The language(s) of Love: JRB Love and contesting tongues at Ernabella Mission Station, 1940–46

Abstract

In a recent collection of essays, Umberto Eco, the well-known author and professor of semiotics, suggests the idea of translation as a complex process of negotiation, between texts, authors, readers, languages and cultural frameworks, with the translator as negotiator. 1 Extending this already expansive and productive notion to translation as any interaction between two languages, and translator as anyone involved intimately in that process, I want to examine the role of missionaries-in particular that of the Reverend JRB Love 2-in 'negotiating' the relative place of the colonising language, English, and an Indigenous language, Pitjantjatjara, in the life of an Aboriginal mission station, Ernabella, in Central Australia in the early 1940s. 3 Lest there be any confusion, Love was also a 'translator' in the narrower sense, being involved at the mission in the conversion of part of the biblical text to the Indigenous language. This is an instructive story in itself that this article can only touch on, but I am more interested here in examining his role in, and his rationale for, advocating and attempting to negotiate a bilingual language policy at the mission site against an opposing vernacular-only policy. The maintenance of indigenous languages in the face of powerful onslaughts from dominant culture languages has been a part of the narratives of both colonialism and postcolonialism. 4 In Australia, debates have continued on the advisability or otherwise of the retention of Indigenous languages, given the dominance of English, with arguments often moving on to intricate questions of the survival and autonomy of minority cultures. 5 An earlier form of these debates occurred at Ernabella, which had been estab