When did major efforts to document surviving Australian Aboriginal languages begin?

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Distinctive features of Australia's Indigenous languages — Australian Aboriginal languages A discussion of the languages of Indigenous Australians.

A major collective effort to document and record surviving Australian Aboriginal languages began in the early 1970s.1

Prior to this, many speech varieties had already become extinct or were known only through fragmentary and poorly transcribed missionary word lists. As a result of these systematic efforts, fairly complete grammars or grammatical sketches are now available for approximately 100 of these languages.1