The Guardian Australia has launched an ambitious new multimedia series dedicated to exploring the remarkable efforts of Indigenous communities to revive and preserve their ancestral languages.
Award-Winning Team Returns with Groundbreaking Project
Speaking to Country represents the second major project for 2025 from the Guardian's Walkley award-winning Indigenous affairs team. The four-part series is reported by Ella Archibald-Binge and edited by Calla Wahlquist, with crucial funding provided by The Balnaves Foundation.
This interactive series delves into the profound connections between place, culture and language, examining how language fundamentally shapes our understanding of the world. The project has received comprehensive production support from the Guardian's multimedia, data and design teams.
Four Compelling Stories of Language Revival
The series features several powerful narratives from across Australia. Kamilaroi woman Ella Archibald-Binge contributes a personal essay documenting her journey across her late grandfather's Country, exploring how her lost connection to language affects her identity and cultural confidence.
Another segment highlights the extraordinary revival of the Gumbaynggirr language, which has been brought back from the brink of extinction to become one of Australia's ten fastest-growing languages. The language is now taught in New South Wales' first bilingual school and celebrated through community choir performances.
The series also examines a three-decade-long community-led project that has revived lost Tasmanian languages into Palawa kani. A final story showcases how communities like the Nyiyaparli in Western Australia, who have dwindling numbers of fluent speakers, are employing modern tools to ensure their language continues with new generations.
Building on Previous Success
Guardian Australia's Indigenous affairs and data teams previously won the 2025 Walkley Award for their coverage of Indigenous affairs through The Descendants series, which was also supported by The Balnaves Foundation. That project explored how Australian families are confronting the challenges of truth-telling from multiple perspectives of history.
Since launching in Australia in 2013, the Guardian has established itself as a source of independent journalism, maintaining bureaux in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Canberra while operating as part of a 24-hour global news network.
