Vocabulary of the Woolner District Dialect, Adelaide River, Northern Territory
Adelaide, Printed by W.C. Cox, Government Printer, 1869.
Duodecimo, 30 pages.
Bound without the printed wrappers in later binder's cloth, lettered in gilt on the spine; edges lightly speckled red; free endpapers tanned; author's name in light lead pencil on the title page; a few unobtrusive spots of foxing; essentially in fine condition.
The very rare first edition of this short vocabulary of the Wulna or Wuna language (now extinct) of the Darwin region. This is only the third copy we have handled in nearly five decades of trading, there are no sales recorded in the cumulative book auction records, and institutional holdings are extremely thin on the ground (however, they do include the extraordinary copy, extensively annotated by Paul Foelsche, that we sold to the State Library of New South Wales a long time ago). For the record, this copy has an additional space after the second letter of the first word of the title (VO CABULARY) which is not present in the Foelsche copy (now digitised and available online). The text of this edition was later reprinted in 'The Native Tribes of South Australia' (Adelaide, E.S. Wigg & Son, 1879), where Bennett is identified as the author. A detailed and graphic account of the death of John Bennett appeared in 'The Adelaide Observer' on Saturday 20 November 1869. News had just arrived in Adelaide that he had died at Port Darwin on 28 May that year, as a result of being speared twice four days earlier. Ferguson 6935.
Item #139903
Sold