ACT 2, SCENE 12

LOCATIONS SIGNAGE: ELDER HALL, ADELAIDE, 1989, 10TH ANNUAL CONVENTION OF THE AUSTRALASIAN PHILOLOGICAL SOCIETY

MEGAN BROOKS (age 83) stands at a lectern, addressing an audience.

WORDS SIGNAGE: NAA MANNI

MEGAN: Naa Manni. I hope that one day this will become a regular greeting in meetings such as ours. It is, as many of you already know, the way the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains say ‘hello to all present’.

As these custodians – who are in the process of repossessing their dispossessed language – make clear, words are the binding salve between us. They frame us and explain us to ourselves and others. They are the star trails of story, our guides by night and day.

Words have been my life. They are also the subject of this talk. My name is Megan Brooks. This is my final address as Professor Emerita of the University of Adelaide, and Chair of the Australasian Philological Society.

A little history. When I turned twenty-one, I received a gift – this trunk. Scratched into its surface in a childish hand are the words The Dictionary of Lost Words. The child who wrote this was Esme Nicoll, an unacknowledged but startlingly original lexicographer who had died prematurely some months before my birthday.

The trunk that arrived at my home here in Adelaide was the repository of Esme’s life’s work and it became a talisman of mine. It is an encapsulation of a life, a humble piece of magic, and a treasury of secrets.

Among those secrets was – me. Esme was my birth mother. I was, it seems, the most treasured ‘lost word’ of her life. And she was the unknown ‘lost word’ of mine.

The first word she ‘rescued’, as she thought of it as a child, was a difficult one that spells out an idea of serving until death. What Esme learned over her short lifetime was that the words that define us are both complex and ambiguous, restraining and releasing us by turns. They do indeed shape us, but they also offer a boundary for us to push against, and if we do, we may sometimes choose the next shape of ourselves.

That realisation is what began my own long journey with words. It was a gift to me. I hope it can be a gift to you.

I will now start my talk proper with that word – troubling, beautiful, dangerously nuanced. Here it is on this quotation slip.

‘Bondmaid’.

WORDS SIGNAGE: BONDMAID

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