Books

We have produced illustrated books in Noongar language available via UWA Publishing.

Follow the links below to listen to each story being told.

More information about the process of developing these books can be found in this article:

In 2007, senior Noongar of the Wirlomin clan in the south coast region of Western Australia formalised the creation of Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories Inc., an organisation established to, among other things, facilitate the enhancement of community-held knowledge by workshopping various local documentation and recordings repatriated from the archives. Fieldnotes created in 1931 from discussions with local Aboriginal people at Albany, Western Australia, along with contemporary community wordlists and archives have to date inspired the collaborative production of six illustrated bilingual books. Working with archival research material alone was deemed inadequate because of issues of orthography and legibility in written records, the poor quality of audio recordings, and the context and incomplete documentation of the initial, ‘fieldwork’  sessions. The archive material is  fragmentary, and so community knowledge is vital to grounding and making sense of its contents. Further, the workshops provide opportunities for individuals to cross-reference their own language heritage with that of others, and thus to build collective heritage in addition to benefiting from the inspiration of archival material.