The language of ‘messy’ encounters: Matthew Flinders’s depictions of Australian Aborigines (1801-1803)

In this contribution I focus on the key linguistic features characterising the descriptions of the encounters with local Indigenous populations as narrated in Matthew Flinders’s fair journals of the first circumnavigation of Australia (1801-1803) (Morgan 2015a, Morgan 2015c); to that end, I use corpus linguistic methods to examine referents and modifiers. My analysis of the most frequent items corroborates Douglas’s (2014) conclusion that Flinders avoided strong, racialised language in his accounts of such encounters. To a large extent, the preference for conventional vocabulary and descriptive modifiers, in addition to extensive use of hedging devices, accounts for the neutral, moderate qualities of Flinders’s style.