Gavan Breen began his working life as a metallurgist, but switched to linguistics in his early thirties to become involved in the salvage of dying Australian languages. He has spent many years recording and analysing almost-extinct (now extinct) languages in western Queensland and adjacent parts of inland Australia. He has worked with the School of Australian Linguistics, training native speakers of Australian languages in vernacular literacy, basic linguistics and other skills relevant to teaching and literature production in bilingual education, translation and interpreting, lexicography and other language-related work. He has also done substantial work on Arrernte and other living languages of Central Australia, especially in phonology, the interrelationship of kinship and grammar, and compilation of dictionaries.