Seán Ó Séaghdha

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Written by: Seán Ó Séaghdha

Buganditj or Buwandik is the name of a people and language of the South-East of South Australia.

Details

Written by: Seán Ó Séaghdha

The Booandik Tribe of South Australian Aborigines: A Sketch of their Habits, Customs, Legends, and Language is a book by missionary Christina Smith (more properly Mrs. James Smith) published by the South Australian government in 1880.  It largely consists of accounts of her work and interactions with the local Aborigines, in particular (as the sub-subtitle says) “of the efforts made by Mr. and Mrs. James Smith to Christianise and Civilise them”.  In addition it does contain some information on culture and language, including a grammatical sketch and vocabulary provided by her son Duncan Stewart, who learned the language at a young age and acted as a translator.

A copy of this book was scanned by Google and is available at the Internet Archive, however the OCR of the text was very poor and I have been working on a corrected and expanded ePUB edition.  This will include new photographs of the plates from an original edition held in the State Library of Victoria and an additional resorted vocabulary using spelling from The Bunganditj (Buwandik) language of the Mount Gambier Region by Barry Blake (Pacific Linguistics, ANU, 2003).