We are Aboriginal storytellers, but we are two voices amongst the many Aboriginal peoples and nations of Australia and we speak for ourselves alone; there is not a single Aboriginal story, nor a definitive Aboriginal experience.
In telling this tale, we were informed by two sets of stories that are the inheritance of Aboriginal peoples. The first set are stories of our homelands, families, cultures; the stories that speak to the connections which sustain us and which we sustain in turn. The second set are the tales that entered our worlds with colonisation; stories of the violence that was terrifyingly chaotic or even more terrifyingly organised on a systemic scale. Both sets of stories inform our existences, and thus our storytelling.
Ancient Aboriginal tales tell of an animate world where everything lives. This includes animals, plants and humans, but also rock, wind, rain, sun, moon and all other life in our homelands. As such, Aboriginal family connections extend beyond human beings to encompass all life. These connections can also reach past one cycle of existence to shape the next. For example, a person with a particular connection to dingoes may have been a dingo before, and will be one again. We drew upon this aspect of our understanding of the world in writing the character of Crow.
Aboriginal stories also tell of a non-linear world; one in which time does not run in a line from the past through the present and on into the future. All life is in constant motion, turning and rotating in relation to other life, and it is through these movements that the world shifts forwards or back. In the words of Beth’s Grandpa Jim: ‘Life doesn’t move through time. Time moves through life.’ And on this view of time, the extent to which an event is ‘past’ is not measured by the passage of linear years, but rather by the degree to which affected relationships have been brought into balance. Thus, the journeys of Catching, Beth, Crow and Michael Teller do not ‘advance’ because linear days pass, but because they are finding ways to heal. Each of them ultimately reaches a point of transformation where they move out of one cycle and into another. This is why Catching says to Michael, at the conclusion of the book: ‘It’s the beginning that hasn’t happened yet.’
Part of the processes of healing in the book are storytelling processes; as Catching knows, it is stories that get you through and bring you home. And the stories of Catching’s family include the heartbreak of the Stolen Generations.
The laws and policies of successive Australian governments that created the Stolen Generations began in the latter half of the nineteenth century and continued for around a hundred years. The Australian Human Rights Commission has estimated that between one in three and one in ten First Nations children were forcibly removed between 1910 and 1970, and that no family escaped the effects of forcible removal.1 This leaves First Nations families with the dual legacy of the terrible heartbreak of Stolen children, and the great strength it took to survive being taken or having a child taken from you. And it is by drawing on the resilience of her ancestors that Catching is able to survive when her own life is threatened.
The final step in Catching’s path to her own strength is shown to her by the experiences of her great-great-grandmother, a woman who lived through the hard days of the frontier and was robbed of all her choices. But Catching’s old Granny knew how to hold on to herself – with laughter, with love, and through her connections to her family and her homeland. All three girls ultimately find their way to themselves and raise up their voices to defy all that would diminish them, including the things they have internalised.
And so the story begins, ends, and begins again with what always lay at the core of this tale: the enduring strength of Aboriginal women and girls.
Ambelin Kwaymullina & Ezekiel Kwaymullina
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1 Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (now the Australian Human Rights Commission), Bringing Them Home: Report into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families, 1997, Ch 2. Interested readers can find a copy of the report and other resources, including testimonies from Stolen Generations members, at bth.humanrights.gov.au.