, it is difficult to capture the deep simultaneity, the integral totality, of these multimodal transpositions of time, place, person, material life, and cultural practice.

Dixon parses the speech of the scrub hen performance. “The two of them …, ” it begins. This he points out is, a dual form. Where we in English have two pluralities, singular and plural, Dyirbal has three: singular, dual, and plural. It is also in a grammatical case that we don’t notice in English, which he classifies, not as the familiar nominative, but (obscurely in this naming) “absolutive.” Then the verb “clapping” uses a grammatical voice which he names “anti-passive,” again obscurely.

Dyirbal, like many other languages of first peoples, allows free word order (this is good for poetical meter and rhythm in song), but has a phenomenally extensive system of noun and pronoun case-marking, classificatory prefixing, and verb conjugation.^§AS1.1.3c This encompasses meaning functions of such subtlety that speakers of modern languages can barely grasp them. The grammatical intricacy of these languages makes them almost impossible for non-native speakers to learn with anything like proficiency, capturing as they do finely calibrated nuances of meaning that have no direct parallels – let alone to comprehend the logics of transactivity that sustain their deepest cosmologies.¹⁰¹

---

⁹⁶ R.M.W. Dixon and Grace Koch, 1996, Dyirbal Song Poetry: The Oral Literature of an Australian Rainforest People, Brisbane, Australia: University of Queensland Press, p. 81.

⁹⁷ Ibid., pp. 3–6, 17–18.

⁹⁸ Ibid., pp. 14, 81.

⁹⁹ Ibid., pp. 40–41.

¹⁰⁰ R.M.W. Dixon, 1980, The Languages of Australia, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 47–48.

¹⁰¹ R.M.W. Dixon and Grace Koch, 1996, Dyirbal Song Poetry: The Oral Literature of an Australian Rainforest People, Brisbane, Australia: University of Queensland Press, pp. 81–82.

---

Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 204-207. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Dyirbal "Scrub Hen" Song §MS2.1.2c