97 year old Australian Indigenous woman Laurie Baymarrwangga and the Yan-nha ŋu dictionary team are looking for funds to complete the publication of a 350 page Yan-nhaŋu Atlas: Illustrated Dictionary of the Crocodile Islands. As one of the last of 12 speakers of this la nguage she has struggled for twenty years to complete this publication in order to give to the children of her community some opportunity to learn their heritage. In 2012 she was recognised as the Senior Australian of the year for her efforts (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurie_Baymarrwangga), but no funding was forthcoming. The Atlas is in its final stages but is short of funds to complete the project in time. As Baymarrwangga is 97 years old we are working constantly to distribute the Atlas while she is still alive. The trilingual Atlas is in Yan-nha ŋu, and the local lingua franca of Yol ŋu Matha with some 7000 speakers in North East Arnhem Land, and in English to support bilingual education.

Baymarrwangga’s trilingual Yan-nha ŋu dictionary project is aimed to support language education on the Crocodile Islands, in two Yol ŋu languages, Yan-nha ŋu and Dhuwal/a (7000 speakers) and English. It will be distributed to homelands across North East Arnhem Land where Yolŋu Matha is spoken.
In 1993 there were only 300 of her words documented; now we have some 4000 words recorded, containing the local knowledge of countless generations. This learning resource is designed to fill the vacuum left by the removal of bilingual education. It includes a sketch grammar, beautiful historical pictur e series mapping the hundred year life of Baymarrwangga and including the photos of th e most renowned anthropologists to have worked in the area since the early 1920’s. These pictures include never before seen images by Donald Thomson, Sir Hubert Wilkins, W. Lloyd Warner and AP Elkin. This aspect of the Atlas gives it an outstanding historic al and aesthetic quality beyond any other contemporary work.