Margaret Sharpe

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Margaret Sharpe
Academic background
Alma materUniversity of Queensland (PhD)
Academic work
DisciplineLinguist
Sub-disciplineAustralian Aboriginal languages

Margaret Clare Sharpe is a linguist of Australian Aboriginal languages, specializing in Yugambeh-Bundjalung languages, with particular regard to Yugambir, She has also done important salvage fieldwork on the Northern Territory Alawa language.

Career[]

Sharpe completed her doctoral dissertation on the language of the Alawa people at the University of Queensland in 1965.[1] After a further stint of fieldwork between June 1966 and May 1968, this was updated and issued as a monograph under the imprint of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies in 1972.[2] In the meantime she worked with one of the last speakers of Yugambir, Joe Culham, then in his eighties, and managed to write up the results in a 53-page analysis published shortly after his death in 1968.[3]

As part of her work on Alawa, she translated both Alawa-language stories and kriol versions of the same given by her informant Barnabas Roberts concerning violent encounters between white settlers and the Alawa,[4] and, according to one reviewer, their juxtaposition underlined that Aboriginal story-telling in their English dialects can be at times as, if not more, revealing as what is recorded of an event in their mother tongue.[a]

Sharpe went on to do extensive work as lecturer at the Department of Aboriginal and Multicultural Studies of the University of New England, on the Yugambeh-Baandjalung dialect chain. She has also been active in teaching indigenous groups about the disappearing languages their forefathers spoke.[6]

Sharpe has written three novels, one of which, A Family Divided, deals with interracial conflict and friendship.

Sharpe speaks a version of Bundjalung, "though not terribly fluently" and has recorded talk in conversations with the Yugambeh language instructor Shaun Davies.[7] She remains an adjunct lecturer, and is now returning to her original interest in science by completing a PhD in astrophysics.[8]

Honours[]

In 2017, Sharpe was designated a Kaialgumm, "champion in the fight", by the Yugambeh Museum in recognition of her decades-long scholarship and teaching in documenting, and helping to revive, the Yugambeh language[9]

Notes[]

  1. ^ Perhaps the best illustration of the value of Aboriginal English is Barnabas Roberts' story, given to Margaret Sharpe in 1967...Roberts' Roper Creole/English testimony of violent contact between Aborigines and whites, and Sharpe's Alawa translation of a related incident are placed back-to-back. Even the translator admits that the Aboriginal English is "fuller than the Alawa version (in translation) in some respects" Hercus and Sutton p.63. It certainly is.'[5]

Citations[]

  1. ^ Sharpe 1965.
  2. ^ Sharpe 1972.
  3. ^ Cunningham 1969.
  4. ^ Sharpe 1986, pp. 63–64,381ff..
  5. ^ Headon 1988, p. 37.
  6. ^ Sharpe 1993, pp. 73–84.
  7. ^ Marciniak & Sharpe 2017, pp. 2:35ff.
  8. ^ MS Blog.
  9. ^ UNE 2017.

Sources[]

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