A Feeling of Belonging

The feeling of belonging that you, as an Aboriginal person, have to country is very strong spiritually. I have this in two ways, because my mother was a Martu woman who was born in a place called Lake Way, near the town of Wiluna, in Western Desert country in Western Australia. Her family name was Wongawol, but Mum was given the name Lily Booket by the Native Welfare Department when she was very young, because she had been taken away from her people. Wongawol though, is the true family name, and because of that it is very important to me. The Wongawol family are a very strong traditional family who belong to the Dingo Dreaming, which links them and me to many different places. My father came from a different place in country. He was Phillip Heath, a Nyungar man born in Katanning, in the south-west of the State. His own connections to country are through the Menang and Goreng peoples. Though my parents were from different areas of country, they were both strong spiritually in their own ways, and I learnt a lot from them when I was growing up. I am a strong person too. The spirits have always guided me throughout my life, so I am following in their footsteps. My mum and dad told me that even when I was a little baby the spirits worked through me.

They used me to warn them of impending danger. When I was about a year old, we were living in Collie, because Dad had a job on the railways. They were the only adults in the camp and then there was my elder brother, Brian. We had only a makeshift toilet, like a lot of Nyungar people who lived in the bush in those days. It was wedged in between the truck of a large tree near our camp. One day, suddenly, a willy-willy sprang up and circled the toilet.

‘That’s strange,’ Dad said to Mum,‘ I think the spirits are trying to tell us something. I think something is going to happen, Lil. We’ll have to be watchful.’

At the end of the day, Dad doused the fire and he and Mum and us kids settled down to sleep. In the middle of the night, though, a bad storm blew up and it raged with such a mighty force that I woke up and began to cry my head off. Mum got up to tend to me and in that instant all hell broke loose. There was a mighty crack, then a crash and the roof fell in followed by a large tree branch. There was mayhem for a while because it was dark, we couldn’t see Dad, and Brian and I were both screaming our heads off in fear. As it turned out, Dad was okay. Though the branch had pinned him to the bed, there was a curve in the branch that protected him. Mum though, wouldn’t have been that lucky. If I hadn’t cried and she hadn’t got up to tend to me, she would have either received some very bad injuries or been killed. For many years to come they told that story because they reckoned it was me who saved Mum’s life.

It is because of my parents that I can put my feet in two camps because through them I have my feet in two lands. Knowing what my connections are to my mother’s and father’s peoples gives me a strong sense of place and a feeling of deep belonging. Connections like these are very important to Aboriginal people because they tell us who we are and influence the way we see the world.

My father’s country

It was through my father that I learnt about the Nyungar side of my culture, the old ways to do with the land and Nyungar spirituality and all the spirit creatures that lived in Nyungar country. When I was a kid, we would always be sitting with Dad and other people in our family group around the fire, or out on the lawn in the summer when it was warm; listening to the old stories being told about what had happened, and who was who. The old people loved telling stories and they were about all sorts of things. It was a wonderful way of teaching, and through listening to them you soon learnt who you were related to, and came to understand the huge amount of relatives you had. That was how knowledge was passed on in those days, because there were no radios or televisions or public libraries you could visit to find things out. It was all word of mouth, so it was that oral history tradition that I got off my father from when I was very young. I understood early on that I had been born with a passion and feeling for country. It’s a feeling that sits in the pit of my stomach, it’s been with me all my life, and it will never go away.

When I was little, everything in the natural world was a wonder to me because it was so beautiful. We were in the bush all the time on weekends and on school holidays, because the suburbs of Willagee and Melville were mostly bush in those days. We’d take the dogs and go exploring and smelling all the different bush smells. We felt a part of the place, of the country that we were in, and it was a part of us too. I remember there were these beautiful berries we used to eat that were a limey green colour, we used to call them swanberries. They were sweet and delicious and we loved finding them. My brother Brian and I often went down the hill to explore, because up the other side from our place was a piece of bushland loaded with thick carpets of catpaws, which are beautiful little orange flowering plants that grow about fifteen to twenty centimetres high, and lots of other native plants and wildflowers. We loved it when the wildflowers were blooming and we could have a good look around and see what was new in the bush. I used to marvel at everything and our dogs would sniff out the blue-tongue lizards from underneath the balga bushes. There were all kinds of wildlife in that area then. The trees were huge and friendly and you could stand underneath them when it rained and never get wet. Sometimes we followed the track that wound through there. Nowadays that track is called Stock Road, and it is quite a busy road with a lot of traffic, but then it was just a rough track that they drove the stock along; mostly cattle and sheep headed for the abattoirs down at Robbs Jetty near Fremantle.

Sometimes we would sit outside with Mum and look up at the sky and watch all the little woolly clouds coming in. Some of them looked like baby sheep. You would always get a cloud play there, at the edge of the Continental Shelf, because that’s where the clouds would rise. If it was nearing sunset, Mum would say it was the little lambs going home to rest. That was also her way of telling us that because the sun was going down, we had to come inside as well. She never liked me and my brother wandering around at that time of day, and that was partly to do with the way the Welfare took Aboriginal kids away. Mum had been taken away from her own people when she was only two years old. There was a story that went around in her day that if you didn’t stick together then the lady with the elastic arms would get you. She was always telling that story to Brian and me to warn us.

‘What if I hid around a corner?’ I asked her once. ‘Would she get me then?’

‘She will still get you,’ she replied. ‘Her elastic arms will come right around that corner and pick you up and take you away.’

The lady with the elastic arms, I will never forget her. I realised later, of course, that that was Mum’s way of describing the Welfare and the power it had to take Aboriginal children to a place they didn’t know that would be strange to them. It makes me feel very sad to remember it. In the past, many things have happened in Australia to force people away from the countries of their ancestors. I’m proud to say, though, that even when that happens, we still have the feeling inside us for where we come from, and we find different ways to go back so we keep that connection to our Ancestors.

It is strange driving through the areas of Melville, Willagee and Fremantle now and seeing all the houses, where once there was mainly bush filled with native plants and animals. When I grew up, I left Western Australia for a while and went to live on the east coast, but when I returned in 1953, I went to visit the bush I had loved so much as a child. I was shocked by what I found. Everything had been bulldozed, and I felt so sad that I just found myself standing there in a hollow between two hills, surrounded by a vast sea of sand, crying while the wind whipped the sand into my face. I have got a big feeling for my father’s country, and I hate to see any of the natural world destroyed.

Right across Nyungar country now there is a lot of change going on in the environment. There are many problems. Too many trees have been chopped down, there is a huge issue with salinity and there are many threatened and endangered species of plants, animals and birdlife. Government and industry haven’t been accountable enough in what has happened. At Dwellingup, there was a secret site where chemicals were dumped. I was walking along there one day with a friend when we came across some huge mature trees that were dying. I was very surprised, because I had never seen big trees like that dying before and I wondered what on earth was going on. It turned out that drums filled with toxic chemicals had been illegally buried there and harmed the trees and other plant life. That kind of thing has to stop.

My mother’s country

I have said that I have a big feeling for my father’s country. Well, I have a big feeling for my mother’s country, too. Unfortunately, I never had the opportunity to return to my mother’s country until I was a young married woman, so I missed out on knowing her place when I was a child. As I have already said, my mother had been taken away from her people when she was only two years old, and then, when I was just thirteen, Mum died. This meant she never had a chance to reunite with her people and her land, but I went back and so did my daughter, Lillian. My daughter’s ashes are buried in that country now, so she is at peace where she belongs. My journey to my mother’s land began with three dreams.

In my first dream I saw the big dingo painted on the flour mills at North Fremantle. I felt scared about what this might mean. Why had it appeared in my dream? I often drove past those mills and I wondered if it meant I was going to have an accident there. From then on, I was always very careful to watch out for the other traffic, because I knew there was something very significant about that place.

In my second dream, I went over the hill from that dingo place at the mills. I walked past the low bushes and the limestone and some older Aboriginal people took me to where there was a limestone cave on the north bank of the Swan River close to the ocean. Who knows, it could even have been under the ocean at one time. I know there is another trail that goes right down to the big rocks at Albany, where they have Dog Rock. I think all these places link up together through songlines. It is a huge area and what I didn’t know at the time was that it was a very significant place for me, because that site at North Fremantle is the beginning of the Dingo Dreaming trail that runs right through to my mother’s country.

In my third dream, I was hiding on the riverbank behind some trees watching these little boats going up the river. A huge V-formation of black swans was flying in front of them. As I watched, a terrible feeling of doom came into my heart and I said to myself, ‘This is the beginning of the end.’ When I looked down, I saw that my feet were not mine; they were big chunky ones. I think I was in someone else’s body and I was seeing what they saw and feeling that same feeling of doom in my heart, because of what the coming of the first white people would mean to my people. So these three dreams came to me to link me back up to the country I belonged to and to help me understand my cultural inheritance better. So then the dingo on the flour mills took on a different, more positive meaning. Many years later, I found out that my mother belonged to the Dingo people. You see, whenever I get anything from the spirit world it is usually pictures and I have to work out from the pictures what it means. I felt really good about it once I understood what it really meant, because then I could put all the pictures together like parts of a jigsaw and understand the great importance of it.

I remember when I first went back to my mother’s country, I was twenty one and newly married and my husband had a job on a station in the area. I really didn’t know anything about traditional people at that time, but the old people would be sitting there every night in front of the fire and singing their songs in language. I couldn’t understand the words, because I’d been brought up in the city and didn’t speak their language. It was really very aweinspiring for me to be a part of that. They were a wonderful group of people and I was very impressed with the way they conducted their lives, how gracious they were, and all the lovely little fat babies running around enjoying themselves. It is wonderful to feel one with people and country. Your heart just expands in that situation, and when you are walking around the land, you can feel it deep inside you.

Due to our history, our people have been forced to deal with a lot of things that are foreign to our culture. And because of my interest in spirituality and healing, and also my training as a nurse, I have always considered all the different ways in which we can be healthy, and especially how this might have worked in our communities before the British came to colonise this land in 1788. There are many small things which, when you put them together, add up to health and wholeness. For example, I know that vitamin A is essential for healthy skin and things like that. But the day we stopped giving our babies the tail end of the goanna, which is jam packed with vitamin A, and bought them a teething ring to chew instead, was a backward step for us. Our ways were different, but they worked. Our people had tested them for thousands of years. We knew how to be healthy. We were active and vigorous in our own countries. We never had processed foods with no goodness left in them, instead we had what the land provided: low-fat meat, vegetables, fruits and fresh water. It was all very balanced. Governor Arthur Phillip even noted in 1788 that Aboriginal people looked much healthier than many Englishmen. Now, over two hundred years later, our whole health status has been reversed and we are struggling to survive. The introduction of tea, sugar, flour, sheep and cattle was devastating. Sometimes we were herded together by the authorities and forced to live in one place; our bush medicines couldn’t cope with this kind of static environment and neither could our people. It caused us a lot of harm and the introduction of other animals, like foxes and rabbits, harmed all the natural resources of the land so it made it impossible for us to live the way our ancestors had. Our people lost heart because of all the changes that affected every aspect of their lives and their countries. It was like being caught up in a big willy-willy of change and not knowing what the new rules and regulations were or why they had suddenly come.

The problem with uranium

My mother’s family, the Wongawol family, have a culture deep in spirituality and healing and are tied closely to the land and environment and ecosystems. They feel very concerned with the damage done to the land. In our way of thinking, if the land is in bad repair, then so are the people. If the rivers dry up and become polluted, then this can be equated with the body’s lifeblood, and it means that life can’t be sustained. In my mother’s country, the government has allowed large drums of nuclear waste to be buried, and this has caused a lot of destruction to the underwater system and consequently to the land and the people. We are spiritually tied to the land, so whatever happens to the land has long lasting effects on us as human beings. (Image 12.2)

Image 12.2: Joan’s mother’s country—Lake Way, Wiluna, c. 1986 Courtesy Joan Winc

My mother’s birthplace, Lake Way, is seventeen kilometres south-east of the town of Wiluna, and six hundred kilometres north of Kalgoorlie. Uranium was discovered there in 1972, with the ore deposit sited on a channel on the northern end of the Lake Way salt lake. In 1978, bulk ore samples were taken and used for a wide variety of purposes, including a pilot plant project for uranium extraction. In the early 1980s, the government gave permission for mining the ore, but this project never came to fruition. However, the radioactive ore that had been irresponsibly left lying around the old mine sites has caused a lot of problems. In June 2000, scientists determined that there were areas of extreme radiation scattered around the former site and these areas were unmarked and unfenced, so Aboriginal people living there had never known of the danger. Corroded forty-four-gallon drums and piles of uranium ore exposed to the wind were found on the shoreline; and on the lakebed itself, where the ore samples had been kept, ground radiation levels were found to be seventy times higher than the background radiation level. This area has always been an important and popular hunting ground for Aboriginal communities, so what on earth did the mine workers think they were doing leaving radioactive ore lying around like that? I just can’t believe the mentality of it all. (Image 12.3)

Image 12.3: Joan, with her daughter Lillian and her cousin Nellie Farmer (Wongawol) at the orange orchid outside of Wiluna, c. 1986. Courtesy Joan Winch

Lake Way is called Lake Way for a reason. The water goes underground and all the rivers run into that area, so of course the waterways, which are so important to life in that desert area, will be affected. This was a great meeting place for peoples from throughout the desert country and extending right into Central Australia. Large groups always met where there was fresh water and good game, but the mining industry in general has given very little consideration to factors such as this. If you know anything about mining, any kind of mining, then you will know that by the time the miners have finished with the land, it’s absolutely ruined. They rip the guts out of the country, leave big slag heaps behind them, and spend as little as they can on rehabilitation. There is very little accountability in terms of looking after the place for future generations.

What kind of world?

There is a battle looming over uranium and the government will want to win because of the amount of money involved. Our old people have always told us that there are some things you leave in the ground, and uranium is one of them. Huge mistakes have been made in the past, but the lessons still haven’t been learnt. The increased use of nuclear energy that is being proposed now in Australia could end up destroying the cradle of civilisation in the oldest land in the world. Look at the Rum Jungle uranium mine, south of Darwin, in the Northern Territory. It was Australia’s first large-scale uranium mine and while it was closed in 1971, it is known all over the world as one of the worst cases of pollution. The radioactive tailings and other poisons got into the waterways, especially the Finniss River, and when the wet season came and the rivers and dams flooded, it helped to spread the poison. The traditional owners of the place warned everyone about what would happen, but noone listened. ‘Don’t dig those holes in there because it is really very bad, it is big trouble,’ they said. ‘A big monster is going to be released out of the ground. Just leave the monster in the ground. Don’t disturb him. He is asleep.’ They knew the uranium shouldn’t be disturbed, but their warnings were ignored. The fish and the shrimp all died, the trees, palms, grass, plants and other vegetation all died, and you couldn’t drink the water. Even today, the sources of contamination still haven’t been contained and heavy metals, including uranium, continue to leach into the waterways. How long will it take people to learn that what happens to the land also happens to us?

I feel very concerned about the whole uranium issue because Western Australia’s largest uranium deposit is at Yeelirrie, which is right smack in the middle of my mother’s country. For many years, thousands of tons of powdery radioactive rock was left lying around there, exposed to the elements and causing harm to the land, water and air. No warning signs were posted, there were no fences to keep people and animals away either. When ore is exposed like that there is a danger of radioactivity entering the food chain, if that happens then you can’t clean it up; and it can lead to all sorts of cancer and other genetic diseases, especially if the poisons have built up in bush foods that people are eating, like the wallabies and kangaroos. The people who created the mess didn’t want to clean it up. It took a twenty-year campaign before the ore was finally reburied, but who knows what damage it did in the meantime. It’s really quite horrific if you think about it. Scientists tell us that it takes hundreds of thousands of years for plastic to break down in the environment, but when it comes to radioactive waste, it is with us virtually forever. So why do governments and multi-national companies want to fill the earth with nuclear waste? If it becomes too dangerous to breathe the air, then money won’t help you. I have seen first hand the effects of nuclear weapons. As a nurse I went to Japan, where the first nuclear bomb was dropped. It was very distressing to see babies in the hospital in the 1980s who had been born with cancer. Their families were still suffering from the effects of what had been passed on with the dropping of that first bomb. Is that what we want? It is just too terrible to think about.

The way forward

I am hoping I won’t be alive to see what governments and multi-national companies will do to the world. If they have their way, they will destroy all the beautiful natural things and it will all be in the name of the dollar. So how are we going to protect Australia? How are we going to protect the people and the country? What will happen to the babies and children when the world is turned into a giant nuclear dump? Will it be the beginning of the end? Is there nothing we can do about it? All over the world there are already unsolvable problems with nuclear waste, and now governments are talking about creating even more. Let the people who advocate this live next door to the reactors and the waste dumps with their own families. What will they think about it then? Will they feel safe? Or will they be terrified about the effect it is having on their children and grandchildren? Children are the heritage of Australia, and they are the ones who will be dying of cancer and other diseases if all this rubbish isn’t stopped.

I look back on my own experiences and there are two things that give me hope. The first is that our people have always had their own protocols when it came to caring for country. I can explain this best by sharing a story. There was an old lady I knew who went through the Law when she was young. In those days, you were given a role to play and you were also given a tract of land to look after. Her tract was hard to look after because it was at Meekatharra and there was a lot of mining in the area. Though the miners were there, she still thought of it as her tract of land and she felt responsible for looking after it. When I went walking with her, it was like walking through her own garden. She would show me this tree and that plant and tell me where the water comes in the winter and it was just magic to listen to all the things she knew about that land. She had the ownership, she felt the responsibility, she did her job caring for it as best she could. It hit me, then, that if you multiplied that many thousands of times over across Australia, then that was how this continent and all its flora and fauna got looked after in a very particular way. Everybody had a job, everybody had a role to play. It’s the same to day. We all have to be responsible for what happens. (Image 12.4)

Image 12.4: A visit to the Emu Farm when it was operating outside of Wiluna, c. 1986 Courtesy Joan Winch

The other thing I think about is a woman’s Dreaming site in the Perth area, which is called the Butterfly Dreaming, and it is tied to the beautiful blue and black butterfly. The butterfly lays its eggs in ants’ nests near a small shrub we call a bacon-and-egg plant. The ants carry the larvae up to get the nectar from the shrub. Then they carry the larvae back down again at night and the larvae exude this nectar, which the ants collect for food. This is a symbiotic relationship, where what is good for one is good for the other. That’s how we have to think about the natural world, because in the long run, when everything is in balance, what is good for the earth will be good for us as human beings too. Life is dynamic, we need to harness it positively, not negatively. If we don’t all work together to find a way to do that, then at some time in the future there will be no safe place left for anyone’s children.