Because of her...

I pay my respects to Elders, past, present and emerging

I’ll just let those words mellow in your mind for a time…

Respect, acknowledgement, recognition. Acknowledgement of country is a heart centred practice to me. It’s not the procedural compliance that some of my peers perceive it to be. I’ve been known to weep openly in the speaking of the words. Falling into the sheer grace and tender surrender of the pain and strength that has come before us.

This acknowledgement recognises the unique and deeply important role Aboriginal people in Australia have played in terms of my personal, and our collective, understanding of history and the privileged life I am blessed with. Particularly as a women with my feet sinking into the earth on this glorious country.

There is much more to this concept for me though. There is a deeply ingrained gratitude for the lessons I have been gifted about family and bringing them up good. Of being a women, a wife and mother. The powerful role women play in birthing, growing and nurturing our emerging leaders whilst continuing to emerge and flourish myself. I’m still learning but the ground beneath me is strong.

I pay my respect to Elders, past, present and emerging...

I love listening to the old ones. Lunch with the Elders is like my Christmas with the exchange of lyrical stories and laughter. Love for each other and their history. Though woven through the song lines is a sadness for what has come before and what currently is. The knowledge that many will never be able to understand the deep trauma history has impaled upon their souls persists.

I’ve heard tales of life where white people would cross to the other side of the street simply because of the color of our Elders skin or to avoid a common human exchange. The shame and welts of the ego this must have caused draws sorrow from my chest. I’ve been with friends, students just like I was at the time, out shopping. I’ve watched store clerks follow their every move while I could have literally walked out with half the store unchecked. This occurred without even knowing my friend and I were two sides of the same coin. Grown from the same earth. Just with different shades of skin. That friend is now a nurse who protects your families with such gentle care.

And I am held in her grace.

I have nieces told they’re pretty for a black girl because of their light skin or dyed and straightened hair. You think that’s a complement. She feels shame for her origin story and for feeling the needs to put on the majority mask in order to gain acceptance as a minority. In the next breath, she is called a coconut by her own people. More shame. She continues to raise her beautiful chin and smiles that lovely wide grin people like to photograph and make into posters and advertising.

And I bask in her grace.

One particular story from our Elders has stuck in my mind. The Aboriginal Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act (1897) in Queensland gave the government power to oversee the ‘protection & care’ of Aboriginal people. In practice, this amounted to indentured, mandatory work placements in labor intensive service positions and garnered wages amongst a raft of other atrocities. Lucy was required to ask for permission to access any of her wages and was given food provision that were deemed appropriate to meet her basic needs while she toiled to ensure the wants of those she served were held in the highest regard.

At the time Lucy was working at the local hospital. Long hours, hard days. Her husband was placed on a property in another rural town some hours away. The couple were overjoyed one day to learn he was coming to town on business with the property manager. Lucy, young and much in love, wanted to look pretty when they stole some brief time together. It’s such a simple and lovely wish. One I can recall for myself in days gone by. She had a colleague help write a letter, taking it to the protector asking for money to buy a new dress. She was granted a quarter of what she asked for, a tiny request to begin with, and got herself something within her means.

When I asked how that felt, absorbing the waves of grief filling my throat, she smiled and told me of her happiness and joy in finding something nice for a tidy price. That her husband had told her how lovely she looked. How the sight of her soothed his ache. It devastated me. This joy. She felt this was enough. This was a good day. I thought of how I would feel having to beg for my own money. The rage this brings continues to roar up my spine.

I bow to her grace.

I remember asking one of the Aunties in a community I worked in for a time why she swept the dirt in front of her house, not thinking there would be deeper wounds laying beneath this earth. She stopped and looked at me. ‘Habit’ she threw back. I watched her for a moment longer sitting on the ground next to where she was working, drawing lines in the dust. She squatted next to me and told a story of how habits are formed through fear.

Raised by her Grandmother and Mother she remembered the fear held by the children as they watched cousins and friends being taken by the ‘welfare’. Often they didn’t understand why. They had little in possessions but were bountiful in love, care, food, connections and culture. The mothers and grandmothers carried this fear, their houses already clean. This unknowing flowed into their days. They started sweeping the dirt in front of the house. Keeping things tidy. Doing better. Being better. The fear stayed. More children were taken away. Lost.

The women wept but gathered closer. Aunties, cousins, all in the same house. This was how family worked. Protection, love, community. White people call this ‘over-crowding’. They value space rather than connection. More children were taken. Difference became wrongness. The larger injustice being that many of the women before her had been taken away from their own little ones in order to care for the children of white families. This alone makes no sense. None of it does but this astounds.

I drew in her grace.

The greatest lessons I have learnt have formed me as a mother. Having raised children born of my body and some not. I have flowed through the care of family like water around rocks. These experiences created a searching for a broader, more complex palette surrounding the concept of family. I have learnt lessons of blood lines, family and land. Of collective communities where there are no half or step or other. Family is family between and throughout generations, if love, care and connection is present. It is grown rather than appointed. This is a loving, love-filled state of being. The sum of our parts making our whole.

My soul sighs with the grace of this beauty.

No matter how far away from tradition I stray there is some type of cultural muscle-memory steeped through ancestry that draws me back to Country as if to salve a wound. I don’t really understand it to be honest but I have felt it. The hum of feet on Country. I’ve heard the Old Ones throw the grab ‘it’s in ya blood’ and claims it ‘calms our spirit’ but to me it feels deeper than the physicality of blood and more guttural than the wind. I feel it in the very vibration of my essence and truth. A connection to ground, grounding down, grounding me down. It is the physical, outward manifestation of mind, heart, and breath rooting my ego deep into the earth. For want of a better explanation it is where I glimpse peace, not yet contentment, but definitely a touch of ease.

When you hear an Aboriginal women, Elder or one of our generation alike, speak with passion or advocate for herself and her people take a momentary pause. Just a breath before your mind skates to thoughts of her anger or unpalatable spitting fierceness, a cultural norm of its own. Thoughts that there is ‘just no need for disrespect and blame’ because ‘I’ve done no harm’ that the privileged often have. Take a brief beat to remember these stories through history, and sadly the continuing narrative of today at times.

As one women to another it pays to connect to the powerlessness and control exerted over past generations. Harm to body and spirit. Breathe in the pain carried through the blood of mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers. Broken down in a shame not of your own making. Do this while picturing your own mother or grandmother ridiculed and stripped bare. Used until there was only rawness. Taken away from husbands and babes to work for another family. No money, no rights. No worth. Begging and joyful for any mere scrap of humanity.

Then acknowledge the sheer grit and determination that has allowed Aboriginal women and Elders to rise. Not just rise but to come into their own. Supporting communities, changing policy and narrative with a strength and force that is undeniable. All this whilst continuing to softly, gently educate those willing to listen with nothing more than a mere whisper.

In the words of an Elder from my community “We did not cause the problem. White people caused the harm and now you look to us to fix it. We will care for our own. In our own way. In our own time and not because you said we must”.

I pay my respects to Elders past, present and emerging as it is because of her I can.

And with grace I will.