Geoffrey O'Grady
Geoffrey O'Grady was a professor Emeritus of linguistics whose primary field of specialization was Australian Aboriginal languages.Life and career
He trained as a jackaroo and worked as a stockman at Wallal Downs station pastoral lease some 156 miles north-east of Port Hedland from 1949 to 1955, and from 1952 carried out linguistic studies, focusing particularly on the Njaŋumada. Challenging the received notion that Aboriginal languages were lexically impoverished, O'Grady gathered some 4,000 roots which, together with Helmut Petri and Gisela Odermann's list of 6,550 words compiled at Anna Plains, gave proof of a rich language that could appropriate by assimilation and grammatical modification many concepts that were exclusive to the domain of Western civilization.
Over two months, in March/April 1961, O'Grady and the visiting American linguist Ken Hale made a sweeping survey tour of coastal languages spoken from Port Augusta to Broome, and managed to record significant quantities of material from 26 languages.Citations
