TALK OUR LANGUAGE

TALK Our Language is a participatory photographic project celebrating a generation of young Indigenous Australians. It reflects on what it means to be Indigenous in 2017 told through one of Sydney’s revitalised languages. Dharug Elders and speakers Jacinta Tobin and Richard Green worked with artist Sarah Rhodes to frame the students’ personal stories culturally.

These workshops empower Indigenous teenagers to share their stories through
photography, English and the Sydney language, Dharug. Dharug (meaning yams) is
the traditional language of the Dharug and Eora peoples, spoken in the Sydney region
from Katoomba, in the Blue Mountains to Wreck Bay, on the NSW South Coast.

Liverpool Boys and Girls high schools, supported by the Liverpool Council, International Grammar School (Ultimo), Bethlehem College (Ashfield), Casula Public School (Liverpool) and Georges River College (Peakhurst), supported by Georges River Council and Hurstville Museum & Gallery, have all worked with TALK Our Language to create videos and sets of postcards.

 

Our story, our dreaming: yellomundi-ngun gunyalungulung-ngun

Hurstville Museum & Gallery, artist Sarah Rhodes, and Jacinta Tobin, Elder from
the Dharug Tribal Aboriginal Corporation, facilitated a TALK Our Language
workshop in conjunction with the exhibition Home / On Country earlier in 2017.

Students from Georges River College (Peakhurst campus) looked at their place
at school, how they fit into their family and the broader community. Notions of
identity were explored and what it means to them to be Aboriginal.

The culmination of this workshop is the exhibition, Our story, our dreaming and the
creation of a series of postcards. The aim is to circulate the Aboriginal language through the community and give teenagers an opportunity to tell their stories.

 

This project was supported by Arts NSW’s Audience Development Fund, a devolved funding program administered by Museums & Galleries of NSW on behalf of the NSW Government.

 

 

 

Exhibition on display at Hurstville Museum & Gallery
31 March – 30 April 2017