A grandmother has a lot to say. Mima is the name for grandmother in our clan. Everyone should remember it.
Grandmother? I should fling my arms wide when I say grandmother because with our people there is a different idea of the word.
I have three grandsons from my two daughters, Karen and Shelley: Kayn, twenty, Christopher, fourteen, and Nicholas, twelve. But I am not just grandmother to my three biological grandchildren, I am a grandmother to so many others in my clan. Family is everything to Aboriginal people. There are circles within circles, but we are all family. I am from the Yorta Yorta Nation, whose country extends throughout the top area of Victoria and some of New South Wales, but within the Yorta Yorta Nation I am a member of a smaller clan, the Wollithica. All over Australia we have clan groups and larger tribes that belong to the nations of Aboriginal peoples.
Because of my family, my upbringing and what I have experienced, it is natural that I have advocated for my people and I haven’t stopped, despite ill health. I am nearly eighty and I’ve lived a very active life. And a varied one. I once added up all the jobs I have had since I started work at sixteen and it came to twenty-seven. So the changes I’ve seen are astonishing. My family have always been outspoken and concerned about all the issues of race, discrimination and justice, but these have not always been in the foreground the way they are now. When I was small and living on the banks of the Goulburn River at Mooroopna in Victoria, the concerns of my people were more about simple needs, about survival.
These days I am involved in two educational programs delivered in the early years and school sectors. The first, Cultural Understanding and Safety Training, involves me educating teachers working in early childhood and right through to secondary school levels. The aim is for me to share my cultural and historical knowledge with teachers. I deliver two sessions per school and then the Koorie Education Support Officers advise the teachers where they can access further information (internet, local Aboriginal organisations and networks) to help them work with young Aboriginal people.
The second program involves me visiting kindergartens and primary schools. I tell the children some of the things I know, things I’ve come to understand over a long life that could not be more different from theirs. It’s fun; I enjoy charming the children with stories and illustrations of the country we all live in. Children find it easy to learn how the land is connected to them. I will speak to them if they care to listen; that way they see and hear someone from a culture that is the oldest culture on Earth.
The hardest task is convincing the teachers that what we want to talk about with their students is worthwhile. Some teachers assume that all history is always past and we have arrived at a good place. But people my age have lived it, so we have things to speak about that should be heard, not swept under the rug. The Roman philosopher Cicero once said, ‘To be ignorant of the past is to remain a child’—that is so true. The past is not ancient history to me. It is living history. I am living history.
I have a big possum-skin cloak, fifteen possum pelts, which I made myself. On the inside I have drawn my personal dreaming. ‘Dreaming is like a totem,’ I explain to the children, and they especially love this. I have the long-necked turtle, as well as the dreaming of my clan and some other pictures. It contains the story of my life and is yet to be finished. I like the fact that these possum cloaks are what everyone from my country used in the past. They were everyday things, worn to keep out the cold. They were not ceremonial robes, as people seem to think. The stories and detailed drawings of symbols and pictures on the inside of the cloak show how an individual’s lived experience is tied into our cultural connection to country.
The children love to look at my cloak and think about the images on it. They want to know everything. How is it sewn together? How did I make pictures on the inside skin? What do the patterns mean? Where did I learn about them? Of course, I explain that I haven’t used the old methods of kangaroo sinew to sew the pelts together, or bones to punch holes in the skin, nor have I used a hot pointed stick and ochre to etch in the drawings, but they love to know how the drawings used to be made. They are also keen to have a personal totem themselves! What they especially love is rolling around in my cloak.
So, in a sense, I am a grandmother to all these children I happen to spend some time with. In our culture the Elders carry the wisdom or the knowledge, all that deep knowledge that has been passed on orally—traditionally we didn’t write things down. It is a different way of thinking from that of a written culture. Everything is mapped out in the head.
Grandmothers in all cultures do this: they keep the stories, tell the tales. And the children learn important things they need to know from us, sometimes things that have been passed down through the generations. There is no religion in Aboriginal culture. We believe in a creator who gave us our lore and laws to follow. The laws mainly involve looking after the environment and maintaining our connection to country. You’re taught that this is your responsibility, because the land provides for you, not just food, but in all sorts of ways. You need to be taught to listen to the land. If you listen to the lessons properly, you will learn how to live life properly. The children don’t know they are learning as they observe and take in things, as we go about ordinary life and talk about our lived experience. Traditionally, grandmothers have had the time: while the younger, more able people were out working, the older people stayed behind and looked after the babies.
I also belong to a program in schools where we act as substitute grandparents for Aboriginal children who don’t have grandparents or anyone who is in a position to act as grandparents. This means going to events at school or occasionally doing things a biological grandparent might do. So, you see, I want to spread my arms wide when I say that word grandmother.
My father was English/Australian and, although he acknowledged me, he didn’t have anything to do with my upbringing. I am filled, made, created by all those conscious and unconscious things that came from my mother’s side. My birth mother was an itinerant worker and had to move a lot, so I went backwards and forwards between my mother and grandmother until I was about five. Most of my family were itinerant and needed to follow the seasonal work of fruit and vegetable picking, but the clan was based in Mooroopna and up near Barmah and Echuca and on the Cummeragunja Reserve. It’s complicated, but these threads of family are critically important. And holding these threads in my head is the important part of being a grandmother.
Traditionally, clan groups were family groups, so you didn’t have just one set of parents, you had two or three sets of parents. The whole group had responsibility for the children. If you were crying or had fallen over, any one of the family members would look after you. We were a very close-knit clan and the nurturing was done by everyone. Love was never limited to your own children.
I never felt threatened or afraid as a child. We say that in our community you have many eyes on you. They are always watching what you do. You feel safe.
From the age of five, I lived with my aunt and uncle. They had a permanent house in Mooroopna and were the people who raised me from then on. I called them mum and dad and that’s how I’ve always thought of them. My ‘grandmother’ was mum’s first cousin. My real grandmother was also moving around with the family, so I saw her when she came back for work. But I had other grandmothers, or nanas, and I always felt connected within the family group. As I said, it is complicated!
I was born in 1940, so I grew up with a mixture of contemporary and traditional ways. My family has adapted to modern life, while still keeping some of our ways of life.
The grandmothers are expected to pass on the critical knowledge of family connections. It isn’t an exclusive female thing—some men have this knowledge, of course—but now it is the grandmothers, people like me, who know exactly who is who in the complicated network of family threads. I am always being called upon to untangle who someone might be related to. This is often the case with young people who are romantically linked, because in our culture there are very strict rules about intermarriage.
I was there at the birth of Kayn, and I lived with my daughter, Karen, and him until he was about ten years old, so I have been very present in his life. I’m really pleased that I’ve had a positive influence on his life. We remain close and text with each other, which makes me feel very contemporary. What might be unusual, or different, from mainstream Australian families is that we always welcome family into our homes. No matter how distant the bloodline might be, if they are clan, they are family and they are welcome. If we have a house, it is also their house. When my daughter, Kayn and I were sharing a house, living happily together, there would always be other family members present, so Kayn had many eyes on him.
Of course, if children are to identify as Aboriginal, they need to be taught the old ways and live with the culture, so they know who they are and where they come from. My husband was not Aboriginal, but he was happy for me to expose our children to their culture and to the things that were extremely important to me. I find it harder to be this sort of grandmother with my second daughter Shelley’s two boys, who live up in Brisbane. When children are small, however, it tends to be easier to teach them. But we never force our children or our grandchildren into being fully involved in Aboriginal issues. They need to know enough to be able to make choices and respond in the right way to Aboriginal issues in today’s society, but they can’t make choices if they are ignorant.
It is difficult to describe, but I need to elaborate on what it means when our culture has more than one grandmother per child. Imagine a grandmother who is not that woman who has a commanding influence, or who is there simply to bestow material gifts on a few grandchildren. I am talking, of course, about a certain stereotype of a grandma that you see in the media—one who is more like a fairy godmother than a practical woman (although I think there is more call these days for grandmothers to be practical, because their children are often working). My idea of ‘bestowing’ is to give my grandchildren access to the culture, the old ways and, most importantly, if possible, some of the language. We cannot lose what language we have. We need to teach the children that English is not their first language. I see all around me how the old ways are breaking down, and this brings an urgency to my grandmothering.
We clans all live apart now. In the old days we lived together, all of us, even in the bush. But it was a terrible time for our people back then, especially in terms of health care problems. We were hired out as casual workers but, as everyone now knows, we were not paid. Our money went into a fund established through the Aborigines Welfare Board. And you need to know that we were not counted in any census, until the 1967 referendum approved changes to the Constitution. And it was not until 1965 that all Indigenous Australians had the right to vote in both state and federal elections. And among the many areas we were denied access to was higher education.
So in 1939, half the people in my clan, over 150 of them, walked off the Cummeragunja Reserve in New South Wales. This was the first time my people had rebelled against the way we were made to live. The Cummeragunja Walk-Off is extremely significant in our history. Although I wasn’t born until the following year, it had a profound effect on my life. The walk-off was a way of showing that we were not powerless. Some of the clan went to Echuca and others went to Mooroopna and Shepparton, where they camped on the banks of the Goulburn.
We used to live on the river flats between Mooroopna and Shepparton. You had to get this thing called an Exemption Certificate issued by the government and only then were you allowed off the reserve to go and find work. You could live in town without police supervision, but there were curfews and a lot of discrimination. So when people got exemptions they started living on the fringes of towns. That’s why they got to be known as ‘fringe dwellers’. I was only four, but I have very clear memories of living as one of the fringe dwellers on the river flats between Mooroopna and Shepparton. This is all recent history and it should not be overlooked or forgotten. Over the past few years some of the best knowledge of our history and inter-racial relations has come from accounts in reports written by the government body, the Aborigines Welfare Board, as well as from accounts in diaries of settlers, explorers and others. They are very straightforward accounts and add to our knowledge—particularly to my knowledge when I talk to my grandchildren and when I talk in schools.
People tell me I have confidence. I can only think that this confidence comes from belonging to a prominent clan, and from our connection with other prominent clans. We were always spokespersons for our people. Our Elders, William Cooper and William Ferguson, Pastor Douglas Nicholls, Jack Patton, Marg Tucker, Geraldine Briggs, Amy Cooper, Gladys Nicholls and Nora Charles, were always interested in building up a stronger voice for our people. When I first came to Melbourne, I worked for the Aborigines Advancement League with Pastor Doug Nicholls, Aunty Gladys, his wife, and Stan Davey. And I was lucky. I was not traumatised by being taken away from my family by the authorities, or by being sent to a foster home. Sadly, the lives of many of my family members have been shaped by this sort of trauma of separation.
I think it is interesting that a little girl born in Mooroopna, who grew up in those shacks on the area known as ‘The Flats’, those tumbles of tin and wood scavenged from the local tip not far from us, who was encouraged to leave school at fourteen, stayed at school until sixteen. I can only put it down to the strength of the clan, men as well as women: they gave me the confidence never to doubt myself.
In the past, as white settlement increased and our land was taken, conflicts arose and it was always the men speaking to the men. We tend not to think about this, but that was the way it was. The white women settlers didn’t have voices—their husbands would do the talking—and it was the same with the Aboriginal people. Men like to speak to men.
In the 1940s, following the Cummeragunja Walk-Off, things started to change. For many different social and cultural reasons, and especially because of the Second World War, Aboriginal women, women like my mum, started to speak out. The world had shifted and they found their voices, you could say. The men seemed discouraged, so what else could the women do? The women needed to speak out for themselves and for their children about the important issues. It was the women who were the strongest voices, who were keeping the old ways and keeping families together. I have to be delicate talking about this. Traditionally, there was women’s business and men’s business and they would come together to discuss Aboriginal affairs and issues. Together they would plan for the whole group. But over time, the men seem to have become drawn into destructive behaviour. Or they have become dispirited.
My mum was involved in forming a group in Mooroopna to talk with the local council and officials. We had a lot of help from the Save the Children Fund and from the unions. They were extraordinary in their practical and political help at various times. My mum worked with a marvellous woman called Sister Turner, from the Save the Children Fund, and they set up a kindergarten on the river. Because everyone was moving around, it was difficult to get a basic education, but the mums realised how important this was. These women set the example for me; they were my role models. Our history is colourful and we have a lot to be proud of—and we need to speak about it, not just as grandmothers, but as people who have this knowledge of a particular world to pass on.
The important thing for me now is to tell Kayn—the grandson I see most of, because he lives closer—about who his family is, to enable him to see himself within this small circle, and then the wider circle of family, his connection to both the Gunnai/Kurnai and the Yorta Yorta Nations. I also want him to know about some of the old ways, even though they might not seem that important to a young man in a modern world. I want him to know about the welcome ceremonies, the smoking ceremonies, to learn some language. He knows how to acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the Land, wherever he may be. He did an awesome acknowledgement of country at our NAIDOC event a few years ago and again at the opening of a new building for his scouts group. He knows his totems, penguin and turtle, and he participated in burning symbols of his message onto a possum-skin pelt to say goodbye to a dear Aboriginal friend who wanted to be buried in her cloak. If he knows who he is and is responsible about that knowledge, he can start to give back to the community. Kayn already knows a lot about his connections all over Australia.
I am proud that I have been able to impart some of my traditional cultural knowledge to Kayn, and that he has become a strong and resilient young Aboriginal man. He also makes sure that I am okay, and comes to check in on me, staying overnight occasionally and asking me questions about our culture and identity.
But there is the wider perspective too. It isn’t just for Kayn and my other grandchildren. I would like to be able to pass on whatever knowledge I have of those more than sixty thousand years of a lived culture on this country to other children as well, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal. There is so much to know. This is why I am working with educators, and this is why I made the possum-skin cloak. If you teach children at this very intimate level, you can help to prevent racism, which seems to me to be based on nothing but ignorance. Children walk in the footprints of their Elders so they can be strong in their cultural identity and have connection to history, culture and who they truly are.