Armidale woman Dr Margaret C Sharpe leaving city for QLD

On August 1 Margaret will say goodbye to the town she has called home for nearly five decades and will head for the slightly warmer horizons of Nerang, a suburb in the City of Gold Coast, QLD.

There, she will teach, and help rejuvenate traditional indigenous dialect, a passion she has devoted her life to.

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Margaret is a linguist of Australian Aboriginal languages, specializing in Yugambeh-Bundjalung languages with particular regard to Yugambir.

The Yugambeh dialects were traditionally spoken in the Gold Coast area whereas Bundjalung is the widely used name for dialects of the NSW Northern Rivers.

Margaret has published dictionaries on these languages, including all the material she and others have researched and investigated.

She has worked extensively as a lecturer at the Department of Aboriginal and Multicultural Studies of the UNE and has been active in teaching indigenous groups about the disappearing languages their forefathers spoke.

Margaret moved to the Armidale area from Queensland in 1978 to take up a teaching position at what was then called the College of Advanced Education (now the New England Conservatorium of Music and hub for the Dept of Regional NSW).

"I took up my teaching position there at CAE which I kept for 17 years until my retirement," Margaret remembers fondly.

"My husband was a technician for (what is now known as) Telstra and he was able to get a transfer which was perfect for us.

"Nerang is on the railway line which suits me just fine as I don't drive," she said when asked about her decision to move.

Margaret said she was looking forward to helping her friends on the North Coast reclaim their ancestral language and culture, to take pride in their heritage through language.

"And of course, anyone from Armidale will say, it's warmer up there," she said with a laugh.

"And there's no daylight saving there either!

"I also, unfortunately, have a collapsed vertebra which means I don't have as much lung space as I used to and can move around more in the lower altitude."

The academic said she had seen a lot of changes in Armidale over the years and made many close friends whom she hopes to visit as often as possible.

Margaret played brass trombone in the Armidale town orchestra, the oldest continuing brass band in NSW, for many years. She has written three novels, one of which, 'A Family Divided,' deals with interracial conflict and friendship.

Margaret's other passions include astronomy and astrophysics and managed to combine these interests with that of Aboriginal society, discovering the indigenous people were very much interested in the night sky.

In 2017, Sharpe was designated a Kaialgumm, "champion in the fight", by the Yugambeh Museum in recognition of her decades-long scholarship and teaching in documenting and helping to revive, the Yugambeh language.

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