She was told not to speak her language, now she's teaching it

Now, she's received one of the nation's highest honours for sharing it with people around the world and helping to breathe life into another lost language.

Ms Wright - known to most as Aunty Beth - is a Gamilraay, Yuwaalaraay and Wayilwan woman and a teacher of seven Indigenous languages at TAFE NSW in the Yarradamarra Centre in Dubbo.

She has just been announced as one of the recipients of a Public Service Medal, a King's Birthday honour awarded to public sector employees.

"I'm accepting it humbly... it comes with mixed emotions," she told the Daily Liberal, when asked how she felt about the honour.

"You've got to put it into perspective of how we feel about the King in the context of what happened with Aboriginal people.

"But then I thought I'm not only accepting on behalf of myself, I'm accepting on behalf of my family, the elders out there who taught me the language and TAFE and all the stuff that we do."

Ms Wright started teaching the Wiradjuri language at TAFE part time in 2010 but she has long had a passion for teaching. She said teaching language is "her dreaming" and something she was naturally called to.

"I've got three sisters, one sister does painting and weaving, my other sister does dancing," she said.

"And my sister, who's closest to me in age, knows everyone... When someone mentions a name from Walgett, I'm ringing her up asking 'sis who's this person, who's his mob, who's his people' and she can rattle that off for me.

"Isn't it funny that we all grew up in the same house... but they took that on and I took on the language."

Before working at TAFE, Ms Wright helped teach the Gamilaraay Yuwaalawaay language at schools in Walgett and Goodooga. Although she learned the language from her family growing up, she was not encouraged to share it with others.

"Growing up in Walgett we were told at a young age, 'don't, don't speak your language outside the house unless you're down by the river fishing with the aunties',"

"We were told especially 'don't speak it in front of the welfare man because he'll take you away'.

"I still remember the welfare man's name today. I'm 59... Why is his name embedded in me?"

Now she's helping Indigenous people living around the world reconnect with their culture through learning language.

"When a new class starts and I ask the students why they're signing up, I find 70 per cent of those people have lost their language or their culture or themselves," she said.

"As they're going through the journey, they learn identity and they learn language. Like the old people say, language is your identity."

One of Ms Wright's proudest achievements is helping to preserve the Wayilwan language in Warren, out of the same classroom her father studied in when he went to school in the early 1950's.

When she was tasked with setting up the Wayilwan program she could only find a resource with 100 words.

Despite only knowing a few words of the language, she earned permission from local elders to teach the language and spent thousands of hours accessing primary sources to create a dictionary of more than 1000 words.

Some of these sources included recordings of Wayilwan speakers made by British linguists in the 20th century.

"One of those recordings we got access to is my great, great grandfather. I remember him. He was a beautiful old man," she said.

One of the challenges which came from using these recordings was that the British linguists didn't understand cultural concepts like women's business and men's business which prevented speakers from using certain words.

"Before the linguist even starts she says, 'oh, you might know many of these because you've lived with the non-Indigenous people for so long'... it's already condemning," Ms Wright said.

"When she gets to the word for 'teenage girl' he couldn't say it, and for 'mother-in-law', not because he didn't know it, but because of the rules of the language.... A word is more than a word."

All the hard work paid off. Now, for the first time since the last remaining Wayilwan speakers passed away in the 1960s the language is being spoken, and sung, again in Warren.

"I went over to Warren the other day and watched the kids singing 'Lean On Me', translated into Wayilwan... they weren't even holding paper," she said.

"That was so beautiful because they were singing it without reading it, it was instilled in their brain. These are 8, 9 and 10 year old kids... they're the future of our language.

"Language is more than just language. Language is identity. The old people say language is your soul. Now we have the opportunity to awaken it and bring it back."