Jenna Lee explores the survival of First Nations language by repurposing colonial word lists into artworks that depict resprouting and cultural life.

The language we know shapes how we perceive the world.

But how does it feel in the body, on a cellular level, when the way we interact with the world is exclusively in a language that was forced upon you? How does it manifest to look at the world around you and to struggle to articulate what you see and feel?

The only language I know fluently is English; my Japanese is getting better, my partner and I speak in broken Greek words at home to each other and our dog, and I endeavour to learn Larrakia, slowly speaking these words back into my world.

But language is in the air and all around us.

When I go on a walk on this continent in one of the many places I have lived across it, through the bush, up a mountain, along a creek or on the sunset-coloured sandstone coastlines of my country, I can sense it: language is there, I recognise its presence, but the memories of it are gone. I have lost the ability to comprehend it.

There is a unique grief in mourning the words you will never know.

Having spent good chunks of time in Japan for work, often solo, I know it’s the same feeling as when you are trying to connect with someone new, but you only speak a few words of each other’s first language. There is a literal barrier, a hazy fog, you are reaching out to each other through. This is how I feel on my walks, that there is a hazy fog between me and the land, that the language it and I speak are different, that I can admire it, respect it, appreciate its beauty, but I cannot know it in the way it wants to be known.

My day-to-day is sitting in this sadness as I stumble through colonial linguist compiled word lists of the Larrakia language that failed to record the context and relationship of the words. That sure, I can now point to a plant or animal and say its name in Larrakia, in my thick Australian accent, but I’ll never be able to articulate how I feel, how I relate to and move through the world: I can’t articulate emotions or connections. That was taken from us. The more I read these documents, the more questions I have, the more I want to reach out through the haze and speak directly to ancestors.

This feeling is echoed throughout my family history, not just in the impacts of colonisation for my Aboriginal ancestors, but with the White Australia Policy for my Chinese and Filipino ancestors, the post-World War 2 policies for my Japanese ancestors in Darwin and Broome and the colonisation of Ireland and Scotland prior to migration here. English language, throughout my lineage, is one of force and pressure, but also one of survival.

And survival may be the main point of all this grief, that through all this, myself, my family, and mobs all over this continent are learning, speaking and keeping their languages alive. It’s in community schools, spoken on country, and it’s being documented by us for us to use—word by word, we are speaking it back into existence.

To say I think about language is maybe an understatement, and to have come to using dictionaries and word lists as my physical medium is no surprise.

A dictionary is a book containing the story of everything, but what is it when it contains nothing?

I make all my works from a single book: Aboriginal words and place names by A.W. Reed. This flawed book published our words with no context or connection to people. His published books extend into myths, legends, stories, place names – none of which ever credit who the story, place name or word belongs to or originated from.

The connection is severed, and the book becomes a useless object. Imagine for a moment, a translated dictionary of ‘East Asian’ to English: that, along each entry, the book doesn’t say if a word is Korean, Japanese or Mandarin. Even with physical proximity and a connected history (even some shared written characters), each of these languages is from a unique culture and context that would probably take issue with being published as unworthy of differentiation.

This is exactly what Reed’s book does to us, suggesting that “Aboriginal” is a language in which words can be plucked at random and listed by “birds”, “reptiles”, “tools” and other basic categories. The reality, of course, is that we have 250 languages and 850 regional dialects, that I, being from the Larrakia mob of the Darwin region, could never have had a conversation with the mob on the other side of the continent.

So why did he publish a book like this? In his own words, the book’s aim was to provide “those who are in search of names of houses, children, boats… a rich treasury of words native to their own land…”

The dark irony of this statement is that the first things taken from us alongside our languages were our land, our children and access to our waterways.

Possibly the most important point I should stress about Reed’s collection of books is that they are very much all still in print and widely available. This is a point I always make clear, because my work is not about things in our past; these feelings I am working through are not from imagining a distant history, it’s from experiencing reality.

Our language is not dead; it’s just been taking a long rest.

All of this is to say what I attempt to do with works like ‘Grasstree (at rest)’ is not only to show that language is alive in the land all around us, but that it is constantly resprouting.

That through what could be seen as destructive and disruptive forces like drought and bush fire, a grasstree doesn’t just survive, it thrives, and from the ashes around it, sews its seeds. Each new sprout is a word spoken back into existence, that word by word, the ecosystem of our languages recovers.

From the edge of destruction, our languages live on in the seeds we sprout within us.

About Jenna Lee

Jenna Lee is a Gulumerridjin (Larrakia), Wardaman and KarraJarri artist of Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Irish and Scottish ancestry, working on unceded Wurundjeri Country in Naarm (Melbourne). Her practice explores language, materiality and the transformation of inherited narratives through installation, sculpture and works on paper. She recently installed a major new work at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, maan-ma danala: bidim-ba (language dillybag: steady persistent rain) for the major new exhibition And still I rise, capturing the relief and renewal that arrives with the first rains of Balnba (wet season) in the tropical north.

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