Snapshot Wax lyrical

Eight wax cylinders, recorded with Fanny Cochrane Smith in 1899 and 1903, contain the only audible link to Tasmania’s lost Aboriginal languages.

THESE DAYS AUDIO files online allow you to listen to the faint voice of Fanny Cochrane Smith talking and singing in her native language. The recordings, now more than a century old, are muffled and have the scratchy, tinny sound of 19th-century wax cylinder recordings, but their significance still resonates. Fanny – then in her late 60s – was the last fluent speaker of a Tasmanian Aboriginal language.

The clips date back to two recording sessions done for ethnographic research in 1899 and 1903. In this image from 1903, Fanny leans towards the horn of the latest in recording technology: an Edison phonograph. Horace Watson, – an artefact collector, dentist and chemist, who married into Australia’s Keen’s Curry Powder empire – is carefully brushing the wax peeling off the recording stylus. The cylinders the pair produced are some of Australia’s earliest known recordings and the only known audio of indigenous Tasmanian words.

These were also among the first recordings added to Canberra’s National Film and Sound Archives’ ‘Sounds of Australia’ register when it was founded a decade ago. Fanny was known for moving between two worlds – that of her indigenous community and of her settler life with white husband William Smith. In the clips she can be heard explaining her background and singing both a Corrobboree song and a ‘Spring Song’.

In Tasmania, where Aboriginal languages were lost along with much of the original population, her voice is an incredible link to the past. To bolster the connection that today’s Tasmanian Aboriginals have to their heritage, the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre (TAC) in Hobart began a language revitalisation program in the 1990s. With the help of linguists, the project is using resources such as Fanny’s recordings and historic documents to build a composite language called ‘palawa kani’ from what is still known of nine original tongues.

Today, Fanny’s living descendants, such as lawyer Rosie Smith, say they attempt to use this language as much as they can. In 2012 Tasmania was also finally able to put in place a dual naming policy for landmarks – the final state or territory to do so.

FIND A recording of Fanny’s voice online at: www.australiangeographic.com.au/issue136