Lunchtime talk: Jeremy Steele

 

Non-Indigenous researcher Jeremy Steele completed his Master’s thesis ‘The Aboriginal Language of Sydney’ at Macquarie University in 2005. His interests in history and languages led him to the story of European upheaval in Sydney in 1788 and eventually to the Sydney-language sentences recorded by First Fleeter William Dawes in notebooks kept in a London university library. Steele’s way of coping with the words he came across was to make lists. In due course these became databases with thousands of entries. The insights afforded by the capacity of the databases to sort and match words were indispensable to the thesis.