Finding home

There are many things I want to do this year, I have big plans and I finally feel like I’m in the right place to start them.

Things like learning German, growing my bee business and committing to yoga every single morning.

But the one I’m going to tell you about, the resolution I’m sticking to this year, is about cultural identity. It’s going to take a bit of background story to help you understand why this is such a big deal for me, so please hang in there.

Australia is home to over 25 million people, and the indigenous population of Australia sits at about 3% of that.

Aboriginal Australians have been here for more than 60,000 years. It was only 200 years ago that white settlers arrived.

When the colonisers came, it brought about a terrible history for the indigenous people. Genocide, rape, displacement, torture, slavery and children being ripped from their parents arms.

For a lot of people, this history has lead to lost languages and customs, being secretive of aboriginal heritage, a deep generational grief and even the extinction of some tribes.

I am an Aboriginal Australian, a woman of the Barkandji tribe of western NSW by the banks of the Darling River.

That information about who I am, that single sentence, took me decades to put together.

For me, cultural identity has been a very difficult part of my life.

My Dad stayed out bush while my Mum and I went to live at the coast. I was a baby in the bush, I don’t remember any of it. I remember little houses squeezed in next to each other with traffic roaring by, being a few minutes walk to all the shops and the hustle and bustle of inner-city life.

I grew up with my white mum. I had my white grandparents and a white, techy uncle who loved to watch all the kids’ movies with me. All our family friends were white.

I didn’t see the difference. To me, my mum was my mum, my grandma was my grandma and of course the whole world could look at us and know we’re related. But it just didn’t work that way.

When my mum was a teenager, she was a nanny and got to look after the most precious little babies. Strangers would approach her and ask her what her baby’s name was and how she was finding motherhood. She’d always tell them that she was just the nanny.

So when she had her very own baby, she couldn’t wait for the questions. She was so excited to say, ‘I made this! I love her and isn’t she just perfect?’. But no one asked. Everyone assumed she was the nanny.

When I go out with my grandmother, and she takes me to lunch, there’s confusion at the counter when we order next to each other and she makes clear that she is paying for my meal too. I can see the cogs turning inside their heads as they try to process why that old lady is paying for that woman’s meal too, so I loudly proclaim that she is my grandmother and watch as the confusion melts away.

When I was a kid I spoke to my dad on the phone every few weeks. He always called for special days and I never felt like I was missing anything in the father department. My dad is my dad and I love him. It didn’t really matter to me that he wanted to stay out bush instead of coming to live in the city.

He’d come up to visit every few years, and we went down there once or twice.

What I learned as I grew up was that people saw me differently. They saw the brown skin, dark eyes and dark hair. And that’s what they saw first.

My mum tried really hard to get me involved in the aboriginal community around me. She tried to get information for me, but what we found was it wasn’t her place to be given that information in the first place.

I grew up knowing nothing of my heritage, but the world expected me to have some cosmic connection with every rock and twig. English was supposed to be my second language and I should have secret women’s business to attend to away from prying eyes.

I remember a day at school when I was around 6 or 7, and we had a birthday boy in class that day. We all sung happy birthday to him, and I think he may have brought in a cake for afterwards. Another boy in the class was Korean, and the teacher talked him into singing Happy Birthday in Korean in front of the class.

Almost as soon as he started singing, my friend Christopher turned to me and started poking me and saying I should get up next to sing.

Sing what, may I ask? I had no other language than English. But in that moment, a deep shame set in to my 5 year old self. ‘Of course this is something I should know,’, I thought. So rather than admit I knew nothing, I started to sing made up words under my breath as if I did have another language, but I was just too shy to get up in front of the class.

And that was my first real experience with being different. Not that I really was different than anyone else, I had basically the same upbringing as them, but when they looked at me they expected that I was having to try hard to fit into their culture. That I had something more behind me. But I didn’t.

In highschool when I’m 15 years old, I get invited to join my schools’ indigenous group called Wanthala. There’s about eight of us in total, but all the other girls are a few years above me and already friends, so it’s hard to feel included. But they were always kind, always talked to me and it felt nice.

Sometime later in the year the teacher running Wanthala set about making a short documentary of the Wanthala group and the girls in it. So we had someone follow us with a camera around class and learn what we were doing. Then, it was played at assembly in front of the entire senior school.

Eight girls, a 20 minute long documentary, so you’re thinking about two and a half minutes per girl, right?

The thing was, almost all the girls were boarders. English was their second language. They did leave in remote communities in outback Australia. But I didn’t. I lived a 5 minute train ride away from the school. I didn’t need help with my English, because it was the only language I knew. I was in that documentary for about 30 seconds. And it really hurt. And it really confused me.

My school was my community. These are the people who I identified as aboriginal to. But it made me feel like no one saw me. I didn’t count because I wasn’t black enough. Who cares about a suburban aboriginal?

So these experiences, along with countless “So where are you from?” (capitol city answers not accepted) drove me to just feel awful any time cultural heritage was brought up.

Fast forward to a phone call with my Dad a few years after the documentary. My Dad told me our mob were the Barkindji. Up until that point I thought our history was lost. I didn’t even know he knew our tribe’s name.

I tried for a few months to google up information, poured over old newspapers for articles from the 40s, visited organisations that were supposed to help you find your family history, but the reality was I was a teenager who had a lot of homework and a part-time job at Dominos. I was beaten down and didn’t have it in me to keep fighting to find out who I was.

So I left it for a few years. Kept ticking the little boxes on government forms, but just didn’t engage. Didn’t try. Let sleeping dogs lie.

That is, until my daughter, my beautiful little girl, came home from school and said to me, “Did you know aboriginal people exist? Like, they’re real people, not made up.”.

“I know, you are one,” I blurted out.

I hadn’t realised I’d closed her off from that. Hadn’t realised that my hurt and shame had meant real consequences for her.

Since then we’ve been learning words from the Barkindji language, we’re watching little snippets about our artists, and learning more about our people.

So finally, you’re going to hear my resolution for the year.

It’s to keep going. To try not to give us. Keep reading aboriginal people’s stories. Keep learning Barkindji words.

I’m also going to work hard to and save up enough money to go and visit my Dad every year. Like I said before, it never bothered me that he chose to remain in the bush, but I never really considered why. After learning about our mob, after piecing the timeline together, I now realise that he probably didn’t have much information either. By my age, his aboriginal mother had passed away. His little outback town is actually only a stone’s throw from the Barkindji territory, and his home backs on to the Darling River.

My daughter wants to know the other indigenous students at her school, so I made a resolution to make that happen for her.

I’m going to make a group for the indigenous students of her school so that they can have a community around them. If they have information they can share, wonderful. If they don’t, they can learn about our mob and the people who’s land their school is built on. It will be a safe and inclusive place with no preconceptions about their little lives. No judgement on whether they have fair skin and blue eyes, or no family knowledge of their ancestors.