Stories from the Saltwater as told by the old Marra ladies

Greg Dickson, Australian National University

Project Details:

Small Grant. Duration: 2010-2011. £8,500

Project Summary:

There are five elderly Marra (lSO:mec, location: -15/135.5) speakers who are defying language shift in the Roper River region of Northern Australia, where all other Marra people now use Kriol, an English-based creole, as a lingua franca. This project will capture stories in Marra, translated into Kriol and English, about the lives of these last Marra speakers and their traditional knowledge. The project is truly collaborative and will create an ethnographically oriented canon of trilingual texts representing Marra people and traditional lifestyles. It will be of significant cultural and educational value to Marra people and inform important inguistic research.