Language studies by women in Australia: ‘A well-stored sewing basket’

Few women contributed to documenting Indigenous Australian languages in the nineteenth century. Brief accounts are given of six settler women who did so: Eliza Dunlop (1796-1880), Christina Smith (‘Mrs James Smith’; 1809?-1893), Harriott Barlow (1835-1929), Catherine Stow (‘K. Langloh Parker’; 1856-1940), Mary Martha Everitt (1854-1937), and Daisy May Bates (1859-1951). Their contributions are discussed against the background of forty-four other settler women who contributed to language study, translation, ethnography, or language teaching. Reasons for the relative absence of women in language documentation included family demands, child raising, and lack of education, money, and patrons, as well as alternative causes such as women’s rights. Recording Indigenous languages required metalinguistic analytic skills that were hard to learn in societies that lacked free education. Extra obstacles for publication were remoteness from European centres of research, and absence of colleagues with similar interests.