Pictures From My Memory: My Story as a Ngaatjatjarra Woman [1 ed.] 9781925302004, 9780855750350

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'With the skills of a multilingual interpreter and one grounded in her own domain, Lizzie Ellis’s narrative moves through these spaces with grace and confidence.' — Professor Fred R Myers, Silver Professor of Anthropology, New York University Pictures from my memory is a compelling and accessible autobiographical account of Lizzie Marrkilyi Ellis’s life as a Ngaatjatjarra woman from the Australian Western Desert. Born in the bush at the time of first contact between her family and White Australians, Ellis’s vivid personal reflections offer both an historical record and profound emotional insight into her unique experience of being woven between cultures — her Aboriginal community and the Western worlds. Ellis shares her first memories as an Aboriginal child living in communities, through her schooling years on the reserves and the progressive cultural changes that her family experienced, to her work as a renowned linguist and interpreter for judges and politicians. Preceded by an introduction and followed by an anthropological overview of Ngaatjatjarra culture by anthropologist Laurent Dousset, Pictures from my memory provides important insights into the intricacies of a traditional Aboriginal culture, but also describes in a vivid and expressive way the complexities of navigating two worlds.

AUSTRALIAN HISTORY, INDIGENOUS STUDIES, ANTHROPOLOGY

ISBN 9780855750350

ABORIGINAL STUDIES PRESS

FINAL_full_cover_01.04.16.indd 1

ABORIGINAL STUDIES PRESS

PICTURES FROM MY MEMORY

'Lizzie's story is a generous gift; she draws us gently in to share her extraordinary life. She is a talented storyteller, shining a light on Aboriginal culture and its power as she charts her people’s momentous journey.' — Professor Carmen Lawrence, University of Western Australia (former Premier of Western Australia)

Introduced and edited by Laurent Dousset

ELLIS

PICTURES FROM MY MEMORY My story as a Ngaatjatjarra woman LIZZIE MARRKILYI ELLIS 4/04/16 2:31 PM



Lizzie’s story is a generous gift; she draws us gently in to share her extraordinary life. She is a talented storyteller, shining a light on Aboriginal culture and its power as she charts her people’s momentous journey from the traditional ways of the Western Desert to the often perplexing world of the whitefellas. Her insightful reading of both worlds and her capacity to straddle them while still cherishing her roots provoke both admiration and hope. — Professor Carmen Lawrence, School of Psychology, University of Western Australia (former Premier of Western Australia)

Ellis’s story is a gift to the reader, with a story that begins in the bush right at the edge of Australian settlement — at the Giles Weather Station. Few will have had the opportunity to move back and forth between the Indigenous life-world of the Western Desert people and white Australian society. With the skills of a multilingual interpreter and one grounded in her own domain, Lizzie Ellis’s narrative moves through these spaces with grace and confidence, with an uncanny perspective that allows us to see each in terms of the other. — Professor Fred R Myers, Silver Professor of Anthropology, New York University

PICTURES FROM MY MEMORY My story as a Ngaatjatjarra woman LIZZIE MARRKILYI ELLIS

Introduced and edited by Laurent Dousset

ABORIGINAL STUDIES PRESS

First published in 2016 by Aboriginal Studies Press © Elizabeth Warnngupayi Marrkilyi Ellis & Laurent Dousset 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1964 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for the education purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. Aboriginal Studies Press is the publishing arm of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies GPO Box 553, Canberra, ACT 2601 Phone: (61 2) 6246 1883 Fax: (61 2) 6261 4288 Email: [email protected] Web: aiatsis.gov.au/asp This publication was supported by CREDO (Centre for Research and Documentation on Oceania), Aix-Marseille University, CNRS, EHESS. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data: Creator: Ellis, Elizabeth Marrkilyi, author. Title: Pictures from my memory : my story as a Ngaatjatjarra woman / Lizzie Marrkilyi Ellis ; Laurent Dousset. ISBN:

9780855750350 (paperback)



9780855750145 (ebook : epub)



9781925302004 (ebook : pdf)



9781925302011 (ebook : Kindle)

Subjects: Ellis, Elizabeth Marrkilyi. Women, Aboriginal Australian — Western Australia — Biography. Women linguists — Western Australia — Biography. Ngaanyatjarra (Australian people) Aboriginal Australians — Western Australia — Social life and customs. Aboriginal Australians — Languages — Western Australia. Other Creators/Contributors: Dousset, Laurent, editor. Dewey Number: 305.8991509415 Editor: Karen Deighton-Smith Front cover: Lizzie Ellis, photo by Graham Tidy, 2015. Courtesy Fairfax. Design by Bruderlin MacLean Publishing Services Printed in Australia by SOS Print Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are respectfully advised that this book contains images and words of deceased persons, and images of places, which could cause sorrow.

Contents

List of illustrations

vi

Preface

ix

Introduction

xi

1

Pictures from my memory

2

Moving to missions and reserves

13

3

The world was bigger than I thought

23

4

Back closer to our country

35

5

Yirara College

49

6

Learning a profession

63

7

Settling in as a family

71

8

Belief systems

79

9

Working and sharing

85

10 Aboriginal nights

1

95

11 Language, identity and culture

103

12 Breaking down and getting up again

117

Appendices Extract of Lizzie’s family tree

123

Glossary of Ngaatjatjarra words used

124

A brief overview of the Ngaatjatjarra- speaking people

130

v

List of illustrations

Map 1: Map of most-cited places

vii

Map 2: Map of most-cited languages

viii

Map 3: Approximate location of some of the Western Desert dialectal groups

131

Map 4: Map of the areas of the Weapons Research Establishment’s activities

149

Plates between pp. 48 and 49 Plate 1: My father as a young man in the Rawlinson Ranges in 1957 Plate 2: Me as a baby with my mother Plate 3: Me at the Bondini Reserve, Wiluna, with baby brother Leslie Plate 4: Dave Price and myself in old Tjukurla Plate 5: My daughter Lucy and I in Alice Springs in 1983 Plate 6: My daughter Lucy with her tjamu, her grandfather Plate 7: Teacher training at Batchelor Plate 8: Neil Simpson, Aku Kadago and myself in Noumea Plate 9: Winifred, my sister-in-law, with me, Emma and Lucy Plate 10: My sister Daisy Ward in the early 2000s Plate 11: My niece Audrey watching me doing a painting Figure 1: Ngaatjatjarra kinship terminology of one’s own and one’s parents’ generation

141

Figure 2: Extract of the Ngaatjatjarra kinship terminology of a married man and a married woman

143

Figure 3: Ngaatjatjarra grandparents and grandchildren kinship terms

144

Figure 4: Generational moieties

145

Figure 5: Distribution of people in the section system

146

Figure 6: The section system of the Ngaatjatjarra people

146

vi

Map 1: Map of most-cited places

vii

Map 2: Map of most-cited languages

viii

Preface

I belong to a traditional desert nomadic society. My parents were Ngaatjatjarra people, Western Desert people, and I have lived a semitraditional life. My mother, her parents and grandparents saw white men for the first time in Purli Karil, the Rawlinson Ranges, in the 1950s. I was born in the desert and I have seen and heard all the stories and life ways of our old people. I am a member of a generation that experienced both the traditional ways of living in the desert and the modern ways of Western life in urban cities. Being literate in English and having lived many years of my life in the white man’s world, people from all walks of life have shown a lot of interest in my family, my society’s ways of living and our worldview. All those comments and questions about my life experiences as an Aboriginal person have led me to writing this book. I’m tired of repeating myself; but it’s more than that. I also wrote this book because Aboriginal people are the first nations people of Australia, but so much of our culture has gone. I wanted to record the stories about my life and my family’s lives so that future generations will be able to learn about their culture and not lose their identity; to know and understand how life was for desert Aboriginal people and how we live our lives today. White men brought huge change to Aboriginal lives and our society. I experienced many of those changes and I want to share these experiences with my people and with anyone else who has an interest in Aboriginal people.

ix

Preface

Living both a traditional life and in Western society has helped me pass on our culture and language to the next generation, as well as help Indigenous and non-Indigenous people talk to each other and understand each other. And just being able to talk in my mother tongue is a blessing. Lizzie Marrkilyi Ellis, 2016

x

Introduction

Lizzie Marrkilyi Ellis had been thinking and talking about writing a book about her life for many years, but in 2005 she decided it was time to start and I offered to assist. We both decided that the writing should happen in a neutral place, a place without family, demanding neighbours, duties and phone calls. We also decided it could be combined with a trip to France, to visit ‘my place’ in the countryside overlooking the mountain range she called ‘my friend le Vercors’ rather than me always visiting ‘her places’. It was a way of returning some of the hospitality and help Lizzie and her family in the Western Desert had given me over many years during field trips as an anthropologist doing research with her people. My research centre, the CREDO*, was keen to help fund the project. So Lizzie travelled to France in 2005 and again in 2011 to visit my place and write her book with me; the result of a friendship that has lasted more than twenty years. In 1992, I was travelling though Australia as an undergraduate student with a friend hoping to find a suitable location for my future research. We visited many communities in Queensland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia, but after meeting people in the Western Desert (who were later revealed to be Lizzie’s family), I wrote in my notebook that the place where I wanted to do my research was Tjukurla among the Ngaatjatjarra-speaking people. A year later I received a surprising phone call from my PhD supervisor Maurice Godelier. A linguist, Jacques Montredon, was *The Centre de Recherche et de Documentation sur l’Océanie (CREDO), is a research centre of Aix-Marseille University, the CNRS and the EHESS located in Marseilles, France.

xi

Introduction

looking for students interested in participating in a three-week intensive Aboriginal language course at the University of Besançon in France. I immediately wrote to Jacques, asking for more details on the particular language to be taught. His answer was a surprise and an unexpected coincidence: the course was about the Ngaatjatjarra/ Ngaanyatjarra language, and the Aboriginal person he had invited to provide this course was Lizzie. So Lizzie and I first met in 1994 in France. It was an enormous privilege to discuss my project with Lizzie before returning to Australia. My topic was kinship, and Lizzie supported my ideas from the very first minute. Even though she was living in Alice Springs when I arrived, she came with me when I first visited her community, rolling out my swag at her father’s camp. ‘He is now also your dad,’ she told me, ‘and I am your senior sister. We are responsible for you, and you have to listen.’ There are not enough words to express my gratitude to Lizzie and her family, nor are there enough words to grasp the destiny that provided for our improbable encounter. Very early on when Lizzie talked about ‘writing her life, writing her book’ she expressed her need to engage with her own life, to share her moments of joy and sorrow, and all the complexities that emerge from living in two worlds simultaneously — her Aboriginal community and the Western lifestyle she adopted when living in Alice Springs. She was married to a whitefella, sent her children to public schools, worked as a renowned interpreter, dressed, ate, spoke and lived like a whitefella, while also continuously connecting with her Aboriginal community, participating in ceremonies and funerals, looking after the family and redistributing whatever she had to those in need and the right to demand. Every time she drove past Uluru to visit her community in Western Australia, she said, ‘It’s good to be home.’ And every time she drove back to Alice Springs she said, ‘It’s good to get back.’ Lizzie was, and is, continually mediating and reconciling two worlds that for many people are incommensurable. This is what she wanted to write about.

xii

Introduction

Over the years Lizzie had written a few pages here and there but she lacked time away from all her professional and family commitments. But I sensed there was more. Her modesty and the lack of intense dialogue about her experiences seemed to be stopping her from making progress. It wasn’t until 2005 in France, observing a strictly daily work plan and recording our conversations, that progress was made. In 2011, we finished recording then transcribed and rearranged text. Finally Lizzie read and modified the manuscript during my stay in the community of Wanarn in 2013. The outcome is not just the story of a life. Lizzie’s book is uniquely rich and challenging, depicting events in her life that she considers have affected her way of thinking and being. It provides unprecedented insights into the experiences and emotions of an Aboriginal woman who has lived through one of the most challenging historical periods of Aboriginal–white interrelationships in Central Australia: the progressive rapprochement and efforts of mutual understanding after periods of complete negation and destruction by the white settlers. As difficult as these attempts have been and still are, and however painful some of the episodes and anecdotes reveal this process to be, Lizzie’s book is neither black nor white. It is not a plea for one or the other party, for one or the other lifeway, but the story of an Aboriginal girl with fond memories of playing cubby house in the bush and remembering hunting trips with nostalgia, while having thoroughly enjoyed attending white men’s schools. It is about a woman proud of being Aboriginal, but also affected by some of the inherent pressures of her culture. It is about an Aboriginal person committing herself fully to intercultural dialogue and adapting to whitefella ways of living without any political agenda, away from family and country while experiencing the oppressive crowdedness of cities. It is a life of mixtures, of translations and transculturations, of indistinguishably complex, experienced realities. The experiences are considered significant for her, not necessarily because she wants to favour certain aspects of Aboriginal life ways or Western conditions, but because they are true and vivid in her memory, because they are the pictures

xiii

Introduction

that have been imprinted on her mind. If I had to summarize her account in one word, I would say uprightness. For the reader, it is important to keep in mind that all of Lizzie’s stories and opinions are placed in a double matrix of relatedness: that of place and human relations. Sometimes Lizzie describes the geography so generally, as ‘our country’ or ‘my community’. However, they are complex and multifaceted and, to some extent, impenetrable aspects of Lizzie’s life experience. A community is a location, but it also personifies its people and vice versa. At other times, the geography is narrowed down by extraordinarily detailed descriptions, such as the number of the room in which she lived at Yirara College in Alice Springs as a teenager. Life experience and memory is relational. The need or obligation to relate to someone is an integral part of the content and context of every part of Lizzie’s story. People and relationships are everywhere, and even more so when they are absent: they serve to trigger memories, and they are in the landscape that reveals a wider range of belonging than that of the person alone. For example, listing all Lizzie’s auntie’s children or a cousin’s siblings is not simply a means of not forgetting to mention anyone, but a way to recreate the experience in its entirety, including all those people who directly or indirectly took part, or made the place. People are not just human beings but relationships, and in particular kinship relationships. I suggest readers who are not acquainted with Aboriginal ways of classifying kin to read the appendix on kinship so that they understand how the world of Aboriginal kinship is an extended but highly organised way of enacting relationships beyond the circle of close family members. When Lizzie talks about mothers or aunties, they may not always be the actual mother or aunty, but be so-called classificatory ones. They nevertheless completely and inherently belong to, and take part in the body of interrelationships, and are thus a means for situating oneself. Lizzie’s story is first of all the story of a girl and then of a woman and of her capacity to act, to make decisions and to evolve in a situation

xiv

Introduction

that becomes increasingly complex because of the intermingled realities of an Aboriginal and a Western world that both shape her existence. She is capable of, and committed to, finding her way in both these worlds, accepting fears, shame or sadness, as well as developing interest, determination, happiness and joy. Her intimate knowledge of both cultural backgrounds provides her with the capacity to bridge these two worlds, to translate in linguistic and cultural terms what has remained misunderstood and mutually unrecognised. But it is also her capacity to bridge these worlds, and to acknowledge that she is an actor in both of them, that contributed to her fragility and depression, which she refers to towards the end of the book. At important places in the narrative, Lizzie pauses, reminding herself that she is not only talking to her own people but also to people who may not fully understand what drives her decisions and actions. In these cases, she adopts another perspective, one of selfanalysis in terms of rules and norms and of what makes ‘culture’ and cultural difference. Lizzie herself adopts the observer’s perspective of crystallising and comparing morals, structure, meaning, relationships and symbols. Norms and rules touching on the most varied aspects of Aboriginal society are described in moments of uncertainty, and without any presumption about a superiority or inferiority of particular cultural ways of doing and of thinking. They are simply there to remind us of the differences and to humbly value their wealth. Laurent Dousset, 2016 Aix-Marseille Université, CNRS, EHESS CREDO UMR 7308, 13003, Marseille, France

xv

1

Pictures from my memory My name is Elizabeth Warnngupayi Marrkilyi Ellis and I have lived a semi-traditional life. I was born in 1962 in the bush at Warakurna, Ngaatjatjarra country, in the Rawlinson Ranges just west of the West Australian–Northern Territory border in the Western Desert. Today, a small Aboriginal community is there but at that time there was only Giles Weather Station, built a few years before. My parents were Ngaatjatjarra. They were travelling through the area to attend a ceremony. It was business time; a time when people get together. I was their first child. When the ceremonial time was over, my family travelled east, towards Pankupiri and south, still around the Rawlinson Ranges. I don’t remember the name of the place where they camped, but it was where my umbilical cord fell off. In Ngaatjatjarra culture, the place where you’re born and where your umbilical cord falls off when it is dry is your country, that’s where you belong. It is your ngurra, your home. We travelled around and lived in the Rawlinson Ranges, Pangkupirri and the Tjukurla area. Tjukurla, north-east of Warakurna, is also a community now. My parents lived a traditional life. Western Desert people were among some of the last Aboriginal people to have had contact with whitefellas. Dad saw a whitefella for the first time when they were building the weather station. It was built as part of Australian and British governments weapons testing program in the Western Desert: the Weapons Research Establishment (WRE). They also made

1

Pictures from my memory

graded tracks so trucks could travel through the area. Warakurna was in the middle of the rocket testing range. Mum and Dad told us stories about that time. There were quite a few people living there, near Warrupara and Kutjurntari, in the Rawlinson Ranges. They were from all around the area and they gathered around what is today Warakurna, where Native Patrol Officers Macaulay and McDougall employed by the WRE regularly visited. The late 1950s to early 1960s was a time of great drought. Families were still living a nomadic way of life in our country but they were lean times, famine, so they moved closer to the weather station to get food. Old people went to the rubbish tip to get food scraps. The patrol officers started giving families tins of meat and other food, but our people thought it was evil or poison so they would dig a hole and bury the food. The whitefellas opened the tins and ate it themselves and then offered it to our people. This is how they learned it was edible and had a go of eating food they hadn’t seen before. My parents told me the whitefellas had big fridges at Kutjurntari, and that people from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) — Hetzel and Firth and others — were doing experiments on Mum, Dad and all the other Aboriginal people who camped there. They asked my parents and the others to go into the fridges ‘to see how long you can last’. But they wouldn’t go in a second time. ‘Oh no,’ they said, ‘I am not going in there, it’s too cold.’ Mum and Dad told us they made them run up and down the road and tie a plastic bag around the top of their arms to measure the sweat, to test their stamina. Men and women had to do that. But they were testing babies too, collecting urine samples from us and wanted to put us into the fridges as well to see how long we could last in the cold. My mum also told me funny stories about that time. She was collecting urine samples from me using plastic bags. She thought the bags had to be full. One night, the little bag came off me and all the urine poured out onto the red sand. Mum was worried. There was nothing left; the bag was empty. She was convinced there had to be

2

Pictures from my memory

something in there, so she returned the plastic bag full of water. That must have been an interesting little test. Later, Hetzel and Firth wrote a book about nutrition and water and documented their findings about how the families could stand extreme cold and heat in their living environment. Despite all those tests — the running, the fridges and the plastic bags — Mum and Dad spoke affectionately about that time. Everybody was there together; all the families were camping near each other at Kutjurntari. They were being fed and there was no fighting. They were one group in one place, a big extended family with ties to the area of Purli Karil, the rich hill, that’s what we call the Rawlinson Ranges. It must have been the time when they took the photograph of Mum and me with my mother’s sister and her daughter (see Plate 2). Mum looks really unwell in that photograph. She was very sick and lost all her mimi, her breast milk, so they took me to Nyurrpaya, Mrs Bennett, to breastfeed. She was one of Mum’s sisters from Warupara, near the Gills Pinnacle, on the southern side of the road between Rebecca Creek and Docker River. My dad and Mr Bennett were close friends. They were from the Karrku–Warakurna area around the Rawlinson Ranges. Anyway, Mrs Bennett had a baby boy, Frank, at the same time so she had plenty of milk. She said Frank was a good baby: when he saw me being taken over to drink the mimi, he never got angry or selfish. He just sat there, curious, and watched me breastfeed. My relationship with Frank was very strong because we shared his mother’s mimi, and I had strong links with Mrs Bennett and her other children. Mum, Mrs Bennett, and my brother Frank, are not with us anymore. I miss them very much. Of course I was too small to remember anything from that time. The stories I tell here are ones my parents told me — living in the country, travelling around, hunting and camping. They also told me how they went to other ceremonies in the area with me when I was a baby, such as the Tjilkatja (manhood) ceremony, which took place on the other side of Docker River, to the east, towards Lasseter’s Cave. Tjurnti is the Pitjantjatjara name of this place. One was a special boy

3

Pictures from my memory

ceremony for one of our uncles who has since passed away. Every young boy has to go through this ceremony to become a man of the first order. Tjurnti was my family’s country’s south-eastern boundary and it was also one of the places that our families went to get bush onions in the right season. Bush onion was one of the main staples for Aboriginal people of the desert. Dad told me about Mr Bennett and him hunting together for rock wallabies east of the Docker River in the hills at Tjurnti. Our two families were very close: walking around, camping and hunting together, fetching water, cooking, looking after each other’s children. Mum’s father’s country is Kulail and Docker River, and both our families are from that area. Kulail is an important place to my family and me. Mum’s father’s brother is buried there close to Kulail waterhole. One day, many years later, Mum took us with her to look for her father’s brother’s grave. My sister Myra and her late husband, George, were living at Kulail at that time. They had created a homeland, an outstation of Docker River. This was when Nelson, their fourth child, was about one year old. We stayed there for a few nights. Mum took me with her and we walked across the dry river into the country to find the grave, which she said was close to a rabbit warren. We searched, but we couldn’t find it. My other grandfather, Mum’s actual father, died near the Giles Weather Station. There are different stories about how he died, but the one Mum told to me is that he was shot dead at his camp. She said her older brother saw the white people responsible and fled into the bush to wait for his mother. When my grandmother came back to the camp, he told her what happened. They left that place, never to see my grandfather again. For a long time, they didn’t know what had happened to his body. Then, about ten years ago, a whitefella or a descendent from someone of that group rang up. We don’t know exactly who it was; he didn’t say. He said my grandfather had been buried long ago at Giles Weather Station, not far from where they let off the weather balloons every day. The family went to see the

4

Pictures from my memory

gravesite. We pulled all the weeds out and put flowers on the gravesite. We also made a headstone. Our families were living in their tribal areas when I was a baby. This was around the time when a young Rupert Murdoch came to the Rawlinson Ranges to write a story about Aboriginal people. He came to the area because there had been reports going back to the cities about mistreatment of Aboriginal people. When Mum and Dad spoke about that time, they didn’t talk about mistreatment. They just laughed about the silly things the whitefellas used to do to them. I don’t think the experiments were funny, but they did. They just said, ‘Oh those whitefellas were really stupid.’ But there are also awful stories of families in the region being shot by whitefellas, possibly prospectors. People say that families were shot like dogs. My family stayed around Pangkupirri, Kulail, Tjukurla, the Rawlinson Ranges and the weather station until the late 1960s. The very first thing I remember was walking up and down a hill when I was small. This was in Warburton, south of Warakuna. My family had walked from the Rawlinson Ranges south to the Warburton Mission a few times. Some families had been to Warburton before. William and Iris Wade set up the mission in 1934. They travelled from Kalgoorlie, Leonora and Laverton to teach the word of God to Aboriginal people. They also wanted to save our people from being massacred by pastoralists and prospectors. When they arrived in Warburton something broke on their wagon. They interpreted it as a sign from God that they should set up their base there. From then on, people came from everywhere to live at the mission although people were already living in the Warburton area because it was an important site. Mum went to the mission first with her mother Manitji, her mother’s sister, and another time with her birth mum, Matjuwarri, Dad and his siblings. Families weren’t together all the time; they only came together for ceremonies and other important events. Once these ceremonies were over, they went off again in small family groups. So when they met up with another family group who had been to Warburton, they told them, ‘Oh, come with us, we’re going to Warburton, because all

5

Pictures from my memory

the families are there.’ They spoke about the abundance of food at the mission, so they went. I don’t have any strong memories of staying at the mission. We were only there for a short time, and I was only about five years old. I just remember the hills and walking down a plateau that slopes down onto flat country. The mission was on a small hill; we had to walk up to get to it and walk back down to the flat area, where people used to camp and live. Mum said my sister Myra was born at Warburton, so now there were two children. Dad said mission time was a good time, since there was plenty of food there, but he also said that, unlike Purli Karil country around the Giles Weather Station, there was a lot of fighting around the mission. In the old days, when someone did something wrong, that person would be followed so they could be punished. But it was hard to catch people out in the desert, because they were travelling around, usually separately. Sometimes things had happened a long time ago, but people remembered and were still angry. When they all got together in Warburton, they started big fights. Dad talked about him and all his brothers fighting against other groups. It was like a war. He said, ‘At Warburton, there was non-stop fighting, all day, and the next day, and the day after.’ There were men getting spears, being speared, spears being pulled out and getting more spears. They were bashed on their heads with clubs, and boomerangs were flying all over the place. The children and some of the women ran away and hid to get out of the way, while other women and men would be the ngarlkilpa, the mediators, for the fighters. Dad was proud of how he and his brothers fought with courage and honour, supporting each other. He showed his scars from the spears with great pride. But he also said mission time was a bad time. It was the time of the biggest fights they had ever known. There was so much violence, so much blood wasted and life lost. Although, sometimes he laughed about it, especially when he explained how he would wangurrilu pungkula karli, kurlata wiyalpayi, duck and weave from the boomerangs and spears. I have fond memories of Dad showing me

6

Pictures from my memory

how he moved around with a shield to avoid the oncoming spears and boomerangs. My grandmother lived at Warburton for a while, and my uncle, Toby Farmer, went to the mission school. But we ended up leaving Warburton, not because of the fighting, but because there were ceremonies going on and we joined other people on a truck to travel south-west to Laverton. They went because some family had already moved to the Laverton area. But we didn’t stay long in Laverton either; instead we moved on to Leonora then on to Wiluna, and that’s where I remember a lot of my early childhood. My first strong childhood memories are from that time. …………………………… Leonora, north of Kalgoorlie, was a small sheep town. There also was a gold mine around Laverton and Leonora called Sons of Gwalia. It opened and closed a few times. So there were sheep stations, the gold mine, and a reserve where us Aboriginal people lived. My sister, Myra, and I lived on the reserve with our parents. There were one-room brick houses with just a fireplace, a window, a door, and a veranda; you just walked in and that was it. They had shared toilet and shower blocks but the houses just had one room with a fireplace. The people living on the reserve came from all over the place — around Leonora, the Western Desert, and around Warburton way. But it wasn’t like Warburton; there wasn’t much fighting on this reserve. People went hunting, but they also went to the shop and I believe they also got rations. I remember going to a butcher’s shop with my family. We could buy meat, kangaroo meat and kangaroo tails. The people at the butcher’s shop hunted and shot the kangaroos. They skinned them and cut them up for people to buy. Mum and all the other women went to the rubbish dump to collect copper wire so they could take it into the shop and sell it. They used the money to buy food. My parents and the other families also collected sandalwood and sold it. Us kids collected bottle lids to get money. Sometimes we used that money to buy an ice cream or something else we wanted.

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Pictures from my memory

The reserve was on the edge of town, on the north-western side. Us kids had to live at the hostel, which was on top of the hill on the other side of town from the reserve, near the hospital. All school age Aboriginal kids lived at the hostel because at that time, the police made sure all the Aboriginal kids went to school. That was the time when they took kids away: the Stolen Generation. The authorities took away all the half-caste kids and trained them in cities, but they didn’t take away full-blood kids like us. They left us on the reserve, at the missions, and made sure we went to school. Kids stayed at the hostel during school terms. Every now and then, our parents walked up the hill to visit us, and we walked down to the reserve on weekends to see them. My brother, Leslie, was born at the Leonora hospital. After having the baby, Mum came by the hostel so we could see him. We went down to the fence and Mum pushed Leslie’s foot through a hole in the fence. I remember touching his little pink foot. I think they didn’t want parents and other people to come into the hostel because I don’t remember parents coming in to see us. We would see them from a distance, walk over and talk to them through the fence. I don’t recall many kids at the hostel, but my cousin Dorothy was there at that time with me. I remember when I first met her. There were lots of older girls at the hostel and they liked fighting. They had big fights and made us little kids join in. I remember one such fight. Dorothy was new; she arrived at the hostel after I got there. She was sitting down by herself, telling stories drawing in the sand with a wire, tjintjatjuranytja. But the older girls made us call her nasty names. I didn’t know she was my cousin at that time. She reported us to the manager and we got into trouble. Later, I got to know Dorothy very well because Mum cared for her for a few years when we lived in Wiluna after her parents died. She was like a big sister to me and we are still very close. My mother was very closely related to Dorothy; she was Dorothy’s aunty and Dorothy is my cousin. The reserve didn’t have its own school so every day we walked from the hostel to the local school at Leonora. It was just a normal

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Pictures from my memory

country town school with a mix of black and white kids. There was a little creek we had to cross to get there although to me it looked like a huge river. At least I remembered it as being huge. But many years later, travelling to Kalgoorlie and Perth for work, I went across this creek that was so big in my mind. In reality, it was tiny. Anyway, one day it started raining while we were at school. When we left school to walk up to the hostel, we realised we couldn’t cross the creek because it was flowing so fast. We stood there for a long time, asking ourselves how we could possibly cross that river. Luckily there were Aboriginal people living in a house next to the creek, and they carried us across on their shoulders to the other side. It is a very strong memory. There was big rain, and all the creeks were flowing. I loved school. I loved learning to read and write. I remember how later I would read our old people’s mail for them, from family or whoever. They showed me the mail and I read it, saying who it was for and told them what it said. But I didn’t like school when I was being teased. At that time, we were known as the Farmer family, after Mum’s maiden name. I don’t remember who most of the kids were, but they teased us and sang that song, Farmer in the Dell, and I cried a lot. Those kids were nasty. Dorothy and a bigger boy, Yirriya, who I think was a skin brother, used to look after me. The big ones used to look after us little ones. When someone picked a fight with me, I went to Dorothy. She told them off or hit them. At the hostel, boys and girls lived in separate dormitories in different buildings. In between the two dormitory buildings lived the lady who looked after the girls and the man who looked after the boys on the other side. The boys and girls toilets and showers were in the same block — girls on one side, boys on the other. We used to bang on the wall and yell out to the boys. Our dormitory was one long room, with beds all the way along and small bedside cupboards between each bed. At night, the big girls frightened us with ghost stories. But at other times we would be jumping along the beds all the way down. Sometimes we went to the movies on the other side of the hill from the hostel and when we walked back we would scare ourselves. When

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Pictures from my memory

something moved in the dark, we would scream in fear and cry and run like mad to get back to the hostel. Sometimes the big kids scared us for fun and we would be crying and running at the same time. …………………………… Dad worked as a stockman on some of the sheep stations. Dad’s close friend, Ernest Bennett, Mr Bennett, who was one of my fathers, would fondly remember working with my father around Leonora as a stockman. While we were at the hostel, Mum and Dad both worked on the surrounding sheep stations. One of them was Kaluwiri station. They went mustering and did other kinds of work with animals. I don’t know if they were paid — maybe they received rations such as flour, sugar, tea, tobacco, tinned beef and so on — but I know they lived on the station. Dad told me many stories about working there. He said they used to see a lot of tjinakarrpilpa, feather-foot men, travelling through the station. Tjinakarrpilpa have strong powers. They can become invisible or change into animals such as emus and travel through the land. Tjinakarrpilpa are killers or what whitefellas call assassins. One day Mum was sitting down close to a fence when she saw an emu on the other side. Next minute it was on her side and she wondered how it got through the fence. She looked again but the emu had disappeared. It must have been a feather-foot man. You can see a tjinakarrpilpa if you have the gift. Another time, people watched some tjinakarrpilpa steal food from the storehouse but Dad and the other workers rode out to chase them away, and the station people, whitefellas, shot them. But when they went to pick them up, there was nobody there. They shot them from a distance and saw them fall to the ground, but they didn’t see any bodies when they reached the spot where they fell. They just saw bags of flour, sugar and tea, and tobacco. Mum and Dad knew where these tjinakarrpilpa came from. They travelled a lot from the south up to Leonora and Wiluna and further north, then back south again.

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Pictures from my memory

Mum learned how to use a gun at Kaluwiri station. Later she went hunting with a .22 rifle at Wiluna. Women can hunt kangaroos and other animals with guns, but they can’t use spears since spears are for men only. Women also have special hunting dogs. If a woman sees a kangaroo, she can use her dogs to kill it or use a gun. To train really good hunting dogs, they get kumpu, urine from the kangaroo, and rub it on a dog’s nose when it’s a puppy. The dog remembers the smell and becomes a good hunting dog for kangaroo. Aboriginal people have a close connection with their dogs and give them skin names. When somebody passes away, people don’t want to kill the dog of the deceased person so someone will take on that dog and look after it. Some people who didn’t have children have a few dogs and they treat them like their children. The dogs follow their owners everywhere; they are part of the family and are always with them. Mum had lots of stories about the time at Kaluwiri station, because she was at home most of the time looking after the babies. She had Myra, Leslie and Susan too so she had three little ones to look after while Dad worked. Dad learned a little bit of English while working on the station. I remember many good times at Leonora living at the hostel but we were only there for about a year, and then my family moved to Wiluna. Mum and Dad moved because of ceremonies and because other families were going as well. They always travelled with close and extended family. We were family groups living together and travelling together. Dorothy was with us at that time and I remember some of the old people, such as Dorothy’s grandmother and Mrs Manupa Butler’s mum, and old Mr Carnegie and his two wives with their children being with us.

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2

Moving to missions  and reserves We travelled north to Wiluna on the mail truck. The truck delivered mail to all the stations in the area so we went from Laverton to Leonora, and then from Leonora to Wiluna. It was school holiday time; kids couldn’t leave the hostel and travel at other times. The police checked the trucks to make sure no school kids were travelling around during school terms. We stayed at Wiluna for about two years. It didn’t matter where Aboriginal people came from; the authorities moved all of them onto reserves. At Wiluna, some were from the Patjarr area, just west of the Rawlinsons and further away, others were from the east of the Rawlinsons, from Mum’s country. They all went west to Wiluna. So we had, and we still have, family all the way from Warburton to Laverton, to Wiluna, to Jigalong and many other places — all across the Western Desert. They had been travelling to all these places for ceremonies too, particularly the rainmaking ceremony and the special boy ceremony. And they had known some of these places long before whitefellas arrived, so it wasn’t foreign country. They travelled to these places through the bush but when the roads were made they travelled more often. At Wiluna, we lived at a few places: Bondini Reserve, Cafe Mission, and the emu farm. There was no school on the reserve. To the southeast of the reserve, was Cafe Mission that was run by a church group. They had a shop, a farm, church and a swimming pool. We lived

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Pictures from my memory

at Cafe Mission because there was a school for small children, and later we moved to the reserve. The houses people lived in were the same as at Leonora; just one room, and a toilet and shower block that everybody shared. I think only one or two of the houses were normal ones. My siblings Jillian and Peter were born while we were living at Wiluna. At the mission the houses were on one side, and the school was on the other side along with the church, the shop and the pool. The mission farm grew figs and grapes. We used to walk from the mission all the way to Bondini, and from there we walked all the way to town, to Wiluna. They must have been quite close to each other but in my mind it seemed like a very long way. The adults went to town to go shopping or drink alcohol. Dad started drinking in Wiluna. A lot of people drank then. People could simply buy alcohol at the pub, walk outside, sit down somewhere and drink it. Sometimes Dad woke me up the next morning to help look for things that he had lost while drinking around the town. We searched all the spots where he thought he had been, where he could have dropped that something. At the time I hated it. It was boring for me, endlessly walking around. ‘Ah, it must be over here,’ he would say, but there would be nothing there. Now, when I think back to that time, I laugh and remember Dad with much affection. There were times when we did find what he had lost, like a can of motor oil, and we were both happy. People at the mission were given rations but we also hunted and gathered bush food. I remember Dad and others hunting for kangaroos. He would kill the kangaroo and cut it, get it ready to carry, then put it in a tree. He dragged a stick behind him all the way back home, and told us kids, Mum and others to follow the stick track to get the kangaroo from the tree, a long way in the bush. This was because he was too tired to carry it home. When you hunt, you might walk for a long time before you see something. So he would leave a track and tell us to get it, bring it home, cook it and share it with all the family. We also hunted with other families. Sometimes we would just go for a day, and other times we would go on overnight camping trips, for

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Moving to missions and reserves

three, four or more days. We call these ngarringka, overnight hunting trips. We wrapped up our things in our blankets and walked to where there were animals to hunt and where bush food was ripening. One time, we went out east of Cafe Mission for a few nights. We were packing up to go back to the mission and everybody started walking back. Mum and I were the last ones to leave. Suddenly Mum noticed the footprints of one of our skin grannies. She looked at the footprints and said, ‘Hey that’s so and so. What’s she doing walking around here?’ She recognised the tracks were fresh and that Granny must have been walking by us during the night. There were also some dog tracks along with the footprints. We ran to tell everybody and called them back so they could have a look. Everybody recognised the tracks and started crying, because it was impossible for her to be at that place. She was an old lady and we had left her back at the mission. So we followed her tracks and saw how they went up to and passed a windmill. Some of the men who where ngangkari, maparn men, magic and medicine men, walked in front of us and the women and children followed. Suddenly, dogs appeared and started chasing us. We ran back the way we came. We knew our skin grandmother was there. The old people of our group said that these dogs were mamu, evil spirits, mamu dogs, devil dogs. These mamu dogs must have taken Granny away from the mission. We waited while the maparn men did their magic to get rid of the mamu dogs. Some of the men stayed behind to make sure everything was all right and we all left. After destroying the mamu dogs, the maparn men got our skin grandmother and brought her back to the mission. …………………………… Mum told me that when we were at Wiluna, two old people were brought in from the desert. A lot of people left the desert because of the drought. They were willing to go to the mission because food was available. But there was a man and a woman who had married the wrong way and they had stayed behind in the desert. Their story was told in a book, The Last of the Nomads. People got worried for them

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Pictures from my memory

because they were getting old, and they said, ‘We’d better go and find them.’ We were at Wiluna when they arrived. They passed away not long after they were brought back. I think they were homesick for their country, or maybe they just gave up. They were old and fragile. I don’t think there were any other people out in the desert who hadn’t met white people. My family had seen whitefellas in the Rawlinson Ranges, and everybody had been taken to missions. My family were from the Kurlkurlta–Tjukurla–Pangulupirri–Purli Karil–Kulail area; a lot of our family went south towards Warburton. Others such as my dad’s brother, Sally Butler and her family, went to the east, towards Papunya. Others again would have gone north, maybe towards Balgo Mission. …………………………… When kids at Cafe Mission reached a certain age, they were sent to another school at Karalundi mission. I was among them; I would have been about ten years old. My cousin Dorothy and my younger sister Myra and I were at Karalundi at the same time. But later Dorothy was sent to another school in Kalgoorlie. She was older and had to go to a different school but Kalgoorlie was a long way from Karalundi, further south, past Leonora. All the Aboriginal girls and boys from Wiluna travelled to Karalundi on a bus. We lived at the Karalundi mission during term time in the dormitories, one for boys and one for girls. It was too far to go back to our parents on weekends. From Wiluna you drive west to Meekatharra, and then twenty-five kilometres north of Meekatharra was Karalundi mission. The mission school was for full-blood kids; half-caste kids were taken to the big towns. At that time, we didn’t know about these things. We just did whatever we were told. This is what happened: you were taken, told to go here or there. ‘You have to go to school,’ whitefellas said. So our parents sent us to school. And then they told you, ‘Oh, these ones are older and they need to go to another school,’ so I was taken to Karalundi.

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Moving to missions and reserves

The mission was run by the Seventh Day Adventists. It had a kitchen, an orchard and a swimming pool. There was also a church, a netball court and a soccer field. I remember there was a lot of lucerne growing in the field to sell as bales of hay at Meekatharra. In the orchard next to the pool, they had orange and lemon trees as well as chickens. The Kadabuls, Aboriginal people from around that area or perhaps from Jigalong, worked for the people who ran the mission and they lived there. I don’t remember exactly what they did, but I think they helped out in the kitchen and on the farm. Schoolteachers also lived there. They only spoke and taught in English. Everything was in English. When we first got there, we jumped in the shower where we were washed, deloused, and had scabies cream put on us. We all ran around the room naked, covered with soap or scabies cream, in the big bath and shower room. They did that every time we came back to the mission, every term. We went to church a lot; there were church services every morning before school and then every night after supper. After school we also had to help, such as get the dough ready for baking to make bread; we did that in turns. While I don’t really remember much of the mission’s food, I do remember that when it was time to eat, we had to line up at the veranda. All the boys had to line up on one side and all the girls on the other side. The girls would go in first, and we were sitting when the boys came in. We took turns to serve, take the food and put it in front of everybody. But before we could eat, we had to wait for someone to say grace. It was the same prayer every time! ‘Dear Jesus, thank you for this food. Amen.’ I liked going to school and I liked being at Karalundi but there were times when I hated the mission, especially on Saturdays because we had to go to church. Saturday was the day of worship. Every girl had one particular dress to wear to church and the boys had a set of clothes they wore every Saturday too. I hated Saturdays because I had to wear a horrible orange dress. It came down on my body and looked like an umbrella. It had layers and layers of petticoats underneath. Oh, I hated Saturdays because I hated wearing that dress. I tried to get

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Pictures from my memory

the ladies to give me another dress, but they said, ‘No you can’t, you can’t change your dress,’ even though there were lots of other dresses available. There was a clothes room full of dresses but they were really tough and wouldn’t give me a different one. We weren’t given choices. I learned to swim at Karalundi but the way I was taught was odd. One of my skin sisters, Ada Bates, told us how to dive in and swim. But I always did a belly flop and she would say, ‘If you do a belly flop again I’m going to drown you!’ I was frightened, so I would dive in straight towards the ladder and quickly climb out so she couldn’t drown me. Sometimes on weekends the mission people took us swimming at Murchison River and occasionally we camped overnight. Along the way there were lots of Kurrajong trees. We would stop and dig the Kurrajong roots and cut them; the roots are like carrots. You peal off the skin from the root and you chew on them. They are sweet and have plenty of water. We loved digging up the Kurrajong roots. We also ate the stem of that plant from Afghanistan with the red flowers called Ruby Dock. It tastes like celery but it is red. You break the bottom, break off the leaves, peel it and chew on it. We would go into the bush to collect karlkurla, bush bananas. There were a lot of bush bananas around the mission. We collected a lot of karlkurla and kulyu, yams. One day there were many pink and grey galahs lying on the ground after they had been electrocuted sitting on a fence at Karalundi. We picked them up because it is kuka, meat, for us. Our people eat them because they have a good taste. We gutted them, took their feathers off and boiled them in water in a tin can and had a good feed at our cubby house. We did lots of things like that at the mission. Us girls often went into the bush together. We usually went hunting and digging for kulyu on the weekends. We hid crowbars in the bush and we would grab them and go off in the bush and dig kulyu. We ate them raw, but we also cooked them. Sometimes we brought some back to the mission because on the weekends we used to play in our cubby house along the fence and we took the kulyu with us to cook and eat. One time when I was digging kulyu, I was sitting on the ground with

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Moving to missions and reserves

my legs crossed and I accidentally stabbed myself with my wooden digging stick. This is why I have a large scar on my leg above my knee. It was the night before we left for school holidays. When we got back to the mission, I still had a large splinter pointing out that had broken off in my leg. During the night my leg puffed up. By the time we got on the bus the next morning I was in a lot of pain. We drove to Meekatharra where they dropped me off at the hospital and the bus went on to Wiluna. The doctor had to pull the pieces of stick out of my leg. I stayed there for nearly a week. The nurses helped me with my schoolwork, and the cooks took me into the kitchen where I sat while they were cooking. It was a small hospital and the staff knew everybody. Later, Welfare picked me up and took me home to Wiluna. One weekend, all the big girls and the big boys organised to meet in the bush somewhere. The big girls said, ‘Come on, we’ll go for a walk.’ So we followed into the bush where we met up with the boys. They were all going off with their boyfriends and girlfriends. When I was young, I used to be terrified of boys. I thought they were aliens from a different planet, and I used to keep my distance. But they were all going off with each other and I was left on my own with one other girl. There were a few young boys left. One said, ‘Oh Lizzie, you go with so and so.’ I said, ‘No, I’m not going, I am scared.’ They all went off, had dates in the bush and came back. We went back to the mission and the whitefellas, the mission people, didn’t find out about it. But, one day, two big girls and two big boys snuck off together on a date. The mission people realised the four of them were missing because they didn’t turn up at mealtime or some other activity. Those two girls and two boys got into serious trouble. The boys had to do extra duties. The two big girls got the belt on their backsides. The boys probably got the same treatment. They also shaved the heads of the two big boys — from the middle of the head all the way back to the edge, like a narrow strip in the middle. They had this bit of hair on both sides of their head and nothing in the middle. It was their punishment for being sinful. These boys were terribly ashamed about the haircut. When I first saw them I burst out crying. I was so terrified of them; they looked like monsters. 19

Pictures from my memory

The boys and girls dormitories were on either side of the teachers’ houses. Between the girls and the boys, there was a line you shouldn’t cross. But one of my skin dads, aunty Manurpa’s young brother, Ricky, used to sprint from the boys’ side all the way over to our dormitory. He would run all the way to us and we would tag him on the shoulder or on the back, and he’d run all the way back where all the boys were. He never got caught. We loved that game. He was the only boy who did it and none of the girls had the courage to run over to the boys’ side and back again. I thought he was so brave. Another time, the girls decided to run away from the mission. Some of the big girls stole a fork from the kitchen to unlock the dormitory door. They wanted to go to Meekatharra, or back to the missions where their families lived. They were about fifteen years old but some of us little ones were only between eight and ten years old, and we didn’t want to leave because we were scared of the dark. But the big girls had decided we would all leave at night and made us pack our things in secret before going to bed. After they turned off all the lights and the lady who looked after us locked everything and said goodnight, we all got out of bed. The big girls unlocked the door with the fork and we quietly walked out, passed the pool, through the fence and across the scrub. We walked through the bush, avoiding the turn-off road that links Karalundi to Meekatharra and then crossed the main road back into the bush. After walking for a while, the bigger girls said, ‘Let’s get on the road and hitch a lift.’ So we walked back to the road hoping a car would come along. Suddenly we saw a light coming towards us. It looked as if a truck was coming. So we stood there and all the big girls put their thumbs out to hitch a ride. But when the truck got closer we realised it was the mission’s truck. We took off through the scrub like hell, back the way we came, running flat out and dropping all our things. We were running, screaming and yelling at the same time. After running for a while, we stopped and checked if we were all together. We decided to go back to the mission because by then they would be waiting for us, and we expected to be in serious trouble. So we went back, crossed the road again and walked back towards 20

Moving to missions and reserves

the mission. We were walking, walking, walking until we saw that truck again. It was a full moon and we could clearly see the truck. We hurried to run and sit down so he couldn’t see us in the shadow of a tree. Some time later we saw the truck was going the other way. So we got up again and walked, until we suddenly heard a man’s booming voice say, ‘What are you girls doing?’ Another big fright! We were running again but the voice shouted, ‘Come back here you girls! Right this minute!’ So we all stopped, turned around and went back. We were still walking, but this time the superintendent was walking right behind us, making sure we all went back to our dormitories. We got into serious trouble; we all had to feel the big belt on our backsides. We used to play cubby house all the time and build them up against the fence. One time, the mission people wanted to teach us how to live our lives for when we were to go back home. They wanted to show us how to live cleanly. We went into a big yard, and made a wiltja, a traditional house, what whitefellas call a humpy. The whole class helped to build this wiltja and we also made a fire and were cooking food. I thought, ‘Oh, this is silly, they want to teach us that,’ because I liked to be in the classroom, doing schoolwork. I didn’t like working outside but I enjoyed eating the food we cooked. …………………………… One day back at Cafe Mission during the school holidays, Mum gave Myra and me a dollar. It was the old dollar note. Myra and I were walking with that dollar note to the shop but we got into an argument because Myra wanted to hold the dollar note too. She said, ‘No, give it to me!’ I explained I would hold it but she kept asking to hold it and crying, so I gave up and said, ‘Oh, I know what I’ll do!’ I tore the note in half and I gave her one half while I kept the other half. We walked into the shop and chose something but when we went to pay for it, the man said, ‘No, no, where’s the other half of the dollar?’ So we put the note back together and he taped it up.

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3

The world was bigger than  I thought Around 1972, all the students at Karalundi were taken to Perth for a holiday. We rode on a bus from Karalundi all the way to Perth. It was my first trip to a big city. We were scared; there were too many people and too many cars. But since we were all together and because all the big kids were there as well, we felt all right most of the time. Before that, I never knew there were so many people, so many white people living in just one spot. We stayed at a place called Kalamanda, which was owned by the Seventh Day Adventists. We went to the beach. We hadn’t seen the sea before so when we saw all that water, we were seriously scared. We stood on the beach while the mission people tried to get us into the water. They had to literally pick us up and put us in. The first time we stood in the water, we were knocked over by a big wave. I struggled under the water and I couldn’t figure out which way was up. After a while we got used to it and we enjoyed ourselves swimming and playing in the sand. We went on an excursion to a bakery and we also visited the Weet-Bix factory. They took us south of Perth to Nannup and Pemberton and as far as Albany where they used to catch whales. We saw huge whale jawbones. We stayed to the north of Albany on a farm in a sheep-shearing shed. It was freezing. I still remember how smelly it was. They dug a pit toilet outside. In Pemberton, we visited a place

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Pictures from my memory

where there was a big tree with a lookout at the top. First all the girls climbed up the ladder but while we were climbing the boys were at the bottom and looked up. They teased us because they could see our knickers. So we all came back down and made the boys go up first. We also went north to the Stirling mountain range. There were lots of walking tracks and I remember climbing up to the top of the mountain where we had a beautiful view. There were so many wild flowers out. We also went to Busselton where we stayed at a campground. It was on the beach and they gave us a big grader or tractor tube. We were swimming around with it but the boys lost it and it drifted out to sea. The second time I visited Perth, I went with Dorothy. Our teacher, Miss Wareham, wanted to reward the two of us for being really good students that year. We travelled to Perth in Miss Wareham’s private car and stayed at her house. On Saturdays, we went to the local Seventh Day Adventist church. Every time we went, the white people made a big fuss of us. They talked to us and asked us many questions. The same thing happened in the streets. People stared at us a lot so Dorothy and I used to stare back at them. When we walked around the neighbourhood, the white kids teased us. They called out, ‘Charcoal, charcoal, charcoal! Why don’t you go and rub yourself with more charcoal?’ And Dorothy would reply, ‘Chalk! Chalk! Go and rub yourself with more chalk!’ Later I joined Dorothy giving cheek to those white kids. One day, Miss Wareham left us in her house for a few days with one of her nephews who came to look after us. He was a teenager, about the same age as Dorothy. But then he got a friend of his, another boy, to stay with him so there were four of us in the house. The two boys were trying to get fresh with us. We were watching television when one of the boys made a move on Dorothy. She screamed and pushed him out of the way and we both ran outside. The two boys ran after us, chasing us around the house. We managed to get back into the house and locked ourselves in. We thought we had locked all the doors, and we were sitting in the bedroom but next minute one of the boys walked in. There was another door we didn’t know about. Then

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The world was bigger than I thought

it all was on again running around outside, around and round. By the end of it I was exhausted. Dorothy told them that if they didn’t stop, she was going to tell Miss Wareham. They stopped. We went back into the house and the boys were good from then on. This really is the only thing that I can remember about that trip. After Perth, we went straight back to school at Karalundi. At Karalundi they preached to us a lot. They warned us, ‘If you’re bad, you to going burn in hell forever.’ I had nightmares about burning in hell. This is probably why it put me off being a serious Christian. From a very early age I tried to resist. The other thing that really disturbed me was, as I said earlier, the orange dress. That dress and burning in hell, that was it. Christianity didn’t have a chance with me. But I couldn’t say anything otherwise I would have had the belt on my backside. …………………………… In the early 1970s, the government handed control of the missions and reserves to Aboriginal people. The church was told to leave and the government took over, so we left Karalundi and we never went back. We moved back to the reserve at Wiluna and went to the local town school. It was a mixed school, white and black kids together. The school wasn’t far from the pub. I remember that because we used to walk across to the pub and buy sandwiches for lunch. A bus came to the reserve to take us to school. If you didn’t get on the bus and missed school, then the police came around. School was enforced. After school the bus came back and took us back to the reserve, back to the camp of my parents. During recess and lunch we played games. We played ‘cops and robbers’ and what we called ngakulpa, knuckle jacks or babies, a game played with small bones. You play it sitting on the ground and throwing the bones into the air and letting them fall. The game had a few steps to it. First there were babies, and then there were plums and ups and downs. I don’t remember exactly how it went. There

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Pictures from my memory

was one part where you had to play that game without showing your teeth, mouth shut. But everybody tried to make you laugh. If you did, you were out. You threw all the knuckle jacks on the ground and the other person had to pick which one it was you had to play with. The following turn there would be two, so you had to pick up two. On the next throw there were three, and so on. I liked going to school to learn and play but also because at home on the reserve, people drank a lot. I hated being around drunks. There was a lot of violence at the reserve. They got the money for the alcohol from working on Desert Gold Farm during fruit-picking season. The people at the farm had a truck with a big iron cage around it. In the mornings, they drove to the reserve to pick up people who wanted to work on the farm. They worked all day picking melons, oranges or whatever fruit was ready for picking, and were driven back in the evening. People used to bring plenty of fruit home. They would take as much as they liked, and it was free. I remember them bringing home watermelon, rockmelon and oranges so we ate plenty of fruit every day. During the holidays, kids would go with their parents on the truck to Desert Gold Farm. There was a big bushy shady tree where people put down their belongings for lunch. Us kids sat under the tree while our parents went to work. Sometimes we went with them and helped pick fruit, but most of the time we would stay near the tree and play. We called it the lunch camp, because everybody joined up there for lunch. In the afternoon after work, people went to the farm office to get their pay. I don’t really remember what my parents did during other seasons. Maybe Dad still went dingo hunting, like he did in the Rawlinsons. He told me stories from that time, of how he hunted dingo, took back the scalps, and was paid in rations. The Bondini Reserve at Wiluna was a big place with many people living there. There was a big windmill that brought up the underground water. There were a lot of one-room houses and two toilet and shower blocks. A couple of houses had their own toilet and shower. Some people lived in one-room tin shacks. Most of our families lived in

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wiltjas, shelters made from branches, iron, tents and whatever else we could find to provide some shelter, because we weren’t local people. It was only the people from around Wiluna who had houses. Not all of them, but local people lived in the few houses that were on the reserve. There was just one fruit tree on the reserve. I went there every day when the tree was fruiting to get the tjaartupirr, black berries. They are tiny, black and spicy-bitter, but sweet at the same time. Many of these trees grow at Kurlkurlta, my dad’s country. They are a sacred fruit, mirrka, for us of Kurlkurlta. Kurlkurlta is a very important place for our people. For a long time we couldn’t visit the site, and it was only in the late 1970s, many years after living at Wiluna that the menfolk of our tribe made the first trip back to Kurlkurlta. At the time there was no road going out to Kurlkurlta. I think some of the anthropologists were with them as well. They had to go through the bush from Warakurna, up north through the desert to Kurlkurlta. It was the beginning of the school year and I was at Yirara College in Alice Springs at that time. (I talk about Yirara later in Chapter 5.) By then, my parents, siblings and my extended family lived at Docker River. I heard about the trip to Kurlkurlta on the radio while in Alice Springs, and I was really worried for my dad. They ran out of water and food on the way. It was in summer and the rock holes they were relying on to fill up with water were dry. They used all their water for the radiators of the vehicles and none was left for the people. The army or some emergency mob had to fly over where the men were and dropped water and food from the plane. Luckily they made sure all those men arrived home safely. But let me return to Wiluna. My parents taught my siblings and me a lot of traditional knowledge. They were our main teachers and were very firm with us, just like their parents were with them. During the school holidays, they taught us how to live following strict cultural rules and everything we needed to know about our land and our important stories that are linked to the land. They also told us many times how to live our adult lives in the right way. They told us a lot of stories, such as bedtime stories at night. Sometimes we took part in ceremonies like

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Pictures from my memory

the special boy ceremony and the rainmaking ceremony. We knew the rainmaking ceremony because our grandfathers had learned this ceremony from people living in the west and took it back home to Warakurna. My mother’s father’s headstone, the one that had been shot near Giles Weather Station, says that he was one of the senior rainmakers from his country. It was only much later that they stopped doing the ceremony in Warakurna because many of the older people who knew how to do it had passed away. Our parents, grandparents and our ancestors before them learned everything they knew in the bush from their family members, unlike me who had bush schooling as well as whitefella schooling. The knowledge and skills they learned from kin helped them to survive in their world, and live according to our cultural rules. Knowledge and skills were passed from one generation to the next by certain kinship relationships and at different stages in a person’s life. Public knowledge and skills are taught to young girls and boys. There are different stages of your life when you may access certain kinds of knowledge, and these stages may be marked by signs, such as scars on your body. I have four scars on my inner right leg and three scars on my inner left leg as well as some scars on my left arm. In my culture, when females reached their mid-teens, they burned marks on their legs, but most of the time the marks were on their upper arms, near their shoulders. Some old people, including my mum, had scars on their breasts too. It was a sign of entering womanhood, to say they were at a marriageable age. The scars are made using a certain type of grass that grows in the bush. When it dries out, you wet the bottom, stick it into your skin and light the other end. When it burns down, it makes a scar. Big grasses make big scars and thin ones make little scars. When the grass burns down you feel it burning into your skin but you don’t touch it, you just blow the ash off or just leave it as it is and wait. If you touch the wound, it will get sore or infected. We made the scars in winter when it wasn’t too hot.

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Once a woman has maybe two children she will begin to be trusted with secret and sacred rules. When a boy completes his special boy ceremony, he begins to be trusted with secret and sacred men’s knowledge. Knowledge and skills were passed on in small portions, and only to the rightful person to learn at the right stage of a person’s life. In our culture, there are people who are keepers of certain knowledge and certain places. You have to be a mature and responsible person, and most of these people were and are the seniors and elders in our community. …………………………… At the reserve we played wiltja-wiltja, cubby house, a lot. It was a traditional game for girls, building a house and playing family. We made real fires in the cubby house, and sometimes we stole flour from our parents, as well as sugar and a billycan, and cooked there. We stayed in the cubby house nearly all day. We would build cubbies and have competitions to see whose was the best. We decorated them with flowers, and made pathways to and around the wiltja, then, when everybody had finished, we visited each other’s wiltja and voted for the one we thought was the best. We played mothers and fathers in the cubby houses. Someone played the man and we pretended to be married, a husband and a wife with their baby. The baby was a long rock wrapped up in a bit of rag or a shirt, and we carried it around. Sometimes two boys pretended to fight each other or two girls would fight. We would be there with our babies trying to stop them from fighting. We pretended two girls were fighting over one boy, or when a boy wanted to marry a girl, they would pretend to take the girl by force. But when that girl’s family saw that boy coming, they would block his path. The girl would hide behind her family and go round and round in a circle while the man would try to grab her, just like adults did. Or sometimes we would fight against a small tree, pretending the tree was somebody. We would

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go up to that tree and swear at it and hit all the branches and leaves until there was nothing left. We copied everyday life in our cubbies. Sometimes we let boys play with us. But if they weren’t following our rules, we said, ‘No you can’t play with us,’ and told them to leave. Sometimes when we went back to the main camp for lunch, the boys smashed up the cubbies and when we came back we had to rebuild everything. But we could recognise the tracks and knew who the boys were. When we saw those boys again, we chased them throwing fire sticks at them, and tried to beat them using our hands. One time during the school holidays, Dorothy, Leila and I wanted to go looking for kulya, yams. They look like parakilya, a herb, but they have thick roots. We used to dig up the plant, or sometimes it can be pulled up with all the roots and just collect it. You lightly roast these roots in the hot ashes of a fire until they’re cooked and you eat them. So one day we wanted to go and collect these roots and bush berries, pulyu pulyu or parka parka. It was a long walk. We collected the yams and were walking back towards the reserve when suddenly, looking behind us, we saw horses coming after us. We ran like mad towards a tree so we could climb up. But instead of running to a big tree where the three of us could be out of reach from the cheeky wild horses, we went to a little skinny tree that was leaning to one side. Dorothy and I climbed up this skinny leaning tree and there was no more room for Leila. She tried and tried to get up, but we said, ‘No, you can’t climb up, Leila, you have to stay there.’ So she stood at the base of the tree, and one of the horses came very close to her. It snorted and stamped its foot on the ground. Dorothy prayed hard. After a while the horse calmed down and looked around. It got distracted and started eating the grass. We decided it was time to make our get away. Quickly, quietly, we climbed down from the tree and took off down the road towards the reserve. We sprinted like mad. But when we turned around, the horses were coming again right behind us. We ran again, but when we looked around to see where they were we realised there weren’t any horses this time — it was a motorbike. It was the

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strange bloke who used to work at Desert Gold Farm. He used to walk around in just his underpants. They even called him Underpants. After we returned to Wiluna from Karalundi, Dorothy and Ricky went to school at Kalgoorlie, but they travelled back by bus for the school holidays. One Sunday night they were walking from the town of Wiluna to Bondini Reserve. It was dark. All along the way people walked up and down between town and the reserve. Some people thought Dorothy had a bottle of wine in the box she was carrying and started chasing her. Dorothy and Ricky ran flat out. Dorothy shouted, ‘No, we have no grog! I only have my clothes in the box. I just come back from school from Kalgoorlie.’ But they wouldn’t believe her so they ran straight to my mum’s wiltja, because Mum was looking after her at that time. I always thought this was a funny story. My parents moved from Bondini Reserve to Desert Gold Farm for a while. They didn’t stay long, but I remember living in a big army tent. It had a big pole in the middle and fours posts on each side to hold the tent up. My parents worked on the farm planting vegetables such as cabbages, lettuces and carrots. They watered them and picked them. One day, Mum and I went hunting. Mum took the gun with her, but we also had her hunting dogs with us. It was raining a lot and we couldn’t see very far. Suddenly there was a kangaroo that jumped right in front of us. The dogs chased the kangaroo and eventually killed it. Mum and I followed the dogs, picked up the kangaroo, and took it back to camp. It was still pouring with rain. I remember Dad and I sitting in the tent trying to stop all the water from coming into the tent from underneath. We made banks of sand so the water wouldn’t come in. He also sang rain songs, and every time there was lightning and thunder, he would swear at the lightning and tell it to go away. He said that when there is lightning around, you are not allowed to show your teeth or be eating otherwise you get struck. You have to store the meat and you are not allowed to eat until all the lightning and thunder are gone. Don’t sit outside, but be under a tree or a wiltja, hide away, so you don’t get struck, and keep your mouth closed. When the rain stopped, us kids splashed and played in the puddles.

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Mum was a good tracker; she could tell exactly when and what animal had walked passed. She would look at a track and say, ‘Oh, it ran like this a minute ago.’ Or she said it went past in the morning or at night. She hunted rabbits and goannas a lot. She also foraged for bush foods and dug up witchetty grubs from the prickly mosses, an acacia tree with prickly leaves. They call this tree Dead Finish because in the dry time it is the last one to survive. We call it wakalpuka. Women would split the seedpods open to collect the orange-black seeds in the middle, then they would grind the seeds into a paste and eat it. Many of the grains were eaten dry and raw, or mixed with water to make a paste and then a damper out of it. The prickly leaves were used to kill warts. I treated my great niece Melanie, when she was ten years old, with prickly acacia leaf one day and again the following day, and two weeks later the wart on her hand had disappeared. Some of our family had moved back to the east, but they travelled a lot to Wiluna for ceremonies and people travelled up and down between the Rawlinsons, Warburton and Wiluna all the time. They came for a special boy ceremony or for fights that had to be sorted out. There were big fights on the reserve. When people had unresolved feuds, they had fights after the arrival ceremony. There were boomerangs and spears flying, but in those days there were a lot of ngarlkilpa, mediators, who helped stop the fights. Nowadays, when alcohol is involved, if everybody who is fighting has been drinking, nobody jumps in to stop them because you can’t reason with people who are drunk. But in the old days, most people were sober and they wanted to settle old wrongs. Those who were fighting would listen to the ngarlkilpa because they were a certain type of kin, for example avoidance or another important relationship, such as waputju, fatherin-law. In those days ngarlkilpa saved many people from savagely wounding and murdering each other. Ngarlkilpa stopped two people or a group from fighting by talking sense into people. If they had fought for too long, they would say, ‘Enough, it’s even, you should all stop now; you’re all bleeding. No more. Go and have a feed.’ In the old days, they fought for hours.

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This happened when people were extremely angry. Then they would go off and say, ‘You wait, I’m just gonna have a little rest, but I’m still thinking about you, just wait there.’ They would have a feed and rest but returned later to fight again. They dragged out the fight as long as they could because they thought the other person needed to be seriously punished. For example, when someone stole a wife or if a man married a widow, then both had to stand up for what they did and take the punishment. This happened to one of our skin mothers. She was a widow but got married again while she was on the reserve. When her family arrived with the ceremonial party from Warburton way, they found that she was married without them knowing. So my skin mum and her husband had to face the family. My skin dad stood there with a shield, and she was standing next to him. People first started throwing boomerangs, and he had to do warngurri, it is like a dance that men do when weapons are thrown at them. Dad used to show us how to do it when he was telling us stories. So our skin dad had to deflect all the boomerangs first. People threw them at him in turns, one after the other. After the boomerangs, people threw spears while they came closer. They walked along getting closer and closer, until one stabbed him in the leg. But there were ngalkirpa, mediators, making sure that they didn’t go too far; just enough so he was touched but not severely wounded. Pampurlku wantiku, spear him, touch him once. Then after the spears, people hit him on the head with clubs and he wasn’t allowed to fight back. He had to take it all. He was only allowed to protect himself. But the ngalkirpa and a lot of women and his wife were there, making sure they didn’t hurt him too much: wampuri puwa, hit him gently, they would say. When he had been beaten, everybody was happy and the fight stopped. They let him stay with his new wife. Later they visited them and gave them blankets or boomerangs or any other gifts. They might have also given blankets or food or some other gift to the husband’s family. Around this time, my dad did his time in Fremantle jail, near Perth, because of some grog-related offence. He hadn’t done anything

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serious. Dad told me that while he was in jail, they used him as a tracker to find criminals or people lost in the bush around Perth and they paid him in tobacco. After he had done his time in jail, Welfare brought him back to Wiluna. There was also a jail at Wiluna, in town, not far from the pub. The people in jail sat outside with the guards. They had a fire going and cooked whatever food they had. Families could just walk up and talk to them. They went back inside the jail for meals and then go back out again during the day. They weren’t hardened criminals; they were there for minor offences. …………………………… My parents had had enough of living at Wiluna and wanted to go back home to Docker River, to their country. People were moving up and down between the Rawlinsons, Warburton and Wiluna all the time. But the police went down to the mail truck and watched who was getting on and off to make sure the kids stayed at school. One day we managed to get away. My parents told us kids to go first and they would come behind. The first time we tried the police saw us and sent us back to the Bondini Reserve. But the next time we were on the truck, with our parents hiding us kids under blankets. When our parents saw the police coming they told us, ‘Don’t move!’ The police looked in the truck and asked, ‘Any school kids here from Wiluna?’ People said, ‘No, no, this is the mob from Warburton way.’ And that’s how we left Wiluna.

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4

Back closer to our country When we left Wiluna, we travelled first on the mail truck and then on one of those long trucks that carry timber or steel and has only a half-size cabin just for the driver. We sat outside on top of our belongings with our legs hanging off. While we were on the truck, people listened to our Wiluna talk and we were curious about their way of talking too, which was Ngaanyatjarra. We were just talking amongst ourselves, but I remember how the people were listening, astonished at our strange tongue. I had to learn to understand the kids at Docker River. The language is similar in many ways. A lot of the words are the same but the accent and some endings are different. The second truck took us as far as Warburton. The next day, one of mum’s skin brothers, Sam, took Mum, Dad and us six kids, in his car further into our parents’ country. We went from Warburton east, towards Blackstone and then before Wingellina, we turned north to go past Partirninytjarra and then up towards Giles Weather Station. When we arrived at Kutjuntari, the Pinnacle, we saw another car on the road. It was Toby, Mum’s actual brother driving the other car. We met all our mob on the road. They were living at Docker River. Warakurna wasn’t a community at that time; it only had the weather station. The only communities were Warburton, Docker River and Ernabella. Our mob was on their way to a hunting trip, gathering bush tucker, mainly pintalypa, green bush tomato. Mum cried for Toby, because when you haven’t seen your families for a long time, you cry for them. Men and women cry with each other to show how

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much they mean to you. Also, in our culture, people did not speak openly about family members who had died, so crying was a release for our people to remember dead ones and greet families they had not seen in a long time. Mum had left Warburton with only two children, Myra and me; when she returned I was a teenager and there were six of us: me, Myra, Susan, Leslie, Peter and Jillian. Susan changed her name to Nerida in her twenties because her name became kunmarnu, taboo to say because of the death of a person with the same name. Uncle Toby had gone to school at Warburton Mission. His mum, my grandmother, had been living there as well. Among our very close family, it was only my Mum and Dad who moved to Wiluna with Myra, Susan, Leslie and me. Mum never went to a white man’s school. She was a teenager when she met her first whitefella, so she only went to bush school. All her families taught her the knowledge and skills she needed for her adult life. After meeting Toby and his family, we drove to Docker River. Our families used to live on the west side of the community, near the sand hill. When we arrived, Uncle parked the car near my grandmother’s wiltja and Granny came out. By this time she was blind. Mum and everybody else were crying for each other, greeting each other. All the people from the west camp came over and were crying for Mum and Dad and for all of us kids. It was called west camp because all the people from the west camped there. It was always like that; you would camp on the side closer to your country. At Wiluna we camped on the east side, because our country was east of Wiluna. People from around Jigalong camped on the north-western side, towards their country. On the reserves during football matches, in ceremony times, and so on, you always sat or camped on the side closest to your country. You only went to the other side if you had family there you wanted to catch up with. Usually, you just stay on your side. We lived in wiltjas in west camp near Granny, mum’s mother, Matjuwarri. We called her Ngitirn but she had another name, Matjuwarri. That’s also how all my mothers call me now: Matjuwarri. But the two Aboriginal names that I was given by my skin grandmothers

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were Marrkilyi and Warnngupayi. Mrs Burke’s mother had given me her name, Warnngupayi. My other grandmother who lived at Mt Davies gave me her name, Markilyi. So I have two Aboriginal names. These two grandmothers are my kalyartu, namesakes. Aboriginal kinship systems are different to Western society’s system of family. We have more grandparents, mothers, fathers, aunties, uncles and cousins than just those people who are a part of our close and extended family tree. …………………………… Before white men came to our country, we had our own rules for pregnant mothers. You never asked a woman if she was pregnant or not; this was forbidden, as well as any other kind of conversation about her pregnancy or her unborn child. When contractions started, the pregnant mother left the main camp for a secluded area and gave birth to her baby helped only by her sisters-in-law. This was the law. The camp of a mother and her newborn baby was out of bounds to all males. Only females were allowed to visit. Once, in the mid-1970s, when we were living at Warakurna, a man wanted to warnngiranytja, take by force to marry, one of my cousins who was in her late teens. This man harassed my cousin so she ran to her cousin’s camp, who had just given birth. She was safe there because the man couldn’t follow her into the birth camp. Once, on a very hot day, Granny, Mum, my sisters and me were sitting down in the wiltja. One of our grandmothers came over and sat down with us and then suddenly she started groaning. We looked over and she had given birth. Granny and Mum jumped up because Granny’s little wiltja was in the middle of the main camp. She yelled out to Toby and the other men telling them to go away, explaining in a roundabout way what was happening. They would have understood that a woman had given birth and they left. My sisters and I ran to the clinic to get Sister Pat so she could take the mother to the clinic. Traditionally, after a baby is born, we dig a hole and put hot coals into it with cassia leaves on top, which creates a lot of smoke. Then the

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baby’s mother and an aunty pass the baby through the smoke, holding it in the smoke a few times, to make the baby healthy and strong. The mother goes into the smoke as well, to strengthen and cleanse herself. Nowadays, children are born in hospital in either Alice Springs or Kalgoorlie so the women wait until mother and baby get back to the community before they smoke them. Babies are given Aboriginal names by their grandparents — sometimes by actual grandparents, but more often by distant ones, also called skin parents — when the mother and baby come back to the main camp, about ten days after the mother has given birth or, nowadays, when they get back to the community from the clinic. When a female is born, a kaparli, a grandmother names her. The grandmother places the baby on her tummy and speaks, verbally transferring her personality and physical attributes, as well as her name, to the child. When a male is born, he will be named in the same way by a tjamu, a grandfather. This special relationship is called kalyartu. Grandparents race to be the first one to get to the baby, ‘Oh, I’m going to be the one who names the baby.’ When they get to the baby and give it their name, they put the baby on their belly and they touch its legs and arms. They straighten the legs and talk to the child about their own character and say, ‘You are going to be like me and do this and that, be this kind of person and do these things.’ They talk their personality on to the baby and then they’d say, ‘I am giving you my name.’ Two kalyartu, the person and their grandmother or grandfather, can joke with each other. But it’s also a respectful relationship because the grandparent has given the baby their name. We give presents to our kalyartu and help them as well. My daughter Lucy always gives a skirt or a blouse to her kalyartu. So when we were living in town, she bought things to give to her kalyartu when we visited our parents and families during the winter holidays. People with the same name don’t call each other by their name. They call each other kalyartu. My kalyartu, were Marrkilyi and Warnngupayi. We were also given English names because the whitefellas — the missionaries and the Native Patrol Officers — couldn’t pronounce 38

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our Aboriginal names correctly. In the old days, we only had given names and no family names, just our Aboriginal names. Today, when babies are born in the hospital, they get a name for the registry of births, deaths and marriages. The registrar visits the maternity ward every day to fill in the forms for the new babies so the Aboriginal mothers pick an English name and put it down on the form. It’s just a name they have to choose for the whitefellas. When the mother goes back to the community the baby gets the Aboriginal name the traditional way. I was given the name Elizabeth by another grandmother in Warburton Mission; that was her English name too. Personal names are important and always have a story, even English names nowadays. For example, I named my first daughter Lucy after my best friend at Yirara College, and my husband, Michael, named our second daughter Emma after one of his students that he used to teach at Umbangara ctitljommunity near Papunya. Whitefellas told us we had to have a family name. When we were living in Leonora, we were known as the Farmers, using my Mum’s maiden name. I don’t know when and how it changed to Giles. I was Lizzie Giles in Karalundi, Wiluna, Docker River and Yirara College, as well as when I went nursing. When I married, I took my husband’s surname Ellis and even though we aren’t together any more I kept it because a lot of people know me professionally by the name Ellis. Also Ellis is my daughters’ surname so it’s my way of keeping close to my daughters. Aboriginal people are known by several names. They have their skin names, like Tjarurru, Karimarra, Purungu or Panaka, their Aboriginal given names, and their English names. Sometimes they also have nicknames. My younger brother, Peter, got his nickname in Docker River when we were kids. He used to have lots of warts on his tummy and his knees. As kids we used to call him Tiltjarn, Warts. The name sort of stuck, since we still call him Tiltjarn every now and then. But we now mostly call him Tjutjapu-ku mama, Tjutjapu’s father, or I just call him marlany, my young brother, or Peter. ……………………………

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At Docker River, there was only one tap in the camp for everybody to collect water. We went into the bush to gather wood. There was plenty of wood around, but it wasn’t close by and you had to walk a fair way. I would put my cardigan on the ground and fold it, then put all the wood on top and tie it up. That way I could lift the wood up onto my head and carry it back to camp. When my parents told us kids to get wood, I went all the time. My two sisters were lazy. They were smaller than me, but they had two arms and two legs too, I thought. It was always me who collected the wood and the water. Sometimes they came with me, but they walked back with two pieces of wood, one in each hand. My parents tried to tell them to get more wood, but they just came back again with three tiny sticks in their arms. From west camp we walked down into the community where there was the shop, the office and the school. The school was in what the Northern Territory Department of Education called silver bullets, which were caravans. The caravans had classrooms and a toilet and shower block. After arriving at Docker River, we didn’t go to school straight away. We stayed in the camp, hung around in the bush, played cubbies and went hunting. After a while, someone said we had better start going to school. It probably was my uncle, mum’s older brother, Jacky Farmer. One of those silver bullets had a kitchen in it for the school, and a cook worked there. We called him Cookie. I think he was one of our skin grandfathers from Blood Range, east of Docker River. He cooked us lunch every day at school. It is probably one of the reasons why our uncle told us to go to school. Uncle Toby, the younger brother of Jacky Farmer, wasn’t married, but he had a girlfriend called Topsy. She worked at the school as a cleaner. Mum and her sister Pantjiti found out that Topsy loved their younger brother so they walked down to the school with their kuturu, fighting stick, to hit her. When people found out somebody was in love, they said, ‘You gotta go hit them. Right way, wrong way, anyway.’ Granny should have hit Topsy because she was Toby’s mother, but she was blind so Mum and Pantjitji had to do it. But Topsy saw Pantjiti and Mum coming so she ran off to the toilet and shower block and

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locked herself in. Somehow Pantjiti managed to get her out and gave her a good beating. Mum didn’t hit Topsy; she didn’t know her, but she supported Pantjitji with her presence. When Toby heard his girlfriend had been beaten up, he jumped into his car. He was so angry that he started spinning his car around the camp and up the road. We all had to run off into the bush and shelter behind big desert oak trees until he calmed down. This is the way it is. The boyfriend has to get angry. He even ran over his mum’s wiltja with the car. After that, they said, ‘Oh yeah, you can marry now.’ He married Topsy and they have been together ever since. Later, Toby tried to get a second wife. Topsy didn’t like this idea but Toby married a woman from a neighbouring group and the three of them lived together. After a while, the second wife couldn’t take Topsy’s rudeness anymore. Topsy was too tough: she didn’t want a second wife hanging around. She wanted to be the only wife, so she was rude until the other one left. I must have been about sixteen years old when the three of them were living together. My siblings and I spent most of our days close to Uncle Toby. My uncle having two wives fascinated me. Mum told us to come home, but I wanted to stay with him. I think I was kind of a nosey person. Traditionally in our culture, a man can have more than one wife. Co-wives are two or more women married to the one man. They call each other nganarti. The system helped grow up families in our nomadic society. When one wife was pregnant and caring for the children, the other wife or wives could hunt and forage for food for the family. In the old days there wasn’t much jealousy because women thought it was better to have a helper. My dad’s uncle, Mamutja, from Kurlkurlta, had four wives. I knew these wonderful women when they came back from Papunya to Tjukurla after Mamutja passed away. They lived together in one camp, close to their children and grandchildren. There were many ways a man could take a wife. He could take a woman by force, warnngilku. He would come with his spears and his boomerang into camp and try to grab her. If she didn’t want to marry him, she hid behind the other women and he would run around them, 41

Pictures from my memory

trying to grab her. The women would try to stop him from getting the young woman. If he grabbed her and took her away, the families would fight. If they wanted that man to marry her, then they would agree, but if they didn’t want him to marry her, they would grab him and say, ‘No, you’re not having her.’ The man would leave. When a man took a woman, he usually spent time with her in his country before letting her come back to her family. Sometimes a man would spear a woman and take her. The father or uncle of that woman would spear him too, and say that now they could get married. Other times, a man grabbed a woman when she was out in the bush hunting. The man would follow her tracks and then warnngilku, take her by force. They would travel around together, hunting and camping. After a while, the woman relied on him, and grew to like and love him. I heard stories about men grabbing young women by force and carrying the young woman on their back to hide her tracks, because most of the time families tracked the woman and man to get their family member back. At Docker River, men often chased us teenage girls when we went hunting together. When we saw them, we tried to avoid them and run back to the camp. We climbed trees to see who they were. Sometimes it was a girl’s boyfriend and they just wanted to go off to the bush together, but most of the time it was a man who wanted a wife. If a man caught us and asked, ‘Where is so and so?’ We would say, ‘She went that way digging honey ants or maku (witchetty grubs) she’ll be back soon.’ But we were hiding her. Sometimes it felt like a game, but it was serious and scary. We didn’t tell our parents. And sometimes when we were getting back on the truck after we went swimming at Urruru and Tjirlpuka men would come over and grab one of the teenage girls. Everybody would pull her and shout, ‘No, no, no!’ They fought like warnngilku, but without spears. In the old days, most of the marriages were not love marriages in the beginning because it was always the man marrying the woman that he wanted. But they often grew to love that person, care for them. My cousin-brother got his wife at Tjirlpuka by doing this warnngilku. He had no spears, but the girl, my cousin, was very eager to be alone with him anyway. 42

Back closer to our country

Another way for a woman to marry is to become a pikatja, promised through ceremony. It is a man’s right to marry his pikatja whenever he wants to. A man can also promise, kalkurnu, his daughter, to his best friend. At the right time, the friend would tell her to leave her family and live with him. Other times, the parents would tell her to go to her future husband. In this case she would take a firestick with her and go to the man’s camp; the firestick means marriage. This isn’t done anymore. Most young people choose their marriage partner themselves. One of my mums, my actual mum’s sister, told me the story of when she married. She didn’t want to marry her kalkurnu, promised husband. Her husband used to go hunting and bring meat back and give it to her and her mother. She would say, ‘Throw that meat away, Mum, it’s poison, you’ll die,’ and she wouldn’t eat it. One day he grabbed her, warnngilku, in front of her mothers at Piyultjarra, to the east of Warakurna. My grandmother tried to stop him but he grabbed her and took her away. My mum’s parents finally agreed to the man keeping their daughter as his wife. She said she hated her mum so much for allowing the man to keep her. But, after a while, she got to know him, and care for him and even love him. Promised or arranged marriages, kalkurnu, lasted longer than modern marriages. …………………………… The eastern mobs, Pitjantjatjara and Nyanganyatjarra people, lived at Docker River too. The Pitjantjatjara had lived at Angas Downs and Areyonga, and when Docker River was established, they all moved there to be closer to their country. We fought a lot with the Nyangatjatjarra kids, the Pitji-Pitji kids as we called them, from east camp. They used the word nyangatja, for saying ‘this’, while we said ngaatja or ngaanya. We would say, ‘Nyangatja, Nyangatja’ really slowly and exaggerated the way it was pronounced. And they would say, ‘Pintupi, Pintupi’. They called us Pintupi and we called them Nyangatja. They swore at us and we swore at them back. We copied the way they spoke, teasing them. This made them wild. ‘You come

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here and say that, I’ll hit you…’ And we replied in their language, ‘Nyangatja, come here’, but we never did have a full-on fight. We often had to pass east camp, past all those girls who were our enemies. We swore at each other as we kept walking. Our parents would say, ‘Hey, stop swearing at them, don’t be naughty.’ And we replied, ‘But they’re swearing at us, we have to swear. We can’t just let them swear at us one way.’ But then Mum and the others explained we couldn’t swear because they were our cousins or sisters or whatever. We would say, ‘That’s not our cousin!’ We didn’t know we were related but our parents did. They told us, ‘That’s your so and so.’ Afterwards, when they found out who we were fighting with, they would say, ‘No, that’s your such and such, that’s your sister, cousin or niece or aunty or whatever.’ Once we worked out who we were related to, we stopped fighting. We only swore at them because we didn’t know we were related. One time there was a boy, he’s now my sister’s pampurlpa. This boy was teasing my sister in class. She was crying and crying and then he started teasing me as well. I had my tjintja, my story wire, with me. We told stories in the sand, tintjatjura, drawing with a piece of wire. In the old days they used a stick. Well, I whacked him across his back with my tjintja then I ran all the way to our camp. I was sitting there shaking; I knew I had done a bad thing. Pretty soon I saw my uncle coming up, Sonny’s father, mum’s older brother, Jacky. He told me off, ‘You stupid girl, don’t hit other kids, they’re strangers. You don’t know them, you have no right to hit them.’ I missed school for a few days because I was too scared to go back and face that boy again. Some time later, when I thought he had forgotten everything, I went back to school. But he hadn’t forgotten, and he hit me. I was okay. …………………………… On weekends we always went out to the bush. We walked all the way to the four hills on the other side of Docker River where we went hunting, digging for witchetty grubs, catching goannas, and so on.

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Sometimes we walked between the first two hills, through the gap to the rock hole on the other side. Many families made a camp at night. The women hunted for rabbits. The little ones stayed at the camp, but the bigger kids could follow the women if they wanted to. Most of the time I went with Mum and other women although sometimes I stayed behind to play cubbies. I followed and watched them while they were hunting and helped them when they told us what to do. Men hunted kangaroos. We ate whatever we could at the camp but if it was too much, then we took some back to the west camp and shared it with other family groups. We always carried water with us when we went hunting, for example, in a billycan. When the water was finished, we had to turn back. Sometimes the old people went with no water at all. At other times they took water but even when they had drunk everything, they kept walking and came back only much later with no water at all. They were tough. Our families and people could travel, hunt and forage over long distances, without drinking water for most of the day. I believe the wild tobacco they chewed helped to suppress their hunger and thirst. Our country supplied our people with a lot of food. We lived off many animals but there were also many different types of grains, vegetables and fruits. We had bush potatoes, yams or tubers and bush onions and our people collected a lot of seeds and grains from trees, shrubs and grasses. These were ground into flour and mixed with water into a thick paste, and we cooked damper in the fire. Our country also provided our family with many different types of nectar, or bush cordial and bush lollies, as the children call them nowadays. Certain fruits, grains and nectar were prepared and stored for eating at a later time. But most of the time we ate these foods on the way to wherever we were going. We even have a special word for eating while walking, nyamunu. It is also used now when we eat while travelling in a vehicle. One of the fruits we looked for was yurrarn, clear sugar nectar balls that grow on the mulga tree after a good rain. We would walk past

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Docker Creek, turn along the riverbank and follow the road to Kulail until we reached the place where the thick mulga grew. We climbed up the trees to get the branches with the sugar balls. Sometimes we could reach out with our hand or a long wooden hook and grab them, but most of the time they were up so high we had to break the branch. This was very sticky work. We had sticky nectar on our hands but it tasted sweet and lovely. Once we broke off a branch, we pulled the little leaves off leaving the yurrarn. Then we made a little tray with minarri, grass, where we lay all the yurrarn-filled branches until we had a big pile. We put the pile on our heads and walked home. Back at camp, we soaked the yurrarn in a bucket of water until all the nectar came off, then we drank it. Other times we just ate them, sucking the nectar from the branch, yurrarnpa. We also collected karliny-karlinypa, honey grevillea, the one with the orange flowers. We could walk up to the plant and yiirltjanku, drink, from the flower to get the nectar. But we weren’t allowed to drink this nectar just any time. We had to wait until Dad said we could drink it. The flower is related to some men’s special knowledge. They had to do some ritual first before they told us we could go for karliny-karlinypa. Nowadays, as soon as the flower is out, everybody drinks the honey of the karliny-karlinypa. There is another flower, similar to the karliny-karlinypa, that grows on a bush and we used to drink its nectar. Another one called yurltukunpa, grows on a tall tree, whereas the other ones are bushes. They all flower around the same time. Sometimes, when we were hunting and got thirsty, we could have a quick drink of some of the nectar as we walked through the bush, tracking and hunting. In the old days, the women took a piti — a wooden bowl with a deep base — with them when collecting flowers. They filled it up with water, and walked from bush to bush collecting all the little flowers that hold the nectar into the bowl to soak. After a little while, they threw those flowers away and put more flowers in the bowl until the mixture became really strong. Then they put minarri, grass, on top of the bowl so it wouldn’t spill and carried it back to the camp. They

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first gave the bowl to their husbands to drink and then later to the children. There was another bush food we collected around Docker River. It was called wirriny-wirrinypa, a type of a berry. It is a ground creeper that grew in the mulga scrub or near the swamp along the road to the east. There were big gum trees and paperbark bushes growing around the swamp and there were many wirriny-wirrinypa at this place. They grow on the ground and have yellow fruit. The plant has a lot of prickles so you have to carefully pick it up by the branch, lift it with a stick to pick the fruit. After school or on weekends, we took a big empty milk tin and we went off each with our own little tin to collect them. We filled the milk tin up and brought it back to camp, but sometimes, by the time we got back, the tin would be empty because we had been eating them all along the way. Other times we saved some for my younger brothers and sisters.

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Plate 1: My father as a young man in the Rawlinson Ranges in 1957, a few months after he saw the first whitefella. This photo was taken when Dad and other Aboriginal men helped clear the area for the airstrip at the Giles Weather Station. Photo courtesy of The West Australian.

Plate 2: Me as a baby (in the background) with my mother. In the front, my mother’s sister Tjawina with her daughter Fiona at Kutjuntari in 1963. This photo was published in the Hetzel and Frith book, The Nutrition of Aborigines in Relation to the Ecosystem of Central Australia, in 1978. Photo courtesy of the CSIRO.

Plate 3: Me at the Bondini Reserve, Wiluna, with baby brother Leslie and, in the background, my dad and some other men chatting together. Photo courtesy of John Stanton, The University of Western Australia.

Plate 4: Dave Price and myself in old Tjukurla, looking at my dad’s garden, winter 1989. Photo courtesy of Michael Ellis.

Plate 5: My daughter Lucy and I in Alice Springs in 1983. Photo courtesy of Michael Ellis.

Plate 6: My daughter Lucy with her tjamu, her grandfather, my father, in Docker River. Photo courtesy of Michael Ellis.

Plate 7: Teacher training at Batchelor, here at the Jabiru Primary School. Photo courtesy of Michael Ellis.

Plate 8: Neil Simpson, Aku Kadago and myself in Noumea with Ochre and Dust. Photographer unknown. Photo courtesy of Lizzie Ellis.

Plate 9: Winifred (front), my sister-in-law, with me, Emma (on my hip) and Lucy in New Zealand looking at the seal on the beach. Photo courtesy of Michael Ellis.

Plate 10: My sister Daisy Ward in the early 2000s collecting bush tobacco for chewing. Photo courtesy of Lizzie Ellis.

Plate 11: My niece Audrey, Laurent’s daughter, watching me doing a painting in Geyssans, France, 2005. Photo courtesy of Laurent Dousset.

5

Yirara College In the mid-1970s, Ron Lester, the teacher at Docker River School, asked me if I wanted to go to Yirara College, a boarding college for high school in Alice Springs, and I said yes. About five or six of us, including my sister Myra and a girl called Lilly, who later married my cousin Roderick, went to Yirara. My sister Susan (Nerida) went a few years later. It was not my first time in Alice Springs. Mum told me that a day or two after I was born, they flew us to Alice Springs Hospital. I also went there with the kids from Docker River School and Mr Lester to compete in a sports carnival for bush schools. On the way to Alice Springs we landed at Tjurlu, Curtin Springs Station. I was told that a lot of Aboriginal people were living and working there but they didn’t pay them with money and sometimes they didn’t pay them at all. They were paid in rations — flour, sugar, tea and some tobacco. When the law changed, saying all people who worked on stations had to be paid in money, the station people said, ‘Oh no, we can’t afford to pay you. You can’t stay here anymore.’ So people moved to the bigger settlements set up by the government. I was told many of our families from our country near Docker River, Kulail, Warakurna and Blackstone were at Tjurlu before. My mum’s father’s country is Docker River and Kulail. Uncle Toby has his Tjukurrpa, his Dreaming there, the Tjilkamarta (Echidna). There was no work at Docker River; people lived off welfare money. When I went to Yirara College, my parents were still living in wiltjas. They started building houses at Docker River but they were built for

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the Pitjantjatjara people, not us, because many of our mob had moved in from west. Things were changing. They had been given money from the government to go back to their country. A group from Warburton started setting up outstations, homelands. The Warakurna community started near Giles Weather Station. They set up camp close to where the community is today. They had a big water tank on a trailer, which they filled up at Giles Weather Station and took back to the camp. I think they bought their food from Docker River. When the council was set up, there were a lot of people from our family on the council because a lot of that mob came from Warakurna way and lived at Docker River. Then more and more council members were Pitjantjatjara people. When we arrived at Docker River, my uncle, Jacky Farmer, was a senior councillor on the Docker River council. In time, Warakurna became a community with its own council but as in all communities, there were white advisers who did the administrative work. Warakurna got its first silver bullet caravan for its first white administration worker, Mark Chambers. The caravan was his house and his office. There was a generator and a little shop too. It is really the white adviser who is at the top, above the Aboriginal chairman and community council members. The adviser is supposed to be an employee of the council, but the council is not really the boss. On paper it is, but in practice it’s the one whitefella who is the boss. I believe the situation is like that because the majority of our people aren’t literate in English so they don’t have proper control. Another problem is that these advisers often don’t stay very long, and each one has a different way of doing things, sometimes completely opposite to the one before, so people get confused. Also, the advisers often don’t know much about their own whitefella laws. Sometimes they know less than the whole community put together, and less than the community council because they’ve been dealing with the laws on a regular basis. Sometimes our mob are the ones teaching the whitefellas, but they don’t get any credit for it.

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When Warakurna became an outstation, my parents moved between Docker River and the new camp. When at Warakurna, we lived in the area along the creek. Other times we lived in wiltjas close to where the community is today. We still moved quite a lot. Our parents were always with Mr and Mrs Butler and I grew up with our cousins, Ruth, Maureen and their younger siblings. Sometimes when we came back to Docker River on school holidays, my parents weren’t there. They would be in the bush or at the Warakurna camp, so one of our relations, whoever was in Docker River, took us to Mum and Dad in their car. When Uncle Jacky passed away, my parents left Docker River for Katjiyungkuny and later Kutjuntari. Jacky lost his life in a fight. Alcohol was involved. I was at Yirara College when it happened. When we came back for the school holidays my family had gone. In our culture, when somebody passes away, the family moves away from the area where the person died. You can only go back to that place when the grass has grown, yukiri pakannyangka, after rain. Someone drove us from Docker River, to our parents at Katjiyungkuny, Giles Creek, near the Rawlinson Ranges. I camped with my blind grandmother, Matujawari, Mum’s mum. Her wiltja had a door and inside her blankets were on the ground and she had a fire in the middle. My bed was on the opposite side from her. Mum’s brother Toby and quite a few other families were living at Katjiyungkuny as well. They went to Docker River to buy food. I really enjoyed that time; there was nothing there, just the bush. And next to the road there was a soakage with water where we stopped to have a drink. Today the soakage has disappeared; it is under the Central Desert Road. When they widened the road, they covered it. The water is still there, but you can’t get to it. The same thing happened to the Warakurna soak near the roadhouse. Katjiyungkuny was rich country. It had a lot of maku, witchetty grubs. We also hunted for rabbits and caught goannas. In wintertime, when the goannas hibernate, you go to their warren and pirlurlku, jab the ground with your digging stick or your crowbar, or press the earth with your foot and when it collapses, you know there is a goanna

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lying underneath hibernating. It is easier to get them in winter because they don’t run. The winter homes of goannas are called yura. Their little summer burrows are called yararnpa or makarnpa. When they dig the winter burrow, they dig a tunnel deep down into the earth, but then the tunnel comes up again just a short distance below the ground somewhere else, and that’s where they usually lie. However, they can also lie in the deep part and might even turn around, back to the entrance, and sleep there. You have to pirlurlku all around to find where the tunnel is going and where the goanna is sleeping. When they hibernate, they also turn around and block the tunnel somewhere with sand, using their nose. You might be digging the hole, following the tunnel, and think the tunnel ends there. But we know it is still there because you can see that the sand is different to the rest of the soil around, that it still is part of the tunnel and it’s only the spot where the goanna has blocked the tunnel, and we keep digging until we get to the unblocked side of the burrow. At Katjiyungkuny, us kids — well, I was a teenager — used to play on an outcrop of a sand dune on a rocky hill. It had trees hanging over and a steep drop below. We loved to hang on those trees and swing across and fall down into the soft sand. The Gunbarrel Highway went passed Katjiyungkuny and sometimes tour buses came along, travelling from Perth to Uluru and back. When they saw us at Katjiyungkuny they stopped on the side of the road. All the tourists jumped off to talk to us and take photos. I taught my young brothers and sisters to go up to the tourists and ask them in English, ‘Please, can I have some lollies?’ And I taught them how they had to say ‘thank you’ once they were given some. I taught the little ones because I was too embarrassed to go myself. The little ones weren’t embarrassed; they just went up to them and asked for some lollies without a problem. After giving the lollies to the little ones, the tourists, would say, ‘Oh, they’ve got lovely English,’ not knowing I had taught them and it was about the only thing they could say in English. They took more photos of us smiling at the tourists and got back on the bus. After the bus had gone, I ran over to the little ones to get my share of lollies.

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…………………………… After my mum lost her brother, when I was about sixteen years old and we were living at Warakurna, someone passed away so we had to move to the other side of the camp. But the next morning, one of our skin grandfathers had an accident and died as well; we had to move again. There weren’t many people there at that time. My mum sent me to be one of the tirlitjartu, undertakers. Tirlitjartu take the body and bury it. If the deceased person is a man, the tirlitjartu are his wife and her sisters or people with the same skin name as her, as well as the deceased man’s brothers-in-law. If it is a woman, then her husband, his brothers and the deceased one’s sisters-in-law will be the tirlitjartu. I was a tirlitjartu along with one of my grandmothers who had lost her husband. I had the same skin name as her, so I was the right skin to act as an undertaker. It was the only traditional burial I took part in. Mark Chambers, the white community adviser, came with us. The church wasn’t involved in the burial, not that there was a church building there at that time. Traditionally, the tirlitjartu organise people to get together and put them down on the manta, marntangka tjunku, the ceremonial ground at funerals. We went to the west of Warakurna, where everybody gathered in one spot so they could wail and cry and grieve for the deceased. Everybody lay down together. While they waited, the tirlitjartu party took the body to the bush for the burial. I thought the burial was going to be sad and serious but it was quite different. Some tirlitjartu went off digging for goannas and there was a bit of laughter, although they were serious at different times as we buried our tjamu, grandfather. After the burial, we headed back to the people who were sitting or lying at the ceremonial grounds, the manta. We collected gum leaves and made a long shouting noise to let them know we were coming back and were close by. When we got there, we walked around the people throwing the gum leaves on top of them as they lay on the ground and cried loudly. After that, everybody got up and cried their last cry at the manta. People got up, then threw themselves on the

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ground, and hit themselves with billycans or with rocks or whatever they could grab. This is what they did in the old days but people don’t hit themselves anymore. Nowadays, many people are diabetic so they have to be careful not to hurt themselves. At a traditional funeral, all the belongings of the deceased were burned; nothing was kept. When cars arrived in the communities, they even burned the deceased person’s car. But they don’t do that anymore. They just swap the belongings including cars and even houses. If the person was a Ngumpaluru person (‘shadeside’ moiety), they exchange things with a Tjirntultukultul person (‘sunside’ moiety). Ngumpaluru and Tjirntultukultul are the two halves of Ngaatjatjarra society as well as in other Western Desert cultures. Members of these two halves can swap their belongings. If they don’t want to, people ask someone else. Another thing that changed is that today we have two funerals. The first one, we bury the deceased, and the second one, we visit family members. It is similar to what happened in the in the old days when people who had not attended the first burial would be taken to the burial site. Modern funerals are a mix of old and new ways. Tirlitjartu people are still involved, and get everybody together in the marntangka tjunku, one area, where pastors give readings. The coffin arrives by plane and is taken to the hall or church, where the tirlitjartu hand out flowers to everybody and everybody goes over to the hall or church. After the funeral service, everybody goes to the gravesite, the cemetery nowadays, and there is a burial service. Today everybody goes to the gravesite, whereas in the old days, only the tirlitjartu went. And now everybody is buried in one spot, the cemetery, whereas in the old days people were buried separately in their country. They were living in their country so they could be buried where they were walking around and were living. Now in every community there is a cemetery but people are still buried in their family’s country in the communities. Nowadays, after the burial, everybody kind of shakes hands but not the same way whitefellas do. It is a gentle hold of the hand, mara yungku or mulkurtu yungku. And since most people are going to the

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gravesite, this can take a long time. Often the older people don’t want to go to the burial and stay at the manta. Sometimes they don’t even go to the service in the hall. Once the burial is over, people go back to the manta with gifts, often blankets and other things and put them up in one big pile. These things are for the tirlitjartu, a gift for arranging and doing the burial. When the tirlitjartu come back, they shake hands with everybody sitting at the manta, then they take a blanket or two and walk off. In the old days, tirlitjartu would have made another pile of presents and the tirlitjartu would swap gifts with the other people. During the time between a person’s death and their burial, people get together and live in one place, which we call the sorry camp. After the funeral, people go back to their homes while the immediate family of the deceased may stay longer in the sorry camp. Also, after the burial, people move away from where the person died, sometimes to another community. This shows respect for the deceased person. In the old days people travelled to another country, to another ngurra, another kapi, water place. They won’t go back to the place until there has been rain and new grass has grown, yukiri pakannyangka. In the old days, there were no special signs on gravesites so people used features of the landscape to help them remember where the grave was. But now, people live in one spot and are buried in a community cemetery, so they put concrete and a cross on top of the grave. Some even have names or words marked, such as ‘for my dad’. I got a big headstone for my dad with his name inscribed on a plaque. Mum and I took it out to where Dad is buried and got one of the staff members at Warakurna to put it up. …………………………… I enjoyed being at Yirara College just as I had at the other schools. I was there from 1978 to 1981. Sometimes I was homesick but it didn’t last long. The only thing I didn’t like was travelling between Docker River and Alice Springs in a small six-seater plane. I hated being on that plane because I got airsick. I swore at the pilots because I thought

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it was their fault I was sick. I thought they weren’t trying to avoid the bumps. When I was older, I learned about air pockets and realised it wasn’t the pilots’ fault. Later, when my sister Myra joined me at Yirara and we travelled together, she would look across at me and laugh while I was nearly dying vomiting into a sick bag. I hated her when we were flying. I wished she would get sick but she never did. There were a lot of students at Yirara College who came from all around the Northern Territory. There were Warlpiri, Arrernte, Pitjantjatjara from the Anangu Pitjantjatjara lands, from Amata way and so on. There were some students from Yalata on the Great Australian Bight as well. Many of the Yalata girls were in my class and we were friends but we didn’t mix much with Arrernte and Warlpiri kids. We only mixed with our classmates or with other Western Desert language-speaking students. Every day we sat outside in certain places, and told stories, tjinytjatjunkupayi, with a story wire on the ground. Although there were many Western Desert language-speaking students, we all met for the first time at Yirara. There were five dormitories for girls. I was in J Block with mainly Western Desert language speaking kids, so we could understand and talk to each other. If we didn’t fully understand, we learned the new words and ways of talking. I am not sure if the school deliberately put all students that spoke a similar language together, but that’s how it was. Later when parents came to visit, we found out how we were related. The parents figured out the relationships and explained them to us. Mum and Dad never came because it was too far to travel from Warakurna or Docker River but other family members came to Alice Springs. If someone from our family or one of the other kids parents saw us and recognised us, they would say, ‘Oh that’s your such and such.’ We met many families at Yirara such as the Michaels, dad’s brother’s kids from Nyirrpi, and people from Kintore–Papunya. Just as my family moved south and then west, to Warburton and Wiluna, these families moved east to Papunya. But when Docker River and Warakurna communities were established, many people returned to be closer to their country, closer to Tjukurla and Kurlkurlta. Many close family members from

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Papunya visited so we got to know those students and their families at Yirara. We also learned their language, which is slightly different to Ngaanyatjarra and Ngaatjatjarra way. I learned a little of the Luritja talk from Maryvale way. When we learned words in other languages from the other students, we learned all the swear words first. I used to hang around with the Tennant Creek girls who were in my netball team so I learned the Warumungu swear words. My best friend, Lucy, was from Wave Hill so I learned the Gurindji swear words as well. Thinking back, when those Docker River kids called us Pintupi, it made us feel bad about ourselves, even though we didn’t know what the word meant. We just knew it was something nasty. Later, I learned that it is a Pintupi word, a Pintupi expression. It is pintu - pi, pronounced pintu piiii, and it means something like ‘Ah my goodness,’ or ‘Wow!’ You would also use it if you were frustrated with someone or something. Listening to my Pintupi family, I learned how to use the words and their many meanings. For example, Pintupi can also be used as ‘My word!’ or ‘For sure!’ or ‘Absolutely’. If you were to ask, ‘Were there many people there?’ then the answer can be ‘Pintu piii!’ meaning ‘too many’. ‘Pintupi’ is also used as a derogatory term. Pintupi are our families who were rounded up and taken to the Papunya Settlement in the Northern Territory. Certain people of the Papunya region, so-called civilised blackfellas who had been living on the settlement well before the Pintupi arrived at the settlement, looked down on people from the west. They strongly believed that the Pintupi were lower class citizens and treated them that way. Those kids at Docker River were using Pintupi to put us west camp kids down. Nowadays, when I hear people say, ‘Ah, you’re Pintupi!’ I reply, ‘Don’t say that. I have Pintupi relations and there’s a lot of them who are smarter than you. Just call someone stupid if this is what you want to say. Don’t put a whole group of people down by using a word that they call themselves.’ Sometimes I have been guilty myself of using the word against someone, and I quickly apologised.

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Miss McQuillan was my Year 9 teacher. She was very good and very strict — she didn’t take any nonsense from any of us. We learned academic subjects as well as art, home economics and sport, and we had language groups. Our days and evenings were very busy. After tea, we had evening homework sessions. At other times we had home group made up of students who came from the same communities like Docker River and Areyonga. Each home group had a teacher. We did fun things like go to the teacher’s house or somewhere else to have fun. We also picked a hobby for a year and that’s what we did one evening every week. I chose knitting. We also played a lot of sport, mainly netball or swimming, at least one evening during the week as well. I was part of the Yirara choir, and we sang a lot. The choir was mainly made up of Western Desert kids. We even cut two records at 8HA radio station. We sang hymns, Bible songs, mainly in English but also in Pitjantjatjara. Sometimes we sang at fetes and on special events. I still remember our choir teacher, Mrs Helena Monahan. She was good and I liked her. We went to Emily Gap once to record a song in the hills. Later on I found out it was a sacred place, wati-ku, a men’s place. It’s a popular tourist site now. The fire alarm used to go off a lot at Yirara. I particularly hated this when it happened in wintertime because we all had to run outside into the cold. The girls had to get together on the tennis court and had to make sure all the girls were there. The boys had to run out to the basketball court. Once it was me and some other girl who had turned the fire alarm on. We used to run down the corridor in the dormitory with a broom and pop the alarm until it started ringing. The firemen came and said, ‘Oh it went off in top J.’ But we didn’t say anything. They probably knew that it was us kids who set off the alarm. We had good fun, as there were so many things to do at Yirara, things that I loved doing. Every Saturday we went shopping in town. The bus dropped us off and picked us up a couple of hours later. We could shop or visit family in the hospital. They also took students to sports events on Saturdays, so sometimes I played netball with girls from Tennant Creek instead. 58

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I was the only one from Docker River way who played netball. I first played it at Karalundi mission, and later I played when I was married with kids and living in Alice Springs. On Sundays they took students to church but you only went if you wanted to go. I did go a few times, but I had gone off church. It was too serious and boring. You have to sit quietly for a long time, and listen to something that you didn’t really care about or believe in. But there were a lot of other students who were very religious and took it seriously. They went to church every Sunday. Every Friday night our houseparents took us girls to the drive-in, which was next to Yirara. The boys went on Saturday nights. We took our blankets and pillows, and sat right up the front on the ground to watch the movie. When we walked home, somebody would see something in the dark and think it was a ghost and take off, screaming and yelling. We would run with our blankets and pillows, often dropping them, and the houseparents would say, ‘Don’t be silly you girls, there’s nothing out there’. But we replied, ‘Yeah, there’s a man, we saw him’. It was really funny. Houseparents lived with students in each dormitory block. Their flat was next door to our rooms. My first housemother in top J was Ann Ferguson, from Wingellina way. She was a cousin of mine. She remembered me when I arrived at Yirara because we were at Leonora at the same time. The next housemother after Ann was Jessie Burton. She was a nice old lady from Victor Harbour in South Australia. Houseparents made sure we were in the dorm at night, put us to bed and woke us in the morning. On the weekends, they looked after us. If you needed their help at night, they would come. Each dormitory had several rooms and the person you shared with changed each term. Girls and boys were strictly separated in the dormitories and in some of the classes. The first classroom I went to was for girls only but after that I went into mixed classes. Sometimes we sat next to boys in class; it depended on the teacher. The teacher told everybody where to sit and if you were a nuisance in class, then they made you sit closer to them so he or she could keep and eye on you. But I was a

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good student. I enjoyed school and learning a lot and hardly got into trouble in class or our living areas. I also learned to drive a car at Yirara College. First they took us driving on the hockey field and then after more practice, we drove on the streets. One day I was driving the car back to Yirara. The driving instructor was in the front passenger seat and two girls were sitting in the back with a tutor. I had stopped in the middle of the highway waiting for oncoming vehicles before I turned onto the College road. A big road train came right up behind us and it couldn’t slow down. Everyone saw it except me. The instructor shouted, ‘Step on it!’ I accelerated and turned the car off the highway onto the road that goes to the College. Everyone was shaking. It was lucky I hadn’t seen the truck because I would have froze and it would have smashed into us. I waited until they stopped shaking, then I drove in through the College gates. It was also while I was going to Yirara College, when our people worked hard to get homelands or outstations established around Docker River. Tjukurla was our outstation. Everybody lived in the settlements, but many people wanted to go back, to visit and live on their own country or the country of their parents or grandparents. The government gave money to help set up these outstations. The first step was to make a little road out to their country, next put a windmill up for water and then build a wiltja. It was just some sort of structure so there was some shade when people were out there. Sometimes people even build a little tin house. That’s what they wanted to do: go back to their country and eventually live there permanently. At the beginning people only went to the outstations for weekends or sometimes a bit longer, then go back to the main settlement. They took food and whatever they needed with them and until the food ran out. These outstations were set up to get the families away from the settlements, to spend time in their country, teach their young kids about the country, and eventually build it up and live there permanently. But nobody actually lives in many of the outstations around Docker River anymore. People used the government money to buy cars, usually a

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Toyota utility, to drive out there but when the government money for the outstations stopped, people also stopped going. It was too .

expensive to maintain the outstations and travel out there. But Tjukurla, my community, is a different story. It started as an outstation of Docker River, but it became a community a few years later. This happened in the mid-1980s when my husband, Michael, and I were living in Maryvale (Titjikala), south of Alice Springs, teaching at the school. I will come back to my marriage and Maryvale later. There was a death in our family in our camp at Docker River so, because of the taboo to live at a person’s place of death, all our mob moved to Tjukurla. Then other families from the Tjukurla and the Kurlkurlta areas moved from settlements to the east and west to live permanently in Tjukurla. The population grew to fifty people. Angas Green, the outstation manager, took food from Docker River to Tjukurla, and Sister Pat came out from Docker River once a week to look after people’s health. There were no houses and they were camping in wiltjas made of sheets of iron, blankets, tents and timber they had taken from the west camp in Docker River. One day somebody in Alice Springs, some smart person in an office, looked at a map and saw that Tjukurla was not in the Northern Territory — it was just over the border in Western Australia. This was a problem because the Northern Territory government planned to set up a separate school and health service for Tjukurla. The authorities decided Sister Pat couldn’t go to Tjukurla anymore to provide health services since these people were not living in the Northern Territory. But Sister Pat said they were not going to stop her from going. She was a very strong lady. She told them she didn’t care about their rules or invisible borders. ‘They’re still people,’ she said, ‘they used to live in Docker River and they need health services so I’m going. If you want to stop me you’ll have to come out here.’ They never did, but Tjukurla did finally get its own medical clinic. The Northern Territory government sent someone to Tjukurla to talk about a school. A man called David Price worked for the education department. At that time, Michael and I knew him through

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the teacher in Docker River. David and his wife were close friends and family of ours. His Aboriginal wife is also related to me through my dad’s brother. He met with my dad, Mr Butler, and the rest of the mob at Docker River, but the education department announced they wouldn’t build a school in Tjukurla because it was in Western Australia. So the West Australian Department of Education had to organise another meeting with dad and our families. This is when they agreed to create a community. They built a shop and a little clinic, as well as a community adviser’s house. They also built a few tin shacks, those little brown ones, with two rooms. The ones you can’t live in because they are too hot in the sun. They’re nothing, just tin. People were still living in the wiltjas they made themselves. Many years later, Michael and I took Lucy and Emma, our two daughters, to Tjukurla for holidays. We usually camped near my parents’ camp. My young brother Leslie had just gone through the special boy ceremony and he was a mirnu, young man, and was still wearing his pukurti, hair bun. My mother made meals for Leslie and we had to take it to him. We weren’t allowed to go all the way to him. We could only go half the way and put his meals down on the ground. He would come over from the other side to get the food. Lucy and Emma thought this was a good game and we sometimes waved to my younger brother.

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Learning a profession There was an English nursing sister who worked at Docker River for over twenty years. Everybody knew her as Sister Pat. She’s retired now. I really enjoyed being with her; we had very good conversations together. When I was home during the school holidays, I often visited her at the clinic. We would talk for hours. One day she said, ‘You should train to be a nurse.’ In Year 10, our last year at Yirara College, the school said we could apply for a traineeship or go back home. Some students went to the Power and Water Authority and others went for office work. But Mary James from Lajamanu and I applied to do nursing at the Alice Springs Hospital. I didn’t forget what Sister Pat told me. I had a room in the nurses’ quarters at the hospital and they allowed me to keep my room at Yirara, so I stayed there on my days off. The nursing aide course was for one year. There were twelve of us doing the course: ten white people including one man, and Mary and me. We spent time with our teachers in the classroom as well as time in the wards. We experienced every medical faculty — medical, paediatrics, maternity, emergency, surgical, geriatric and theatre — although in theatre we were there for a few days just observing the operations. I remember a lady having her varicose treated and an Aboriginal bloke who had his leg amputated just above the knee. He had been involved in a car accident. I enjoyed working in the hospital but I didn’t like being in theatre. I was scared I might make a terrible mistake and end someone’s life. We had to count everything, all the

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instruments and swabs to make sure they hadn’t left anything inside the patient. My first rotation was in the surgical ward, where we prepared patients for operations. I was still a young woman, about nineteen years old. I told the head nurse I couldn’t wash Aboriginal men because in my culture we can’t be close to a man unless he is our immediate family member, plus washing them was taboo. She replied, ‘That’s all right, you can wash all the white men.’ So I washed other patients who couldn’t wash themselves, helped them into the bath and prepared them for their operations. I remember one man who had his leg in traction; he had a broken leg or hip. In these cases, patients couldn’t go to the bathroom and we had to give them sponge baths, wash them while they were in bed, especially those parts of the body they couldn’t reach. I would tell them to wash their private parts themselves. But sometimes they said, ‘No, you do it.’ So I washed everything as quickly as I could and didn’t spend too much time around that area. Sometimes Aboriginal men who I didn’t know asked me to wash them but the sister would say, ‘No, no, she can’t wash you.’ Those were very funny and embarrassing times for me. We spent time on the medical ward as well as the emergency department and the gastroenteritis ward. In those days, many very young Aboriginal children came in with gastro. After their time in hospital, they were moved to what was called Mount Gillen to recover. Mount Gillen helped mothers after they left hospital with their babies. They taught them how best to care for the baby back home. If the children were feeling good enough to leave the hospital but not well enough to go home, they’d go to Mount Gillen where they fed them so they could regain weight after the gastro. I also had to learn about geriatric nursing so I went to an old-timers nursing home. The place was mixed; it had white and black people. The first day I arrived at the home, they showed us trainees around the ward. The matron took us into one room where there was an old Aboriginal fellow sitting on a commode. The matron chatted with

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him and told him I was the new nurse’s aide. He said to the matron, ‘Yeah, I know her, that’s my wife.’ I said, ‘I’m not your wife. I’ve never met you in my life.’ But he insisted, ‘No, you’re my wife.’ The matron explained to me, ‘Don’t worry, he says that to every female he meets.’ There was also a white lady. I went into her room to check on her and see if she needed anything, but she wasn’t there so I walked out. This lady saw me, rushed into her room and ran out to tell the matron I had stolen her knickers. Of course, I hadn’t but it took a while to calm her down. The first day I was rostered on for night duty at the nursing home, the ward nurse rang me asking, ‘Why aren’t you at work?’ I apologised and told her I would be there in ten minutes. I was embarrassed — I was still in bed sleeping! They had to ring me the next few nights to wake me up. Slowly I got used to working at night. Geriatric nursing was hard but it was also hilarious and fun to work with the oldies. Later, when I worked at the Hettie Perkins Aboriginal Nursing Home, the matron and the nurses were glad I could speak the language of a few of the oldies. Not long after I started working at the nursing home I ran away for a few days with my future husband, Michael. I had met him while I was at Yirara College. His brother, Peter, was teaching there and introduced us. Peter and Michael were skydiving instructors as well as teachers, and Michael was skydiving during the Yirara College Open Day. Peter introduced us just after Michael had jumped out of the sky into the fete and he was still wearing his parachute gear. So while I should have been at the old-timers nursing, I went with Michael to a bush teachers’ conference where the principals of all bush schools around Alice Springs used to meet once a year. Michael was teaching at Umbangara, on the way to Papunya, about two hours drive west of Alice Springs. When I got back to Alice after my few days away with Michael, my nursing teachers said, ‘Oh, next time you think of running away, tell us first, okay!’ But they were really nice. I ended up falling in love with Michael. Before meeting him, I was terrified of men. I didn’t know

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you could feel that way for someone of the opposite sex. At Wiluna, Docker River and other places when I saw the bigger girls go out with boys, I always asked myself why they wanted to hang around with boys. When I met Michael I knew why. Michael visited me while I did my practicals in the gastro ward. One day he brought me a nursing dictionary as a present. I didn’t tell him I already had one, exactly the same. I only told him much later. He also brought me flowers when I was working on the ward. The other nurses made a big fuss and I was embarrassed. I was still training as a nurse’s aide when we married in 1982. I was pregnant with Lucy. A marriage celebrant married us in the garden of Michael and Peter’s house in Giles Street. Many of the Yirara students came along to the wedding. In our culture, when a man marries, he usually has to give things to his wife’s parents long before the marriage. If a man had his eye on a certain lady, he would follow that family around and help with hunting and supply the family with meat. If there was trouble he would fight for them. When Michael and I decided to get married, I sent a letter to my parents with a photo of him. My parents couldn’t read so someone had to read it for them. Next thing, Uncle Toby, my mother’s younger brother was on the phone at the paediatrics ward. He told me that Dad was on his way to Alice Springs to collect the dowry. I got a big shock and thought, ‘Oh my goodness!’ I quickly explained to Michael, ‘My dad and uncle are on their way. Dad is coming to collect your car as the dowry.’ I expected him to make a big fuss but he just said, ‘Yeah, that’s all right,’ and I was so relieved. I didn’t think of our many cultural differences when I agreed to marry him. This was just the first of many cultural lessons he had to learn and live with throughout our twenty years of marriage, and we weren’t even married yet. My younger sister Susan (Nerida) was married off to a promised husband before me. She married Mr Martin; Mr M we used to call him. He already had a wife, our sister-cousin Helen, so he had two wives, Susan and Helen. Susan was very unhappy about it. Dad married her off for doing something wrong. However, Dad was okay with

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me marrying a white man. Actually, I found out later that at Docker River, when Dad told my promised husband I was of a marriageable age, he declined. If he hadn’t it would have changed my life, that’s for sure. So Dad and Toby collected the car and drove it back to Docker River. That was what I was worth: some old Holden. I remember nursing while I was heavily pregnant. Michael was still teaching in Umbangara but he moved to Alice Springs at the end of that year when he got a teaching position at Yirara. That’s when I moved out of the nursing quarters and went to live with Michael at Giles Street. Peter and his wife Rose lived in the house and we lived in a caravan in the backyard. I had to work at the hospital longer than the official date of completion because I had taken quite a few days off and I hadn’t finished all the practicals. In the maternity ward, every time there was a birth they would ring a bell. All the trainees would all run down to the birthing suite. It was very special to see a baby being born. We learned how to wash a baby and how to hold the baby properly. We practiced on dolls but later we had to wash a real baby. We had to ask a mother in the ward if she would agree for us to wash her baby as part of the test. It was scary; I was afraid of dropping the baby while the mother and nurse watched me. In the children’s ward, the nurses and the sisters in charge were often confused when they discharged a child with their mother, only to find later that another woman in the ward said she was the real mother. In our kinship system we have many more mothers than just our biological mother. My mother’s sisters are all mothers to me, and all the women these mothers call ‘sister’ are mothers to me as well. I explained our system to the sisters in charge and the other nurses, and how to ask the women a number of questions so they could be sure they were sending a child or baby home with their biological mother. When I was on duty, the nurses asked me to interpret for them when they couldn’t understand what Aboriginal people were saying. I could interpret all the Western Desert languages: Pintupi, Pitjantjatjara, Yankunytjatjara, and Luritja. But if it was a different

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language like Arrernte or Warlpiri, then I couldn’t. One time, one of my aunties was sick and stayed in hospital for some time. She was also mentally unwell. Aunty would often go into the other wards and grab things. For example, she took nappies and little clothes from the maternity ward. Every morning we emptied her cupboard and returned everything. At other times she stole men’s clothes including underpants from her ward. We had to show the underpants to the men and ask each of them if they belonged to them. One time one bloke said, ‘Oh no, she can keep it.’ This same aunty would say to me, ‘Oh, yukari, niece, give me a fire stick. I want to burn the house down. The mob across the road are giving me cheek.’ The building across the road was the education department but she thought people, families, were living there. I would tell her to wait, that we’d do it later, because I had something to do first and I would get that fire stick later. I made her wait until she forgot about setting fire to the building. I graduated with the rest of my group as enrolled nurses but not all of us finished the course. Many had dropped out along the way. I have a picture of all of us who graduated. Everybody wore a uniform, except for me. I wore a big baggy dress because my tummy was so big. I was glad it was over. The day after I got my certificate, I went to the hospital to give birth to Lucy, my beautiful healthy daughter. Most weekends we went to the old Alice Springs airport where Michael and Peter taught skydiving; it was boring most of the time. When we weren’t at the drop zone, we went for picnics with Peter and Rose and their kids. They had a son, Martyn, a daughter, Jacinta, and they were looking after two of Rose’s cousins. It was around 1982, and Michael and I became friends with many couples who were like us: a white man married to a black woman. There was Peter and Rose, Dave and Bess, Alister and Ada, Ron and Vera, and Neil and Jenny. Once I did skydive, in Katherine during the Northern Territory Skydiving Championships. There was an Asian bloke whose parachute was big enough to hold two people so Michael paid for me to do a tandem jump with him. I was so scared, especially when they cut the plane’s engine and everybody jumped out. I was thinking, ‘No, why

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have I done this?’ But I had no choice: I was strapped onto the bloke on the front. He moved along to the open door and I had to follow him. He reached the door and swung me around; and there I was, on the edge of the plane. After we jumped, we swirled around. I had my eyes shut because I was so frightened. We were spinning around and I didn’t know where we were anymore. But suddenly I could see down below, and this was the best part of the experience. Once we had straightened up and I saw the earth and could look around, that’s when I enjoyed it. The parachute opened and I kept looking down. Michael had jumped out before us because he wanted to take photos. When we were swinging around, I turned and saw him waving at me. It was an unreal sensation, just floating. After we landed, I felt like I was walking on air. But I decided never do another tandem jump. Michael and I had Lucy and were looking after my siblings Peter and Jillian. Michael left Yirara to become the principal at Docker River School, so we lived there for a little while. We didn’t stay long because there was a problem with the silver bullet caravan we lived in and he was transferred back to a school in Alice Springs. I was pregnant with my second daughter Emma when we left. My family lived at Tjukurla, but sometimes they came to stay for a little while in Docker, especially as my siblings, Leslie and Jillian, were going to school there. My parents camped where the clinic is today. I remember one time I was getting into a utility with my younger brothers; I was driving. They were hopping in the back and in the passenger seat but they hadn’t closed the door so when I backed out, I bent the passenger side door on a post. It wouldn’t really shut it anymore. Michael wasn’t pleased because it was a brand new Toyota Hilux. He took the door off so we drove around with no door on one side. We even drove to Tjukurla and back like that. One night my mum was sitting on the passenger side and she kept telling me not to slow down on the corners otherwise she would get lassoed by someone standing on the side of the road in the bush. I explained it wouldn’t happen because she had her seatbelt so she was strapped

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into the car but she still made me drive fast around the corners, and she didn’t believe that she was safe. I was happy in Docker River because Michael, Lucy and I went out hunting a lot on weekends with my family. When we moved back to Alice Springs, we didn’t have a place of our own. Michael and Peter had sold their house so we moved around quite bit until we found our own place. At one time we lived with Peter and Rose in their flat. Rose was trying to sell some things, including her brother’s couch, so she organised a lawn sale. We all stood out in front of the house, hanging around, selling things but later in the day they all had to go somewhere and they asked if would mind the stall. I agreed, but I quickly got panicky. ‘What does everything cost?’ I asked. Peter said the couch was $19.50 and told me the rest of the prices over his shoulder while he was walking away. Rose didn’t hear him; she was already marching off to the car. Michael had to go too so I was on my own with Lucy. The next minute some people arrived and asked for the price of the couch. I said it cost $20. They immediately agreed and gave me a $20 note. They went off to get a trailer, picked up the couch and were gone. I felt so proud of myself. I had sold the couch. Everybody came back from their urgent business. Rose said, ‘Ah, you sold the couch! How much did you sell it for?’ I answered $20, with a big smile on my face. She said, ‘Whaaaat?’ I said, ‘But Peter had told me it was $19.50 so I’ve sold it for $20.’ Rose couldn’t believe it. They jumped into the car and drove to the radio station. She was on the radio telling those people who bought the couch for $20 to return it because it really was worth $300 but they didn’t come back with the couch. I always remember this event and think how much of a bush girl I was in not knowing how much whitefella things were really worth or about many other whitefella things at all.

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Settling in as a family There were times when I felt lonely in Alice Springs, and wanted to be around my family. At other times I was alright because I was busy but I definitely preferred living at Docker River. All my family was there and it was a lot more relaxing. In Alice Springs I had to cope with being alone most of the time, putting up with racism on the streets, and whitefellas staring at me when I went shopping or walked through the town. It was hard. I learned to cope with being stared at. When people stared at me, I would say, ‘Do you want me to come closer so you can have a good look?’ This made them embarrassed and they looked the other way. At other times I just stared straight back to them, holding their gaze until they looked away. Aboriginal people wouldn’t stare, but white people have a good look at you. I had to be really tough. Nowadays I don’t worry about being stared at any more because of the colour of my skin. Michael felt comfortable in Aboriginal communities because he had been living in some of them for a while before he met me. He lived and taught at Areyonga (Utju in Pitjantjatjara) and Umbangara where he was the only whitefella teacher. In Docker River, Michael took part in community life. He attended ceremonies even though he didn’t really participate. He would sit in the right group for him. Because he married me, he was automatically given the skin name Panaka, since I am a Tjarurru. A Tjarurru person must marry a Panaka person. So during ceremonies he was sitting in the right place, just sitting and not doing anything else, but that wasn’t a problem.

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Ngumpaluru and Tjirntultukultul are the names of the two halves, and each of these two halves is again divided into two halves, which are our moieties. If your parents are in one half then, before you’re even born or being thought about, you’ll be in the other half. Your children will go into the other half again, that of your parents, and so on. Your children’s children will go into the same half you belong to and so forth. It just goes backwards and forwards. I am a Tjirntultukultul person, a Tjarurru skin. People of Tjarurru and Panaka, as well as Yiparrka, they are all Tjirntultukultul people as well. On the other side, among the Ngumpaluru people, there are Karimarra, Purungu and Milangka. When you belong to one half, you are in it forever and you marry in that half, because the people that belong to that group are grandparents, grandchildren, cousins, brothers and sisters. Within the Tjirntultukultul people there is a further difference. My siblings, my daughter’s daughter, my mother’s mother and me, are all Tjarurru, whereas my cousins, my father’s mother and grandsons, they are Panaka and Yiparrka. So everyone belongs to a group, and within this group you divide people up. You feel close to everyone in your family but in ceremonial times, because of the Tjukurrpa, the Dreaming, there are rules about where you have to sit as well as the protocol of the ceremony. For example, if you are Tjirntultukultul, you sit on a certain side with all the other Tjirntultukultul people. There are also rules for every day life that tell people how to interact with each other, and these are expressed in the kinship words. With some people you have to be respectful and distant, like your parents and your children. For example, one terribly hot summer, Mum and Dad were living in the old Tjukurla community shop, in the middle of the community. I was there on holidays. This tin house is the church now, but it used to be the shop, as well as Mum and Dad’s house at some stage. They had a little summer shade, a wiltja, just at the back of the house. That’s where they were sleeping. It was in the afternoon after lunch, naptime, and everything was quiet. But suddenly Max, my son, my cousin’s sister Daisy’s son, comes over and says to me ‘Oh Mum, one of those

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dogs, one of my grandfather’s dogs had a go at me.’ He was walking too close to the house and one of the dogs bit him in the leg. ‘Is there a gun here?’ he asked. I showed him Dad’s .22 rifle. My son grabbed the gun, took off and next minute we heard the gun firing. This woke Mum and Dad up and they worried, ‘Somebody is shooting! Firing a gun somewhere!’ I said, ‘Yes, someone is. Dad, it’s your gun. Maxwell took it to shoot one of his grandfather’s dogs.’ Dad went off his head, but instead of growling at me he was growling at Mum. I didn’t get in trouble with him because I am the eldest daughter and you are not supposed to growl at your eldest and adult daughter. Relationships with aunties, uncles and cousins, as well as grandchildren and grandparents are more relaxed, and you can joke with them if they are close kin. But if they are distant kin you always talk to them in a roundabout way. For example, for a woman, if a man is becoming her future father-in-law, their interaction will become more respectful. They can still talk but are not allowed to make jokes, to get too close. However, for a man, a relationship with a yumari, a mother-in-law, is forbidden. They are not allowed to talk to each other face-to-face or even be close to each other; this is what we call an avoidance relationship. There are other avoidance relationships, but the mother-in-law and son-in-law ones are the well-known ones. If they wish to talk to each other, they usually have to do it through another person. If they wish to talk directly to each other, they need to do it from a distance and in a roundabout way, as if they were talking to another person. That’s how they used to talk to each other in the old days. The mother-in-law and son-in-law relationships have even more rules. If the son-in-law is fighting, then the mother-in-law might say, ‘Stop fighting now, go and rest,’ which might be delivered to him through a third person and the fight would stop. The people in avoidance or other special relationships, such as between a man and his father-in-law, his waputju, or between a mother-in-law and a daughter-in-law, have to listen to each other.

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Other special relationships occur during the special boy ceremony. One is pampurlpa. A woman or girl puts ochre on a special boy at his coming out ceremony. The young man and the woman or girl are pampurlpa. It is called pampurlpa since this word means touching. This relationship brings two families together. They can help each other out. They can’t talk to each other, but they can communicate and give each other gifts through another person. A yumari relationship happens the moment when an aunt dances along to the special boy and hits him on his back with a stick. The special boy has just been chosen by the men who sing the song for this event while an aunty of the boy dances up to the special boy and hits him. The special boy is lying face down on the ground. Being hit with the stick during this ceremony says that the boy can marry the aunty’s daughter or an actual sister’s daughter. This aunty becomes a motherin-law. This is how a girl gets a promised husband. These are the ways that certain relationships come about during a ceremony, when people perform certain tasks that place them immediately in an avoidance or another special kind of relationship. Another special relationship that involves a lot of sharing happens when two or three special boys go through the ceremony at the same time. They call themselves ngalungku. These days they give all sorts of things to each other, like televisions, cars, money, smokes, everything. It’s a constant sharing between each other among the ngalungku. My brother was the only special boy for that year at Docker River so he didn’t have a special boy ngalungku. The word ngalungku is also used for people who are the same age. …………………………… My parents never said they were disappointed in me marrying a white man. I suppose I was away a lot with school. I don’t think they were surprised when they heard that I had met and married a white man. I don’t know if they expected it, but they weren’t surprised. They never told me how they felt when they found out. Over the years, I could tell

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that my parents were proud of Michael and me. Michael wasn’t just any whitefella who didn’t have a job. He was a professional person, a teacher, and he had standing in the whitefella community. Mum and Dad also became really proud of me over the years because of the work I had done in nursing, teaching and language. When white people came into the Ngaanyatjarra Lands or to Docker River, they would introduce my parents and say, ‘These are Lizzie’s parents.’ And they would say, ‘Ah, you’re Lizzie’s mum!’ and make a big deal about it. The other ladies might jump in and say, ‘Ah, I’m Lizzie’s aunty,’ or ‘I’m Lizzie’s grandmother,’ and so on. They would introduce themselves using my name because they could see that Mum was recognised by a lot by people. It made my parents feel very important. When Mum went somewhere and non-Indigenous women were there, she heard that people knew me because I had worked with them. Even Aboriginal women from different areas, like Luritja, Warlpiri or Arrernte people knew my mum through me and through the work I’ve done in languages and interpreting. …………………………… In Alice Springs, Peter and Rose moved into a house in Eastside. We stayed with them for a little while, camping in a tent in the garden while we waited for a house to come through with the Northern Territory Housing Commission. Before we got our house, we moved to a place owned by one of Michael’s skydiving friends, Daryl. It was a lovely house on a big block. It was quite bushy and there were lots of orange and mandarin trees. We lived in an old Bedford bus in the backyard. The people we bought it from had taken all the seats out, except for the driver’s and the two front seats. So there was a bedroom at the back with a kitchen in the middle and a lounge. It was nice and I enjoyed living in this bus. When I woke up, I could see all around us. Daryl didn’t have hot water for the shower. There was an old manual washing machine that we used. Sometimes we used to heat up water in it and washed ourselves outside at night under the stars. It

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was fun and scary at the same time. My mum came and stayed with us for a few days just before I gave birth to our second daughter, Emma. One Saturday I went into labour. I went to the hospital and had Emma. Lucy was two years old and still breastfeeding. Michael brought her to the hospital in the mornings and evenings for a visit and for me to breastfeed her. It was funny because one day, a nurse walked into my room and said, ‘Twins!’ She got her paper out then had another look at my babies. She noticed one was bigger and was wearing a t-shirt. I was breastfeeding both Lucy and newborn Emma at the same time. When Lucy was breastfeeding she would always be poking my nose and Emma’s nose. When our name came up for a house, Michael chose one near Peter and Rose, and it was across the road from the hills and bush. It was at Kurrajong Drive. The yard was quite bare and there were hardly any trees. There was bit of lawn in front, with one small witchetty bush, so Michael did a lot of planting. After we moved in, we found out that Dave, the one that had come out to Docker River, and his wife Bess and their daughter Jacinta, were living down the street. We lived in that house for most of our marriage. I have many fond memories of my life in that house with my husband and children. I stayed at home with Lucy and Emma most of the time. Sometimes I visited Rose. She was a very social lady and always out doing things and going somewhere. Most of her family was living in Alice Springs. Only later they returned to their traditional country near Port Augusta. Rose and I often took our children for drives. On the weekends we went out bush, camping or just having a picnic, or going to the skydiving club. Other times we went out on many occasions with other people for hunting and to dig out honey ants and bring them home. We stored them in the freezer and the girls took them to school to share with their friends and teachers. The honey goes hard but it doesn’t freeze. We went out bush a lot when Helen, a painter from Glenbrook, in the Blue Mountains, who was a friend of Michael’s mother, came to visit us. We took her to many places and as far as Docker River. Helen

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loved the desert; she visited in winter for two weeks nearly every year. She took photographs of Aboriginal people and our country and painted them in watercolours later. Much later she wrote a book about her travels in Central Australia called The Children of the Desert. They only printed one lot of this book and never reprinted it again. Michael built a big cubby up in a tree for the girls. They played in there a lot with Alistair’s girls. Michael knew Alistair because he was a teacher at Papunya while Michael was teacher at Umbangara. When Michael met Alistair he was married to a white woman but in Papunya they split up and he married Ada, a Luritja woman from Papunya. Alistair’s children from his first marriage were Jemma and Jade. There was also another daughter called Sharon. Alistair and Ada’s children, Maggie and Laati, are the same age as Lucy and Emma. Alistair, Dave and Michael became friends, probably because all of them had married Aboriginal women, but also because all of them had been teachers in Aboriginal communities. Ada, Bess and I were all related through kinship and marriage, so there was a strong link there as well. One of my skin mothers married one of Ada’s brothers. And my relation to Bess, Dave’s wife, is through my father Purungu, who is my dad’s brother. Most of his kids married into Bess’ cousins, brothers and sisters. When Alistair and Ada were in town, they stayed with us. There were a lot of kids of a similar age who played together. And sometimes my younger sister Myra’s children, my sister’s kids, joined in as well when they were in town from Jay Creek, where she lived with her husband. Myra married a Luritja man, a brother-in-law of mine. He passed on a long while ago now. Poor thing. Michael and I would pick them up in Jay Creek and go out west for a picnic with all the children. The creek always had water, and the children used to swim. It was an old government settlement where they took Aboriginal people from the Alice Springs area and a ration depot where Central Australian Aboriginal people lived. Later Myra and George left and went to live at Docker River with their children Rita, Judy, Geraldine and Nelson, and later at Uluru in Mutitjulu.

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The township of Alice Springs was originally at the old telegraph station. But they moved the town from there to where it is now. From the whitefellas point of view, there were too many blackfellas in the town so they made settlements out of Alice Springs for full-blood Aboriginal people — Amoonguna and Jay Creek — and moved them there. Much later, Aboriginal people came back to Alice Springs. My brother-in-law’s family lived at Jay Creek. Many of the Pitjantjatjara and Ngaanyatjarra people used to live at Angas Downs and Curtin Springs Station. Aboriginal people, Mount Ebenezer people, own Angas Downs now. It became an Indigenous Protected Area in 2009 as part of the government’s Caring for Country scheme. I stayed there once with anthropologist Suzie Hutchings. We were employed by the Nyangatjara Aboriginal Corporation, which ran the school and Anangu tourist tours at the rock. They employed Suzie to do some sort of work for them and I was the interpreter. We travelled together from Alice to the rock and back. On the way we stayed with my Aunty Sandra at Mount Ebenezer, who is a traditional owner of Angas Downs. She took us out to Angas Downs because she was one of the directors for the Nyangatjara Aboriginal Corporation and Suzie had to talk to her. We camped out there. It was beautiful, lovely and quiet. There were only my aunty, her sisters and her sister’s brothers living there at the station. All the other people lived at Imanpa. I was talking to Suzie about my life and about Wiluna. She asked, ‘Oh, are you Lizzie Giles?’ I said, ‘Yes, I am. Ellis is my married name.’ Then she said, ‘Oh, I’ve heard about you because I am friends of John Stanton.’ I think she said she attended courses at the University of Western Australia in Perth, where John Stanton works. John Stanton is the anthropologist that took the photo of me at the Bondini Reserve when I was a child. It is a small world.

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Belief systems In Aboriginal culture everyone has a totem. Ngaatjatjarra and Ngaanyatjarra people have totems. Children are told about their totem when they are big enough to understand. The totem can be an animal, a plant or a bush food. These animals, tjukurritja (totemic) beings, and bush foods become a person. You live your life as a person with that spirit, with that totem. Tjukurritja beings are sacred to us. They make up a sacred world and are linked to us through the myths, the songs, the stories that link the people to the land. These beings lived in the Tjukurrpa (Dreaming) time, the Creation Time. When Tjukurrpa time ended, the modern time began for the modern people, but they had strong spiritual links to the Tjukurrpa time, the Tjukurrpa law and tjukurritja beings. In Western Desert Ngaanyatjarra culture, you are something before you are born. I was kunmarnu. Kunmarnu is a work that means ‘no meaning’; a substitute word. I can’t reveal the English meaning of this Ngaatjatjarra word because of cultural rules around this word’s use. Kunmarnu is the word we use when something is taboo. Mum and Dad were on a hunting trip, near Docker River, Kulail area. Dad found me living in a hollow tree. I was a kunmarnu and a mother with two babies. He killed my two babies and me. Mum was pregnant with me and, I, the kunmarnu spirit, entered her. This is how my totem became kunmarnu. People make the association between the totemic spirit and the unborn baby. Mum and Dad understood from what had happened that the kunmarnu was me, in my mum’s tummy.

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They understood that the kunmarnu was my spirit, that the kunmarnu is my tjuma, my totem. We cannot eat out totemic-self (spirit-self) because it is our tjuma, and it is a sacred totem for my family and country. My siblings’ totems are emu, echidna, snake, and both my brothers are goanna. Dad’s country is Kurlkurta and his totem links him to that country. He always said it was very sacred and important country for our people. Docker River, Kulail area, is also my grandfather’s, my mother’s father’s, country. Kurlkurlta is an important place for Ngaatjatjarra, Pintupi, Mantjiltjarra, Pitjantjatjara and neighbouring tribes, especially my dad’s tribe. Sometimes people have two totems, like my younger sister Jillian. My mother and her cousins were tracking echidna through the spinifex plain near Desert Gold Farm in Wiluna. The echidna tracks disappeared into a clump of spinifex and then a snake came out onto the echidna tracks; this snake chased my mum and aunt, and they ran away in fright. So the echidna was my sister’s totem, but it also changed into a snake so she has two totems. She has a double personality, because of the two totems. Many of the animals that used to live in our country have become extinct. Introduced animals like rabbits, feral cats, foxes and camels made their lives hard. These animals compete with native animals for food and some of these animals kill the native ones. A lot of birds that used to nest on the ground disappeared this way. I remember when I was in my early teens, we used to walk through the land, and we would always find birds nests on the ground. But nowadays, you won’t find any because cats and foxes have eaten their eggs and the baby birds. So, for a lot of people, their country animals, their totems, aren’t in the country anymore. In many cultures, people believe that after you die you become something different, you are still here. You might even come back as another person or as an animal. For us, when you die, there is nothing left, there is no more existence. However, the spirit itself is still there somewhere. This is why we don’t say people’s names or

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talk directly about the deceased. We are not allowed to see or hear their names or a word that rhymes with their names. If the deceased’s name is a word for a thing, or if the name rhymes with the word for a thing, we don’t say the name of that thing anymore. We call these people kunmanara, whether they are men or women. If it is a thing, we say kunmarnu. That’s why my sister, Susan, changed her name to Nerida in her twenties. Her name became kunmarnu, taboo to say because of the death of a person with the same name. But we can refer to the dead person in a roundabout way. If my brother died, then I’d say, ‘I have no brother,’ and then I would tell the story I wanted to tell. So it is okay to refer to someone who has passed away without using their name. Saying their name out loud is disrespectful. Whitefellas, don’t have a problem saying the names of dead people. It isn’t considered disrespectful. They even name buildings and other things after important people who have passed away. After death, the spirit remains, but it is not a thing; it does not remain in the grave or go somewhere else. As long as you can remember a person, feel the dead person, and talk about that person in a roundabout way, the spirit is here, is still active. But even if it is too long ago, if no one remembers, the spirit of that person is still here somehow. The spirit may remain with a person or at a house, and people and children can see this person for a brief moment at certain times. Many people have said that they have seen an old man at our house in Tjukurla and I tell them that it is the spirit of my deceased father. The first Christian missionaries came to the Western Desert in the mid-1930s so many of our people had to learn about Christianity. Even though the missions closed in the 1970s, there are churches in most of our communities and now we have Ingkarta, Aboriginal pastors. But not many Ngaatjatjarra and Ngaanyatjarra people who become Christians stay Christians for very long. The majority say they are Christians and even go to church, but they aren’t Christians in their everyday lives. You can tell because they don’t live by the Ten Commandments. For example, they swear, express jealousy and

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other things that as a Christian, you shouldn’t do. Dad always said to me, ‘Jesus is just another Tjukurrpa, one story among many.’ There are many similarities between Tjukurrpa and Christian religion. Dad believed in a higher being, in the Christian God, and he equally believed very strongly in Tjukurrpa as we have sacred beings too. Both were very special and real to him. Me, on the other hand, I say I am not a Christian, but I try to be a good person most of my adult life. To me, our Tjukurrpa, our culture and our belief, is far stronger and more important to me than Christianity and it was here long before. At least once a year evangelists travel through our lands to get more followers. They ask the people, ‘Who will come forward to give your heart to the Lord.’ Many people do accept God in their hearts and are serious but a week or two later, most of them are back to their old ways, gambling, or when they go to Alice Springs they drink alcohol. When people drink, they always get up to mischief, do things that they normally wouldn’t do: things they mustn’t do according to the Ten Commandments. In our communities, the turlku, the church service, is held on Sundays and can take place in open areas or in a church. Often Ingkartas are also strong men in the traditional way and are important people in Aboriginal ceremonies. The Ingkarta reads from the bible or pray, and people would sing. There are many Ngaanyatjarra people who have been strong Christians for a very long time. My parents often went to church services. Most of the services were outdoors because communities didn’t have churches in the beginning when they were being established. My parents would say to me, ‘You got to follow the Lord. Don’t be a mamu (devil).’ I went with them just to keep them quiet and happy. I used to say, ‘Mum, when your mother and father were alive, and their mother and father were alive, they never knew about Jesus. The white men brought Jesus with them. Why should I learn about Jesus? They never knew him.’ But my mother would just reply that I shouldn’t be a mamu. I repeated, ‘Mum, your grandmother and grandfather never knew Jesus, they’re not even in heaven.’ She would reply, ‘Stop talking like that! They’re

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in heaven.’ She never understood my point of view. According to Mum, everybody goes to heaven. All the old people who never knew about Jesus before white men came to our country, they’re in heaven, in a place they never knew about. Why do we switch beliefs from our own way to some other group’s belief system? Who is to say that this belief system is the right one and that all other societies in the world, every other group’s belief system, are wrong? I gave this a lot of thought in my twenties. This is why I am not really strong on church. And because, when we were young in Karalundi, we used to be told that we would burn in hell for being a sinner. ‘Jesus will send fire onto you,’ they said. ‘It will rain upon you and you will burn in hell for eternity.’ On the one hand we were told that God is kind and loving, and on the other hand they said God would send us to burn in hell for eternity. It’s because of this contradiction that I haven’t become a Christian. I believe in my Tjukurrpa. God and Jesus belong to other groups. But both belief systems have many similarities: what is right and what is wrong; the importance of sharing and caring; respect, reverence, sacredness, holiness and many more. There have been other changes in our believe system too. When Lucy and Emma lost their baby teeth, I taught them to bury them in a nice spot in the garden. But one day, Emma heard at school that if you put your tooth in a cup with a little bit of water, during the night a tooth fairy comes along and replaces the tooth with a dollar coin. From then on she refused to bury her teeth in the garden. She said, ‘No Mum, I don’t want to bury my tooth; I want to get the money.’ Michael put the money in the glass of water for her. I refused. I said, ‘There’s no tooth fairy. The proper way is to bury it, as I was told in my culture.’ I couldn’t bury it for them. It’s up to the children to do it themselves. Unlike Emma, Lucy didn’t have any problems with burying her baby tooth. Lucy and Emma learned a lot about white man culture but I taught them a lot about my culture too. Traditionally, women make things from our hair so when we went to the hairdresser, I got them to sweep up and give me all the cut hair. When we visited my mum, we took 83

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her the hair. She made nanpa, wati-ku nanpa, belts for men made out of hair, or she made katawirri, headbands for women, or other things for women’s ceremonies. Women spin the hair using a little wooden cross. They make a little split in one of the sticks, and stick another wooden stick through. They tie the first bit of the hair string around the stick, and then they spin using their hand and leg, feeding in the hair. They spin the hair so it gets tighter and tighter. Then they wind it on and put the next lot of hair along until they have a large ball of string. Everybody cuts their hair, for example during sorry business time when someone has passed away, and they keep it for making things later on. I don’t collect our hair all the time anymore. A lot of our old people, our grandparents’ generation, are not around anymore and our cultural customs are not as strongly practiced as before. There is less need for human hair now; we use whitefella wool from shops instead. Another cultural difference was celebrating birthdays. Traditionally, we don’t celebrate birthdays in our culture. When my girls were babies and small children, I didn’t celebrate their birthdays but when they found out about birthday parties in lower primary school, they demanded to celebrate their birthdays, so we did it from then on. But I still rarely celebrate my own birthday to this day. The white man has his calendar and the clock to help him talk about time. Nowadays Aboriginal people have learned to use clocks, calendars and to celebrate birthdays. But when I was younger, we talked about time using the celestial signposts such as the sun, the moon and the stars, the weather, the seasons, such as the pirriyapirriya season which heralds the beginning of summer, kurli for summer, warri for winter. We also used the stage of a person’s life to talk about particular times or events, for example, when a person became a special boy, married, had children or died. Seasonal signposts were used for time events such as when emus laid their eggs and when the eggs would hatch, when certain plants were flowering or fruiting, and when goannas begin to hibernate and when they come out of their hibernating hole at the end of winter.

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Working and sharing When Emma was still a tiny baby, I packed shelves in one of the supermarkets in Alice Springs at night while Michael looked after her and her sister. I started work when the shop closed at six o’clock in the evening, and finished at ten o’clock at night. We added the prices and repacked the shelves. This was before they had barcodes. We had to find the price for each item on the list and add the prices with a price gun. I worked there for a few months. At least it was something to do and a way to bring in some extra cash. We worked in an aisle on our own, unpacking a large pallet of items that you opened, priced, and stacked onto the shelves. I was the only Yarnangu, Aboriginal person, there. All the others were whitefellas. It was pretty quiet work but heavy labour. After working at the supermarket, I started nursing at Hettie Perkins Nursing Home. It was an Aboriginal nursing home named after rights activist Charlie Perkins’ mother. The cooks and a lot of the cleaners and laundry workers were Aboriginal people. We had some fun times working in the home, especially with some of the old people. Sometimes they got cranky with us and tried to hit us with their walking stick or whatever. Some of them didn’t like us because we were trying to get them into the bath or into the shower and they didn’t want one. They would fight and carrying on, but when we finally managed to get them into the shower or bath, they didn’t want to get out. There were a lot of Western Desert people in this home,

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Pintupi mob, Pitjantjatjara, Arrernte, all sorts, as well as people from Alice Springs. I met my sister-in-law, Lorna Wilson, at Hettie Perkins. She lived in Alice Springs as a child, but went to Victoria for her schooling and did her nursing training there too. We met when I was cleaning the pan room and I was about to walk out when she walked in. She wasn’t dark, because she’s a part-Aboriginal lady, just like my girls. Anyway, she looked a lot paler because she had been down south. We looked at each other and then she started speaking in Luritja. I was shocked: there was a white lady talking an Aboriginal language. But she wasn’t totally white; she had an Aboriginal mother and spoke her mother tongue Luritja, which is a dialect similar to my language, Ngaatjatjarra. We became good friends and after nursing, we worked together language teaching, interpreting and translating, and interpreter training in our languages and in Pitjantjatjara, another closely related dialect. My sister Myra married George Okai, Lorna’s cousin-brother so this made Lorna my sister-in-law. It was fun working at Hettie Perkins. The old people made us laugh but there were also sad times. The old people got frightened and worried a lot for their families. They wanted us to make a fire next to their bed, which we couldn’t do. They wanted a fire especially in winter, when it’s really cold. Some of them walked out of the compound looking for their families and we ran down the street looking for them and brought them back. Sometimes they said, ‘I am leaving, I don’t want to stay here.’ It was also hard work, lifting the old people. Nowadays they have lifting gear to get the old people in and out of baths and beds, but back then, two people had to do the lifting. When someone was leaving their job at Hettie’s, when it was their last day, the other staff used to do something special to you to say goodbye. Sometimes, they would grab the nurse who was leaving and take things off, such as their watch, or get things out of their pocket. They would be thrown into a bath, or people would make a mixture of food colouring, dog food and shaving cream and chuck it all over

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them. They did it to me as well, they day I left. They took me outside on the lawn and somebody had a big bucket of this bluey liquid. They were holding me while somebody was pouring it all over me, from my head all the way down. But it was still fun working there. In 1986, I had worked at Hettie’s for about six months when Michael applied for the principal’s job at Maryvale School. We rented out our house and moved to Maryvale (Titjikala). It was a one-teacher school, but I used to help out as the teacher’s aide. It was a paid position. Lucy wasn’t old enough to go to school, but she went anyway because both Michael and I were at the school. I had both the girls with me as we only had four students. Since I was looking after the little ones, and Lucy was with me, she did all the work the other kids in the class were doing. Emma had to be with me too, since we had no babysitter. She was learning very early. I was the assistant teacher but, because there wasn’t any other teacher and we couldn’t get a person from the community to do the work, Michael took the big kids and I had the little ones. Michael planned the lessons for me, and I taught them. When the education department sent another teacher, Kathy, a whitefella, I helped her with the little ones in the junior class. Michael organised making an orchard with fruit trees at the school. We had all the kids digging the holes and putting good soil in and planting the trees. Some of the fruit trees are still there today. Michael introduced a new reading and writing methodology called ‘key vocabulary’. It had been developed by a teacher in New Zealand in the 1950s or even earlier. When you teach children a foreign language, which was what we were doing since we were teaching English to Aboriginal kids, you start by picking the words that they already have in their minds. I would tell the little ones to close their eyes and ask them what they were thinking about or ask them what they liked or disliked eating. They would say a word like ‘porridge’ and I wrote it down. They went up to the board and wrote ‘porridge’ three times, then wrote their name on a card on one side and ‘porridge’ on the other side. Every day they had to pick a new word. When they came to school the next day, I would hold up the word from the day before

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and ask what it was, and it always worked. They read the words correctly because it took what was already in their heads. We used to get words like ‘Chuck Norris’, ‘drunks’, and ‘spinning around the camp’, everything that was part of their own lives. They ended up with 30 words each. We placed their cards with their words on the floor every morning. They had to pick one of their words and turn the card around and read it, as well as check for their names to make sure it was theirs, because sometimes several children had the same words. Michael used the mainstream teaching method of sounds and spelling, but key vocab was extra. The kids wrote fantastic sentences because they were writing about their own life stories, real stories. And since we had taught them to write their name on the back of the cards, they wrote their names everywhere around the school on the walls. The junior children loved to show how they could write their names. We didn’t tell them off because they learned to write their name, so it was good. Titjikala or Maryvale, the area where the people lived, was excised from the Maryvale Cattle Station. This is where my sister-in-law, Lorna Wilson, comes from. There was the homestead and the camp area. Maryvale community was on the other side of the creek. At that time there only were a few houses and the cemetery on the other side of the creek. The creek ran between us, those who were living next to the school, and the community. The kids had to cross the creek to get to the school, so they often arrived very muddy, especially when it rained. There were a small number of people living in the community, including young men. They played on the school trampoline. They did amazing tricks, huge somersaults and jumped off onto the ground. I was told most of the people didn’t work at the cattle station — they just got pensions. The station people ran a shop so the people could buy the basic stuff. But now, Tijtikala community has its own shop and learning centre. They even run a tourist place. It’s like in Africa where they have big tents, very expensive safari-style camping. They offer programs teaching tourists about Aboriginal culture and food and take them around; the famous Chambers Pillars are not

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far from there. When we lived at Titjikala, the tourists drove along the old south road that went down to Adelaide. They often lost their way, ending up at the school, and we had to tell them where to go. I remember a French couple that had lost their way. We invited them in for a cup of tea and we were sitting and talking. The man said to me something that sounded like, ‘Si katul is yours?’ I thought, ‘What? The kettle?’ But he meant, ‘The cattle is yours?’ I said, ‘No! The cattle belongs to the station people who live about 100 yards away.’ One time, people from Victoria came through on camels. They spent a few days with us. The kids were very excited about the camels and they loved being with them all the time. We went out for picnics a lot because there were many dams in the Maryvale Station area for the cattle, so the kids could have a swim. There also was a big sand hill called Mt Charlotte. There was a creek; I think it was the Hugh River. It starts near Jay Creek and flows down past Titjikala into the Finke River. On the banks of this creek, there is kind of a hill covered in sand. It is a really steep climb up to the top with a beautiful view of the area. That was one of the favourite spots. When it rained near Alice Springs, the water flowed down the creek even if it wasn’t raining at Maryvale. We could hear the noise of the coming floodwater and see the frothy brown water coming down the river towards us. The children tried to make a dam to stop the floodwaters. They were unsuccessful, but they had a lot of fun doing it. When we lived in Maryvale, we visited my parents every year in wintertime. In summertime, we visited Michael’s parents in New South Wales so we would be there for Christmas. We usually travelled together with Peter and Rose. I enjoyed staying there and only once got into trouble with Michael’s mother. Lucy was six or eight months old and she was crying. Michael’s mother was, in a very bossy way, telling me to put Lucy to bed. I said to Michael, ‘My aunty wouldn’t talk to me that way. I want to leave right now.’ It was at about eleven o’clock at night. I was standing outside, packing and getting my bags. Michael went inside and had a word with his mum. She said sorry and

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I calmed down and I ended up going back into the house. It was late, but Michael and his brother were still playing the guitar in the room that we were sleeping in and so I couldn’t put Lucy to sleep. Michael’s mother came over from England when she was ten years old. I don’t think she was happy when Michael married me. Peter had already married Rose so I think Michael marrying an Aboriginal lady as well was a bit too much for her to handle. But over the years, she got to know me and we ended up getting on really well together. She became a lot more relaxed and freer around me. Michael’s parents had a hobby farm and they had some sheep. My mother-in-law named one of the female black sheep ‘Lizzie’ after me. We all thought it was hilarious and giggled when Maw, my mother-in-law, talked about Lizzie the black sheep. Michael’s father, Richard, was always nice. He is Australian. He had been in the war in the Navy and fought the Japanese. He told us many stories about his time in the war. At wintertime, we went to Tjukurla to see my parents. Sometimes they were there but at other times they were at Warakurna or Docker River. When we arrived in Docker River we asked around to find out where they were staying. There were no telephones during this time. It was like that, they moved around all the time. If there was something going on in another community, such as a ceremony, they packed their belongings and left, and then they might stay there for a while. Or sometimes they had to wait until they could get a lift to come back. It can take quite a while until there’s a car with enough room and going in the direction that you want to go. But at some stage they went back to their community. The first few times we visited my parents from Maryvale, they were staying at Docker River. We would make a little wiltja and camp next to them. It was windy, cold and dusty in wintertime. During one of our visits, my younger sister Myra got married. She had a baby when I was nursing at the hospital. When she married her husband, George, he hadn’t gone through men’s business yet. When they moved from Jay Creek to Docker River, he went through the law there while we were visiting. Myra and George’s first-born is Rita. Today Rita is

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thirty years old and lives at Mutitjulu at Uluru, Ayers Rock. She is a great girl, and she always takes good care of me when I’m passing Mutitjulu. All of Myra’s children are fantastic: Rita, Janet (who calls herself Judy now), Geraldine and Nelson. Going to Docker River always reminded me of living there as a teenage girl. Every Friday night they screened movies outside. The men always picked the film they wanted to watch, because the men were on the council and they could choose what they liked. They always picked westerns, cowboys and Indians. To this day I don’t like westerns because every Friday night it was the same thing. When I was a kungkawara, a teenager before marriage, I took part a lot in ceremonies. But visiting Mum and Dad from Maryvale I didn’t take part in ceremonies very often. Sometimes when we arrived at Docker River or Tjukurla, they had already gone somewhere else for a ceremony. And in wintertime they usually don’t have many ceremonies. Ceremonies were hard work. They were busy and solemn times, but I loved the singing and dancing. Missing ceremonies wasn’t a problem but it did mean I missed out on special events of close family members, such as if a close male family member was going through the special boy ceremony. When my brothers Leslie and Peter were caught, selected for the special boy ceremony, I wasn’t there and I felt sad about missing them. There weren’t phones in the communities at that time, so people couldn’t ring family members and let them know that the ceremony was on. But things have changed. I was at Peter’s coming out ceremony, the yarritjiti in Nyirrpi near Yuendumu. Peter and our brother, one of dad’s brother’s son, Purrungu’s son, was in Nyirrpi at the same time, and they were both special boys together, ngalungku. Even though I wasn’t living in my parent’s community, I never felt like a stranger. Whenever I went back, I just slotted back in as if I hadn’t been away. I talked to the people to find out what had happened since I was last there. They told me all the important things, like what ceremonies had happened, who had passed away, who had married and had babies. In fact, I felt more at home when I was back

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at the community. I used to say, ‘I feel at home when I am walking through the bush, on my own, in the rain.’ The bush always takes me back to my childhood times. When living in town, with the cars and the buildings, I’d be nearly bursting inside, wanting to get out bush again. I had to get out of town and camp somewhere. It was good Michael loved camping and picnicking out bush. After a while in town I would say to him, ‘Enough! I need to go out bush again!’ When we visited Mum and Dad in Docker River we went hunting most days. Sometimes we hunted for goannas, other times for honey or maku, witchetty grubs. Michael often went shooting kangaroos with Dad and other men. He would give it to the people and they would cook it, cut it up and share it, because the hunter has to share most of the meat he gets. There’s always a certain piece that the hunter gets — the head and neck, with the internal organs attached to it, such as the heart and the lungs. The rest is shared with whoever is around. If no one is there to cook and cut it, then the hunter does it himself. But he always gets the same piece, the hunter’s piece. I love eating rabbit and kangaroo brains; they are still my favourite meats. I also love liver and the bone marrow of kangaroo. I needed to go bush because of the town, the cars, the buildings, but it also was because of the people. They would always be asking for you to buy them things and give it to them. Sometimes, especially for the older ladies, I would buy things, such as clothes. But in town, there are too many people, too many Aboriginal people that want you to share everything you have. This creates a lot of stress at times. When I was in my early teens, I remember seeing a piece of an old boomerang when getting firewood. My parents, grandparents, aunties and uncles told me not to burn it or touch it. Things that people made must not be burned because it is considered part of that person. It was left because the person who made it, their spirit, is still in that thing. That man or woman could be elsewhere, but their spirit is still with the thing. If you take the object or burn it, you might get sick. But the new objects you can buy in shops aren’t made by people you know and sometimes they are made by machines so that is okay. If you knew

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them, it would be different. However, it doesn’t mean new objects have less value when you give them to someone. They are valued because they have been given by a person with a special relationship, such as a kalyartu, namesake, or my mum or Mrs Bennett who both breastfed me. It depends on the relationship. You give to someone who you feel strongly about. So the gift of a new object carries something of the person who gave it to you. If I take a gift from someone who is my kalyartu and someone else asks for the object, then I say, ‘No, I can’t give it to you because it was given to me by my kalyartu.’ People should respect this and say, ‘Palyarnmanku, that’s all right, keep it.’ In the old days, sharing food and making gifts was an obligation. In those days there weren’t many things you could give, so people offered whatever they had to show they respected that person. Of course, it is reciprocal. Sharing has to be two-way. This was set out in the Tjukurrpa time, the Creation Time (the Dreaming). The sacred beings that lived during Tjukurrpa passed laws for us modern people to always share. The sacred beings created the land and everything we have in our culture. In our culture, everybody has the right to ask for things. But you have to be careful that you don’t only give but also receive. Sometimes people take things from you and only tell you later. You might come home and ask, ‘Oh, what’s happened to our TV?’ And someone would answer that your aunty took it. So, the next time when you visit her at her place, you might take something of hers and say, ‘Thank you, remember the TV? We’re doing a swap here.’ A lot of people give things away. Every time I went home I asked Mum where her blankets were. She said she had nothing and people were always taking them, especially the grandkids. People are constantly on the move, getting together with family, and every time you see family you have to give something, it’s a cultural obligation. In our language, we don’t have words that equate to the English words ‘please’ and ‘thank you’. However, the meanings of ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ can still be conveyed in our languages and we use one or two sentences to do this. Our traditional cultural protocols dictate

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that you share certain things without being asked and take what is being offered to you without saying no. This system provided our society with a way to support each other, to consider each other like one big family. When a person continually asks others for something or favours, the person who actually gives things to the person who asks, the receiver, turns them into a professional beggar, which in my view is an extremely sad situation. Unfortunately some people only take and never give. After a while you say, ‘No, you’ve never given me anything back. I’ve given you this and this and you have never given me anything back in return. So that’s it, finished!’ Usually, people feel embarrassed being caught not giving back but other people just keep taking and think it’s their right. They don’t realise that in the old days, giving was two-way. That’s the proper way, the right way: give and take, take and give again.

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Aboriginal nights Aboriginal people are frightened at night about mamu or nyirurru, devils or ghosts. They live in the dark and come out at night. If they hear a baby crying, they grab the spirit of the baby. That’s when the baby gets sick. If this happens, you have to get the maparn men or women to help. We call the medicine person or doctor, maparntjarra. The maparntjarra has to find the baby’s spirit. Sometimes it might be just behind a person. They get the spirit from behind and bring it back to the front, onto the breast. Sometimes the spirit is hiding somewhere in the bushes or behind a wiltja, behind a house somewhere away from the physical body. When they find and return the baby’s spirit, the baby is healed. That’s why you have to be very quiet at night and babies aren’t allowed to make noise; you put babies to sleep and don’t let them cry at night. When children are little, they sleep with their parents. But when they get older, such as when girls start developing mimi, breasts, they stop camping with their parents. They camp with the other big girls and older women in the yarlukuru, the single women’s camp. The same happens with the boys. They sleep in the tawarra, the single men’s camp, further away from the family’s camp. So, when my daughters, Lucy and Emma, were little and we were camping, I made sure they never cried and put them to sleep early. I even scared them into going to sleep. When they weren’t looking, I would get a red coal from the fire, and I would put it on the ground not far from our swag, the bed we used when we camped in out bush. I would put it there and tell

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them, ‘Look over there, oh, look mamu; mamu is looking. His red eye is looking at you.’ They put their heads down and went to sleep. It may seem like a bad thing to do, but when you are in the dark night, in the middle of the bush, a long way from anywhere, you don’t want to broadcast your presence to people who do evil to humans. We are also scared at night because there are warnapa, invisible men, who are the same as feather-foot men and wati, men, any real men, who might be lurking around at night. They would avenge a death, and then go back to their country and nobody would know what they did. So, at night, people are afraid of warnapa and mamu. That’s why we like to have many dogs as protection. People say, ‘waawurlpa-natju kanyira!’, ‘That’s my protection.’ Waawurlpa really means barking, to bark. A dog’s bark is your protection. Natju means to belong to me, and kanyira means have or keep. So we say, ‘I keep my bark.’ It keeps things and people away from you. When dog owners fight, the dogs join in too. They bite the other person on the leg or bum. Dogs are part of the family. Some people have up to ten or more. When I went home and saw Mum and Dad with too many dogs, sometimes six to eight, I would tell them to get rid of them. I used to tell them to have only two or three dogs, but they wouldn’t listen. So when a bitch had a litter, we took the puppies straight away, knocked them on the head and left only one. It may sound cruel, but you have to do it. People give dogs as gifts and sometimes they sell them for $20 to $90. Once, when we were visiting Mum and Dad in Wanarn, a community near Warakurna, there was a bitch that had a litter. Dad had his name on two puppies he wanted but Emma, my daughter, wanted one of the puppies that he had chosen. He agreed but said she had to buy it from him since he had paid $20 for the puppy. Emma said, ‘But I am your granddaughter! I can’t pay you $20. That’s too much. You can’t swindle me; rob your granddaughter. I’ll pay you $10.’ She talked him down and he finally agreed. This is how she got Wanytjalya, her black and white dog.

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Nowadays many people have fewer dogs, mainly for health reasons. Health workers tell people that the fewer dogs they have, the less chance they have of getting sick because they say that the dogs spread germs and sickness. An environmental health worker travels around the lands. He makes sure female dogs are sterilised and sometimes he puts dogs down if they are too sick. But people are still reluctant to put down a very sick and crippled dog, like my cousin-sister some years ago. When she heard that the vet was coming she hid her dog at another person’s house so they couldn’t put it down. When people leave the community for a trip in a car, the dogs chase their owners for miles. They follow them for miles and miles. When you are travelling back, you can see all these dogs just standing in the middle of nowhere waiting for the owners to come back, halfway between one community and another. Sometimes the people start crying for the dogs and stop the car and get them, lift them into the car and take them with them. The dogs also follow the kids when they go to school and sit outside the gate waiting for the children to come out again. When they finish school, they all walk back together. You can tell who is where by just looking at their dogs. If you go somewhere, like a building, and there are certain dogs standing outside, you can tell who is inside the building. At Tjukurla and other Ngaanyatjarra, there are still some people who have up to ten dogs. The problem is that sometimes people leave their dogs behind with no food and no one to look after them. The dogs fight and kill each other for food or over a bitch on heat. It’s madness. You have to keep the numbers down. In Ngaatjatjarra and Ngaanyatjarra, there are names you only give to dogs and there are male and female dog names. There also is a special word for growling at them and telling them to go away. We say ‘paaya!’ or ‘paayi!’ to the dogs. We never use this word with people. But that pet is like your son or your daughter. Everybody relates to that dog as if it was their child. My brothers and sisters would call that dog their child as well. My children would call the dog big brother or big sister. My dad used to know all the dogs in Tjukurla and knew each

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of the dog’s own close family. He knew which dog of the community had parented which dogs. He talked to the dogs and would say, ‘Oh that’s your uncle or that’s your niece and nephew.’ When the male and female dogs did the wrong thing, and they did that all the time of course, you would him hear saying ‘tjitji palyamunu’, ‘bad child’. My dad and his cousin John Tjakamarra, Adam Butler’s father, spent a lot of time with each other talking to their dogs and playing with them. I have a photo of them, the two cousins, sitting on the ground in Tjukurla surrounded by all their dogs. If you kill someone’s dog and don’t pay money, they will kill your dog as a payback. Once, when I was working with a white man who was working at the Ngaanyatjarra Council in Warburton, we travelled to Tjukurla and stopped at the visitor’s house in my community. Mum came over and of course all her dogs followed her. I was going to take my swag over to her house. The white man and I jumped in the car, but Mum wanted us to drive to her camp as well. I told her she should walk since it wasn’t far and all the dogs were with her, but my mother insisted on driving with us, so she jumped into the car as well. Her dogs were running in front of the Toyota trying to get to Mum. They tried to bite the tyres of the moving car. The white man accidently ran over Mum and Dad’s favourite dog. The white man loved dogs also and was very upset. Mum picked the dog up and put it in the back of the car. We drove out bush to bury the dog. Mum said, ‘Tell him he has to pay us $50 each.’ I was embarrassed. I didn’t want to say this to the white man because whitefellas don’t do that sort of thing. But I said to the white man he had to pay. He agreed but explained that he didn’t have any cash with him. ‘I can write out a food voucher,’ he said. I explained to my mother that she could buy whatever she wanted at the shop with the voucher, and she agreed. Mum and Dad did a big shop. Something good came out of it; they were happy with their shopping even though they were still sad about their dog. We had other pets as children, not just dogs. But we treated them differently. We wouldn’t really feed them. They were the babies of the animals that were killed for eating, and when they died, they would

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be eaten as well. For example, we used to play with baby kangaroos, the little pink ones, but also bigger ones with fur. We were very rough with them. We played with them and played with them until they died. We didn’t feed them. Sometimes gave them water. But most of the time we just played with them until they died. When a baby animal died, people cooked it and ate it. We also had little birds. I remember once when we went out hunting near Docker River, around Kutjuntarri. There was a baby joey that I had given to Lucy and she was holding it. Lucy was about two years old. The joey was all pink, but it was big because it had a big mother. Lucy played with it until it died. I was trying to get it off her, and my mum and dad were trying to get it off her as well to cook and eat it. But she wouldn’t give it to them and kept holding it. We had to wait until Lucy went to sleep so we could get it out of her hands. As I said earlier, when children are small, parents tell the children bedtime stories before they go to sleep so they won’t make noise and attract the mamu, the bad spirits, or alert people passing by of their whereabouts. Mum and Dad used to tell us the story about a kumputjirtjirr woman, a cockroach lady. She was old, cranky and ugly. She had lots of white hair but she could magically turn herself into a beautiful lady. She would come into a camp, and when people saw her they would ask, ‘Oh, where do you come from?’ And she would answer, ‘My mother told me to come visit my mum.’ She would even say the name of the person she was supposed to visit, a person that was really in the camp. ‘Oh, she’s here,’ people would say, ‘that’s your mum there.’ She would be taken to her and she would say, ‘I am such and such and my mother is so and so, your sister.’ People looked after her since she was young and beautiful. She lived with the family and ended up marrying a man from that tribe, from that group. But after a few days or weeks, she would kill her husband without people knowing it. People buried the man and moved camp. She would leave with them and tell her mother’s sister, another mother, ‘Mum, I told Mum that I’d go and meet her at that kapi, at a rock hole. I think I’d better go and tell her that I am all right, otherwise she might start

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worrying for me and come looking for me.’ People would say, ‘Okay, you go there first and meet us later. We’ll be at that waterhole.’ But while people were leaving she would backtrack to where her husband was buried. By the time she got there she would have changed back into her own self, the old woman again. She would dig up her husband then cook and eat him. After a while people found her out. She used to go to different families and join different groups. One day she came upon a group that she had met before. They realised that it must be the same woman. So they surrounded her in camp when she arrived and speared her before she could choose a husband. My parents told us this story to make us go to sleep otherwise the kumputjiltji lady would come around. Mum and Dad, as well as my grandmother, told me many bedtime stories. I loved hearing them and I made my mum talk and talk long into the night. The stories my parents, grandparents and uncles and aunties told us were like Grimm’s Fairy Tales. All of the stories talked about life themes as well, but they were told using euphemisms and metaphors. I only understood when I became adult and was more linguistically and otherwise aware. People also used facial expressions and hand gestures or sign language when they told these stories. Another favourite story of mine is about a man with a hollow log. It is a folk story, not related to any particular country. My dad told this one most of the time, and I still hear his voice in my mind. A man lived alone and travelled around his little country. During the day he hunted and when he got to a waterhole in the evening he set up camp close by. He carried water back to the camp, made a big fire and cooked his meat. Then he used a rock to break the bones to eat the marrow and throw the bones away. When the sun was going down, he lit fires all around his camp and sang out, shouting to the papa, the dogs. ‘Dogs, tjarnga, come bite me, so that I can die a miserable slow death.’ Sure enough, he would hear the dogs coming, yulurrpurr purr purr purr, their footsteps on the ground coming closer. Meanwhile he had put his log nearby, and when the dogs were close, he stood next to it. When

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the dogs were about to leap and catch him, he jumped into his hollow log. The dogs jumped onto the hollow log and tried to tear at it with their teeth. They rolled the log to try to break it. The man said, ‘Ah, watch it, there’s a person in here. I am trying to sleep. Can you stop that? I am trying to sleep.’ The dogs tried to get him, to put their noses into the log, but one of them got stuck. The man said, ‘Oh that smell! That smell will kill me, not you biting me! Your smell is terrible!’ He complained all night as they tried to get him, ‘Can’t you let a man sleep in peace?’ Towards dawn, the dogs gave up and went away. The man got out of the log and looked around. He walked around admiring all the footprints of the dogs and he said, ‘Oh, looking at those tracks, they were big, huge dogs!’ He looked at where the dogs had moved around the log, how they had dragged the log here and there and everywhere. He praised himself, ‘I was really clever not to get caught by those ferocious dogs. So horrible, coming and interrupting my sleep.’ Then he picked up his log and went on his way. He did this every day, until one day he got tired of carrying that big heavy log around. He decided to get a much lighter log from a warlku, a quondong tree. He found one and took it to his camp. He smoothed it out on the inside and outside ready for him to climb inside. That night he went through the same little ritual of cooking his meal, eating it, then lighting all the fires and singing out to the dogs. Sure enough, they came. When they were just about to get him, he jumped into his new log. The dogs started attacking the log. He said, ‘Watch it, this is my leg there. Don’t bite me there. Watch it! Watch it! Oh my head’s in that area! Stay away from there. Watch it, these are my ribs, my chest there! That’s my foot. I need that, that’s important to me, you know!’ But the log was new and it wasn’t as strong as the other one, so the dogs could rip into it. He said again, ‘Watch it! This is my leg, my leg!’ Next minute he felt the teeth from the dogs in his flesh. He cried, ‘Oh my leg, my leg! Oh, my tummy, my tummy!’ They

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bit his chest and arm. The dogs tore him apart, and when he was just about to die he said, ‘Oh, the men of the future won’t do what I did.’ That’s why you don’t go out asking for trouble, because if you do, you’ll get it. That’s the moral to the story.

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Language, identity and culture When we were living at Maryvale, Fay Bell from the Institute of Aboriginal Development (IAD) contacted me and asked if I would translate some English words into Pintupi. A German stonemason was building a water fountain for the Kiwirrkurra community and he wanted to include an inscription. It was something biblical, about the Lord blessing the water from the spring. This was my first translation job. When I went to Kiwirrkurra years later, the fountain was still there. It was an impressive fountain even though there was no water in it, and the translation looked fantastic. In 1988, we returned to Alice Springs after spending a year in Batchelor where I did a year of teacher training and Michael was teaching in the education department. Peter and Rose were lecturing and teaching there too. Fay asked me to do more translations and explained she needed a Western Desert interpreter at IAD. It is an Aboriginal-controlled adult education and language resource centre for Aboriginal people in Central Australia. They also publish books on Aboriginal language and culture, and dictionaries. When I started working there, IAD offered basic education to get people skilled up, teaching them literacy, numeracy and other skills, such as driving a car. Over the years, they grew and offered higher education courses. I worked in the language and culture centre for seven years. We went into the bush to do interpreting work and we translated a lot of things that people sent in from around Australia

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and sometimes for international events. We also helped out with teaching language courses, co-teaching with a non-Indigenous person. They could usually speak the language but not as fluently as a native speaker. I am a Ngaatjatjarra person and speak the Ngaatjatjarra language, but at IAD I mainly worked in Pitjantjatjara and Pintupi–Luritja. Both these languages are closely related dialects to Ngaanyatjarra and Ngaatjatjarra. I was one of the main proofreaders on the Ngaanyatjarra/Ngaatjatjarra dictionary. Our interpreting and translation work touched on many different things. We interpreted in Alice Springs and in the surrounding bush communities for doctors and nurses, lawyers, the police, and government departments such as Social Security (now called Centrelink). We also interpreted for a lot of Aboriginal organisations such as the Central Australian Aboriginal Congress (the Aboriginal Medical Centre), the Central Land Council, Tangentyere, Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (NPY) Women’s Council, and many others. I worked with many other language speakers including: Marlene Cousins and Corna Wilson, Pitjantjatjara speakers; Christabel Swan, a Perteme speaker; Connie Waliti, Teresa Ross and Christine Spencer, Warlpiri speakers; and Arrernte speakers Veronica Dobson and Sabella Turner. I loved the work, although towards the end I took a year off because I really needed a break. Interpreting is difficult work. The challenge is to interpret truthfully and faithfully, meaning for meaning, not word for word. If it is about cultural matters, you have to explain the meaning. However, when there is a new concept you have to be able to use existing words related as close as possible to this new concept. Human rights and the legal system are the most difficult concepts to translate from English to the Western Desert language. Basic human rights are very hard to understand and to interpret for Aboriginal people, for example, the right for all children to have an education. I translate it as every child can or must go to school and nobody can stop that child from going to school, even the mother and the father. People understand this, but

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sometimes I have to interpret the concept, the word, such as ‘rights’ first. I explain that a ‘right’ is something that nobody can take away from you. Some interpreters translate some words in our language literally. For example, in our language, the word tjukarurru means ‘straight’. But it also means the honest truth, the right way, the proper way. Most interpreters use the word ‘straight’ to translate it. This is why, when talking to white people, Aboriginal people now use the English word ‘straight’, such as, ‘but, I’m telling you the straight story’, instead of saying, ‘I’m telling you the honest, the true story.’ Some interpreters don’t realise some words have two meanings; some have even three meanings, such as mukurringkula, which is ‘love’, ‘like’ and ‘want’. When talking about love, you would say, ‘ngayulurna nyuntuku mukurringkula.’ ‘I love you.’ But if you are talking to a person of the opposite sex and they’re the right skin for you, then you have to be careful. You would say, ‘ngayulurna mukurringkula,’ ‘I like’ and you have to add why you like the person so that he or she doesn’t get the first meaning, which conveys a love/attraction. Interpreters and translators are expected to follow the code of ethics used by the National Accrediting Authority for Translators and Interpreters. They tell us how to behave while we are working. We are expected to respect privacy, be impartial, and be as accurate as possible when communicating between people. For example, in court, you never take part in the argument. As a professional interpreter, you have to interpret truthfully and faithfully whatever has been said. You are not allowed to change or add anything even if you know it would help either party. When the person gives their answer in court, you have to translate exactly what that person said. The interpreter is not that person’s lawyer. Before we interpret, we have briefings with the people who are using our interpreting services. It is very important to have that briefing because it helps you to do the job and help the communication to flow smoothly for all parties involved. They say, ‘Look, this is our story;

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this is what we are agreeing to say. This will be asked of him or her and this is what he or she is going to answer. This is how we want it to go.’ I remember once, when I was interpreting, people were talking very badly about a person I knew who was a very good friend of mine and this friend was at the meeting. As an interpreter, I had to say exactly what the people were saying, all the unkind things. This is the interpreter’s job: when you work, you are just an interpreter. You have to put friendship aside and interpret faithfully and truthfully. Of course, sometimes there is trouble interpreting. I remember one time, when Aboriginal politics was involved; I was kicked out of a meeting. The man who wanted me out wanted to have his own interpreter. He said he didn’t want me and that I was telling lies. Everybody from that community was shocked and said, ‘Oh, you don’t know her, she never tells lies! And she has been interpreting for us for years!’ I had to leave but it’s the only time I’ve been kicked out of an interpreting job. I also interpreted in cross-cultural workshops that talk about differences between Aboriginal and whitefella culture. Whitefellas find it hard to understand why we have so many mothers, fathers, daughters, sons and so on. We had to regularly and repeatedly explain how our kinship system is set up differently to the European one. The kinship and skin name system was one of the topics explained in the cross-cultural workshops. Over the past twenty-five years, I have also interpreted for politicians including the federal minister for Aboriginal affairs, the Uluru and Katja Tjuta Park Board of Management, for the women of the NPY Women’s Council who performed at the Sydney Olympic Games Opening Ceremony and an Aboriginal stage play, Ochre and Dust. The play was written and performed by two sisters, the late Mrs Wilson and Mrs Patterson. They weren’t fluent English speakers so that’s why I was involved. When the play first opened in Adelaide they had another interpreter, but when the play went to Noumea as part of the Pacific Arts and Crafts Festival, they asked me to do the job and I stayed on when it toured to Darwin, Alice Springs and Brisbane.

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I interpreted for the sisters but I also introduced the play and made jokes to get the audience to enjoy themselves. Once, in Darwin, the two sisters had an argument. We were sitting in a cafe on Smith Street having a meal with a couple of crew members. I don’t remember what they argued about but it went on for a very long time. Joanne, the producer, became quiet and asked me later why I didn’t try to stop them. I couldn’t: that’s the way it is with us Yarnangu, Aboriginal people. When two people argue, and they are closely related, you don’t interfere. They were just having a fight with words. They growled all kinds of bad things about the other, then suddenly they stopped and said with a smile, ‘Oh, let’s go.’ We walked back as if nothing had happened. It is like that with our families. People fight and then are quick to make peace as we depend on each other through our skin system and ceremonies and obligations. If Aboriginal people have a genuine reason to argue, you have to let them have their say because they will only quieten down when they have said everything they want to say. If you try to stop them, they will turn on you and forget about their own argument. And when they argue, they don’t just argue about the first reason. They dig up all the little fights from the past and all the bad things that the other person has done to that person. They will link up other people who are related to you and who have done bad things or said bad things to them. So the argument grows and grows until you have the whole community joining, arguing and fighting. That’s why you shouldn’t get involved. But a lot of people don’t keep their noses out of other people’s fights. Nowadays when people fight, others tell them that they are not supposed to make a show. However, there are many times when other families are obliged to join the fight. If they don’t, a new fight will start because of their lack of involvement. In Alice Springs Ochre and Dust was on at the same time as the Federation of Australia celebrations. The Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association organised a huge music and dance festival, the Yeperenye Festival, and people from all around Australia came. It was fantastic. I also worked with the women dancers from Western Desert communities who came to Alice Springs to perform. I 107

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was on the dance ground and had to tell them when to get on and off and things like that. As an interpreter, I’ve had interesting jobs. I also assisted Michael Cook at the Batchelor Institute for Indigenous Tertiary Education in Mutitjulu to train non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal people to become accredited interpreters. …………………………… In the early 1990s, the federal government gave money for Aboriginal language projects. That’s when the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Languages Initiative Program started. Money was given to the different states and territories to develop policies and programs to bring back lost Aboriginal languages and get the next generation talking their own language, not just English. So many of our languages were lost when our old people died. On the missions, we weren’t allowed to talk in our language. The programs helped what they call language retrieval and revival work to help keep our languages and culture alive. There was a national conference every second year in different cities — Adelaide, Darwin and Perth — and they took turns to run national workshops. Those workshops were great because people got together to share ideas about what work they were doing and what they planned to do. They learned from each other and talked about how to maintain the language and keep it strong. Language is very important for a culture. I fell into being a professional interpreter but when I think back, I was already interpreting at the reserve schools at about nine years old when I read out letters for my family. Once at Docker River, when I was about fifteen years old, one of my uncles gave a letter to my mum and said, ‘Get my niece, your daughter, to read that letter.’ I read it and there was a big fight because it was a love letter sent to my uncle’s wife from another man. Usually I liked helping people reading and interpreting but sometimes it got people into trouble! When I started interpreting at IAD, I realised the importance of interpreting for our old people. When they try to communicate to a

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non-Indigenous person who doesn’t speak their language, they feel powerless. They don’t have the power to explain, especially if they are sick. Without language, they cannot get the other person to understand what they are thinking. When an interpreter is with them, the person immediately regains their dignity and identity; they can speak in their language and get their message across. Sometimes white people think that if you shout loud enough at a person, they will understand what they’re saying. But that’s not the case; you have to speak the right words to be understood. You have to say the words in a sentence that is meaningful for that person. You can’t yell to be understood. I saw it happening so many times. After an interpreter’s skills have been used, everybody is happy. The client is happy, and the non-Indigenous person is happy because everyone has got their message across and they have understood exactly what has been said. Sometimes we interpreted over the telephone. Often the hospital or Centrelink rang up and said, ‘Can you talk to this person, they sound very stressed and angry.’ They put them on the phone and we talked to them. Most of the time it was a simple issue. For example, they wanted to go down to the shop, or go to the art gallery to talk to someone about their painting, or they needed to talk to family. All over the world, language gives people, a group of people, their identity. Language and culture: you can’t have one without the other. If you lose your language, you lose the culture. The way we do things, the way we communicate, how we live our lives, how we do certain things, and why, is an expression of our culture. If we stop using the language, then we risk losing that culture. But if you still practice that culture, sometimes even without language, some parts can still be strong, while other parts are gone. When particular animals have gone from the land, we don’t use those words linked to hunting for that game or preparing and cooking and eating it anymore. This part of our culture is gone. But other animals are still around and we still hunt them, prepare them for cooking and eat them. Other parts of our culture are lost because we are not practicing them anymore. Culture adapts to change.

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But knowing a language is not enough to be able to practice a culture. You can’t just speak the language and be an active participant. It starts as a child. When children grow up, they are nurtured and taught from an Aboriginal way of looking at the world. They see the world through their parents’ eyes and interpret the world as they have been taught to interpret it, through their language. They might get stereotyped messages, but it influences the way they interact with non-Indigenous people. Some Aboriginal people may not have the language, but it’s the way they have been taught to look at the rest of the world, through a certain point of view, that shapes them. It will always be from their ancestors’ point of view. If there is a Ngaatjatjarra family that doesn’t speak Ngaatjatjarra fluently, they still have the stories that have been passed down through generations; stories of where their family came from, their country, and how white people came into their world. All of this is given to the children when they’re growing up. It influences how they see themselves, how they see other Aboriginal groups and how they see white people. Other Aboriginal groups have suffered from the coming of white men to Australia, so we have a close link with them. Colonisation, mistreatment, abuse, we all share this. This common experience creates a collective identity that is passed on from generation to generation. This is why we fight to be ourselves, not to become something we are not. Our personal identity, our totems and our own little identity are important too. And you might have a women’s group identity as well because you belong to a certain area. My totem is kunmarnu, and I am a Tingarri woman, Tingarri minyma, the seven sisters and so on, because my parent’s country is Tingarri Dreaming. Then there is a collective identity, being Ngaatjatjarra–Ngaanyatjarra people and having connections with other groups such as Martu because of the shared Tjukurrpa story lines, going to ceremonies, and intermarriages. Even if we haven’t married somebody from Jigalong or Warburton, we still have skin sisters who married a man from there, or a man from there has married in. We are connected to the Pitjantjatjara people

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too, by the Tjukurrpa and story lines that link our countries, and through intermarriage. We all have connections to each other via our skin system and ceremonies. This is the point with cultural matters: when money is available to teach our languages, all the cultural things immediately follow. People do more cultural activities, they teach their culture. Without the one, you can’t have the other. There is a big emphasis by Aboriginal people on learning and teaching cultural ways to our young people, but also to tourists for economic reasons. But even when it is for profit, they are teaching their young ones too and give them a stronger sense of identity, an identity to be proud of. In the past, many of us were ashamed of being Aboriginal. I know I was when I was in my teens. Growing up, there were times I felt embarrassed being an Aboriginal person. I asked myself, ‘Why was I born Aboriginal? Why couldn’t I have been born white or from another country?’ We were made to feel like dirt by white people. But as I grew older and I could talk with my parents and ask them questions about where they lived and what they did, it changed. They told us the stories about white people doing certain things, and we thought it was bad, but our parents just laughed. White people did brutal things to them, but they laughed about it because they didn’t know any different. They said so and so was a cheeky bugger; that he or she was always nasty to them, they weren’t given food while he or she made them work hard. I suppose they laughed about it because they lived a much harder life before white people came. They coped with nature, and as we know, the desert is very tough. Famine or drought, they were used to hardship. Our ancestors, our old people, knew this and they had learned to live with it long before the white man came to our country in the desert. Aboriginal people are now teaching more of our culture. We teach it to our children and sometimes we visit schools to teach everybody. That’s our way of saying to the rest of Australia and to the world, ‘Hey, we’re still here. We had our language before, we had our culture before, and we still have it and we are proud of it.’ We may not have all of it, but we still have it and we want to maintain it. We want to

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be different from white people. We will never be like them because we will never look at the world and interpret it the way they look at and interpret it. There’s nothing wrong with being different. It’s good. I like to be different. I don’t want to be the same as every other Australian! My daughters are not totally fluent in Ngaatjatjarra/Ngaanyatjarra, but they understand quite a bit when we are talking in the language. Sometimes they will answer in Ngaatjatjarra if the person doesn’t speak English. But a lot of us now understand English, so they answer in English most of the time. However, they have a good understanding of our culture because they spent time with my family every year and participated in cultural activities and ceremonies. Michael and my daughters also speak and understand a bit of Pitjantjatjara. When Michael and Lucy were teaching at Mutitjulu School, the children quickly learned that they could understand their language, so they cut down on their swearing. Lucy and Emma both have white partners. Emma’s husband, Nick, is from Brisbane, and they have a daughter Elorah. Lucy’s husband is Maddy, Matthew. They all live in Canberra now. But let us come back to the interpreting job in Alice Springs. While I was at IAD there was a linguist who wanted to do something which we all thought was a bit strange and funny. He was English but had been working in Adelaide for some time. He wanted to see exactly where certain sounds were made in our mouths when we spoke our Central Australian Aboriginal languages. He first asked the linguists if they though some Aboriginal people would agree to this, and many people told him that he would never get an Aboriginal person to open their mouth wide enough for him to do his experiment. However, a few of us said yes. There was Bess Price, a Warlpiri speaker, and Veronica Dobson for the Arrernte language. I did Pitjantjatjara sounds as well as my own sounds in Ngaatjatjarra/Ngaanyatjarra. He asked us to stick our tongues out so he could paint a mixture of charcoal and chocolate on them. He told us to say a certain word that had a certain sound in it so he could see where that sound was articulated in our

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mouths. He wanted to see where the tongue would be, whether it was in the back, on the soft or hard part of the pallet, on the roof of the mouth, closer to the teeth and so on. So we said the words then kept our mouths open so he could place a camera inside and take a photo of the area with the black mark on it. Then we washed our mouths and did it all over again with another word. I quite liked the chocolate and charcoal mixture; it tasted yummy. At least it was something for our trouble. We laughed and we laughed when we had that mixture on, ‘Oh no, I moved my tongue… Sorry, I have to go and wash it out and get it painted again.’ Later he took measurements of our mouths and sent us to the dentist for a dental imprint that we sent to him. He had left by then. Around the time of the tongue painting, Mary Laughren invited me to the University of Queensland as a native speaker in her linguistics class. It was nice at the university because we used to cross the river on a ferry and walk up to Mary’s house. The students had to look at Ngaanyatjarra–Ngaatjatjarra but they weren’t given the grammar; they had to work it out themselves. Some students looked at verbs, others looked at pronouns and so on. Instead of going out into the field, they did it the easy way — I came into the classroom so they could ask questions. If they were doing verbs, then they had sentences such as ‘I went to the creek’, ‘I will go to the creek’, ‘I am going to the creek’, and so on in different tenses and I had to say them in Ngaatjatjarra. If they were working on pronouns, they would ask sentences with all the different combinations of pronouns in them. It was good sitting there saying sentences in Ngaatjatjarra. They wrote them down, and had to work out the grammar of my language. In the mid-1990s, I went to a linguistics conference in Canberra. There were papers given by keynote speakers and there were languages people could learn for a week or two. I taught Pitjantjatjara and learned Tok Pisin, Papua New Guinean pidgin. It was fun. Interpreting and language teaching opened a whole new world to me — travelling, meeting new people and learning. When you are an interpreter, you

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learn many different things relating to many fields and you meet many people. IAD ran week-long intensive language courses. Once we were teaching an intermediate Pitjantjatjara course. A French man, Jacques Montredon, was doing the course. He was teaching French at the University of Queensland. I met him when I was helping Mary Laughren with her course. He had started to learn Pitjantjatjara with tapes and books before he came to Alice Springs. His Pitjantjatjara was very good — a lot better than the other students who were actually living and working in Pitjantjatjara-speaking communities. While he was in Alice Springs, he asked if I was interested in going to France to teach a language course there. I agreed so in 1994 I went to Besançon, France, and taught Ngaatjatjarra for three weeks to six students. There were two anthropology students, a linguistics student, a retired English teacher, a Dutch interpreter and an artist. The course went very well and we all had a great time. Michael and the girls, who were now ten and eight years old, came with me to France. After the course we travelled to Denmark and England. We met Michael’s cousins and saw the Yorkshire moors because Michael’s mother was from there, from a very small village called Sinnington near York. This was a very long overseas trip, but it had not been my first one. In 1987, Michael, the girls and I went to New Zealand for a holiday. We went to the south island to visit Michael’s sister Winifred and her family who lived in Dunedin. We went just after living in Batchelor. In Darwin, we had to get the passports ready but I didn’t have one. My birth wasn’t registered since I was born in the bush so it was difficult to get one. Fortunately, there was an old letter from Alice Springs Hospital that mentioned me being brought into the hospital as a newborn on a certain date so we had some proof and I could get a passport. I was nervous about going overseas because I was scared of the plane falling into the ocean. I remember Michael saying, ‘Look, it’s the same as flying around Australia above the ground. It’s the same

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thing. It’s, just when you are flying over the water, you are falling into the water and not the land. That’s the only difference.’ But for me it is scarier flying over the water than over the land. There is something strange about flying over the water. Just thinking about all that water and imagining going right down and all the creatures that are in the ocean made me really nervous. We ended up going for a few weeks during summer. New Zealand is like Europe: very green, lots of farms, sheep and cattle, fields of crops and fruit. In Dunedin, there was a chocolate factory and you could smell the chocolate every day. And when you smell it, that’s it, you just want to go and get some. That’s what we did, everyday. We used to go and buy chocolate just because of the aroma. In Dunedin, we also went out to the bay to watch the albatrosses. It was the first time I had seen one. They are huge birds with long, big wings. They’re very clumsy when they are landing and taking off because they have to run into the wind off the cliff to take off and to get into the air, but once airborne they fly beautifully. It was summer, but it was still very cold. There were always clouds in the sky. I used to be inside Winifred’s house and, as soon as the sun came out, I told the girls to call me so I could run out and be in the sun to warm myself. They would shout, ‘Mum it’s sunny!’ And I would run outside. We visited one of Winifred’s friends who had a sheep farm just out of Dunedin. It was strange because they had sheep dogs that weren’t allowed to come into the house because they were working dogs. They were good working dogs. Winifred’s friend took us around to the fields to watch when they were doing the mustering. One dog went around and disappeared behind a crest of a hill. The next minute there were all these sheep coming up over the hill. The dog, his name was Patch, was behind them, just one dog mustering all these sheep. It was amazing to watch. But these working dogs had their kennels outside and weren’t allowed into the house. I couldn’t understand that. ‘Why don’t they let their dogs into the house,’ I asked myself. These dogs did the work and were put in their little kennels and locked up in the

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yard. They had only one dog in the house. That was their pet. I said to Michael, ‘These dogs are all by themselves and it is cold and they are sitting there on their own.’ But he answered, ‘They’re working dogs, they’re different, they’re not pets.’ It took me a while to understand this since I was used to dogs always being around people. The concept of a dog being separate was really new to me. But I understand that working dogs were just like a tractor, not a living creature. They’re not really part of the family.

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12

Breaking down and getting  up again In 2000, we moved from Alice Springs to Canberra because Michael became sick and resigned from the education department. Money was tight because he had taken a payout so he couldn’t work as a teacher for a while. We lived in Michael’s brother’s house. Peter had split up with Rose a while before. I worked as a freelance interpreter so I travelled to the Centre and various places. I also did a few jobs in Canberra including interpreting for some people who came from Uluru to do a sand painting during the Canberra Arts Festival, and at a meeting of people from Uluru with the federal environment minister at Parliament House. Peter’s house was pretty crowded so Michael and I put a caravan in the front yard and slept in there. Lucy and Emma slept outside in the shed. But Michael didn’t like living in Canberra, so after about a year we moved to Clare, South Australia. It was while we were living in Clare that Michael and I split up. We had a good marriage. It lasted for nearly twenty years. I was very sad when we broke up. The girls were upset too but we never spoke about it. I left Clare to go back to my community, to live and work in Tjukurla, while the girls stayed with Michael. It meant I was not only leaving Michael but the girls as well. When I was living at Tjurkula, Daisy, my cousin-sister, raised her concerns about the standard of education of our people at one of the

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Ngaanyatjarra Council meetings. They decided to write a report to the education department about schools and training in general in the lands. It brought the department to the negotiation table and the Council invited me to the meetings. The Ngaanyatjarra schools were part of the Goldfield district that were run from Karlgoorlie by one director. We asked to establish a separate education area so we had more autonomy for our schools. We also asked for a second area director. Instead of just a non-Indigenous person for the education side we wanted an Aboriginal person for the cultural Ngaanyatjarra side. After a few meetings, they agreed and we signed a memorandum of understanding. I became the Community Area Director, and Peter Blackwell was the Area Director, Education. We were the first two area directors for the Ngaanyatjarra Education Area. We worked really well together and I used to call Peter my twin. I loved my job but it was also very demanding. I travelled all the time, including a trip to attend the World Indigenous Education Conference in Calgary, Canada, in 2002. This was an extremely interesting experience. Carol Garlett, Gale Barrow and I, all from the West Australian Department of Education, went over to the conference together. They were two Noongar women from Perth. Carol was one of my supervisors. Both Carol and Gale worked in the Indigenous section of the education department. At the conference, there were many people from all over the world giving talks. Carol and I spoke about our language and the culture curriculum that we were setting up for the Ngaanyatjarra Lands. It was quite different from any other conference I had attended. It was held in an Indian reservation and there were tepees in which people had their talks. So instead of going from room to room, you went from tepee to tepee. There were over 100 of them. It was very new to me, and it was also very cold, even though it was summer time in Calgary. During the first year as the Community Area Director, I didn’t spend one full weekend at home in the Warakurna community. There were eleven schools Peter and I had to supervise, and they were all an hour or two drive from each other. We drove to all those communities

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and schools to talk to the teachers and look at their curriculum plans. There were many meetings, such as the Ngaanyatjarra Education Area meetings in the Ngaanyatjarra Lands, meetings in Kalgoorlie, and meetings in Perth… Always meetings! Never-ending meetings! At the end of 2002, my dad passed away and it really affected me. Dad’s passing, my marriage breakdown, leaving my daughters, too much work, and too many family and cultural obligations with both whitefellas and Aboriginal people all got on top of me. I had a nervous breakdown and had to resign from work. I was sick for a long time and even hospitalised for a while. Afterwards I moved back into my flat in Alice Springs. Mum and some of my sisters looked after me but I didn’t want my families around me and I didn’t want to live in Alice Springs either. I hated everyone and everything. I packed up all my things and took off to Adelaide where I stayed with my friend Joanne for about a year. Staying there and being on medication helped me get well again. I was also able to spend time with Lucy again who lived north of Adelaide at that time. Lucy was attending the University of Adelaide then, doing music. After that year I moved back to Alice Springs and worked at the Ngaanyatjarra Health Service, helping Astrid Baker educate young people about sexual health. We organised workshops in big communities and got Mary G to come over. Mary G is a man, Mark Binbarker, but he dresses up as a woman and has his own TV show. He gets people to talk about Indigenous issues in a culturally appropriate and fun way, using jokes. He gets people to talk about difficult issues in a way that makes people feel okay to talk about things that we would usually never talk about in our culture. Once I got over the marriage break up, I enjoyed being on my own, not having a man around all the time. You don’t have to be there, cook, do this, do that, do all the wifely duties that you have to do. There are times when I miss having a man around but it comes and goes. I am used to being on my own now. Of course, I was not really on my own because of all my family members living in Alice Springs.

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I wanted to leave Alice Springs for a while and live somewhere where I am not related to anybody. In our culture, family pressures due to kinship responsibilities can be very heavy. You are obligated to do certain things for certain kin. In the old days there was balance. People usually spent most of their time in small family groups, travelling around the country, living off the land. The only time they came together was for big ceremonies. That’s when you are called upon to fulfil those obligations. Today new presssures have emerged with community living and Western ways. Now people live together all the time and it can become very stressful. Some people have become constant beggars, professional askers. ‘Give me this, give me that, do this and do that, you’re my sister, I’m your uncle.’ They use kinship to force you to give things or make you do things against your will. Some people give everything they have, especially the old people and in particular for their sons, for the male members of their family, because we have a patriarchal society. Sons are considered more important than daughters. When I was younger, I thought girls and women got an unfair deal. Boys and young men had it easy; they weren’t punished as much as girls were during certain cases. For example, if a girl was loving somebody the wrong way according to the kinship rules, she would get a flogging and get married off to an old man that she didn’t love, whereas men wouldn’t get floggings or beatings. It’s always the woman who gets into trouble and gets a bashing from the family. I still think it is unfair. Nowadays, there’s a different type of violence — violence caused by alcoholism and boredom. When a society is dominated by another group that comes onto their land, there is a breakdown in the culture, especially with alcohol and marijuana. In most parts of Australia with Aboriginal people, you get a lot of alcohol-related violence and problems. In the Ngaanyatjarra lands, we have the Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Women’s Council to help women and children who are victims of violence. They have mainly women staff. Non-Indigenous women work with a marlpa, an Indigenous helper. They do a lot of work for women, children and familiies, such as law

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and culture meetings, work on petrol sniffing with young people, work on women’s issues and so on. They have a domestic violence section where my sister Daisy Ward worked. Now she is the Community Liaison Officer for the Ngaanyatjarra Schools, which used to be called the Ngaanyatjarra Education Area. It is difficult to help women who are being beaten up by their men. Most of the cases are alcohol and marijuana-related. Young men smoke marijuana, get stupid and bash their wives. My sister Daisy helped remove the women from their homes and took them into Alice Springs, or she helped them to leave their husbands or partners if the violence was not stopping. It was particularly difficult work because she is related to a lot of people in the Ngaanyatjarra lands. But she knew how to talk, and how to talk to the men as well, in a respectful and win-win sort of way. …………………………… In 2005, I visited my skin brother, Laurent Dousset, and his family in Geyssans near Valence, in the south of France. Laurent was one of my Ngaatjatjarra language students that I taught in Besançon in France in 1994. I knew him very well because he lived in my community while working with my family on his PhD. I had adopted him as a younger brother so he was instantly related to all of my immediate and extended family. My Mum and Dad called him ‘son’ and treated him the same as my siblings. I started writing this book during my visit. After coming back from France I adopted my great niece, Melanie Giles. I have become very fond of her and love her very much. We lived in Alice Springs but moved to Warakurna for a year and then to Tjukurla where we lived from 2010. Living in Tjukurla, back in the community, was good for Melanie and me. I worked for the West Australian Department of Education, helping teach our children language and culture at the school.

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I recently moved to Canberra with Melanie. I am now closer to my daughters, Lucy and Emma, and I am working with my colleague Ingre Kral at the Australian National University as an ARC Discovery Indigenous Research Fellow. I am happy there but I feel the need to go back to Tjukurla as often as I can. I want to continue teaching our children with the other women in the community, to teach our women’s business, our ceremonies, yawulyu, as we call them. Learning from mothers, aunties and grandmothers and older sisters and cousins about all the things a young Ngaatjatjarra woman needs to know living in the desert. The tradition, dancing, singing, storytelling, telling the important stories for our traditional land, caring for our land, passing on to the next generation our culture and language and just being able to talk in my mother tongue, is a blessing.

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Appendix 1:

Extract of Lizzie’s family tree

Triangles represent men, circles represent women. Black-coloured triangles and circles represent deceased people. Lines linking people from below represent marriage, while lines linking people from the top represent sibling-ship. Vertical lines from a person or from a marriage downwards link them to their offspring.

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Appendix 2

Glossary of Ngaatjatjarra words used

Ingkarta

Aboriginal preachers and pastors (a word borrowed from the Arrernte language)

kalkurnu

to promise, promised marriage, marriage after a promise; also in exchange of services and goods

kalyartu

namesake, the relationship between namesakes

kanyira

keep, host, have

kaparli

grandmother, grandaughter

kapi

water, waterhole, home, country

Karimarra

one of the four sections, social category system

karli

boomerang

karliny-karlinypa

grevillea nectar

karlkurla

bush bananas

katawirri

womens headbands made from hair string

kuka

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meat

Glossary

kulyu

yams

kumpu

urine

kumputjirtjirr

cockroach

kungkawara

female teenager

kunmanara

name for people whose name is taboo

kunmarnu

taboo, forbidden, not allowed to be spelled out, not allowed to be spoken; name for things whose name is taboo

kurli

summer, hot

kurri

wife, husband, spouse

kuturu

fighting stick

makarnpa

goanna summer burrow

maku

witchetty grubs

mamu

evil spirits, usually out at night

manta

funeral place where all get together and lie on the ground

maparn

an object with magical properties for healing; sometimes unseen

maparntjarra

magic person, healer, medicine person or doctor

mara yungku

shaking hands (after funerals)

marlany(pa)

younger sibling

marlpa

companion, friend, helper

Milangka

synonym of the section Karimarra

mimi

breast, breast-milk

minarri

type of grass

minyma

senior woman

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mirnu

young man, just after his manhood ceremony

mirrka

food

mukurringkula

Like, want, love

nanpa

belt made from hair string (for men)

ngaanya

‘this’

ngaatja

‘this’ for Ngaatjatjarra-speaking people

ngakulpa

game, knuckle jacks

ngalungku

men who have been through the manhood ceremony together, same age of children and adult in general

nganarti

co-wife

ngangkari

magic man/woman, medicine man/ woman (also maparn)

ngarlkilpa

Protectors, mediators in fights

ngarringka

overnight hunting trips away from main camp or community

ngayulurna

I (first person of the singular), also as suffix -rna

Ngumpaluru

‘shadeside’, one of the generational moieties

ngurra

home, one’s country, one’s place

nyamunu

eating while walking

nyangatja

‘this’ for Nyangatjatjarra and Pitjantjatjara-speaking people

nyirurru

evil spirits or ghosts, see also mamu

paaya (or paayi)

‘go away’, only used for dogs

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Glossary

palyarnmanku

to say ‘that’s alright, keep it’

pampurlku

touch/touching

pampurlpa

a respectful avoidance relationship between a man and a woman

Panaka

one of the four sections, social category system

papa

a dog

parakilya

a herb

parka parka

bush berries

pikatja

man/woman betrothal through ceremony (to marry)

pintalypa

green bush tomato with black seeds

pintupi / Pintupi

pronounced as ‘pintu pi’; exclamation of surprise which could be translated as ‘oh no!’ or ‘too many/much!’ Also ‘Pintupi’, the name of a language and people.

pirlurlku

jab the ground with a digging stick, usually in search of burrow

pirriya-pirriya

season, beginning of summer

piti

deep wooden bowl

pukurti

hair bun, for young men.

pulyu pulyu

bush berries

Purungu

one of the four sections, social category system

tawarra

single men’s (and widower’s) camp

tiltjarn

wart

Tingarri

special song cycle, ceremony

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tirlitjartu

‘undertaker’, active people at funerals, the deceased person’s brothers and sisters-in-law

tjaartupirr

black berries

tjamu

grandfather, grandson

Tjarurru

one of the four sections, social category system

tjilkamarta

echidna

tjinakarrpilpa

invisible feather-foot men

tjintja

storytelling stick, story wire

tjintjatjuranytja

storytelling through sand-drawing

Tjirntultukultul

‘Sunside’, one of the generational moieties

tjitji

child

tjukarurru

truth, right-way, also straight

Tjukurrpa

The Dreaming, the Law

tjuma

totem

tjukurritja

totemic sacred being, usually an animal

turlku

church service

waawurl(pa)

barking, to bark

wakalpuka

an acacia tree, last to survive in times of drought, also known as ‘Dead Finish’

waputju

father-in-law

warlku

quondong tree

warnapa

feather-foot men

warngurri

to deflect boomerangs and spears

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Glossary

warnngilku

marriage by forcefully grabbing, taking away

warri

winter

wati

adult man

wiltja

shade, traditional house

wiltja-wiltja

game, cubby-house

wirriny-wirrinypa

type of berry, grows on creeper

yararnpa

goanna summer burrow

yarlukuru

single women’s (and widows’s) camp

Yarnangu

Aboriginal person, human body

yarritjiti

the ‘coming out’ manhood ceremony

yawulyu

women’s ceremonies/business

yiirltjanku

to drink

Yiparrka

synonym of the section Panaka

yukari

niece (a woman’s brother’s daughter or a man’s sister’s daughter)

yukiri pakannyangka

‘when the grass has grown’ (end of some taboos towards deceased persons)

yumari

mother-in-law

yura

goanna winter burrow

yurrarn(pa)

mulga tree nectar

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Appendix 3

A brief overview of the  Ngaatjatjarra-speaking people

The Ngaatjatjarra language Language is an important aspect of peoples’ identities. However, Aboriginal people also say that languages were put onto the land by the Tjukurrpa (the Dreaming) beings and that they are therefore linked to specific areas and not necessarily only to people themselves.1 Lizzie Marrkilyi Ellis is a Ngaatjatjarra or Ngaatjatjarra-speaking person. Ngaatjatjarra is one of the dialects spoken in the Western Desert cultural bloc. The Western Desert is called a ‘cultural bloc’ because throughout the three deserts (Great Victoria, Gibson and Great Sandy), its inhabitants share a common background language but they also adhere to and practice many shared cultural traditions, modes of adaptation to the environment, or religious beliefs and practices. The dialects of the Western Desert are variations of one common background language spoken in the Great Sandy Desert, the Gibson Desert and the Great Victoria Desert in Central and Central-Western Australia (see Map 3). Unlike its dialects, the Western Desert language has no Indigenous name but is called the Wati language by linguists, chosen because in many of the dialects, the word wati designates an initiated adult male.

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Map 3: Approximate location of some of the Western Desert dialectal groups. The shaded area shows the rough extent of the cultural bloc, the numbers indicate the approximate location of some of the dialectal groups. Key2 1. Antakarinja

11. Ngaatjatjarra

2. Kokatha

12. Spinifex People, Ngalea

3. Kukatja

13. Ngarlawangka

4. Kuwarra

14. Nyanganyatjarra

5. Luritja

15. Pintupi

6. Manytjilytjara

16. Pitjantjatjara

7. Mardu

17. Tjalkanti

8. Wanudjara also Nakako

18. Wangkatha

9. Nana also Pini

19. Wawula

10. Ngaanyatjarra

20. Yankunytjatjara 21. Yulparitja

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The Wati or Western Desert language contains more than forty dialects,

including

Ngaatjatjarra,

Ngaanyatjarra,

Pitjantjatjara,

Yankunytjatjarra, Manytjilytjarra, Kukatja, Luritja, Pintupi, and Yulparitja or Kiyatjarra. The differences between these dialects are sometimes minor, as is the case between Pitjantjatjara and Ngaatjatjarra. However, others have a significant number of divergent words, expressions and pronunciations, such as between Yankunytjatjara in the south-east of the Western Desert and the various dialects spoken by the Martu people in the Jigalong area in the north-western part of the Western Desert, even though these various dialects remain largely mutually intelligible. The Wati language shows some grammatical and morphological similarities with other languages around the Western Desert and linguists classify them in sub-groups, groups and families of languages. The general group in which Wati is included is called Nyungic. This group is close enough to other similar groups to include them in a family of languages which is called Pama-Nyungan, covering about two-thirds of the Australian continent. All languages of the PamaNyungan family have similar features and can, so linguists say, be traced back to a common origin.

Desert hunter-gatherer societies Traditional Aboriginal Australians have been described by social scientists as ‘hunter-gatherers’. There were, and still are, huntergatherer societies in many parts of the world, for example in South East Asia, the Americas, Africa, and the northern polar region. Australia is considered unique because it was the only continent to be populated by groups following what was considered a single mode of adaptation: hunting and gathering, and fishing where possible. Anthropologists usually associate the hunter-gatherer societies with particular characteristics. The extent and intensity can vary from region to region and continent to continent, and there has been strong criticism expressed with regard to their validity because of this large

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amount of variation.3 However, they seem to generally apply to the Western Desert cultural bloc.

Food production and storage Hunter-gatherers do not usually raise animals for food or cultivate crops in gardens but hunt, fish and collect wild vegetables and fruit. Also, they only hunt and forage for the amount of food that is immediately needed or shared among the group. This is called an immediate return type of economic production and exchange system.4 In the Western Desert, the staple meat was goanna, a large lizard, which is hunted mostly by digging up its burrow. Kangaroos, wallabies, emus and wild turkey, as well as other birds and their eggs, were highly valued sources of protein, but are relatively rare. Meat, kuka, was the preferred food type and was mostly hunted by men. Mirka or nandanigarri, vegetable foods, were the staple of the daily diet collected mainly by women and children as they walked to the next camp, usually a kapi, a waterhole. Nandanigarri included yams, bush onions and bananas, fruits and various seeds, and most importantly cereals, in particular wild millet. These cereals were often ground, mixed with water, worked into a paste and then cooked into a damper in the coals of a campfire. Aboriginal

societies,

including

Western

Desert

groups,

are

considered ‘indirect horticulturalists’ because they intervene in the natural processes of animal and plant reproduction and growth. For example, parts of tubers are left in the soil so that a plant can regain its full strength in the next season, or people ensure that seeds fall into the right soil when harvesting them to ensure there is food when they next walk through the region.5 Aboriginal groups have also been called ‘fire-stick farmers’ and some are still actively engaging in this practice. The organised and extensive burning off of certain areas of land is a strategy for regenerating food sources by destroying weeds and other plants that may hinder their growth and productivity. Furthermore, the ashes produced by fires favour the growth of certain plant species.

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As a consequence of white settlement, most if not all, Western Desert communities purchase the bulk of their daily food needs from community shops that provide many Western types of food. However, hunting, mainly with guns, remains an important activity in providing meat, and people still go on bush trips collecting food and raw materials such as seeds for making traditional objects. This change has altered Aboriginal people’s economy from a system of exchange to relying heavily on cash income. However, employment opportunities have been and remain very scarce so families rely on pensions, family allowances and the sale of artefacts and paintings. Some communities also receive revenue from the tourist or mining industry or from land and reserve management programs. This income is redistributed to people in the community and their respective families, in particular through the process of demand sharing.6

Political system Most hunter-gatherer societies are considered egalitarian in spirit, having no chiefs or hereditary leaders but rather ‘situational’ leaderships, where those in charge vary according to the circumstances. Kinship relationships and seniority are the key to understanding who does what to whom, when, where, and to what effect. There is a difference between a ‘political system’ and ‘power’. If one understands by the notion of ‘power’ the capacity to take decisions in the name of a group, then there are much fewer opportunities for this in Aboriginal Australian societies than in Western societies, with the latter’s institutionalised political systems with local, regional and national power structures. However, religious importance and ceremonial status and role are factors that, in the Western Desert as elsewhere, provide some men and women with power. Generally speaking, the older a person is, the more respected their suggestions or decisions will be because experience and the cumulative acquisition of knowledge about land, sacred sites, beliefs and ceremonial protocol, provides the individual with prestige and respect. However, being a senior ceremonial person

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does not systematically enable someone to overrule the power of a younger person who has strong religious connections with a particular sacred site in question. In most cases, decision-making processes are long and complex, and based on the fundamental element of ensuring every person who is directly or indirectly concerned has been consulted and expressed their opinion. With settlement, Western types of systems of governance and accountability have been added to the traditional decision-making processes through the incorporation of communities and the establishment of regional representative bodies. Community chairmen and councils, as well as chairmen of regional bodies, are elected and vested with executive powers that do not necessarily reflect religious experience and knowledge but rather a person’s charisma and capacity to deal with Western administrative and political thinking.

Division of labour Generally, in hunter-gather societies, men and women possess all the skills considered appropriate to their gender, and they can make the tools and weapons they need to forage, hunt, or defend themselves. Men usually hunt or fish for large game while women usually forage for plant foods and fish and collect small game. However, in the Western Desert, men will also forage while out hunting, and women will hunt large game such as kangaroos by using a gun or their hunting dogs. Although the cutting up and sharing of meat is still mainly done by men. A strict gender division exists in certain ritual activities. As well as shared beliefs and ceremonies, men and women each have their own religious hierarchies and sacred objects, as well as their particular rituals that remain in part secret for the other gender. Also, in Western Desert and other Aboriginal societies, being a maparn or ngangkari (medicine man/woman, traditional healer, magician and sorcerer) is a very specialised skill that requires specific capacities that are either acquired through apprenticeship from another maparn, or inherited from a parent who is a maparn.

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Residence and demography Hunter-gatherers were or are usually nomadic, and do not have permanent settlements. They also usually lived in regions with low population densities. The absence of intensive production of food resources means that people move between areas with available natural resources, in particular waterholes. While this is largely true for the Western Desert, the reality of huntergatherer existence is or was not always straightforward. Some huntergatherer groups, in places such as tropical Arnhem Land (Northern Territory) and Cape York (Queensland), or along the large rivers of New South Wales, did not have to be far-ranging nomads thanks to their food-rich environment. Arnhem Land hunter-gatherers have a bigger demographic density than some horticulturalists in nearby Papua New Guinea, and some groups in Cape York were hardly nomadic. However, in the Western Desert, families often walked twenty kilometres or more a day over extended periods of time in an area of extremely low demographic density. Carrying some of their belongings and very small children, families travelled during the day, hunting and foraging at the same time, to reach the next kapi, waterhole, then build a yuu, a windbreak, or a wiltja, a shelter, in the evening, surrounded by a few fires. The Western Desert is one of the harshest environments ever inhabited by human beings before the industrial revolution. The unpredictability of the amount and location of rainfall is one of the reasons for the specific social and territorial organisation in the Western Desert, where rights of access to, and responsibilities towards, sites and areas in the landscape are acquired throughout life. Families, sometimes accompanied by elderly people or fostered children, travelled alone but regularly met up with other families travelling in the same area, making up a regional group. When climate and the environment allowed, several regional groups met to perform ceremonies, such as initiation rituals, that usually lasted days if not weeks. Being a member or descendent of a regional group, which is intimately tied to particular stretches of land and sacred sites, has

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remained a very strong element of identity today. Within communities, or even during events such as sports games, people camp or sit on the side closest to their country, that is, in the direction of their regional group membership.

Kin-based societies Hunter-gatherers have often been called ‘kin-based’ societies, in which kinship relationships are fundamental in the organisation of daily activities, economic exchange and decision-making. Although anthropologists, including myself7, have challenged the notion of ‘kin-based societies’, its importance in Aboriginal Australia is beyond doubt. Kinship is embedded in all aspects of social life, past and present, and every member of a given group or region is related to all the others by the web of kinship. The variability among so-called hunter-gatherer societies has led some scholars to reconsider the typology defining societies based on their modes of subsistence. Given the differences in the extent of nomadic practices, as well as those observed in residential and demographic patterns, it may not be appropriate to define societies using economic and technological characteristics. In modern times, because of the Westernisation of certain means and technologies, this characterisation has become even more questionable. In particular, even though Western Desert and other Aboriginal societies now live in settled communities and are adopting the cash economy, motorised transport and (at least partly) European-style housing, there remain important cultural differences with Western and other societies.

Affiliation to land Land is an important resource in many ways for all societies and especially for Australian Aboriginal people. Traditionally, it is the basis of existence, providing the economic resources and space for living. But it also incorporates the history and beliefs of the people,

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the symbolic and cultural values that are attached to them, as well as anchoring individual identities. For the Ngaatjatjarra people, like other Aboriginal groups, the land or country was shaped by the beings of the Tjukurrpa (the Dreaming), who are also at the origin of the rules and norms of human behaviour (the Law), languages and societies, and the natural species and phenomena. Land is not owned in the sense the Western world defines ownership. It is not an object, but is a central characteristic of the cosmos. People are not supposed to do what they like with land: they cannot sell it or give it away; and they cannot take important decisions with regard to the land unless they are in accordance with the Law dictated by the Tjukurrpa (the Dreaming), and they have consulted more generally with other people and kin who have similar responsibilities to the country. This particular relationship to land is not what Western societies would call ownership; rather it is one of custodianship. It is an affiliation to land, a belonging to land, and a responsibility towards the land. Custodianship and affiliation to land defines it as a central and fundamental element of their existence; without them, existence itself is hardly conceivable. Among Ngaatjatjarra people, being born into a family or regional group that has responsibilities towards stretches of land or particular sites provides a person with similar responsibilities. But there are other and, to some extent, even more important criteria that link people to places. A fundamental criterion is birthplace. Not so long ago, until the 1970–80s, expectant mothers withdrew from the group, accompanied by other women, to give birth to their babies. There is a strong link to ngurrara, to birthplace, as well as to the ngurra nyuntjintatja, the place where the umbilical cord falls off when it dries. Ngurra generally means ‘home’ or ‘homeland’, and when the suffix –ra (‘coming from’) is added, such as in ngurrara, it means the ‘place of origin’. Nyuntjin(pa) is the umbilical cord but also the centre of the circular, central ceremonial design. Together the birthplace and the place where the umbilical cord falls off and is buried constitute, along with the site of conception, a person’s most important spatial affiliations.

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Most babies are now born in hospitals, with the result that many children have identical birthplaces. Most often, the community in which the expectant mother was living just before giving birth is today considered to be the child’s homeland or home community. People have rights to visit and the duty to look after their birthplace as well as the place where their umbilical cord fell off. However, birth is not the starting point of a person’s existence. It is the place of conception that most importantly defines the individual as being part of a network of people and places related to the Tjukurrpa (the Dreaming). Western Desert people believe that every person is the embodiment of a spirit-child. These spirit-children were left behind by the Tjukurrpa beings during the Creation Time. They usually sit in trees, waiting to embody themselves first in an animal, or less frequently a plant, and then to enter the body of the mother-to-be as tiny humanoid beings. Once in the womb, they will soon be born as a human being. The site where the spirit-child enters the mother-to-be will become the baby’s conception site. Ngaatjatjarra people talk of this phase of their existence using the expression parkangka ngaralanytja (‘when I was sitting among the leaves of a tree’). The form in which the spirit-child appears before entering the mother’s body provides some understanding about which being is intended to become the baby’s conception totem, called tjuma. This conception totem is linked to particular sites in space for which the person-to-be will have responsibilities and to which they will be affiliated: it is the tjuma ngurra, the ‘totem place’. Because a spiritchild has always been left behind by a Tjukurrpa being, the story of this being and all the places, not just the conception site, visited by the being during the Tjukurrpa become significant elements of a person’s relationship with the landscape. Birthplace and conception sites are the most important criteria establishing a strong bond between a person and a place. But they are accumulative with other criteria, such as the parents’ and grandparents’ birthplaces or the place where a person spent most of their life, as well as a person’s religious and ritual knowledge for a site.

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Marriage and the obligation that stems from it may also play a role in the distribution of access privileges to sites in space. The more criteria a person accumulates for a specific place or region, the stronger is their claim to privilege over this site, and the more compulsory are his or her responsibilities for looking after it, such as cleaning the site, organising the ceremonies linked to it, etc. Another feature of affiliation to land for the Ngaatjatjarra, and for other Western Desert people, is the absence of strict territorial boundaries. Instead, affiliation to particular religiously important sites allow for flexibility. Clearly demarcated stretches owned exclusively by identifiable people or groups of people would be difficult to imagine in this arid area where people had to have the possibility of migrating in case of scarcity to areas more favoured by rainfall.8 It was, and still is today, important to develop solidarity and to allow mutual rights of access when drought may drive people out of their own territories. In this harsh environment, the sparseness and unpredictability of rainfall encouraged inclusive rather than exclusive cultural adaptations. Allowing people access to sites and sharing the resources of the land, result in the expectation that the host group can assume they will have the same rights in other circumstances. This type of non-exclusive territorial organisation ensures that families and groups throughout the desert have, to some extent, rights of mutual access and benefit from reciprocity.9 This network of shared and reciprocal access to resources is largely supported by a shared web of cultural meanings as well as kin and marriage relationships that criss-cross the Western Desert and link most, if not all, family, regional and dialectal groups to each other.

Kinship and relatedness 10 Kinship and social organisation, as can easily be appreciated in Lizzie’s account, are central to Ngaatjatjarra-people’s everyday life. Kinship contributes to defining normative behaviour (the way someone behaves towards a person) and the rights and obligations (such as the

140

A brief overview

obligation of sharing) of a person towards another. It also contributes to distributing roles and duties in rituals and funerals. As with all Aboriginal groups, Ngaatjatjarra kinship, is called ‘classificatory’ and is without limitation of range of extension. Every member of the society sits in a kin category following a clear and well-known mode of attribution. The use of kinship words, also called a kinship terminology, is not limited to close kin but extended to all members of a group and beyond. The range of people who are considered kin or family (yungarramarri in Ngaatjatjarra, walytja in Pitjantjatjara) is far broader than is the case in Western society. Each Ngaatjatjarra person has many mothers, fathers, uncles or cousins, each of whom sits in his or her category of kin following a set of rules that anthropologists call ‘bifurcate merging’.

Figure 1: Ngaatjatjarra kinship terminology of one’s own and one’s parents’ generation. Note: circles are females, triangles are males, lines linking people at the top mean sibling-ship, lines linking people at the bottom mean marriage, vertical lines from a person or from a marriage downwards link them to their offspring; Ego is the speaker 11

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Pictures from my memory

Looking at Figure 1, a father and a father’s brother are both called mama, and a mother and a mother’s sister are both called ngunytju. So a mother’s sister, unlike in the English system, is not an aunt but called ‘mother’. The only kurntili, aunt, in Western Desert terminology is an actual or distant father’s sister. Because you call your mother’s sister ‘mother’, her children are brothers and sisters to you and not cousins (you call them tjurtu and kurta just like your actual brothers and sisters). These are called parallel cousins by anthropologists. Children of someone you call kurntili, who is necessarily married to someone you call kamuru (uncle, a mother’s brother), on the other hand, are called watjirra (cousins) or kurri (spouse). These are called crosscousins. There is a further distinction with brothers and sisters. Older brothers are called kurta and older sisters are called tjurtu, but both younger brothers and sisters are all called marlany or marlanypa, irrespective of their gender. Also, the word nyarrumpa designates all siblings and parallel cousins of opposite gender to the speaker, irrespective of his or her own gender. In all bifurcate merging systems, the mother’s brother (kamuru) is in the same category as one’s father-in-law (waputju), and the father’s sister (kurntili) is in the same category as one’s mother-inlaw (yumari). However, one’s actual mother’s brother or father’s sister are never actual in-laws among the Ngaatjatjarra people because they are considered genealogically and often spatially to be too close. To distinguish those kamuru who can become waputju from those who cannot because they are too close, and to distinguish those kurntili who can become yumari from those who cannot because they are also too close, the word tiwangkatja is added. Kamuru tiwangkatja and kurntili tiwangkatja mean a ‘distant uncle’ and a ‘distant aunt’ respectively.

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Figure 2: Extract of the Ngaatjatjarra kinship terminology of a married man (left) and a married woman (right). The speakers are shaded (Ngayu is the first person singular). Kurri is the wife or husband, waputju the father-in-law, yumari the mother-in-law. Marutju is a man’s actual brother-in-law and tjuwari a woman’s actual sister-in-law.

In the generations of grandparents and grandchildren, only gender is distinguished: kaparli for females and tjamu for males. These terms are self-reciprocal if the speakers are of the same gender. Thus, a woman will call her grandmothers and her granddaughters kaparli, and they will call her kaparli in return. The same is true for men and their tjamu. However, not all groups have self-reciprocal terms in these generations. For example, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara people call their grandfathers tjamu while they call their grandsons pakali. Grandmothers are called kami and granddaughters puliri. We have seen that in a parents’ generation there are either mothers, fathers, uncles or aunts. Aunts are only father’s sisters and uncles are only mother’s brothers. It is the change of gender (from the father to his sister and from the mother to her brother) that creates the notable difference, the bifurcation. If we apply this principle to every generation, then we can extend the terminology indefinitely. For example, your mother’s mother’s sister’s daughter (your grandmother’s daughter) is a mother to you and, conversely, your mother’s mother’s brother’s daughter is an aunt or kurntili because there is a change of gender from your mother’s mother to your mother’s mother’s brother.

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Figure 3: Ngaatjatjarra grandparents and grandchildren kinship terms.

You can go up, down, left and right indefinitely through the genealogy, always applying this principle, to find out how every person stands in relation to the others. Ngaatjatjarra and other Western Desert people also know what are called ‘social category systems’. These are generational moieties and the section system (also called skin names), both of which are frequently referred to directly or indirectly by Lizzie in her book. A social category is composed of a set of individuals who share their membership to the category and distinguish themselves from others who sit in different categories. A social category system is encompassing, that is, every member of a group or society is born into one of the categories according to rules defined by the system. You cannot live in a society that has a social category system and not be a member of one of the available categories.

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There are several types of social category systems in Australian Aboriginal societies: generational moieties, moieties, semi-moieties, sections and subsections. Semi-moieties are rare and limited to the Gulf of Carpentaria and perhaps existed in the south-west of Western Australia in the past. Moieties and subsections are widespread, the latter especially in Central Australia among the Warlpiri and Arrernte people. Ngaatjatjarra people know generational moieties and sections.

Generational moieties Generational moieties divide society into two categories. Note that generation and age are different concepts. The age of a person depends on the date of birth, whereas generation is the place of a person in a genealogy. Generational moieties distribute all people of a society and beyond into two categories or moieties (Lizzie calls these halves). Each generational moiety includes members of alternate generational levels: a person is always in the same generational moiety as his or her brothers, sisters and cousins, his or her grandparents and his or her grandchildren. A person’s children and parents, on the other hand, are always in the other or opposite generational moiety. Among the Ngaatjatjarra people, these moieties are called Tjirntultukultul and Ngumpaluru.

Figure 4: Generational moieties

Generational moieties have great importance in ceremonies, as well as in daily behaviour. Generally speaking, someone may talk and sit next to a person of the same generational moiety, while they should show respect, restraint and a certain physical distance towards a person of the other generational moiety. In ceremonies, the roles of the members of each generational moiety are strictly distinguished.

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Sections or ‘skin names’ Sections are widespread in Australia and are used nowadays in an increasing number of languages. In the Western Desert too, sections have spread widely in the last two centuries and were adopted by the Ngaatjatjarra people during the first half of the nineteenth century.12 Western Desert people call them ‘skin names’ in English, but more appropriately yini (also meaning ‘name’), miri (also meaning ‘skin’, ‘skin colour’) and yara (also meaning ‘symbol’ or ‘metaphor’). Like generational moieties, sections are social categories: every person belongs to one of the four sections. Sections are a subdivision of generational moieties and divide society into four categories:

Figure 5: Distribution of people in the section system; each square is a section

Figure 6: The section system of the Ngaatjatjarra people

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A brief overview

Figure 6 shows the section system of the Ngaatjatjarra people. These sections have names, which are Karimarra, Purungu, Tjarurru and Panaka. Alternatively, Karimarra has as a synonym Milangka, and Panaka is the synonym for Yiparrka. The Karimarra and Purungu sections are members of the Ngumpaluru generational moiety mentioned earlier, while the Tjarurru and Panaka sections are members of the Tjuntultukultul moiety. Vertical arrows link the mother to the child, diagonal arrows the father to the child, and the equal sign means marriage. For example, a Karimarra woman marries a Purungu man, and they have Tjarurru children. The latter will marry Panaka husbands and wives. Sections make it possible to identify the general kinship relationship in which each person stands to another. For example, if a person is Tjarurru and meets a man who is Karimarra, then he or she knows that the latter is a mother’s brother or a father-in-law.

Contact with the Western World Human occupation in the Western Desert spans a history of at least 25,000 years.13 With the spread of Europeans to the far reaches of the globe, however, most hunter-gatherers abandoned their traditional mode of subsistence in the wake of colonisation, settlement policies, loss of traditional lands and the adoption of new cultural elements. However, these changes do not necessarily lead to a systematic change in all other cultural features. In the Western Desert, as elsewhere in Australia, hunting and gathering are no longer the dominant ways of living and people today rely heavily on commercially acquired food and other goods, even though they still go on regular hunting and foraging trips. Nevertheless, in varying degrees, Australia’s Indigenous cultures still reflect strong traditional elements of kinship, language and culture. Culture — the ways of thinking, acting and feeling shared by a group of people — is essentially dynamic, with change of some kind as a constant. However, change is not the opposite of continuity or

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tradition. Many Western pioneers and government officials believed in the early days of colonisation that the adoption of elements of European material culture would cause Indigenous culture to disappear. These same people would today be surprised to observe the continuing strength of commitment to elements of Aboriginal culture and to realise that this culture is flexible, able to readily accept and integrate certain foreign elements while resisting others.14 Contact between radically different societies, such as huntergatherers and capitalists, leads to more rapid and often painful change than in cases of sustained exchange between people sharing the same mode of adaptation and a similar cultural background. This difference is not solely a result of the huge contrast between these various adaptations; it is also because of very diverse symbolic systems and worldviews that attribute different values and meanings to different things and that contribute to legitimise unequal power relationships and exploitation. Where Europeans successfully colonised new land in Australia, cattle were most often the driving factor. However, the Western Desert is so arid that Europeans did not invade it during the initial stages of colonisation. The few early explorers who did manage to survive their ordeal loudly warned others against the area’s lack of water and supplies. As a result, many parts of the area did not experience direct, sustained contact with Western missionaries and authorities until about the 1920s. Hermannsburg Mission, on the eastern limit of the desert, had been established long before, in 1877, just a year after the explorer Ernest Giles became the first European to cross the Western Desert. However, Mt Margaret Mission, in the western part of the desert, was established by the United Aborigines Mission in 1921, then Balgo Mission in 1939, Warburton Mission, in the very heart of the Western Desert, in 1934 and Jigalong in 1946. Cundeelee was founded as a ration depot in 1939 but became a mission in the 1950s. Missionaries were the first to surround and then penetrate the desert in just twenty-five years.

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From the late 1940s onwards, the Australian authorities made their appearance in the region with the Weapons Research Establishment (WRE) in Maralinga in the Victoria Desert, and later with a meteorological and radar station at Giles in the Rawlinson Ranges, Gibson Desert. The WRE became responsible for making the last ‘first contact’15 with Indigenous people in the area, among them the Ngaatjatjarra.16 From 1952 onwards, the WRE aimed to test atomic explosions and later fired ballistic rockets across the Western Desert. These military experiments were the reasons for grading tracks throughout the desert and establishing the meteorological station named Giles in the Rawlinson Ranges in 1956. The presence of the Giles Meteorological Station meant that government officials, such as Native Patrol Officers, would visit and establish themselves in the Western Desert. The existence of graded tracks facilitated the transport of many nomadic families to missions and settlements, such as Haasts Bluff and Papunya in the Northern Territory and Warburton Mission in Western Australia.

Map 4: Map of the areas of the Weapons Research Establishment’s activities

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At the same time, certain areas in the Western Desert were declared ‘native’ or ‘natural’ reserves. In the Northern Territory, the Petermann Reserve was established in 1920, the Haast Bluff Reserve in 1940, and the Lake Mackay Reserve in 1957. In South Australia, the NorthWest Reserve was created in 1921. In Western Australia, the Central Reserve was established in 1918 and expanded in 1934 to include Warburton. It was further extended in 1958 to the north of the existing reserved area. Later, Balgo (Balwina), Kiwirrkurra and the North Central Reserves were added. Reserve number 17614 in the Western Australian part of the Victoria Desert, what is called Spinifex Country, was declared in 1920, even though no Western official had visited the area by this time. The general understanding was that these reserves should preserve what officials believed to be a vanishing Aboriginal culture until the means to assimilate the remaining people into Australian society in general were arranged. Western Desert people reacted to these intrusions over time by moving, group by group, from their desert heartlands to various missions and ration depots. However, a few years later, people returned to their homelands. In 1976, a meeting of the Pitjantjatjara, Yankunytjatjara and Ngaanyatjarra peoples resulted in the creation of the Pitjantjatjara Council Incorporated, whose task was primarily to fight for Aboriginal land rights.17 Because Aboriginal lands lay within three different European domains — two states, Western Australia and South Australia, and the Northern Territory, administered by the federal government in Canberra — the council was advised to prepare three more or less independent land claims. The claimed area in the Northern Territory was successfully handed back within the Northern Territory Land Rights Act (NT) 1976, which was the first legal framework recognising Aboriginal people as traditional landowners, but it was limited to the Northern Territory. Claims in South Australia were recognised with the Pitjantjatjara Land Rights Act (SA) 1981. On the other hand, in Western Australia, the struggle for being recognised as the original custodians took much longer. The Western Australian government

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only much later agreed to meet with the Ngaanyatjarra Council to discuss and consent to the restitution of the last part of the old Central Reserves. In 2000, the southern part was handed back to the Spinifex People, in 2001 the northern part was returned to the Kiwirrkurra people and, finally, in 2005, the remaining central areas, including Warburton and Giles, were handed back to the traditional owners under the name Ngaanyatjarra Lands. Today, Western Desert people are represented by various local Indigenous organisations, even though the Ngaanyatjarra Council and the Central Deserts Native Title Services have recently become the recognised representative bodies for a large section of the area. These regional organisations are often the consequence of, and response to, local conditions and national or state government policies and pieces of legislation, and they do not always systematically express distinguishable cultural identities of groups and families. Despite these organisations and the establishment of distinct communities, the homogeneity of some cultural elements that all members of the Western Desert recognise is a major unifying factor. The Ngaatjatjarra people live today in several communities: Tjukurla, Wanarn, Warakurna and Patjarr. Some Ngaatjatjarra people also live in Kintore and Kiwirrkurra, further to the north, in Docker River and Mutitjulu to the east, as well as in Warburton and further to the west.

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Notes 1. Also see Alan Rumsey, ‘Language Groups in Australian Aboriginal Land Claims’, Anthropological Forum, vol. 6, no. 1, 1989, pp. 69–79. 2. Note that there is considerable discussion on the names and spellings of the dialectal groups. Those used in this map seem to represent some consensus, but may not necessarily reflect all Indigenous peoples’ and linguists’ opinions. 3. See for example Robert L Kelly, The Foraging Spectrum: Diversity in HunterGatherer Lifeways, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington & London, 1995. 4. James Woodburn, ‘Egalitarian Societies’, Man (NS), vol. 17, 1982, pp. 431–51. 5. See for example Jane C Goodale, ‘Production and Reproduction of Key Resources Among the Tiwi of North Australia’, in NM Williams & ES Hunn (eds), Resource Managers: North American and Australian hunter-gatherers, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra, 1986, pp. 197–210; or RG Kimber, ‘Beginnings of Farming: Some Man-Plant-Animal Relationships in Central Australia’, Mankind, vol. 10, no. 3, 1976, pp. 142–50. 6. Nicolas Peterson, ‘Demand Sharing: Reciprocity and the Pressure for Generosity among Foragers’, American Anthropologist, vol. 95, no. 4, 1993, pp. 860–74. 7. Laurent Dousset, ‘There never has been such a thing as a kin-based society’, A Review Article, Anthropological Forum, vol. 17, no. 1, 2007, pp. 61–9. 8. See for example Robert Tonkinson, The Mardu Aborigines: Living the Dream in Australia’s Desert, Case Studies in cultural Anthropology, New York, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1991. 9. See for example Fred R Myers, ‘Always ask: resource use and land ownership among Pintupi Aborigines of the Australian Desert’, in WH Edwards (ed), Traditional Aboriginal Society, Macmillan, Melbourne, 1990, pp. 96–112. 10. I can only very briefly introduce the reader to the complexities of the Western Desert kinship system. For a fuller but easy to read introduction, read Laurent Dousset, Australian Aboriginal Kinship: An introductory handbook with particular emphasis on the Western Desert, pacific-credo Publications Marseille, 2011a. 11. F=Father  ; M=Mother  ; B=Brother  ; Z=Sister  ; S=Son  ; D=Daughter. Thus FZD is a father’s sister’s daughter (a cousin).

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Notes 12. See Laurent Dousset, Assimilating Identities: Social Networks and the Diffusion of Sections, Oceania Publications, Monograph 57, Sydney, 2005. 13. Mike Smith, The Archaeology of Australia’s Deserts, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2013. 14. See for example Robert Tonkinson, ‘Aboriginal ‘difference’ and ‘autonomy’ then and now: four decades of change in a Western Desert society’, Anthropological Forum, vol. 17, no. 1, 2007, pp. 41–60. 15. See Sue Davenport, Peter Johnson & Yuwali, Cleared out: First contact in the Western Desert, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 2005. 16. For an account see Laurent Dousset, Mythes, missiles et cannibales: Le récit d’un premier contact en Australie, Société des Océanistes, Paris, 2011. 17. P Toyne & D Vachon, Growing up the country: The Pitjantjatjara struggle for their land, McPhee Gribble, Penguin Books, Ringwood, Victoria, 1984.

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