These English translations of Yolngu words are an intimate selection of approximately 100 words for body parts and plants collected by the British botanist, naturalist and later librarian Robert Brown from conversations with Aboriginal people in Caledon Bay, East Arnhem Land, on 5 February 1803. Brown extensively documented his four-year circumnavigation of Australia, including interactions with Aboriginal people — on board the Investigator with Captain Matthew Flinders — in a series of diary entries and manuscripts dated 1801–05.

The words were recorded with a group of Yolngu people days before a fatal interaction, on 21 January 1803, when the ship’s crew approached a group of Aboriginal people on Morgan Island, resulting in the death of an unknown number of Aboriginal people (one deceased Aboriginal man was brought aboard and sketched by William Westall) and the Investigator’s Marine Thomas Morgan — the island’s Eurocentric namesake.

The legibility, and at times illegibility, of the script in this work — whose ink runs off the page, pools and splatters with a calculated urgency — highlight the erasure and violence in Australia’s recorded history, particularly between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, and the nuances in fact, credibility and bias embedded in our national story.