I decided to pick up a pen in 1984 and write my autobiography, because I could see that there was nothing taught in the school curriculum about us Koori mob. Then I thought, if Aboriginal history and studies was going to be taught, who would teach it? Because for many years we have been misrepresented by misinformed people and have never had a voice! You only have an Anglo concept of history and culture taught in Australian schools.
And this in turn left us Kooris like that proverbial ‘bird on the biscuit tin’—on the outside, lookin’ in—because we Kooris have never been acknowledged in the white social enclaves of this country We have been forever excluded, not wanted, though now there is a greater interest in our beautiful culture and history, because of its timelessness. I thought if I wrote about my experiences as an Aboriginal person, it might give the other side—the ‘white side’—some idea of how hard it is to survive between the black and white culture of Australia, and they might become less racist and paternalistic towards our people.
I don’t think white Australians understand very much about what has happened with our people through the so-called ‘colonisation’ of this land—we Koori people term it ‘invasion’ and we are still struggling to come to terms with how that invasion has left us dispossessed and oppressed in our own land. They think we have always been on an equal level with them, when we have never had equality ever! So we Koori people must be looked at through our dispossession and what it has done to us, and also how it has left us.
I can say, from my side of the fence, that the writing of my three books has been the best therapy I’ve ever had, as it took the pressures from my old body and left them on the pages I wrote. Because we Aboriginal people come from an oral tradition—where our legends and laws were handed down by word of mouth, from generation to generation—it is we who have always had to conform to the standards of those invaders, learn the Queen’s English, so us mob can write our stories, so you mob can comprehend what we are on about.
And we never had access to mainstream education. From as far back as the 1940s and late 1950s we only had our little mission school where we were taught by non-trained teachers, mostly the mission manager’s wife. Hence we are a long way behind you mob with the education. But we are slowly catching up.
Most of our writing up until recently has not been defined as ‘real’ literature. Pray tell, what is literature? In the dictionary, it states it’s ‘a form of the written word’, though, over the last ten years, there has been a revolution in Aboriginal writing,
And our writings are our histories too! We are all telling our stories, and saying the same things, about our dispossession in the hope that people will understand us better. We have always been disadvantaged because we have to rely on white editors, who tend to anglicise our text too much always, correcting the way we talk and using the proper English, though now they are bringing into the schools our Koori English. It’s the way we talk, it’s our voice, and, I might add, it’s as relevant as any other spoken English.
To write My Bundjalung People, my third book, I went back to Box Ridge mission, where I was born, and asked the Elders for permission to do this, because I was taken away when I was eight by my father to escape a protection roundup. Me and my two little sisters, we were raised in a little town called Bonalbo. It would have been very wrong of me to go ahead and write about my people’s history, without consulting with them first.
Non-Aboriginals have been having a field day with our Koori resources, writing big books, and making big bucks, without even consulting with our people, and that is why we have to tell our mob to start picking up pens to write our own stories. Because how these people perceive us to be through their eyes, when they write about us, is the thing that perpetuates the stereotypes about us and marginalises even more! I sometimes wonder, if the role was reversed, would these people let us Kooris write their stories? I don’t think so.
So these are some of the disadvantages of being an Aboriginal writer in Australia today. And I’m proud to be just a small part of this writing revolution that is going on with my people. Because of it, we are reclaiming our history, our heritage and our identity, and that’s very important to our cause, because I tell the students I lecture to, ‘If people want to migrate to this country, they must know the real history, because there was a “black” history long before there was a “white” one! Our people are sick of not getting any acknowledgement or recognition whatsoever for the settling of this land, and, let’s face it, the first settlers would never have been able to settle this land without Aboriginal involvement.’
My people were stockmen and women, housemaids, servants and midwives, and deserve recognition along with all of Australia’s glorious pioneers! In Bundjalung country, where I come from, my people on the mission where I was born built up those big cattle hierarchies, for next to no pay, compared to the wages the white stockmen got.
And the writing of our stories, our biographies and autobiographies is our documentation of our histories and stories, from our Aboriginal perspectives, and they need to be read and heard all over this great land, because, for too long, we have had other people defining us, and telling us who we are.
Because the image of Australia is white and, according to governments even today, the only ‘real Aborigines’ here are the traditional ones out in the desert sitting on a rock with a spear in their hand! But we urban Kooris define ourselves as traditional people too, because we at some time in our lives come from some tribe, or tribal area. We never asked for the degree of caste that white people have endowed us with, and are always being stereotyped and blamed because of it! We want to know when will the punishments end?
Over the last two and a half years I have done 238 lectures in high schools, universities and colleges, so I know just how little about us people know. There’s a whole generation that has to be educated about us and our histories. We not only have to educate non-Aboriginal people, but we have to educate our own people who were the stolen generations who were placed into the training homes to be trained in servitude. These kids never had access to their family’s or their cultural knowledge, and were taught to not speak their lingo, and become like white people, forced to assimilate.
Now governments are screaming out for reconciliation with us mob, but, before this can happen, there are so many social justice issues like our atrocious health; our people are dying of curable diseases, and are the most jailed people in her majesty’s brutal jail systems in Australia. Our dispossession in our own land is killing us, but nobody gives a damn!
In 1990, I won the inaugural history fellowship from the Ministry of the Arts, to do the research and ground work for my book My Bundjalung People. It took me four years to get all the information to do that book, but the publisher employed a white editor from somewhere else to do the editing, and all the historical content that I did so much painstaking research on was edited out of the text. I never realised that this had been done until after it was finished. So you see, some publishers only dress up our Koori manuscripts, making ‘pretty stories’ so they are easily saleable.
Here again, is the blatant disregard for our Aboriginal history to be heard in this now multicultural nation that Australia has become. This country has always tried to mainstream our Koori services, putting us down as multicultural, when we are not! We never migrated here, we were always here, we are the first people of this land!
But as yet have never received any acknowledgement as such. There needs to be constitutional change too, because we Aboriginal people never ceded our sovereign rights to any foreign power! There were no treaties, and because of that the taking of our lands is just ‘cultural theft’.
I hope I’ve filled you in on some of the problems that us mob are confronted with, when trying to get our works published. I’ve not only enlightened you about this, but I’ve given you a history lesson as well.