Language, Dormitories and the Disruption of Country
By Boneta-Marie Mabo | 30 April 2026
If you disconnect children from language, you disconnect them from Country.
My thinking about language, dormitories and incarceration is not abstract research. It comes
from my own family history and lived experience. I am Manbarra through my great great
grandmother and my connection to Manbarra mostly known as Palm Island. A place shaped by
its history as a government reserve and mission, a penal colony, where Aboriginal people from
many different Countries were forcibly relocated from 1918. Palm Island operated as a system
of control where dormitories separated children from their families and language for
generations. That history sits close to me. Before becoming a full-time artist and researcher, I
spent many years working with criminalised children as a youth worker and Youth Programs
Manager at Sisters Inside. Through that work I saw how many of the same patterns that existed
in missions and dormitories continue today through youth prisons and child protection systems.
These experiences shape how I understand language loss, incarceration and colonial
governance, not as separate issues, but as connected systems that continue to affect our
communities.
The creative outcome from Boneta-Marie Mabo's Indigenous languages creative arts residency - a screenprinted artwork in response to Mulga language loss and the silence found in colonised archives.
Across many Aboriginal Countries, colonial systems understood this relationship clearly.
Language is not simply a tool for communication. It carries ecological knowledge, kinship
systems, law, and cultural memory. When children are separated from their languages, they are
also separated from the systems that teach them how to belong to place.
For Blakfellas, language is inseparable from Country. Words describe landscapes, seasons,
plants, animals, waterways, and spiritual relationships. Language holds the instructions for how
to care for land and how land cares for people. It carries place names that map territory,
genealogies that connect families to Country, and cultural knowledge that guides how
communities live with land.
Colonial governments targeted this connection directly.
Policies that removed children into dormitories, missions and other institutions interrupted the
most important site of language transmission: family, community and Country.
Dormitories and missions were not simply places where Aboriginal children were housed. They
were institutions designed to interrupt culture.
Children raised in dormitories lived under strict institutional control. Language, ceremony and
cultural practice were often forbidden. English became the language of discipline, schooling and
labour training. Speaking language could be punished or discouraged.
This environment severed the everyday spaces where language is normally learned: listening to
Elders, speaking with family, hearing stories and participating in cultural life.
When children grow up without hearing or speaking their language, the knowledge embedded
within that language begins to fade. Over time languages fall silent, sleep or disappear.
This pattern happened across many Aboriginal Countries.
Manbarra Country became a site where people from many different Nations were forcibly
relocated under government control. Children raised in dormitories were separated not only
from their families but also from the languages of their own Countries.
Generations grew up without access to the words that connected them to place.
Dispossession was never only about land seizure. It also required dismantling the cultural
systems that maintain relationships with land. Language was one of those systems.
The silence that appears in archives today reflects this history. As explored in Weaving
Language Back to Country: When the Archive is Silent, the absence of language in institutional
collections is not accidental, it is evidence of how thoroughly missions, dormitories and colonial
governance disrupted cultural transmission.
But silence does not mean disappearance.
Many Aboriginal languages today are described as sleeping, not extinct. Across the country,
communities are working to wake them again.
Language revitalisation must return to the places where knowledge lives: with Elders, in
community and on Country.
Understanding how language was disrupted means confronting where that disruption happened.
And many of those ruptures occurred inside dormitories and missions.
Recognising this history is part of understanding why the work of language renewal remains
urgent today and why the systems that produced these disruptions must also be examined.
Boneta-Marie's residency at State Library was a part of the 2025 Indigenous languages creative arts residency program. The residencies provide a platform to celebrate, revitalise, and innovate First Nations languages by supporting both emerging and established Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander creatives. You can read Boneta-Marie's previous post, Weaving Langauge Back to Country: When the archives is silent, and more about the other residents here.
This program is funded through the Commonwealth Indigenous Languages and Arts (ILA) program.
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