One of the principal figures in the recording of Aboriginal languages, particularly in the Sydney region, was Robert Hamilton Mathews (1841-1918), originally from near Goulburn in New South Wales. He became a surveyor, a post that took him to different parts of the country, and, having an interest in the indigenous people, he had the opportunity to make contact with people over a wide area. He recorded his findings in notebooks. From these he wrote academic papers, over two hundred of which were published. Many of his papers relate to New South Wales, but he seems to have covered everywhere—from North Queensland to Western Australia, South Australia to the Northern Territory. In many cases the Mathews data is all that there is by way of record of an Aboriginal language.
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Nearly all of Mathews' papers can be freely looked at on the internet, if you know where to find them. Internet links (URLs) for most of them, sometimes more than one, are provided here.
The notebooks
Mathews’ notebooks are held by the National Library of Australia. For a long period they were in the possession of Arthur Capell, reader in oceanic linguistics within the department of anthropology of the University of Sydney. A neat hand for what appear to be occasional interpolations in the notebooks displaying conventions of academic linguistics may be Capell’s.
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Mathews’ own handwriting is for the most part clear, remarkably so given the circumstances under which the notebooks must have been compiled in the field. However, on occasions even with a magnifying glass and considering letter shapes from nearby examples, the deciphering of a word cannot be confidently achieved.
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Mathews routinely acknowledged his informants in his notebooks although seldom in his published papers. A notebook may cover many languages—from the eastern states and South Australia in the notebooks relating to the region under study—sometimes with segments from different languages on the same page. While languages and sections are generally introduced with an appropriate heading at the start, it is not always possible to determine where one informant’s contribution ended, and where it began, and so which particular language was being recorded.
Quality of the Mathews record
The value of Mathews’ work has been recognised by contemporary experts and later scholars, but the quality of it met with criticism. An article entitled "Aboriginal Languages" in the Illustrated Australian Encyclopaedia of 1925, signed by ’S.H.R.’ [possibly (Sir) Stephen Henry Roberts (1901-71), historian and later vice-chancellor of the University of Sydney], states:
R.H. Mathews in his many grammars and vocabularies did not maintain a uniform orthography, even when dealing in different places with the same language.
A. Capell, in A New Approach to Australian Linguistics, 1925, p. 1, acknowledged Mathews as follows:
About the turn of the century, contributions were made by R.H. Mathews, whose work covered a large part of the continent, even if it left much to be desired in thoroughness; but he is to be thanked for preserving much that is difficult and often impossible to get to-day, and he did pay attention to grammar.
R.M.W. Dixon in The Languages of Australia, 1980, p. 15:
… in many cases Mathews’ material is virtually the only data on tongues that are now extinct. Unfortunately, Mathews tended to doctor and normalise his notes for publication, so that recourse must be had to the original field notebooks.
D.K. Eades, in The Dharawal and Dhurga languages of the New South Wales south coast, 1976, p.8, wrote:
I am indebted to the late R.H. Mathews throughout this study. So little of the Dharawal and Dhurga languages has been recorded, but by far the most of this work was done by R.H. Mathews, around the turn of the century.
and a little later in the same work, p.10:
... Mathews’ grammars are rather brief and do not contain many details. The sections on Dharawal and Dhurga in the manuscript books add further examples of grammatical constructions, but unfortunately these are not always consistent. It is impossible to know how reliable his notebooks are, but he certainly never intended them to be published.
In her chapter on grammar, p.44:
There is unfortunately no evidence of understanding such structures as relative clauses, or complements, which were, most likely, a part of the language.
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The inconsistencies and contradictions between Mathews’ notebooks and his articles are frustrating. Certainly he would never have intended his notebooks to be used for such a study as this. It is quite likely that some of the information in his notebooks contains his suggestions which he intended to verify with an informant.
While the quality of Mathews’ work was to some degree inferior in the estimation of his critics, this may have been partly a function of the quality of the information available as possessed by his informants combined with his own personal lack of knowledge of the particular language he was enquiring into. Such knowledge, had he possessed it for each of the widespread languages he encountered, would have enabled him to recognise misunderstandings and misinformation, and absence of system and structure.
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In my own view, the debt owed to Mathews for recording indigenous languages as he did, albeit imperfectly, is inestimable.