A very auspicious time for Indigenous communities all around Australia - National Sorry Day on May 26, followed by National Reconciliation Week, and ending with Mabo Day on June 3, the commemoration of Eddie Mabo and the campaign leading to the 1992 landmark decision of the High Court overturning the legal fiction of terra nullius. Making sense of any idea of commemoration, or indeed, any idea of community leads inevitably to the tangible and intangible domain of language – how it’s used, how it embodies special cultural knowledge, and how it survives.

Project officer with First Languages Australia, Annalee Pope, outlines her involvement with the Priority Languages Documentation initiative, and explains some of the ways that renewed interest in Indigenous languages is taking shape all across the country. And, Indigenous writer and researcher Bruce Pascoe talks about first languages in we now know as the state of Victoria, and explains the intersections of Indigenous language, forms of governance and sustainability.