Heartsick for Country

by Sally Morgan

  Deman Cliff’s mother was Granny Weenie and she’s the daughter of Kandianne, and Granny’s husband was Bill Humphries. His Nyungar name was Minninul.

  Len Collard: So what you’re really saying to me is that old pop (Cliff Humphries) was telling you the camping areas and all these activities that was going on, that’s where the ancestors were, before you fellas, in the latter years, had to shift out to live in the wheat belt.

  Nitcha boodjar koonyarn nitcha koorl buranginy boodjar Karluk maya koonyarn wah. Deman demangarmarn wiern kia moort koonyarn. Deman garmarm noonookurt, boodjar koonyarn karla koorliny. Koorlongka boorda gneenunyiny. Those words say that this is my country where I belong. This is demangarmarn, my grandmother and grandfather’s land, this is their land, where their spirits move now. Boorda, or later on, this is going to be the responsibility of my children and my children’s children, their home and this place will always be linked to their spirit.

  ***

  Our stories are handed down to us from the local Nyungar oral historians and ‘keepers of stories’, whether they are from the Whadjuck, Balardong, Pindjarup or Wiilman language groups, and extracts from colonial text give testimony to the Nyungar cosmology, the phenomenon known as the Waakal, the Nyungar Rainbow Serpent, creator of the trilogy of boodjar, moort and katitjin.

  Finally, old Pop Tom Yelakitj Bennell recorded his thoughts on doing Nyungar history work on his own tape recorder in 1978. Pop said, ‘All the words that I am speaking now are blackfellas’ own words. They’re exactly the same. They are same as white people’s words, say yes this and that, and all this, but Nyungar words are all coming through. All these tapes that I am doing now, if they’d like to write a book the same as a white person, what histories they’re writing in they books, well, these tapes I am doing now, could actually be all the same as anybody’s in Australia.’ [80]

  The Nyungar speakers were active participants in my research work and I am very grateful to our people and say, ‘Kaya noonar quopadar da un maar wangkiny ngung katitich nitcha,’ or ‘Yes, you are very good speakers and writers and I understand this.’

  Kaya.

  IRENE WATSON

  belongs to the Tanganekald and Meintangk peoples of the south-east of South Australia. Irene is well known for her activism and writings against and about the impact of colonialism upon Aboriginal peoples. In 1996, Irene was appointed as one of seven Indigenous judges to the First Nations International Court of Justice, sitting in Ottawa, Canada. She is working as a post-doctoral research fellow in the faculty of law at the University of Sydney. (Image 4.1)

  Image 4.1

  De-colonising the Space: Dreaming back to Country

  We belong to different nations, languages and peoples who were once in sovereign occupation of traditional lands, seas and waterways which were, at the time of Cook’s coming, in pristine ecological condition. Now the land, we call ruwi, like the bodies of many Aboriginal people, is fighting for survival against poor health and environmental devastation. In fulfilling our Aboriginal obligations as traditional owners and carers for country, many of us who have been dispossessed or have no power to decide the future of our lands, collectively struggle to occupy, reconnect with and determine their future health and wellbeing.

  To begin, I return to my traditional homelands, the Coorong and the south-east of South Australia, and to my mother, Noeline Casey, who remembers, as a young child in the 1930s, having to leave Kingston SE, on the lands of her people, the Tanganakeld and Meintangk, and travel to Adelaide (on the lands of the Kaurna) with her mother, Irene Gibson. My grandmother moved to avoid the colonial state’s child removal policies under the Aborigines Act. And, and, the Prime Minister at the time of writing, John Howard, declared on 21 June a state of emergency in remote Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory in response to claims of the sexual abuse of Aboriginal children.[81] The purpose of this intervention was to stop the sexual abuse of children, and the response is to bring the Australian military and federal police forces in to communities. I am hearing through the media stories of Aboriginal women fleeing from their communities for fear of their children being removed. My grandmother fled her traditional lands with my mother in the 1930s, when Aboriginal children were being removed for the purpose of assimilation, that is to fit into white society, to stop speaking our languages, and to break our connection to country. Today, Aboriginal children are removed because they are at risk of abuse, abuse whose origins are in the inter-generational trauma of earlier child removal policies. While the reasons for Aboriginal child removal over the years is stated differently, its effect on Aboriginal connections to country is the same: we become dispossessed as traditional owners of our country. During my grandmother’s time, and in country areas, Aboriginal families were often more vulnerable and easier targets for child removal, and my grandmother witnessed the removal of children from relatives and feared the removal of her youngest child. The removal of Aboriginal children had been sanctioned by the state under the Aborigines Act (SA). The Act provided the legal framework for the detention of Nungas[82] on state Aboriginal reserves, and the appointment of a protector, who held power to control the daily lives of Aboriginal people. As a result Aboriginal people in South Australia (the same legislation applied in similar ways in all other States) became institutionalised, wards of the state known as ‘protected persons’, rather than citizens of their own Aboriginal nations. It was under these laws that Aboriginal children were removed from family, community and country. In law, we were deemed ‘British subjects’, but in practice we were treated in accordance with the racist traditions of terra nullius: made invisible, and doomed to annihilation and absorption as assimilated persons. The protector became the legal guardian of all Aboriginal children until they turned twenty-one, and all movement of people onto and off reserves was controlled. Our access to our traditional lands— ruwi [83]—was restricted at the same time as pastoralists and farmers were invading them. The colonies established reserves, and rounding up Nungas and putting them in these institutions served to provide enclaves of cheap labour for the local pastoral and agricultural industries. The reserves were essentially concentration camps, where no consideration was given to our clan identity and traditional language was banned. The removal of Aboriginal people from their traditional ruwi and their relocation on reserves, sometimes hundreds of kilometres away, became the common practice of the State.

  My grandmother wanted to avoid the capture and institutionalisation of my mother, Noeline, and she succeeded in doing this, but it came at a cost and it meant fleeing from country and kin in the early 1940s and living four hundred kilometres away, returning home to Kingston only whenever the opportunity or resources provided for the trip. I inherited this dispossession from my traditional lands and, like my mother; I grew up in Adelaide, country belonging to the Kaurna. I was part of the first generation of my people not to be born on the traditional lands of our ancestors. In moving to the city, my mother had learnt to avoid government officials who had the power to remove children, but once the threat of removal had passed, it had become difficult to return home. The country where you were able to live had become shrunken, titled and consumed by the Crown, and those small pockets of ‘Crown’ land set aside as Aboriginal reserves were not enough to sustain all the Aboriginal families of the region. Aboriginal families around Kingston were positioned to compete for these little scraps of land and a home for their families, and families who had left due to the effects of the Aborigines Act found that returning was impossible. The limited allotments set aside as Aboriginal reserve lands were even further reduced by colonial policies supporting the resumption of Crown land for public purposes. A block of Aboriginal reserve land close to Kingston town was resumed by the Crown as the local council rubbish dump. An ancient site where my ancestors had lived, fished, trapped wild duck and buried their loved ones subsequently buried in the refuse of the local township. When my mother finally returned home to live in Kingston permanently, she be
came active in the protection of her mother’s country and looked to take care of her grandmother’s burial site. This had been fenced off (an effort of the local school) but was still surrounded by the town dump.

  Caring for country can evoke romantic images of Aboriginal people and the land, and it can be all of those images, but it can also be a lot of worry, sadness and hopelessness over our dealings with a dominant culture that doesn’t care in the same way that many Aboriginal people care for the land.

  Protection of the burial site was always a concern of our family and the Elders and was a project to which Mum solidly committed herself. In 1988 she was instrumental in starting the Kungari Aboriginal Heritage Association. She was the chairwoman of a group of Elders, including Janet Watson, Fred Ahang, Lola Bonney and Ronnie Bonney. The group worked voluntarily to restore the land by getting the council to close the dump and remove the rubbish while Kungari members helped and planted thousands of trees, shrubs and groundcovers. Kungari also concerns itself with the protection and restoration of other important sites throughout our ruwi. (Image 4.2)

  Image 4.2: ‘They covered our country with their rubbish but I have returned home and have taken it away and covered the land with trees which in turn have brought home our ngaitje-bird. Ngaitje means spirit being or totem.’ Courtesy Irene Watson

  Mum spent most of her life growing up in the city, where she had had her own family, but throughout those years we often returned home. In my mother’s words:

  I went back home permanently when I was over fifty years old. It was then that I got involved in [Aboriginal] Heritage. The Aboriginal Heritage [state government officers] come into town one day and said is there any Aboriginal sites here that need protection? And I said, ‘Yes, there are heaps around here all along the coastline and we have a special Aboriginal burial ground here that could be upgraded and could be saved.’ And they said, ‘Well, that can be done.’ So there we are, we put the unemployment team on to do it all up and that was in 1988. We done it all up and got rid of all the rubbish, but see there was still a dump there, so we got the dump cleared up and got the local council to move their dump away from our burial and camping sites. That was done by four young Aboriginal men and my son was there and he led the way to clean it all up. They did a pretty good job in planting all the trees. In the beginning we had no resources, no office, and we worked from my house. We had meetings and the Elders, we all agreed, but unfortunately they are all gone; we had a good team and they were supportive then. It was important to do [protecting the burial grounds], because a lot of the old people are buried there; my great-grandmother, Catherine Gibson, is buried there. All along that coastline you will find [human] remains around there. A couple of years ago we found remains just alongside the burial ground, so that was buried back. All the developing that is going on now is just disturbing everything. Aboriginal site protection is important to me and I think the sites should be left alone. They are put there for a purpose, and that’s to rest; it’s a resting place. And it doesn’t seem to sink into some of these developers. They just want to go in and dig up. But we did re-bury back a few remains, and hopefully we can still go on doing that, and if they do get dug up, we bury them back again. We haven’t always been successful at protecting sites—at Robe, in the south-east, an important fishing cave was destroyed—but we are still trying to hang onto what’s left. The coastal cliff, it was a beautiful spot there, with all the natural shrubs and trees the native plants, they need to be protected. We were negotiating with the Robe Council for nearly twenty years, and we thought they would agree to protect that site, but we lost the battle and they went ahead and built the yacht club anyway. It was pretty sad really, we tried all those years to stop it and they went ahead and done it anyway. I think they will be in trouble later on, because the tides are rising and that yacht club could get washed away. But as I said, people with money can get their way. The land is important because that’s where we come from, that’s our mother earth. That’s why it’s important, but it is slowly deteriorating, the planet is slowly getting hurt and hurt. But the land, it made us real strong, the land.

  If not for the strength we gain from the land, it would be difficult to continue the struggle to care for it, particularly when we mostly lose the battles. If not for the strength gained from the land as sovereign peoples, we might surrender and walk away. But country calls us to act and for the few Aboriginal warriors left standing, it is an imperative. Saving the land from environmental vandalism is often difficult, particularly when Australian and international law provides no real way to help protect Aboriginal interests in land. Its main interest is in assimilating Aboriginal peoples into the business-as-usual paradigm. The South Australian Aboriginal Heritage Act 1988 purports to provide protection similar to other State and Federal legislation, but it has proved to be weak and next to useless in looking after Aboriginal culture and sites. The power and interests of Aboriginal people are outweighed by the power of interests like farming, mining, tourism, roads and towns. It is hard to just sit on the beach and enjoy the sunset when many of our people worry about country and the damage and destruction of important sites. The worry and concern are extended by limits on our power to act. All we have are the powers to say no and to remember that it is the land that made us real strong. (Image 4.3)

  Image 4.3: The Wave sings me home every time Courtesy Irene Watson

  Our connection to country hasn’t always been one of struggle. In the past there were peaceful times, as Eileen Brown Kampakuta, Elder and founding and continuing member of the Kupa Pita Kungkas [84] remembers:

  As a young girl I used to camp with my mother and grandmother and I used to ask a lot of questions about stories from a long time ago, about how they learned and how they teach young people, so I used to go and lay down with my grandmother and ask questions. She used to look up to the sky and tell the story about the creek, you know, up in the sky and the stars mean something. And a lot of stories she used to tell, and later I would go to sleep and my grandmother would call out to my mother, ‘Oh, you can come and pick her up now, she’s gone to sleep.’ The old people taught us how to hunt bush tucker, and when we grew up we used to go and hunt for the bush tucker ourselves, and they taught us the ways and we learned how to find things. You feel at home when you are learning about our Aboriginal culture and you should be out there, on the land, and don’t bring into the big city. But it’s a real thing when you are outside with the trees and the fire going and you are sitting down with the people. But down there [in the city] is good, but our people should ask them to come up and come to the land and sit down with us here. But sometimes they like going down there.

  But such peaceful times have become rare for Nungas. We have become preoccupied with worry for country and the weight of resisting historical pressures to assimilate and to heal from the inter-generational traumas of colonialism. It is the memories held by Elders that remind us of who we are and the importance of our connections to country. But we are still afflicted in many ways. Some of our lands were considered to be so remote and of such little productive benefit that the Federal and State governments viewed them as suitable sites for testing nuclear weapons in the 1950s. Today they are the site of an expanding uranium mine.[85] Other lands are earmarked for the storage of nuclear waste.[86] But these lands are occupied and travelled over. The Kupa Pita Kungka Tjutja struggled to keep their spaces safe from nuclear waste for the future survival of their grandchildren. Emily Austin talks about travelling over and connecting to country for her future grandchildren:

  I was born in—they call that place Amata now, but it was Apara ... I am Yangkuntjara. I live a good life now; it’s like in the old time we used to live a good life. Travel around, we used to walk and our mother used to make a road with a foot track, you know, we had no shoes. We travel around and you know we used to have a good life. But today is you know they on the smoking all those things, drink; I think that’s why today’s life is a bit weak today. But long time
ago, we grow up good way, you know, and bush tucker. They used to live on a bush tucker, say like a kangaroo, emu, goanna, all those things you know and witchetty grub, that’s the main good food they used to eat, you know, and that’s how they lived strong! You need the culture, and you know when we used to going out to stop that waste dump [87] ... It was for our children, their future, you know. Because we’ll all be gone soon, and what they gunna see and learn? You know, so all the grandmothers got together and we talk about it. And then, when we heard they gunna bring it [nuclear waste from the Lucas Heights reactor] and put it in our country and it was really close, you know—they had it over here first on station, I forgot the name of the station—anyway, we stopped that one. We used to go up and down talking ... we used to try and talk, but they wasn’t listening to us, but we didn’t stop we kept on going, because we was thinking of our children’s future, you know, little ones coming up, great-grandkids gunna come so they gunna have a good life too. And we knew it was strong poison too, you know, if they buried around our country, it’ll go down to the water. Because out in the desert we got underground water, so the poison would’ve went down there.