Lower Arrernte was spoken in the Finke River area, near the Overland Telegraph Line station at Charlotte Waters, just north of the border between South Australia and the Northern Territory, and in the Dalhousie area in S.A.[3] It had been extinct since the last speaker died in 2011, but there is now a language revival project under way.
Gavan Breen, an Australian linguist, was able to compile a dictionary of Lower Arrernte comprising about a thousand words by recording talks he had with Doolan.
[4] Doolan's mother Fanny, father Paddy[5] and grandmother, who lived south of the small settlement at Finke/Aputula in the Northern Territory, near Mt Dare in South Australia, spoke the language.
[4] After a stint as a stockman on the Andado station in the mid-1940s,[5] Doolan became a tracker for both Finke and Kulgera police.
The project aims to "identify and document critically-endangered languages — those languages for which little or no documentation exists, where no recordings have previously been made, but where there are living speakers".