Patyegarang was aged around 15 when she became a guide and language teacher to William Dawes. Dawes, an astronomer, mathematician and linguist, was a lieutenant in the Royal Marines on board , of the
First Fleet, to the
Colony of New South Wales. William Dawes met Patye (as he would call her) when he struck up friendships with the local Gadigal people.
Documenting language William Dawes was the first person to write down an Australian language. Patyegarang tutored Dawes in his understanding and assisted in the documentation of the
Dharug language spoken by the Gadigal people and other tribes, sometimes referred to as the Sydney language. Patyegarang was one of the first people to have taught an Aboriginal language to a non-Aboriginal person. Together they made the first detailed study of Australian Indigenous languages, compiling vocabularies, grammatical forms, and many expressions in the language during his three-year stay in the colony. Three notebooks compiled by William Dawes survive. The language notebooks were discovered by
Phyllis Mander-Jones, an Australian librarian, while she was working at the
University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). The notebooks include specific terms for the sun, the moon and the clouds leading Indigenous Curator James Wilson Miller to note that Patyegarang had detailed knowledge of the land and sky.
Relationship with William Dawes Patyegarang may have lived with William Dawes in his hut at Observatory Point. Some of the expressions she shared with Dawes, such as Putuwá which means "to warm one's hand by the fire and then to squeeze gently the fingers of another person" indicate a close relationship. Patyegarang learned to speak and read English from Dawes. It is not clear how long she was associated with him or what eventually happened to her. ==Proposal for statue of Patyegarang==