Hubbry Logo
search
logo
2076497

John Rudder

logo
Community Hub0 Subscribers
Write something...
Be the first to start a discussion here.
Be the first to start a discussion here.
See all
John Rudder

John Rudder was an Australian linguist who studied the Australian Aboriginal languages, of Arnhem Land (Gupapuyngu) in the Northern Territory and the state of New South Wales (Wiradjuri), Australia.

In 1964, Rudder went to Arnhem Land as a teacher, and later as a community development worker and educator among adult Indigenous Australians. In that time he learned to speak the language of the region, and analysed its grammar and syntax.

He sought to gain formal educational qualifications after moving to Canberra, and has since gained a master's degree in Anthropology focussing on Aboriginal Classificatory Theory and Cognitive Structures and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Aboriginal Anthropology focusing on Yolngu Cosmology (focusing on beliefs regarding the nature of existence and how the world is ordered.)

From 1993 to 2010, Rudder was heavily involved with Stan Grant Sr, an elder of the Wiradjuri people, in reclaiming the Wiradjuri language that was at that time effectively dead. He took anthropological studies and records amounting to the records of fewer than 2,000 words and applied the language and cognitive analysis he had previously applied to the Yolngu language, to begin to reconstruct the Wiradjuri language. With Grant, who provided a sense of the language remembered from his youth in World War II among Wiradjuri-speaking family and tribal members, notably his grandfather, they have established training sessions to teach the language across Wiradjuri country. Intensive weekend camps, workshops, and other sessions have seen a growing number of Wiradjuri speakers who are beginning to re-establish the language. For instance, these speakers are beginning to write songs and poems that are then being taught to children.

Secondary effects of the cultural use of the Wiradjuri language are being felt within the language group, and beyond. Examples are:

Rudder was an artist for many years, previously entering the Blake Prize for Religious Art. He recently returned to painting, and his entry was selected for display in the exhibition of the inaugural Phoenix Prize for spiritual art in 2005.[citation needed]

Rudder was a member of the Uniting Church in Australia. Until her death in 2008 he was married to Trixie, a part-time lay pastor for a congregation of the Uniting Church at Gunning, near Canberra.[citation needed]

In December 2010 he remarried and moved to Sydney. His second wife Julie Waddy OAM worked as an ethnobiologist and linguist working with the Anglican Church Missionary Society on Groote Eylandt in the Northern Territory with the aboriginal people for 30 years, and returned to Sydney in 2005.

See all
User Avatar
No comments yet.