Sprigg Salon: Yankunytjatjara Wangka! Keeping Ancestral Voices Alive

Join the South Australian Museum for a special panel discussion about our latest exhibition, Yankunytjatjara Wangka! Keeping Ancestral Voices Alive.

Yankunytjatjara Wangka! is the second exhibition in a series promoting South Australia's unique and important Aboriginal language heritage. An expert panel will discuss the efforts of the Yankunytjatjara community to keep their living language strong and grounded in Country while using technology in clever ways to support learning. Visitors are asked to leave English at the door and kulila (listen), nyawa (look), pampula (touch), pantila (smell) and experience Yankunytjatjara language.

Join Myra Kumantjara (Yankunytjatjara artist), Karina Lester (Yankunytjatjara woman, Aboriginal Co-Manager & Senior Aboriginal Language Worker, Mobile Language Team), Dr Simone Tur (Yankunytjatjara woman, Pro Vice-Chancellor Indigenous Strategy and Engagement, Flinders University) and Clayton Cruse (Adnyamathanha man, Department of Education) to discuss different perspectives on maintaining and keeping language strong in community and in schools.

This panel discussion and the exhibition are proudly presented as part of Tarnanthi: Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art.

Schedule for the Evening

6:00 - Museum opens and welcome drinks service begins. Guests invited to view Yankunytjatjara Wangka! Keeping Ancestral Voices Alive.

6:20 - Welcome to Country 

6:30 - Panel discussion with Q&A to follow

7:30 - Conclusion of panel discussion

8:00 - Event concludes

This event will be AUSLAN interpreted. 

About the Exhibition

A language is a storehouse of the collective knowledge and experience of countless generations. Languages are the hooks on which we hang the cloaks of our identities – they make us who we are. They help us to understand the past and how ancestors lived, thought and understood their environment.

Half of the Aboriginal languages spoken in South Australia have been lost since the arrival of the British in 1836. Australia is considered the most perilous continent in the world for the preservation of its Indigenous languages. Of the 46 Aboriginal languages were spoken in South Australia at the time of colonisation, only four are now considered strong, 19 partly spoken, and the remaining 23 have fallen completely silent.

Yankunytjatjara Wangka! Keeping Ancestral Voices Alive celebrates the efforts of one Aboriginal community to preserve and revive South Australia’s unique and important Aboriginal language heritage. Featuring original works by Yankunytjatjara artist Myra Kumantjara.

The exhibition is a partnership between the South Australian Museum, the University of Adelaide’s Mobile Language Team, and Iwantja Artists.

About the Sprigg Salon Series

The Sprigg Salon series provides audiences with access to the latest thinking around cultural, scientific, and natural world research and discoveries here in South Australia and around the world. It is named in honour of Dr Reg Sprigg AO, a remarkable South Australian geologist who discovered the world’s oldest fossilised animals in the Flinders Ranges in 1946, now recognised around the world as the Ediacara fossils. 

This event is proudly supported by Inspiring South Australia and Beach Energy.