Christine Nicholls continues her discussion of Indigenous spatial understanding.

Australia’s Indigenous languages are rich in spatial terminology. As linguist Mary Laughren once noted:

Desert children’s ability to handle directional and spatial terminology in particular is taken as a sort of intelligence test similar to the counting prowess test among Europeans.

This ability, to handle sophisticated terminology about space and directionality with confidence and accuracy, and the concomitant skill in land navigation even when one is completely surrounded by desert, is inculcated into children from the earliest infancy, even today. My own observations based on more than a decade of living at Lajamanu confirm this, and the former principal of Yuendumu School, Pam Harris, has written about it extensively.

Preschoolers, only two or three years of age, could confidently name all the cardinal directions by the time they entered school and instantly apply them with almost 100% accuracy no matter what environment they found themselves in – a learned skill essentially deictic in nature, that most children in our dominant culture Australia are still struggling with at 15 or 16 years of age.

Wendy Baarda, a teacher and linguist who has been living for many years at the Warlpiri settlement of Yuendumu (where little Liam Jurrah, and many others like him, first kicked a footy) drew attention to this commonplace linguistic and deictic ability in the following anecdote:

One of the school’s Warlpiri Literacy workers was walking along carrying her baby who was about 18 months old. A bystander (another Warlpiri adult) called out to the child to get its attention. The child heard the voice but could not locate the person, so the speaker called out again, this time supplying the direction in which the child should look: ‘Kakarrarni’ – towards the east. Immediately the baby turned its head and looked in the right direction, towards the speaker.

One important difference, in relation to the dominant culture of this country, is that a person’s limbs (“left” or “right”) are not to be regarded as fixed entities in relation to self, as is implicit in the formulations “left” and “right”. Rather, they are conceived within a much broader context of spatial relationships with respect to the exterior world. So, in accordance with the specific spatial circumstance, a person might talk about one’s north, south, east or west hand (or leg).

When one is continually on the move (or run) within 360° of open space, albeit with the intention of reaching specific goalposts within that space, the formulations of “left” and “right” in relation to one’s own body have little or no meaning. This form of spatial apprehension is not restricted to people in the Central or Western Deserts of Australia, but ubiquitous throughout Aboriginal Australia, and as a method of orienteering one’s way through space, survives even where the local languages are faltering.

The American linguistic anthropologist John Haviland has written about the importance of cardinal directions for the Guugu Yimithirr (alt. Guugu Yimiddhir) people of Northern Queensland, in terms of position finding while in motion:

… Speakers of the Australian language Guugu Yimithirr (hereafter GY) at the Hopevale community near Cooktown, in far North Queensland, make heavy use in discourse about position and motion of inflected forms of four cardinal direction roots – similar in meaning to north, south, east, and west. The system of cardinal directions appears to involve principles for calculating horizontal position and motion strikingly different from familiar systems based on the anatomies of reference objects, including speakers and hearers themselves.

Rather than calculating location relative to inherent asymmetries in local reference objects, or from the viewpoint of observers themselves characterised by such asymmetries, the GY system apparently takes as its primitives global geocentric coordinates, seemingly independent of specific local terrain and based instead on horizontal angles which are fixed, as it were, by the earth (and perhaps the sun) and not subject to the rotation of observers or reference objects.

While I have barely touched upon the complexity of these systems here, they have largely survived, not always in intact form, the vagaries of colonisation. Their survival is most evident in rural, tradition-oriented Aboriginal communities, but it persists across generations, following Indigenous diasporic movement into Australian country towns and big cities.

This culturally specific form of mathematical knowledge, intergenerationally transmitted, imparted in its most intact form via Aboriginal languages, plays itself out not only on the AFL field but in tradition-oriented Aboriginal art, and has an important role in other Indigenous knowledge.

The ability to apply such knowledge is a product of nurture, not nature – it cannot be genetically transmitted any more than it is possible to transmit concepts about number and computation to other little Australians, except via processes of acculturation.

This is from an article first published in The Conversation