Making linguistic diversity visible in parliament

The material and linguistic representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in parliaments can be important against a history of exclusion. Similarly, this new mural at my workplace by Dr Kirsten Gray, a Yuwaalaraay and Muruwari woman, recent PhD graduate, artist and Associate Professor, aims to signal that the UTS Faculty of Law is a welcoming space for our Indigenous students and colleagues. It’s called Dhiirra-y, ‘to know’ in Yuwaalaraay language. I have permission to share the image.

In parliament of the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) in 2014, parliamentarian Mr Troy Grant spoke in Wiradjuri in a speech about the North West Wiradjuri Language And Cultural Nest. The Hansard transcript records his four-sentence Acknowledgment of Country in Wiradjuri and the closing phrase, ‘Mandaang guwu ngaanha-gu. Thank you for listening.’

The lands of the Wiradjuri Nation comprise a huge proportion of what is now the state of NSW, and the NSW Parliament has existed for almost 170 years, but these Wiradjuri words had never before been spoken in it. Immediately, the NSW Minister for Aboriginal Affairs noted the milestone: ‘It is the first time in this Parliament that Aboriginal language has been spoken. It is a powerful symbol because this is the oldest Parliament in Australia.’

Aboriginal languages had by this point already been spoken in other parliaments around Australia, including in the national (Commonwealth) parliament since 1998, in Western Australia since 2013 and in the Northern Territory as early as 1981. In a just-published study, I’ve tracked down and analysed each instance of Aboriginal language use and also Torres Strait Islander language use (together, Indigenous languages) in Australia’s parliaments, up until 2023.

There are features of Mr Grant’s use of Wiradjuri in NSW that echo across the data. One is that the record of this language use had to be found by tracing back from online reports (e.g. this list on the AIATSIS website). The Hansard transcripts of each parliaments’ daily proceedings are all publicly available but there is no functionality to find when any particular language has been used.

I was therefore not terribly surprised to find after further digging that there had been an earlier but overlooked use of Wiradjuri in the NSW Parliament. Another elected representative, Ms Linda Burney, had in fact used Wiradjuri in 2003. Ms Burney is a Wiradjuri woman and politician who recently retired with many ‘firsts’ to her name, but her own landmark use of Wiradjuri in the NSW Parliament has not been widely recognised. As far as I can find, she is the first Aboriginal person, indeed the first person of any ethnicity, to use an Aboriginal language in Australia’s oldest parliament.

Ms Burney’s inaugural speech began ‘Ballumb Ambal Eoragu yindyamarra. Ngadu—yirra bang marang. I pay respect to the Ancient Eora [Nation]. I say this—good day.’ Neither Ms Burney herself nor the transcriber named this language at the time, although she has since named and used Wiradjuri in other parliamentary speeches.

This year (17 Feb 2025), I had the opportunity to interview Mr Grant about his 2014 speech and we discussed these two ‘first’ times Wiradjuri was spoken in parliament and how this public milestone could fall off the record:

Troy: I felt really proud. So, Linda Burney was in the Parliament at the time. So, I spoke to her, being an Indigenous woman, and you know, let her know that it was my intention to do it. And was she comfortable with that. And she said ‘Yes’. And so […] she says that she has had spoken an Indigenous language in the Parliament before me. But there’s no record of it. I checked with Hansard, and checked with the Parliamentary Library, and a whole and a whole raft of people so —
Alex: […] I did track down her first speech, and there are words in Wiradjuri to begin it. But it doesn’t say she’s speaking Wiradjuri. […] This is an ongoing problem we have with this research more generally, there’s no metadata. There’s no record there of what language she is speaking. […] Troy: […] so, she said, ‘yes, you can claim to have done the first speech in Wiradjuri. But I spoke Wiradjuri first’ and I said, ‘Okay’, so Linda and I always got on really well.
(Interview quoted here with Mr Grant’s permission.)

Later in her 2003 speech, Ms Burney names another language she also uses, Koori English. In my recent article I talk about the importance of representing this and other varieties of “Blackfula English”, sometimes called Aboriginal English(es), too.

Reading the Hansard transcripts of Ms Burney, Mr Grant and others’ speeches revealed another phenomenon which I discuss in the new article, as well, and that is the inclusion of individual words associated with Indigenous languages within English sentences. Many extended uses of an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander language in a parliament had already been rightly celebrated outside of academic literature (although not all; I gave the overlooked example of Ms Burney’s 2003 speech above) but individual word use had neither been recognised online, nor academically analysed, to my knowledge.

Figure 1 – Language use by year, from Grey (2025)

My article attempts to notice, celebrate and understand both small and large uses of Indigenous languages in Australia’s parliaments, identifying 86 instances in all. My study shows that these are sociolinguistic resources in the repertoires of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous parliamentarians, that their use is increasing over time, and that they are used in parliamentary debate as well as parliamentary ceremonies.

My study approaches Indigenous language practices in the otherwise English-monolingual parliaments of Australia as having the potential to resist symbolic domination. I argue that this is “a valuable form of representation of people’s diverse ways of speaking, the epistemologies Indigenous languages encode, and the ‘First Nations’ they co-construct through language practices.”

I frame the 86 instances as significant for “slipping and sliding” between different social spaces and identities, following Dr Robyn Ober, a Mamu/Djirribal woman and scholar from Northern Australia. While “moving to and fro between linguistic codes, and cultural, and social domains happens in all socio-cultural contexts”, it does not happen readily for Indigenous students in mainstream Australian education, Ober explains in her own study of a tertiary education context. I have extended her concept to the parliamentary context, which likewise gives normative priority to Standard Australian English. As such, these uses of Indigenous languages are “important in creating affordances, or social space, for later Indigenous language use and other Indigenous identity practices within parliaments”.

Churchill Research Fellow, Cara Kirkwood, who is a member of the Mandandanji and Mithaka peoples, has explained that the exclusion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples from Australia’s parliaments can be countered in part by material representation in parliamentary buildings today, for example through art. My study rests on a similar premise, that Indigenous language use in parliaments can be an important form of representation. Overall, I see these language practices as individually and collectively navigating and resisting the social and institutional power structures of parliaments.

I have started a series of chatty and fascinating research interviews about peoples’ experiences practicing multilingualism in Australia’s parliaments. Parliamentarians who have used Indigenous languages and guests who have been invited to use their languages in a parliament are welcome to get in touch to share their stories. My hope is to turn these interviews into an audio resource, with appropriate permissions from the speakers, so that Indigenous linguistic diversity becomes not only more visible but more audible.

References

Grey, A. (2025) ‘Celebrating Indigenous linguistic diversity in Australia’s parliaments’. 45(2) Australian Journal of Linguistics. [Open Access]