Phillemon Mosby works on Poruma to strengthen the sleeping Kulkalgau Ya language he was taught by his grandmother

In a community garden on the island of Poruma in the late 1980s, Lillah Pearson never stopped speaking Kulkalgau Ya to her grandson, Phillemon Mosby.

Kulkalgau Ya, spoken on the central islands of the Torres Strait, is one of the four dialects of the Kala Lagaw Ya language.

After the arrival of the London Missionary Society in 1871, islanders were discouraged from speaking traditional language, which led to the development of Torres Strait Creole. The forced removal of children from their homes, and other oppressive assimilation policies across Australia in the 1900s, threatened the survival of First Nations people, culture and language.

In the garden, Pearson, a child of the 1920s, taught her grandson language but also lore, practice and respect. She was one of the last remaining fluent speakers. Mosby remembers her being an entertainer, but says she was also strict and did everything for a reason.

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“We were told not to run through the gardens. We were told not to play around the gardens,” he recalls.

Today, Mosby sits on First Languages Australia’s 11-person committee and has spent more than a decade working alongside community members and elders on Poruma to strengthen the sleeping Kulkalgau Ya language.

“I understand now,” Mosby says. “She [Lillah] was just a repository of my language. She was just saying, “I’m going to plant this seed. I don’t know when it’s going to harvest.”

The islanders discovered church hymns that had been written down in Kala Lagaw Ya by a German priest. Mosby says that several elders on the island used to sing in those church choirs – including Aunty Thelma Pearson, Aunty Eldridge Mosby, Aunty Mary Mosby and Aunty Viti Pearson – which made it possible to begin the reawakening process.

My grandmother wanted us to learn English and to learn the white way, but she never stopped talking language to us Phillemon Mosby

“While they [missionaries] forbade the practice of certain rituals and ceremonies and initiations, they recorded the language in the language hymns … we had elders who had knowledge, they were choir masters. We had women that knew word for word, even knowing the numbers of the songs. They could say ‘180, this is this song for this season, this is that song’. They just knew if off by heart. And I said, ‘we’re not doomed after all.’”

Mosby began to recognise more and more words and phrases he and his grandmother used in the garden.

“She spoke language that required me to speak language back. She always wanted us to get a good education. She wanted us to learn English and to learn the white way, but she never stopped talking language to us.”

Because of expanding infrastructure, housing and the shop set-up on the island in the 1980s, the garden on Poruma was lost, Mosby says.

Without it, other spaces are being created to share knowledge. Language is now a part of the curriculum for schoolchildren on Poruma.

“Language is what carries our custom, it’s what carries our practices, language is what teaches us what to say, who to say it to and when to say it,” he says.

One of the main catalysts for Mosby’s involvement in the strengthening of language was the Urab Dancers, a group he has led for a decade.

“They’re a local dance team on Poruma, that promotes Porumagal culture and identity – our stories through songs and dance.”

Four elders dance alongside two dozen young islanders, who are usually in their 20s. Those young islanders were coming to Mosby and telling him, “we want to write our story”.

“The millennials, that generation was our predominant target group and it was quite clear that they wanted to write their own song, their own dance, they wanted to connect our time with another time, our father’s time.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The council offices on Poruma, where Phillemon Mosby keeps his database of Kulkalgau Ya words and phrases. Photograph: Jack Banister

Most of the documentation is done by Mosby in his spare time, but he is hoping that funding help will come via this year’s round of Australian government funding for Indigenous arts and language projects.

“What I would like to see is funding for a full-time person to do it. To put the data into a language software program to produce material to give to parents, to the school, to work with other programs in community … to get people to start speaking the language. I think that’s one of the key things now,” he says.

“At the moment, I’m just writing things down and store it in regular Excel spreadsheets.”

One of his favourite phrases is “I’m going home tomorrow” or “Yngay lakidha kuniya lagaka bathaynga”, a throwback to when he was a teenager at boarding school in Cairns in the 1990s.

Recalling the phrase brings up another memory for Mosby – his grandmother never came to the airstrip to see him off when he flew south. For a while he thought she wanted to get rid of him.

“I couldn’t understand why, not until I graduated five years later, and I said, ‘Aka, [grandmother], why do you never come to the airstrip?’ And she said, ‘Your world starts when you step out of my front door. I don’t need to go say goodbye to you on the airstrip.’”