From Spoken Here (Mark Abley, 2003, 2011) pp37
Traditional culture insists that certain knowledge must remain secret – unheard not only by other groups but also by the uninitiated within a group. This need to sustain privacy can pose difficulties in a courtroom if a judge demands open access to all pieces of evidence. Aborigines have learned that it can be safer to say nothing – to pass on knowledge through their own law and initiation. Yet law and initiation spring from language. In the land-claim process, Lawrence said, “You have to prove people’s connection to country prior to white occupation. So you end up hiring anthropologists to do genealogies.” The proof is stronger if the people still speak an ancestral language, for then the names of a grandfather, a water hole, or a Dreaming site continue to pulse with meaning.
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