Allen Hall: 6 September 1918 - August 2004
2004; Aboriginal Studies Press; Volume: 2004; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0729-4352
Autores Tópico(s)Australian Indigenous Culture and History
ResumoWhen the then Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies made funding available for a big thrust to record Australian Aboriginal languages that were endangered or going out of use, four positions were made available at the University of Queensland. I was given a research fellowship with the hope, among other things, that I could supervise three research scholars who were also appointed. The Rev. Allen Hall was one of these. Considerably my senior, he had been a Methodist missionary in the Solomon Islands and had completed translation of the New Testament into Roviana. He came with his wife, Jo, and family and bought a house at 16 St Lucia Drive. He had slightly gingerish somewhat curly hair, and a rather typical New Zealander face and colouring. He was full of enthusiasm and drive. He had lost the first two joints of one finger (I think the middle one) on one hand. Like me, he played the flute, and had had an extension fitted to the appropriate key so he could still play. At times when he invited academic colleagues and friends for a meal, Jo, like the traditional wife, was quietly in the background ensuring all things went well. Our small group of linguists at the university were housed at first in a demountable building of galvanised iron, hot in summer and cold in winter, with some of the Psychology Department including Glen McBryde, although we were nominally under the supervision of Ken Hamilton, the English professor, and with less formal input from Elwyn Flint, another eccentric linguist whose research ideas were in many ways ahead of his time. There was little way at that time for me, a youngish female researcher, to 'supervise' the work of the research scholars, least of all the somewhat flamboyant personality of Allen Hall. He was eccentric and lovable. His different style of logic was at times exasperating, but also amusing. You could not hate him. Allen chose to work on Thayorre, a Cape York language, and produced a Master's thesis, then finally a Doctoral thesis. He collected enormous quantities of data, but needed a guiding hand to organise it and turn it into a thesis. Alan Healey was a great help to him. At that time, 1966-69, the use of computers by linguists had not been underway for long, and at one stage someone broke into the demountable and stole his notes. He plodded on and redid the work. His family remained in St Lucia while he did fieldwork. Allen took up cudgels for the cause of first-language literacy for the Thayorre, and asked me to go with him to the then Director of Education in Queensland, which I did. Allen argued the case for teaching initial literacy in the home language to a protagonist who raised as many possible objections as he could before revealing himself as on side with the idea--and a fellow Methodist! After his academic hurdles were surmounted, Allen continued in helping to produce literacy materials for the Thayorre. Many years later, I was browsing the bookshelves of Harold and Grace Koch while I minded their townhouse while I (and they) were on study leave in 1993. One of their books, A man called Possum, was about a New Zealander who lived virtually off the land in Australia for 28 years, travelling along the Murray and along the Darling up to Wilcannia. He had fallen between the cracks of the system, not being able to get the dole, and was very shy of outsiders. A detective befriended him over the years, and found that although his parents in New Zealand (who he had never contacted) had died, he had a cousin living in Brisbane: Allen Hall. Unfortunately Possum died before Allen was free to visit him. However, I laughed out loud to find the connection, and to realise there were two eccentric but lovable characters so closely related. Bibliography of Allen Hall's Australianist publications and reports Books and booklets Hall, A 1968, The Edward River tribal concept of dimension, University of Queensland, Brisbane. …
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