Dancing the mighty Murray back to health (article for The Koori Mail - Issue 700 - 08 May 2019)

Tradition and ceremony returned to Mungabareena near Albury recently with the arrival of the Ringbalin – Dancing The River tour.

The tour is an initiative of Elder Uncle Major ‘Moogy’ Sumner and the Tal-Kin-Jeri dancers from Ngarrindjeri country. It was organised to celebrate the United Nations Year of Indigenous Languages, as well as for singing up the great Murray River to heal it from the well-publicised problems the Murray-Darling system faces.

“The reason that we’re here is to dance and ask the ancestors to bring the water all the way down to our country at the Murray mouth,” Uncle Moogy told the crowd gathered on the banks of the river at Mungabareena, which is a sacred meeting place for the local Wiradjuri people, located east of present-day Albury.

“The Coorong is supposed to be a mixture of river water and ocean water coming through the Murray mouth. The Coorong looks like the ocean now. There’s jellyfish on the shores. Later there’ll be sharks there.”

At sundown, local Wiradjuri Elder Aunty Edna Stewart gave Uncle Moogy and the dancers a warm welcome to Bungambrawatha (Albury), which she explained meant ‘homeland’ to the local people.

“It’s nice to see ceremony here in our sacred place by the river and to see the local community involved,” she said.

The mob gathered there enjoyed performances of a number of special dances, including those about Emu story, Kangaroo, Tiger Hawk, Whale, Swan Egg gathering and picking berries.

Uncle Moogy took special care to get the attention of the children in attendance by explaining the dances and why they are important.

“The river law joins all us river people together,” he said. “If we all ask the river ancestors country. together, we can heal this river. It is important to hand down our stories to the children, then they can hand them down to their children and grandchildren not born yet. That only happens through ceremony, like the one here tonight.”

The performances also included a local Wiradjuri dance troupe from nearby James Fallon High School. Even though the students had previously performed at a number of big cultural events, such as the National Multicultural festival in Canberra, they had never performed in a traditional sunset ceremony before.

The visiting dancers exchanged techniques with the local troupe, with both groups gaining appreciation of each other’s culture. Afterwards, the local dancers called the event special and said they loved performing with their new friends.

Aside from the Ringbalin dancing tour, Uncle Moogy is standing as a South Australian candidate for the Senate in the upcoming federal election for the Australian Greens Party.

He is a board member of both the Ngarrindjeri Regional Authority board and Black Dance Australia.

After Mungabareena, the Ringbalin – Dancing the River tour continued to make its way down the Murray stopping at Wood Wood, Mildura and Wellington before finishing at Goolwa on the Easter weekend.

Details of the tour can be found at www.tal-kin-jeri.org/ringbalin-2019.

Uncle Moogy’s Senate campaign website is https://greens.org.au/sa/person/major-moogy-sumner

Change the date? But we aren't Australian... (written in 2020)

This article was written for Junkee so it is shorter than my usual length.

Aboriginal people aren't Australian. That's because Australia is a British invasion. So, to us, it doesn't really matter what day the invaders celebrate their arrival/origins. What matters to us is that we are still forced to be Australian. We can't "exit" Australia. Why not? We clearly need our own separate Aboriginal nationhood. We need to share the continent with Australia in a condominium arrangement with them. Separate but equal. Their courts, parliaments and police will no longer have any power over us. We'll own all the land though, the freeloading they've enjoyed will cease. Party time is over. Pay the rent. Separate jurisdiction. Condominium.

This is the dream. Here we go again. It seems that every year now, we re-engage the uncomfortable debate about Australia Day. Over on one side, there’s the tradition. Why muck around with proud Aussies being proud of being proud Aussies? On the other, an uneasiness about celebrating the brutality of a bunch of foreigners breezing in and taking over an entire continent with barely a second thought for the inhabitants and actual owners of the place.

There doesn’t appear to be a middle ground. On both sides, black and white entrench themselves and slug it out on the frontline of the culture wars. However, there is also another side to this debate. One not often spoken of, except perhaps in Aboriginal yarning.

My name is Greg Page and I am Yuin from Warrung (Sydney). My community is La Perouse (Guriwal) on Botany Bay (Gamay). I’m a proud staunch Koori man. My own view of Australia Day is not one you’ll hear widely expressed in the mainstream. But what follows is a valid Koori perspective on the Australia Day “problem”: To put it quite bluntly, I’m not interested at all in “changing the date”. I’m not interested at all in changing the flag, changing the head of state, the official language, in changing the British legal system the invasion has imposed upon this continent, or changing any of the other colonial embellishments the original arrivals decided would be for the best to bring ‘civilisation’ to our sacred continent. These things are what the nation state called ‘Australia’ is founded on. It is the white Australian origin story on this continent. It is where they came from.

That is indisputable. It is fact. But that is not our Koori story. It doesn’t represent who we are as Aboriginal people. Quite the opposite. Theirs is a creation story reflected by mandate in the various institutions of state. Everything reinforces the antipodean British national creation narrative. At the apex sits the British crown and the its local proxy, the federal parliament itself.

This is why I also oppose the present push for an Indigenous Voice to the Parliament. The Australian parliament was never designed for us and will never represent us. Tacking on an a toothless Indigenous appendix body as an afterthought is an ultimately regressive action which diminishes the greatest hope for most Aboriginal people. Wherever researchers and advocates went to listen to Aboriginal people about what they wanted in the potential Constitutional amendment, those people said with a unified voice one simple word: Sovereignty.

Sovereignty, meaning Aboriginal people deciding how we will govern ourselves. It means having a safe distance between our communities and the will of ‘Australia’ being imposed upon us. For too long, Australians have assumed that Aboriginal people will eventually get used to Australia and want to join in nation building so we can all live as one big happy nation under the benevolent British crown. This completely ignores the reality that the British crown itself is our biggest problem: ‘Australia’ isn’t a result of the British invasion of 1788. For us, Australia is the invasion.

Think about that for a second.

None of the institutions of actual power on this continent are Aboriginal. None of the parliaments, courts, police, military, public service, prisons, universities, emergency services, etc. All are either directly or indirectly run out of the British crown. Out of the invasion. This simple fact is also reflected in Australia’s national holidays, not just Australia Day but also Christmas, Easter, New Year, Queen’s Birthday, Labor Day, etc… None of them are Indigenous to this continent.

All stem from the will, desires and culture of the invader. Again, just like the institutions, the national days are an extension of the creation myth. For us, sovereignty would mean that Aboriginal people would enjoy having our own parliament/s. Our own courts. Our own police force. Perhaps beginning simply with our own university (the Catholics have their own publicly funded multi-campus national University, why not us?) Sovereignty would mean we would have strong frameworks in place to decide what is best for our communities. It would mean that we would finally have safe spaces for our cultural practices to flourish again, away from the white hot spotlight of ‘Australian values’ judging us by inherited (foreign) British values. Sovereignty would also mean we respect the history of the newcomers.

Means we honour their history and creation story because it isn’t ours and ours isn’t theirs. Mutual honesty and truth-telling. The first fleet was no more Aboriginal than we as Koori people were British. To try and merge the two into one is clumsy at best, and in many ways an historical deception. Australia must one day realise that the sure and certain will of Aboriginal people is to have our own will represented in our own institutions on our sacred continent.

Institutions of governance and actual power, just as Australia has theirs proudly modelled on their British past. I understand some reading this will claim this sounds like ‘apartheid’. That betrays a shallow understanding of what apartheid actually is. We do not seek to dominate Australia by separating from it. We seek a share of actual power in a way the old South Africa never did. Aboriginal sovereignty is coming. It is the will of our people, articulated clearly time and again. I call on Australians to embrace it and, in doing so, be proud of their own special creation day. In short, don’t change the date, there’s no need. In the spirit of our shared destiny, Aboriginal and Australian, on our shared continent, I wish you a very happy Australia Day.

Fraser Anning and The Uncomfortable Reality of Australia as White, British and Invasionary (written in 2017)

It was laughable recently to hear notorious race-baiter John Howard say that the use of the phrase “final solution” in regard to Australia’s non-discriminatory immigration policy was “particularly distasteful”. He was commenting on right-wing Senator Fraser Anning’s maiden speech which called for a return to cultural and racial bias in the immigration program and to the good old pre-Whitlam days of White Australia, Sir Joh and the cultural supremacy of the British race which invaded and colonised the continent in 1788. I listened to the speech and am paraphrasing from memory because right now it isn’t available online from Hansard. It really doesn’t matter though because I’m not interested in attacking the Senator and his views. He’s an old-school Queensland White Christian Joh supporter. The sort of white supremacist stuff he went on about is to be expected. His honesty is appreciated. Appreciated because the modern nation-state called “The Commonwealth of Australia” is founded on white supremacy.

Founded on the old manifest-destiny type notions that the arrival of white British colonisers into the wider realms of the Empire would be good for the spread of “civilisation” and bring light to the world. The white dreaming creation myth that the Australian invasion was built upon can be seen repeatedly in the correspondence of the time, let alone in the parliamentary debates of the early federal parliament, where the leading lights of the time such as Deakin, King O’Malley, Billy Hughes and all those 18^th century white men believed firmly in white supremacy and that the civilised white British man was superior to other “races” and “castes”.

The sort of "Existing facts" the nation state called "Australia" is founded upon. The eugenic pseudo-science that maintained the mission era on this continent didn’t appear in isolation. It was the justifier for the barbaric acts of "dispersal" by the brave farmers on the frontier. It was the foundation myth that still underpins Anning’s idea of what “Australia” is. How can it not be?

That the Senator praises later European immigrants for their “assimilation” speaks to the fact that Australia is, still, just a British cultural institution. It is—culturally—simply still Britain, in the south. “Oh, but we have our own character. We aren’t British anymore...” I’ve heard Gubbah people say this with a straight face in conversation. In reality, apart from some environmental differences (open spaces, distance, weather, heat, flora and fauna, etc), the Gubbah culture that exists here is exactly British. The language is British, the ontology is British, the cities are still very British (in design and appearance, not to mention the city and street names), the dress style is British, the flag, the laws, the courts, the parliament, the head of state, the multicultural “model” now pursued, the economy, the privatisations, the (dismantling of the) welfare state, etc, etc. Are they so blind they can’t see that? (In the words of the comedian Jerry Seinfeld, the Australian flag is “Britain at night”…) In Anning’s speech, he praises the policies and moral certainty of the Joh Bjelke-Petersen era in Queensland. That was that era when the notorious 1897 Queensland Aboriginal Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium “Act” was in full swing.

When Murris were locked away in the missions. There are some important accounts recollecting the era from a black perspective including the Unaipon Award winners “Is That You, Ruthie?” by Auntie Ruth Hegarty and “Not Just Black And White” by Leslie and Tammy Williams. Also “Auntie Rita” by Rita and Jackie Huggins and “Under The Act” by Willie Thaiday. What these accounts show are the underlying assumptions that the British invasionary project called “Australia” was created for: the superiority of British values, spirituality and, most of all, the British economic system. Aboriginal people, at least those with enough white blood to be “saved”, would be taught these values under the comforting protection of God’s British missionaries. Taught whilst around them their ancestral lands were looted by Brits on the make/take. Has that underlying assumption changed at all? Now we Aboriginal people have self-appointed “leaders” like Warren Mundine hosting Indigenous business shows on right-wing TV networks. Although some mob sadly buy into this “don’t be a victim” white nonsense (the new missionary era?), the true answer to the alleviation of our poverty (and the wider question of sovereignty itself) is simple: the just payment of rentals and tributes on all that glittering freehold land we own. Especially in the big cities. That’s a much larger story for another day, though. The point is that the Australian economic system is still very much “British” in imagining. If it was Aboriginal there would be, for starters, more public housing and far fewer Aboriginal families in dire housing peril, if not sleeping rough in places like Sydney’s Central Station and Brisbane’s King George Square. We must face the simple and honest fact Senator Anning reminds us of. Australia is just Britain relocated.

So, the question remains, why the outpouring of anger at the Anning speech when all he is articulating is the very foundational essence of the Australian nation-state? Is it because sometime around the rise of the Whitlam government in 1972 and the winding back of many of those “old” policies, including White Australia, the Australian nation-state "grew up" and become a leader in racial and cultural morality around the world? A shining beacon to all other nations on how to non-racist and all that? Is that why, when I was in high school in the 1980’s, state to state interaction with apartheid South Africa was banned and white South Africans may as well have been Nazis for the way the media and society here portrayed them? Perhaps not. It turns out we were naive because, in true Gubbah/British fashion, the whites of South Africa (and, let’s face it, they are pretty much exactly the same as the whites of Australia in worldview and moral outlook) have since arrived in great numbers here and seem to be integrating (“assimilating”) very nicely indeed, thank you very much. And if those guys—the supporters and maintainers of apartheid—aren’t “terrorists” then who is? One South African family even lobbed into my old street on the extremely achromic Sunshine Coast (the landing strip for “white flight” from Sydney and Melbourne) bringing their apartheid-era South African flag with them to proudly fly. I don’t think it raised an eyebrow until I pointed it out.

And even then, no-one did anything about it. The local newspaper didn’t think it worthy of even replying to my email about the troubling occurrence.

The apartheid-era South African flag flying proudly in my old street on Queensland's Sunshine Coast. I assume that South African family loved it in there in their new, very white environment and integrated nicely. My Sunny Coast was the conservative-voting, white, southern Queensland former Clive Palmer electorate of Fairfax. Mal Brough’s (architect of the 2007 intervention) electorate was handily next door. Says something. Again though, why the apartheid-denial? In the words of Paul Keating in this interview the nation only just got out of White Australia/apartheid “by the skin of its teeth” around the time Whitlam came to power and made all those sweeping changes. Changes which are loathed to this day by conservatives like Anning. He said so in his speech. And anyway, if so many of the progressive policies of Whitlam have been wound back (free education, social housing, free healthcare, etc) then why is there a reluctance to simply admit that Australia would be no different to South Africa if the Indigenous population was a lot larger. I mean, it is just South Africa in many ways, isn’t it?

Which is why, to throw the recent Aboriginal response to all this frontier-fascism into the mix, the “Uluru Statement From The Heart” is so particularly naive, if not nauseating. The ultimate outcome of the fanciful “Recognise” campaign to kiss-and-make-up (on white terms) after an apocalyptic, catastrophic and genocidal invasion, the Statement was produced from a gathering at the sacred site and came up with the partly united response after roaming around the country for years trying to get something—I never really quite knew what—to take to white voters for the good of… erm… The outcome was that a lot of the same faces (our "decision makers", who basically have no real power whatsoever) came up with a plan to have a “voice to Parliament” advise the Gubs on what they might be doing wrong whilst the 200-year-old-plus carve-up of the “good” bits of the continent for greedy white self-interest continues apace. It is all way above my current impoverished pay-scale, but I know that the carve-up main game must have something to do with all those glittering harbourside mansions I see below me when I get the m52 bus in from the western suburbs across the Gladesville Bridge.

All that wealth is coming from somewhere. None of my mob is seeing it… Aside from the fact that the “voice” would just be sidelined and tweaked into irrelevance like Native Title was back in the day, I find two things about the “Statement from the Heart” to be particularly infuriating… Firstly, haven’t mob learnt not to trust Australia after all these years? The nation-state called Australia is a British colonial experiment. It is the invasion. Simple. So, why do we keep thinking it is anything but the invasion? Why keep believing the Kool-Aid will taste different each time? The state is the invasion. Don’t go back to that poison waterhole. Bad spirits down there… Change a few lines in the Australian constitution? The Australian constitution is a document written by racist British white supremacists from the exact same era as the White Australia Policy itself.

They are indivisible. Why would mob want to go anywhere near that? Change section 51? What about sections 1-50 and 52-128? This document is an act of the British Parliament. The invaders themselves. Why would it even be considered by us? It should be viewed the same way a glowing green puddle is… toxic and radioactive. Not that any amendment would actually “get up” in a referendum. It would be seen as being against “Australian” interests. It might also be called, laughably, “apartheid”. So the whites wouldn’t have a bar of it. Good. Let them keep their cosy British status quo. We should be setting our site on our own full sovereignty. Our own nation-state. Sharing the continent with the invader “Australia”. On our terms. That was the sort of yarn mob should have been having at Uluru. Invoking the lightning and thunder ancestor spirits... The second thing which is infuriating about the statement is the fact that it had to come from the “Heart” in the first place. I loathe the fact that nowadays “authentic” Aboriginal people and culture is only seen by "Australia" as being in the north or centre of the continent.

The truth is that Martin Place in Sydney is just as sacred Aboriginal land as Uluru is. Just because it doesn’t “look” Aboriginal doesn’t make it any less Aboriginal. Or any less sacred. The same way as my fair skin doesn’t make me “look” Koori. I get that racist comment from the Gubs I come across all the time. Why buy into that worldview? Didn’t the power of the Keating Redfern Statement partly come from the fact that it came from the “Heart” of the invasion? It came from ground zero. Making the “Statement From The Heart” just plays into every white stereotype about the invasion, and Aboriginality, imaginable. It marginalises the vast majority of Aboriginal people. Urban Kooris and Murris who struggle with their “invalid” identities and belongings according to the powerful British invader law, lore and culture. As a final thought, and another example of where mob have been led too far down the invasionary path by Gubbah self-interest, I notice the old “we can’t go fixing constitutions when our women are getting bashed” line being used again by some vocal Aboriginal commentators recently.

The sort of Aboriginal "leaders" who seem to get very easy access to the great white (often Murdoch) megaphone. A platform far larger than the audience of their own people who usually don’t give a toss about any of their opinions. This year’s NAIDOC theme was “Because Of Her We Can” which rightfully celebrated our deadly and strong women. The poster too was deadly. But one aspect I found disappointing was that some of those same old commentators used the occasion to push the line about dysfunction and domestic violence in our communities. This is a difficult issue of course, but using a mouthpiece like “The Australian” to air these same old opinions won’t actually change a thing. In fact, it just causes more pain.

What never seems to be mentioned is, in my opinion, the actual problem. Our young men are—in mainstream society terms—mostly disempowered and mostly impoverished. If you look at the cultural pathways for Gubbah men you see how they are empowered by default. They are given the heavy lifting to do in the emergency services, as police officers, in security, as government officials, politicians, armed forces, etc. Roles which have legal power and can be given a type of “warrior” status. Our men, on the other hand, are discriminated against from assuming any of these powerful right-of-cultural-passage roles in the mainstream invader/British society.

They are told they must stop being victims, integrate and become part of the white system to get themselves out of their current malaise. Stop colonising us!! We need our young warriors as the basis of our own security, our own police force, for our own sovereign courts in our own parliaments collecting our own taxes-from the invaders-for using our land in their cities. We need them to be the builders and protectors of our own empowered (not bullshit “empowered” but actually sovereign not-part-of-Australia empowered) communities and institutions. Even if we started with our own gaols or correctional facilities it would be something significant.

Make these institutions the pathways to power for our young men, not the white dead-end hallways they currently are. Most of all, let’s see Australia for the British invasion it embodies, remains and will always institutionalise. Let’s see the way it uses its young men to maintain and support its power, giving them status and wealth along with the power those young men gravitate toward. And let’s realise that those roles merely reinforce the invasion. When a real treaty comes and the giant white rent-free holiday on all that freehold land we own finally ends, let’s build the powerful sovereign roles we used to have for our young men to give them the status they rightfully deserve and require. The truth is that the most powerful thing an Aboriginal person can say is simply “I am not Australian”. At that point, the invasion is exposed to the plain light of day. And so is our pathway to healing and true reconciliation for all our mob.

Joseph Boyden, DNA testing and the tricky question of Indigineity (written in 2017)

When I began this blog I knew I’d have to do a little promoting to actually get a readership. The “readership” still doesn’t really exist but that’s OK because I get so much out of the writing anyway as therapy. And if anyone asks what I’ve written I can just point to the blog for an understanding of what I’m interested in. And also what gets my blood boiling. Writing is a fantastic outlet for my anger. The best. As part of the promoting I began using my Twitter account seriously. At this stage, nine months later, I have to say I am hopelessly addicted to Twitter. Not only is Twitter everything Facebook isn’t (I get to engage in topics and issues I’m interested in, instead of the latest pics of an old school friend’s new kitten) it has also opened my world up to the views of Indigenous people from around the world. I have been privileged to discover the work of some powerful Indigenous activists from Turtle Island*, known colonially as “North America” (the word “America” for all its association with the continent is actually named for a contemporary of our old friend Christopher Columbus. Amerigo Vespucci was an Italian Invader/Explorer whose letters about the continent sparked public awareness in Europe and from this the name stuck). It is to both Chelsea Vowel and Kim TallBear I am most drawn as their work deals with Indigenous identity in the invaded colonial/settler space.

Even though the Turtle Island Indigenous cultures are largely unfamiliar to me (other than the loathsome tropes settler culture has presented to us in film and television) the fact is we share a common coloniser. We can compare invasion notes. And it is shocking how similar the outcomes of the invasion are for our occupied populations. One of the most disturbing aspects at present is the appropriation of our identities. It is no surprise for any Aboriginal person to learn that the rush to DNA testing by people seeking to find out if they are “Aboriginal” is going to cause trouble for our communities. Big trouble. Chelsea Vowel has a chapter in her book “Indigenous Writes” which deals with the issue of “blood quantum” in defining Indigenous identity. The Indigenous peoples of both North America and Australia have had to endure waves of settler policy which attempted to define exactly who and what they were based on how much “native blood” they contained. This involved “rules” which classified Aboriginal people into neat categories such as “full blood”, “half-caste”, “quarter caste”, and “octoroon”. This was a completely arbitrary classification which had the effect, as Chelsea Vowel states, of constituting a “slow genocide”. It is “slow genocide” because through “miscegenation” being Aboriginal becomes something other than the default. It becomes something which is easily lost.

Given the way Aboriginal people live their lives, form relationships, make families and practice culture it becomes something which they almost unavoidably will lose, unless they live somewhere very remote where no other people can come and “contaminate” the gene pool. Hence the old white trope that the only “real Aborigines” live up north on the Gulf of Carpentaria or in Arnhem Land. Us southern Kooris get judged by that standard in our cities every day. The notion that Aboriginal people would actually change their culture (which has been around on this continent since, well, forever) to begin avoiding “outsiders” to keep their blood “pure” and not be contaminated by “miscegenation” is completely disrespectful to the struggle Aboriginal people have fought just to survive invasion. It also places settler culture front and centre as the default.

The subconscious thinking goes something like this “You don’t look Aboriginal, you look white. So you must be an Aussie”. Yep, if you haven’t somehow historically fluked it—if your community isn’t somewhere so far away from where the invaders wanted to take your land, if your great grandmothers couldn’t avoid the “stare” of those brave frontier men so idolised in the bush ballads, then you can’t be a “real Aborigine”. Because if you aren’t “pure” you must default back to being… an Aussie! It is this neat assimilationist trick which is reinforced by people in mainstream Australian society every single day. They challenge your identity ("you don't look Aboriginal") to colonise you (by becoming "Aussies") or eliminate you. It is a daily reproduction of the events of 26 January 1788. Namely, the taking of possession of everything on the continent in the name of the people of Great Britain. Thankfully, Aboriginal people view things very differently. We endured the ghastly “protection” era in which many, if not most, Aboriginal families ended up being placed in the “care” of the missions. The reasoning was that Aboriginal people would “die out” soon anyway so best to make them comfortable (and get them out of the way of the commercial exploitation of the land which was taken from them) while they waited peacefully for their cultural extinction. The history of my own family has revolved around the mission at Guriwal/La Perouse for a good part of the last century.

Guriwal is located at the north head of Gamay/Botany Bay. We were the first community to endure the invasion in 1788 and have always maintained our Koori identities as distinct despite having “Sydney” build up around us. These identities, located within community are described in some wonderful books including Maria Nugent’s “Botany Bay: Where Histories Meet” and “La Perouse: the place, the people and the sea” which was written by some Guriwal community members under the guidance of Dr Nugent. “Canada” too suffered under their own protection era and stolen generation as described in Chelsea Vowel’s book. Over the decades these genocidal government policies fragmented Indigenous identity and caused people to become disconnected from their communities and culture. And that’s not to mention everyday racism in the “mainstream” community which manifested in practices such as police brutality targeting Indigenous people. Practices which persist, ongoing colonisation and invasion. In “Australia” as in “Canada”, over time some individuals and families faced such extremes of racism they chose to “pass” as white if they could to make life bearable for them and their families. Many of the descendants of these people have become lost to their Aboriginal communities.

In recent times however, perhaps as a result of the civil rights movements in the Western world, the assumed racial and cultural superiority of white European people has been challenged and de-legitimised. White people, the descendants of the invaders of “Australia” and Turtle Island, now (for the most part) realise that their skin colour does not automatically make them morally and culturally superior to everyone else. (As a curious side-note, I wonder if a flow on of this is the popularity of tattooing—an Indigenous cultural practice—amongst white people today. Is it that their white skin is no longer a source of pride? or that, worse still, they are ashamed of their white skin so imprint elaborate patterns and messages upon it to de-emphasise their “race”?) The challenge to white supremacy has finally allowed those with Indigenous ancestors to be able to share their family histories without fear of being prejudiced by the mainstream culture. It has allowed them to unlock the closet of shame imposed by invasion and colonisation.

It is into this mix of acknowledging the wrongs of invasion, genocide, racism and pride in Indigenous cultural survival that DNA testing has come galloping. What got me thinking deeply about identity was the recent controversy in “Canada” where acclaimed author Joseph Boyden was “called out” by an in-depth investigation into his claims of Indigineity and ancestry by Aboriginal Peoples Television Network journalist Jorge Barrera. Boyden is an award winning author whose claims of Indigenous belonging have shifted over time from one community to the next. His most recent claim is one of distant Indigenous ancestry not connected directly to an existing Indigenous community. Following the Boyden controversy and what it means for Indigenous identity in “Canada” reminded me of the author Mudrooroo here in “Australia”.

The parallels are similar—an author who wrote books on Indigenous culture, claiming to have identity and through that the authority to speak as an Indigenous person and who, ultimately, was called out by “their” community as not being one of them. Which brings me to the point of claiming to be Indigenous. It usually isn’t a problem for Aboriginal people because they are part of a family which is, in turn, part of a community. You just are Aboriginal. Someone will say, as they have repeatedly to Joseph Boyden, “where are you from?” or “what’s your mob?” Then you just say where your community is. In my case I say “La Perouse”. If they know “LaPa” (not everyone does) they might ask of my family and I’ll just say “I’m Aunty Beryl Page’s son”. That is where I’m placed in the community. That’s my place and my mob. My ancestors are from the south coast of “New South Wales” so I also have connections and relatives down there (like a lot of people from LaPa) and when people (usually white) ask what my “tribe” or “nation” is I say “Yuin”, but my mob is from LaPa. None of this is “chosen” and none can be altered by me.

I’m adopted and grew up in a white family away from both La Perouse and Yuin country. But it didn’t matter when I finally returned because I was “placed” within the communal kin structure. That’s Indigineity. That’s my Koori identity. I don’t know what a DNA test would show if I took one. It would most like likely show connection to Yuin country going back thousands of years but it really doesn’t matter because DNA isn’t cultural and never will be. Just like for Jewish people (as an example), it doesn’t matter skin colour or DNA. It is family, community, ceremony, country and shared history. If I’d have turned up at La Perouse and they said “we’re sorry but we don’t know who you are” then that would mean I wasn’t a Koori from their community. I could have had all the DNA paperwork in the world. It would have been hard to accept but that is how it is in Aboriginal culture. That doesn’t mean you can’t still be part of the community.

There are heaps of “gubs” which are married to Kooris, have Koori kids and live in and with the Koori community. But they aren’t Koori because they aren’t placed within the communal Aboriginal kinship structure. As part of researching this piece, I listened to a recent ABC radio show on DNA sampling within two Aboriginal (former mission) communities, Cherbourg in “Queensland” and Point Pearce in “South Australia”. Whilst the elders who were questioned were generally optimistic about what the project could mean for their communities, I had some strong feelings about the science. Specifically, what exactly is the point of the whole project to start with? The lead testing scientist, who claims “Aboriginal heritage” himself seemed to be enthusiastic to map the timelines and geographic movement of the various peoples. He was staggered that Australians were ignorant of the vast bulk of human history on the continent.

Aside from the fact that for British and other settlers it isn’t “their” history to start with, the great problem with the scientific approach is that the research is being conducted, ultimately, for the benefit of western science. And I wouldn’t trust western science ever after their sordid history with Aboriginal people. We already know our past, our creation and our ancestors. The scientist actually said “Aboriginal people colonised Australia” 55,000 years ago. “Colonised”? This is at odds with our ontology.

There wasn’t “colonisation”—that’s what the white people did. There was creation. Our ancestors created everything including law and culture. That’s the same culture we live with today and want to get back to fully embracing with decolonisation. Also, creation didn’t happen that long ago, just a few generations in our thinking. We celebrate and revere our ancestors as just passed a little back from present memory. Just far enough that creation is contemporary and everything is as it should be in the present. In my understanding calling things “ancient” only undermines our culture today by suggesting it is “past” or “finished”. DNA is going to be big trouble because it is the same old competing European world view again trying to place us within a material, atomistic universe of parts to be tinkered with, disrupted, pulled apart and recombined. They can’t help themselves.

Aboriginal people come from the land. Literally. It doesn’t matter what science says. This is what we know. Our god isn’t somewhere in “heaven” on a different plain, our ancestors are with us sharing our lives. I can look up at Uncle Coolum Mountain here where I live. He isn’t my direct ancestor because I’m not on my country but back in the time of creation all those ancestors knew each other through songlines and shared stories and events. They were powerful and knew everything. Ancestor Uncle Coolum has actually shared some wisdom with me and I have a connection with him.

These creator beings are our direct recent ancestors. That’s how close the connection is for us—they are our directly physically related Uncles, Aunties, Grandparents, etc. Just out of living memory. This is why I believe DNA is almost useless for Aboriginal culture. What can it offer beyond what we already know? It is laughably insignificant compared to the knowledge we have always held as sacred. Finally, a further thought for those people who have descent but who are not connected to a community or those who, in the future, get DNA test results which show they have Indigenous ancestors. Everyone has the right to decide their own identity. If their family history says that they are Aboriginal because of a distant ancestor or if a DNA test proves Indigenous ancestry then they can decide to call themselves “Aboriginal”.*I acknowledge that not all the Indigenous people of “North America” are comfortable with “Turtle Island” as a descriptor of their home.

But being within Aboriginal culture, belonging to kin and community, means that you have to have a place. You have to be accepted and you have to follow what the elders say and listen quietly. If a community doesn’t know you but you believe that is where you belong then slowly become part of it. Then maybe someone will come along who can place you, who knows? But you’ll be part of something which you’ve maybe always been looking for inside you. Something profound and connected directly to country. The invasion called “Australia” devastated Aboriginal communities by depriving them firstly of their rightful land. Then language. Then the children were stolen. Now they want to take our identities. But they won’t because they can’t. Our ancestors are too strong and our connection to this continent too deep. Keep your worthless DNA results, we come from the land. *I acknowledge that not all the Indigenous people of “North America” are comfortable with “Turtle Island” as a descriptor of their home.

My home town, where the "settlers" used the bones of Aboriginal people to build their houses (written in 2016)

You don’t need to look hard to find proof of Australia’s brutal past. The nation was founded on inhumane acts all along the frontier and in the convict settlements. Inhumane acts which continue to this day in our “offshore processing centres.” Still, it’s a shock when the true history of your own sleepy southern home town jump out at you from the page. It allows you to conceive of that brutal era through personal geographic familiarity. History was brought to life in this way for me in a report I read recently. I’ll start from the start. I was born in Sydney in the suburb of Surry Hills at the old Crown Street Women’s Hospital. They closed it down in the 1970’s but the building is still there. Or at least part of it is.

Now it’s an apartment complex on the corner of Crown and Albion streets, a block from the famous Oxford street. It’s a very busy, very central part of inner Sydney. Until the mid-1970’s the hospital was the centre of child adoption in NSW. It was because of my own adoption in 1970 that I occasionally still go to one of the nice cafes in the complex and have breakfast. I like to do that because it gives me a small feeling of connection to my birthplace. It’s not much but like a lot of other adoptees feel about this sort of thing, it’s at least something. And the breakfast is pretty good too. I used to go there a lot more before I finally found my family. I used to make a point of walking past the place every time I was in Sydney. I would often come in on the train and walk the five or six blocks from Central station up the hill to the old hospital. There used to be an old remnant sign way up the top of the building saying “The Women’s Hospital” which gave me some comfort because it was a visible link to my past (when I had virtually no other) but they covered that over at least 10 years ago. I was sad about that.

In the 1990’s I dug around and finally obtained all my birth records. They indicate I was taken from the hospital on the 19th of November 1970 by my social parents.

I call them “social parents” because I believe the late 20th century Australian model of adoption was very much a state-sponsored social experiment which severed all links from the birth family and attempted to erase biology to make the child “good-as-new” with all elements of shame (unwed mother, poverty, rape, Aboriginality) washed clean. My social parents weren’t Koori. But my (birth) mum was. Back then I don’t think the authorities thought twice about displacement and removal from culture. Indeed, the social work records from the time say that she “reported that she was of Aboriginal heritage.” However, “it was noted she did not have Aboriginal features.” Another document from the era noted she was “a lover of sport, her main interest being basketball and hockey, and she had a good tan.” A good tan.

I roll my eyes every time I read that. My dislocation from community and culture, with the confusion and fear that creates in a kid is a full article for another day. Suffice to say, I was whisked away by plane (something my poor mum could never have afforded) to the regional New South Wales city of Albury to begin, well, my life. My social parents turned out to be salt-of-the-earth, battling, white, Aussie hardworkers who had upbringing issues of their own. Alcoholic fathers, mainly.

So I had a difficult childhood and like a lot of adoptees, I never felt I belonged. I had a long-running fantasy where I imagined my parents were aliens who had come from outer space and were playing at being human beings. I used to try to catch them out by sneaking up on them to listen in. But I never did hear them speaking any interstellar dialogue. Just plain old English. I’ve since found out that this is one of the fantasies adoptees have. That it’s all a dream and there is an explicable reality hiding just underneath the surface. My own unique language back then was confusion and constant withdrawal into shame. The “reality” I sought did indeed exist but no-one ever came to reveal it—fuck I waited a long time for someone to come and validate that horrible empty feeling. I still do, to some extent. In a way I’ve been lucky because I have now found my family and had a form of resolution.

But there are huge gaps in my self-confidence and I constantly battle with fear and confusion about who I really am. It didn’t help my identity issues either that as a kid people would mistake me for being various ethnicities. I got called Chinese, Croatian even “Eskimo.” The fearful thing was that I could never confirm if they were right or wrong. They knew as much about it as I did. Where I grew up in Albury there was a public housing estate nearby with a few Koori families. I didn’t mix with them much.

I mean, none of the white (I have fair skin) kids did. Except the ones who were really poor. Poverty is a great cultural leveller. We were probably lower middle class. Not rich—or poor—so the words of one of my childhood favourites George Orwell really resonated: “In the kind of shabby-genteel family that I am talking about there is far more consciousness of poverty than in any working-class family above the level of the dole.” As soon as I could I left for University.

Anything to escape and try to find “reality”. I also began to think deeply about Albury and how I belonged there. I used to wear an Aboriginal flag T-shirt around, years before I found out I was Koori. I copped a lot of grief from people for that. They’d say quizzically “Why are you wearing that?” Genuinely mystified as if to say, “you’re white and white people don’t wear those colours.” I couldn’t answer them, I just had a feeling. Wearing that flag felt right.

When I finally met mum, years later, I told her and she softly said “You knew all along.” Every Koori person I’ve mentioned this to since has said the same thing. The other thing I had a burning need to do was find out about the true (Aboriginal) history of Albury. Not easy. Albury is the sort of southern Australian town where dispossession and relocation happened a long, long time ago. And most locals would much prefer those stories stay in the distant past. Certainly, we all grew up in the shadow of the “great” explorers Hume and Hovell who were the first white men to travel from what is now Sydney to Melbourne. Hence the name of the major highway which connects the two cities.

In fact, most everything of any note in Albury is named after those two men. There is a photo in the local museum of the locals having a great celebration for the centenary of them passing through in 1824.

Of the original inhabitants there was always a great silence. I knew of nothing and never, ever heard anyone speak of them specifically. Albury’s official history, sponsored by the City Council, wasn’t of much use either. “Border City: History of Albury” by historian William A. Bayley is a volume of some 240 pages, including an entire chapter on the “epic journey” of Hume and Hovell.

First published in 1954, references to the thousands of years of human history up to the arrival of the epic journeymen consists—in its entirety—of two dismissive, typically dehumanising asides. On Page 19 Bailey writes: “Aborigines were numerous.

They continually speared or maimed or killed the squatters’ cattle and sheep and frequently skirmished with the white newcomers who kept their huts well supplied with loaded firearms. Drovers, travellers and settlers faced constant danger, several losing their lives, their bodies being mutilated by the aborigines who carried a plentiful supply of nullah-nullahs, boomerangs and spears. As time passed the natives became fewer. Some were killed by the white settlers, others fell victims to white man’s diseases, liquor and tobacco and the remainder moved on to quieter and more peaceful hunting grounds, leaving the rich river flats and grazing lands for the white men.” And on page 32: “William Howitt visited Albury in 1855 and wrote in Land, Labour and Gold that he saw on the Wodonga flats blacks of the Murray tribe ‘...surrounded as they always are by great swarms of dogs’ of which they are fonder than of their children.” Later, I found a slim document published by the local development corporation which offered a generalised description of the local Kooris, mostly focusing on archaeology in the area, all written in the past tense. For a long time after I found that archaeology document I stopped focusing on Albury’s Aboriginal history.

This was a time of unearthing a lot of my own history, including finally connecting with my Mum and family at La Perouse in Sydney. I never stopped wondering about Albury though. Finally this year I came across a document which sheds some much needed light on the early history of Albury before and through the traumatic invasion (Aboriginal world-view) or settlement (Australian world-view) period of the early 19th century. The document is “Nineteenth Century Indigenous Land Use of Albury (NSW)” by Cultural Heritage Management specialist Dirk Spennemann. In his 35 page report Associate Professor Spennemann has answered many of the questions I had always wondered about regarding the early history of the town I was forced to grow up in. Spennemann’s research has gone some way to answering the simple question I had as a child.

A question which many Australian children from towns like Albury (which seem so, well, white) have asked at one point or other, and which is never satisfactorily answered by the grown-ups. Namely: What happened to all the Aboriginal people that lived here? As a child my question remained unanswered, but Spennemann has filled in some of the gaps. After the initial (inevitable) period of conflict in Albury it seems several local Kooris “attached themselves as servants to white settlers and officials performing menial tasks in return for food of low quality.” This was during the 1840’s when a certain George Augustus Robertson passed through the area.

Albury seems to have been no different to other Australian frontier towns with Spennemann noting that “relationships between ‘master and servant’ were often strained, with at least one suicide of an Indigenous person attributed to maltreatment.” Like everywhere else on the continent, the coming of the British was a catastrophe for Aboriginal people, heralding the collapse of the social structure and law handed down from the ancestors since the beginning of time.

By the 1860’s the mission and reserve system was established and an anonymous commentator “proudly commented when describing Albury, ‘the wastes that formed the hunting grounds for wandering tribes of aborigines have been converted into pastures for countless flocks and herds’.” The report notes that the first Protector of Aborigines in 1882 stated that removals to missions were so complete to that year that “only a single Indigenous person remained as a resident in Albury.” A most bracing section of the report concerns burial sites and uncovers a darker, hidden side of Albury’s history. I reproduce in full; “A sand dune existed at the southern end of Olive and David Streets, Albury, which was used for Indigenous and also for early European burials (Anonymous, 1860a, 1861c, 1861d, 1861e, 1896b, 1910b; Vagabond, 1896). 34 Indigenous burial in that dune, with bodies placed between two sheets of bark, are on record for 1840 and 1841 (Bushman, 1842). As Albury grew, that dune was increasingly quarried for sand for purposes of house construction and the cemetery was in an increasingly bad shape (Anonymous, 1862). Over time, the sand delivered to the buildings sites frequently contained human remains (Anonymous, 1874). On at least two occasions Indigenous human remains were also discovered in situ. A tibia and femur were excavated between St. Matthew’s Church and the courthouse in 1877 (Anonymous, 1877). Found 30cm below the surface, there was no indication that the bones had been carted in with sand. In late September 1878, a skeleton was encountered at the ‘new down-river road skirting Hospital Hill’ (now Monument Hill).

The skeleton, which was reported as in a good state of preservation, was assumed to belong to an Indigenous person and was taken charge of by the police (Anonymous, 1878). The location suggests that the burial was located south of Monument Hill, at the edge of the flood plain. Indicative of the sentiment at the time, the skull of an Australian Aboriginal person, presumably obtained somewhere in the Albury area, had apparently been exhibited as a talking point in the boardroom of the Albury Pastures Protection Board.” (Anonymous, 1904c) So houses in Albury are literally built with the remains of Aboriginal people from a sacred burial site. To quote Henry Reynolds, “Why weren’t we told?” This isn’t a shock though. Every town in Australia has its own dirty little foundation secret.

The pioneering men weren’t 10 foot tall supermen. They were British colonisers on the make. Many with an unhealthy interest in phrenology. Indeed, capitalism and phrenology seemed to have gone hand in hand on the Australian frontier. Paul Daley writes of a pioneer working in Queensland—as a butcher then hotelier—named Korah Halcomb Wills. Daley quotes Wills, from his own handwritten notes in the State Library of Queensland, gathering “specimens” for wealthy phrenologists who were presumably more than willing to pay. After participating in a massacre justified in the name of “our own white people [who] were crying out for room to stretch our legs on” he recounts his work soon after on the fallen corpses: “I took it on my head to get a few specimens of certain limbs, and the head of a Black fellow, which was not a very delicate occupation I can tell you.

I shall never forget the time when I first found the subject that I intended to anatomise, when my friends were looking on, and I commenced operations dissecting. I went to work business like to take off the head first and then the arms, and then the legs, and I gathered them together and put them into my pack saddle and one of my friends who I am sure had dispersed more than any other in the colony made the remark that if he was offered a fortune he could not do what I had done.” I wish these histories weren’t so covered up, that the pioneers from then and Australians from now were more honest about how all that land became “available.” The Aboriginal people of Albury didn’t “move on to quieter and more peaceful hunting grounds” as Albury’s official history states. They were murdered, raped, enslaved and herded onto missions. That is the reality of how the modern nation called “Australia” came into existence.

Daley also describes the colonial frontier logic pioneering men had toward Aboriginal women. Constable William Willshere was a frontier policeman posted to Alice Springs in 1882. In Willshere’s book titled “The Land of the Dawning” published in 1896, Willshere writes: “Men would not remain so many years in a country like this if there were no women, and perhaps the Almighty meant them for use as He has placed them wherever the pioneers go … what I am speaking about is only natural, especially for men who are isolated away in the bush at out-stations where women of all ages and sizes are running at large.”

For now, the mainstream historical focal point in Albury is, like that of many Australian towns, the massive Monument to World War One, sitting resplendent on what is now called “Monument Hill.” It's no coincidence that the same monument represents the city on the front cover of the official history.

World War One, ANZAC and that era is “safe” history for white Australia. Occurring after the British colonial period, black population diminished, the remainder out of sight and largely locked away in missions, land assumed, federation achieved, White Australia Policy in force, post-WW2 migrants yet to arrive, Phar Lap running in the Melbourne Cup and Bradman at the crease.

But there is a more important history. A creation story. The foundation of the British colonial project called “Australia.” Thank you Associate Professor Spennemann for blowing some dust off that history and how my home town came into being. Because of your report from now on I’ll refer to Monument Hill by it’s real name “Dirremer” and I’ll call Albury “Bungambrawatha” as much as I can, in memoriam to the Koori people and their descendants of whose land it was, is and always remains.

It helps me personally as well, as a thrice displaced Aboriginal person (place, family and culture) to feel a deeper sense of belonging to, and an understanding of, my adopted home town. Where the "settlers" used the bones of Aboriginal people to build their houses.   References William A Bayley, 'Border City: history of Albury, NSW', 1976, Albury City Council, pp. 19,32. Dirk HR Spennemann, 'Nineteenth Century Indigenous Land Use of Albury (NSW)',as reflected in the historic sources. Institute for Land, Water and Society Report nº 83, 2015, Albury, NSW: Institute for Land, Water and Society, Charles Sturt University. Albury-Wodonga Development Corporation, 'Aboriginal archaeology of the Albury-Wodonga region', 1982, Albury-Wodonga Development Corporation. Paul Daley, 'Restless Indigenous Remains', Meanjin, 2014, Vol. 73, No. 1. George Orwell, 'The Road to Wigan Pier', 1937, Left Book Club, London.

Food Sovereignty and the White Cultural Steamroller's 'Flavour Wheel' (written in 2016)

I’m not the biggest foodie in the world. In fact I find the whole “food” scene tedious and perhaps a little morally dubious. Spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars on a meal seems wasteful when you could just eat something simple. Even something free. There’s also something colonial about the endless, faddish quest to find the next great taste or flavour. Viewed this way, the foodie scene seems pretty exploitative and self-interested. At least at the upper, celebrity end. The end that’s relentlessly pushed at us on TV these days. In this endless rush toward fad and the next amazing flavour or taste (which, by the way, is no different to other forms of entertainment like the music, film or sporting industries) an important ingredient in this dish (see what I did there) is to add a moral dimension to the whole enterprise. I suppose with so many everyday working people thinking “get a real job,” these highly paid performers must sometimes feel a need to justify their existence. So, inevitably, in Australia, the foodie scene has turned its attention to the redemptive, if not reconciliatory properties of using bush foods. Yep, these “pioneers” are blazing a trail across the starched linen tables of yacht clubs and hatted restaurants across inner Sydney and Melbourne.

Closing the gap one serve of Flinders Island salt grass lamb with native coastal greens at a time. They seem to have discovered – in the same way Captain Cook “discovered” - bush foods and now we all need to sit at their feet so they can impart their wisdom as to why Lemon Myrtle and Finger Limes can cure all those nagging invasion ills from a time back when everyone was still eating cured partridge. But all is now forgiven because here comes a “food revolution that really matters!” That’s right, the people that matter in Australia ("chefs such as Peter Gilmore, Maggie Beer and René Redzepi’s sous chef Beau Clugston") have given their seal of approval to Koori food, the “Oldest foods on earth!” Before I put my napkin down, ease my chair out then walk to the bathroom to throw up - lest this is good old cultural appropriation all over again - I need to dig further. Apart from the few fledgling Indigenous run restaurants and catering companies starting to spring up, how does this seeming interest in culture aid communities? Does simply adding a sprig of lemon myrtle to a fillet of steak mean all of a sudden you’re eating “native?” What’s in this for Aboriginal people? A look at the “Australian” attitudes to native food over the years is instructive. Colin Bannerman had a look at a few cookbooks featuring bushfoods and found a few broad themes as to how they are viewed in Australia. Firstly, there are the old colonial survivalists like the Bush Tucker man. This guy represents the bush as alien but able to be survived when you had to.

Enough to get you back to civilisation and a cold beer with a tale to tell your rugged mates about how you wrestled a Crocodile and ate its eggs. That sort of thing. That bloke made a fortune back then. White man as front and centre and “taming” the bush. Then there are the ecologists which have as their central theme the idea that bush tucker is less environmentally damaging than the introduced foods so we should be eating them for that reason. This school of thought is heavy with anthropological observations about the uses of food and at least acknowledge Aboriginal people if not specifically considering them centrally. It’s still a white thing. Next are the foodies. As mentioned, these people run the restaurants and grow the bush foods in a market which will hopefully soon take off. I don’t know how well positioned Aboriginal people are to take advantage of any boom in this area. My suspicion is that they are well on the outer and an afterthought. These suspicions were partially confirmed upon viewing the website of the native food industry peak body, the Australian Native Food Industry Limited (ANFIL).

In their statement “Marking 5 years of accomplishment” they list their key areas of research interest. They include “securing recognition of their [bushfoods] traditional status by Food Standards of Australia and New Zealand.” Which raises the question are these people (who as far as I can make out are pretty much just white farmers and restauranteurs diversifying into a new area) authorised to claim something as “traditional” without actually belonging to the ongoing culture which created and owns these “traditions” in the first place? If not, this is good old appropriation to make a killing. Which, when you think about it, is pretty much the history of Australia. I actually dined in one of these restaurants recently and took my Auntie from La Perouse. I was shocked to learn from the waiter that the place is not Indigenous owned or operated. I don’t know why but I thought it was. Maybe it was the ochre colouring used in the logo and the dot painting-style art used. More shocking still was the distinct lack of interest shown in Auntie’s own deep practical knowledge of bush tucker when she yarned to the waiter about it. That’s not cultural. That is misunderstanding where food sits within culture. It’s disrespectful. I’ve since read the mission statement from their restaurant which boasts the “best regional and Australian produce” and of “supporting local farmers.” They also state their “team is passionate about showcasing Advanced Australian Fare to lovers of fine food.”

Advanced Australian Fare? Really? I couldn’t find anything on their site about Aboriginal people or culture. No acknowledgement. Which brings me to Bannerman’s final category of bushfood cookbooks. These are the ones produced by communities themselves. These are almost always situated within culture. They are concerned with the transfer of knowledge and the “right way” to do things. He quotes the preface from an Arrente cookbook:

“I’m making this book for the ones who are growing up now to read, so that they will be able to look at it in school and learn about what the people before them had, so that you will all know these things.

And so that your teachers can see this too. I’m also doing this so that white people and people from other places can read this book and learn how things are.”

That is culture. Imparting knowledge so others can “learn how things are.” “How things are” doesn’t seem to overly concern ANFIL who have as another research priority the “Development of a ‘flavour wheel’ by an expert panel of food tasters, to help chefs and producers describe their products with a common lexicon – just like the wine tasting guides – only more nutritious.” What “expert panel?”, what “common lexicon?” The expert panel is Aboriginal people. The common lexicon is our culture. Here’s a video of my Auntie out at La Pa talking about our food. No need to develop a fucking flavour wheel… it’s already here in our communities. Has been for 50000 years. Is it all too hard because they might have to acknowledge blackfellas for once or (god forbid) cut them in on some of this potential export boom? And it is “our” food. Aboriginal people claim ownership.

Before, as Bannerman says, “European culinary invasion sees itself as having extinguished native food title.” Or the full realisation of the muscular Bush Tucker Man which Lesley Instone describes as being;

“Like Daniel Boon and Crocodile Dundee before him, the Bush Tucker Man represents the white man who knows ‘native’ lands and knowledge better than the Aborigines themselves.”

The ANFIL website also contains links to various federal government reports into the viability of various native plant species as export opportunities. An example of this is a report from 2009 called “Health benefits of Australian Native Foods” produced by the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation, an agency of the Commonwealth government. In a summary reading I can find no mention whatsoever of Aboriginal people in this 52 page report. Nothing which mentions usages, expertise and culture. In fact, the report states it is targeted at;

• the Australian native food industry
• the general food industry, and
• health-conscious Australian consumers with an interest in diversifying their daily diet with native Australian fruits, herbs and spices.

In other words, the buyers and sellers. Of which, presumably, blackfellas don’t count because they have a long history with bushfood which views it as sacred, within culture and not just another resource to be exploited in the headlong rush to “strike it rich.” Again, Australia is on the make. If it isn’t sheep or gold or beef or coal it’s bushfood. And Aboriginal people are of little use. Same story since 1788. They certainly won’t be considered as owners of anything. Except maybe as “traditional owners.” The type of owners that don’t get a cut of anything or a say. All this seems like another reason to sigh and despair. Kooris are pushed out of the way again by the Australian juggernaut. However, out of all this I see something powerful and transformative for Blackfellas. The issue of cultural food sovereignty is extremely important for Aboriginal people. I feel that food is an under-utilised political and restorative tool for our mob. Especially urbanised and dispossessed Aboriginal people. It could also be an important tool for healing many of our most intractable social and health issues.

Let me explain. In other cultures food is a sacred part of their culture as it is in ours. Nurturing and protecting the animals and plants is central to culture. Just as, say, Jewish people keep kosher, Muslim people stay Halal and Hindu people offer prasad to the deities before meals. For Aboriginal people it is no different. In most parts of the continent traditional diets have been largely lost. Replaced with European foods which came with the invaders. This is part of the missionising project of the Australian state. Now Aboriginal people are almost wholly reliant on European foods and it has removed our food sovereignty and all that knowledge and expertise about our food, where to get it, how to prepare it and how to eat it. Worse, the foods which have replaced these sacred bush foods are the very crops which were the part of the underlying dispossession of the lands themselves. Drive along a country road and see all that sacred land fenced off and what is growing there? Wheat, barley, oats, beef and sheep. All European foods which Aboriginal people continue to consume because of the past attempts to destroy culture. Farming was the original driving force for the theft of all that land.

One nickname I have for Australia is “the spacious rapacious,” because the initial expansion across the continent wasn’t one of “we’re going to exterminate all you blackfellas solely because you’re not even human and we hate you” - although for some of the Australians I’m sure this was true – I believe it was more like, after seeing the amount of land available to exploit they thought “get out of our way, we’re on the make.” And any Aboriginal people who didn’t get out of their way paid with their lives.

So now 200 years later I’ve been thinking of a way to clean up my diet, morally, so I don’t support and ingest these foods which aren’t spiritual, are alien and were the very foods of whose production led to so much despair and tragedy for Aboriginal people. I’ve attempted to create a diet for myself which is 100% cultural. All bush foods, all native. Just like the ancestors. Koori Kosher. This is what I have attempted. Other Aboriginal people are starting to put food sovereignty/decolonisation into practise as well. And realising the importance of food sovereignty as political action. I'd love to hear from more people who are doing the same. First, I scaled back the meat. That’s the easy part. No fish which isn’t native.

A lot is available so that’s not a problem. Seafood too. Muttonfish, Crays, Bugs, Lobster, prawns, yum. Kangaroo, Crocodile and Emu are fine too, where you can find them. No beef, no lamb, no chicken, no pork, no bacon, no ham. Oh well. Fruit is virtually out. Not that the ancestors ate much which was sweet. That was one of the best things about their diet… very low sugar. It is possible to find finger limes and Davidson’s plum. Which are fruits, but sour. Other plants are the big problem. There’s Macadamia’s of course, but you can’t live on just them. I use the oil in my cooking when I can. Some plants are available to grow and my Botany Bay greens are coming along nicely. Nowhere near enough to sustain me meal after meal though. And the really, really big problem is the staples. I’d love to report I’ve tracked down a steady source of yam varieties and the seeds ready to make johnny cakes to replace my bread.

But I haven’t because they don’t exist to buy as far as I’m aware. In fact, the lady at the native nursery I went to near where I live said it would require a whole paddock just to feed one household for a year on pencil yams the same way potatoes do. The issue there is that I don’t have a spare paddock to myself, or the time to do any cultivation, or the equipment, etc. So for now my “Koori Kosher” dream is sitting on the backburner. It doesn’t make me less determined to finally go an entire day, or even week on traditional food. It will happen one day! It does mean, though, that when I eat Kangaroo I give thanks. I thank the ancestors and I take my time. It is special, spiritual. There is a far larger dimension to this as well though. One which could go a long way toward shifting the poor dietary health outcomes amongst Aboriginal people at last. Aboriginal communities need to prioritise reconnecting with our sacred food. The food of the ancestors. It is the gateway to restoring hope, pride, health and culture. Just like language (that's an article for another day). This is a central plank of self-determination. Especially in urban areas where it is harder to connect with culture, tradition and the bush.

For example, for the many Aboriginal kids removed or estranged from culture, not having language or ceremony, food would be an easy way of connecting directly to culture. Imagine it, the kid says to his friend “I can’t eat McDonalds or drink alcohol because I'm keeping spirit and eating cultural this week. I want to.” I'm sure it would make people feel proud. Especially if “keeping cultural” with your diet comes from within community, maybe where they also grow and harvest cultural food for their (and other) mobs use. There’s a fledgling industry for you. Done right. With authority. It would allow economic independence and competence, if not expertise. People in communities would be world experts in their own sacred foods. That’s connecting to country and culture. As Instone says “food, country, ecological knowledge and care occur within a seamless web that binds people and place. There is no dissociation or division between country, food and culture.” And for once it wouldn’t be the same old top-down crap we get from governments when it comes to fixing “problems” in communities.

Current measures are so alienating. Outside experts, using outside methods to fix outside problems (colonialism) using outside products (like European food). Just the same-old assimilationism we’ve always seen. But all this can’t be simply as an adjunct to the existing Australian/European culinary culture. Sure sales of cultural food could ensure the survival of potential Aboriginal-run farms but the central point of growing and harvesting the food is for the reclamation of culture, health, power and pride. Sovereignty, in other words. Food sovereignty.   References Lesley Instone, ‘Eating the country’, Journal of Australian Studies, No. 86, 2006, pp. 135-141 Colin Bannerman, ‘Indigenous food and cookery books: Redefining Aboriginal cuisine’, Journal of Australian Studies, No. 87, pp. 19-36.  

North Sentinal Island and the Condominuim with Australia (written in 2016)

I was engaging in a bit of “research” the other day and got sidetracked. When I say sidetracked, that’s pretty much how I do all my research these days. I’ll find something about a topic I'm interested in then I’ll come across something I didn't know and find that interesting. Then I’ll find something else on that thread then get sidetracked again. If you allow yourself to meander in this way it is amazing what can be unearthed. I love spending a lazy few hours “researching” like this. And so it was I was reading about Aboriginal sovereignty when someone posted, at the bottom of a video, a link to a blog. When I went to the blog it was all about a mysterious island in Asia inhabited by a people essentially uncontacted by “civilisation” to this day. Eschewing all contact with the outside world, any attempt to meet with these people has resulted in a volley of arrows and spears. Huh? That’s impossible, I thought. It's the sort of colonial, paternal, racist click-bait which usually ruins my morning. The blogger didn't mention where the supposed uncontacted people were but there was a satellite image of the island. Ok, I thought, let’s see. I’ll identify the island and put a comment on the blog which exposes this person for the fraud they so obviously are. Haven’t Indigenous people around the world suffered enough from the noble savage trope already? Google Image Search is miraculous for this sort of thing and sure enough when I uploaded the image of the island it returned with a match. It was somewhere called “North Sentinel Island” in the middle of the Bay of Bengal and is politically a territory of India. Which means it was once a British “possession”. If those guys exist, I thought, there is no way the British would have left them “uncontacted”.

The missionaries would have gone in quick smart and... well, game over, they’re fucked. But upon looking up Wikipedia it all checked out! It turns out that the “Sentinelese” people have, through a mix of being isolated, located on a small, defensible island which presumably doesn't contain oil, gold, valuable forestries or arable cow pastures, managed to remain isolated to the point where even potential introduced diseases have not been able to enter. One reason there has been such limited outside contact is because the Sentinelese defend their island with extreme prejudice. As soon as they detect a boat has come beyond the reef which surrounds their island out they come with volleys of spears and arrows. The Indian government, to their eternal credit, has set up a no-go zone around the island to protect their way of life. India knows a bit themselves about being traumatised by colonialism. An example of the Sentinelese fierce independence occurred in 2006.

A boat from a group of Indian fishers strayed onto a beach after the anchor failed overnight when the sailors were drunk. The next day the Sentinelese attacked and killed the two fishermen and when an Indian army helicopter went to resume the bodies out came the Sentinelese shooting arrows at the helicopter. They had to abandon the search. The responses of the two Indian families to the tragic event is of interest. One father says that basically his son was trespassing and under Sentinelese law he was dealt with. The wife of the other fisherman wants the Sentinelese who killed her husband to be brought to justice under Indian law. Such an undertaking would lead to the destruction of Sentinelese society. There would need to be extraction of at least some islanders, which would involve bloodshed, the potential introduction of disease, the Sentinelese language, which is not spoken by anyone else – the neighbouring Indigenous peoples’ languages are not mutually intelligible – would need to be studied and learnt, involving, basically, destruction of the Sentinelese way of life.

And then there is the small question of sovereignty. If the Sentinelese have never left their island, are unaware of any geo-politics or international law, have their own strong system of laws and justice, have been self-sustaining for 50 thousand plus years and have never ceded or signed any part of their land or sovereignty away, then why are the deaths of these fishermen not taken as just another nation’s form of justice? That is, justice viewed the same way a public execution in Saudi Arabia or a caning in Singapore is viewed… not very nice, but it’s their law and they are exercising it. The local Indian police chief summed up the situation as he sees it, “We have witnesses, yes, illegal poachers who won't testify because they can be imprisoned. Then there are the language barriers; nobody speaks the Sentinelese language. This is before we think about identifying the culprits and compiling forensic evidence. We would have to arrest the entire tribe. We are in an impossible situation. If we raided the island there would be casualties on both sides.

If the tribesmen go inland we might be able to sneak back there and collect the bodies - that's as far as this will probably go.” Thinking of this event at North Sentinel island brings me back to those initial Australian contact days of 1788 and after. We have enough documentation from Watkin Tench and all the others which so closely parallel the description of the Sentinelese situation today. The desire to meddle in Sentinelese affairs is the same as it was back in 1788 Australia. The difference is no-one would swallow the “terra nullius” line with the Sentinelese in the present. And this is where sovereignty is important. Since the start of time Aboriginal people, like the present-day Sentinelese, were police officers, lawyers, judges, premiers, prime ministers, public servants, military personnel and border control. Then, hey presto the British arrive on the Australian continent and they call all the shots. Aboriginal people go to the bottom of the pile and - let’s not kid ourselves - have stayed there ever since. This is the great failing of the British system in Australia. Two systems with two hierarchies and two modes of operation which back then could have attempted to come together (they chose, unlike the Indian government, not to stay away) at the very least via those shonky treaties the British were so fond of signing in the 19th century. But… no. It was their way or the highway and Aboriginal people have been on a lonely dusty highway ever since. So invasion happened. This isn't North Sentinel Island. The British stayed.

It is day 83,337 of the occupation. What to do about it? The current thinking, strongly pursued by Governments in Australia, is for the inherited British system to continue on its merry way and just tinker a little with it by, say, adding some indigenous parliamentarians, maybe a constitutional preamble and, bingo, everything works fine and we’re all happy. The problem with that is it won’t solve anything. Whilst “mainstream” people say that “the past is the past, times have changed. I’m not guilty for what people did 200 years ago,” the thing which has not changed is the British legal system. And by that I don’t just mean the judiciary. I mean the parliaments, the executive and, most importantly, the people and culture perpetuating this power. It’s always the same white people from the same white schools in the same white suburbs making the same white laws looking after the same white interests. And, again, it isn't what blackfellas want. What do Blackfellas want? Time and time again Aboriginal people say they want sovereignty, self-determination. We've been told by “experts” like Gary Johns (who seems genuinely terrified by the prospect of true Aboriginal Self-Determination) that the dream of Self-Determination has failed and now is the era of Howard’s “practical reconciliation.”

As most Aboriginal people are aware this is code for assimilation. Unfortunately the democratic process in Australia is seen as divinely granted. It’s the rule of the(ir) people. It’s how they get out of their responsibility to us every time. The numbers are in their favour because it’s pretty much stacked with their people. It’s democracy, right? How can that ever be changed? I've thought a lot about what true self-determination for Aboriginal people would look like. I owe a debt to important essays such as Michael Mansell’s “Why Norfolk Island and not Aborigines” (2005) where Michael proposes what a sovereign Aboriginal state would look like. Then there’s Callum Clayton-Dixon’s “Aboriginal or Australian?” (2015) where the author challenges the usefulness and legitimacy of Aboriginal people thinking of themselves as being “Australian” and all the dispossession and appropriation that comes with that term. Irene Watson’s passionate “The future is our past: We once were sovereign and we still are” poses the question to the Australian state “by what lawful authority do you come to our lands? What authorises your efforts to dispossess us?”

It is one of my favourites. Of course, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is required reading (if not memorisation) for all Aboriginal people. Articles 3, 4 and 5 give me strength daily when thinking about what is right and just for our mob:

Article 3: Indigenous peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.

Article 4: Indigenous peoples, in exercising their right to self-determination, have the right to autonomy or self-government in matters relating to their internal and local affairs, as well as ways and means for financing their autonomous functions.

Article 5: Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain and strengthen their distinct political, legal, economic, social and cultural institutions, while retaining their rights to participate fully, if they so choose, in the political, economic, social and cultural life of the State.

I still can’t believe such a beautiful document even exists.

How was it allowed? No wonder Australia (and Canada, New Zealand and the USA – what do they all share in common?) held out signing it. But the most important work I always turn to when thinking about Aboriginal sovereignty isn’t by an Aboriginal author at all. It is by an academic named Joel H. Samuels, a law professor from the University of South Carolina. In 2008 Professor Samuels published a little known essay titled “Condominium Arrangements in International Practice: Reviving an Abandoned Concept of International Boundary Dispute Resolution.” The essay provides a treaty and sovereignty framework for Indigenous people which everyone else seems to have missed. Which proceeds from a simple proposition... Why can’t two separate states exist on one piece of land? That is, in a radical overhaul of the status quo where nothing ever seems to change and gaps never seem to close, why not consider a Condominium arrangement between the Commonwealth of Australia and a new sovereign state which is a federation of Aboriginal nations? Give Aboriginal people full control to come up with their own solutions. Give Aboriginal people back their ancient right to govern themselves.

Give them full control of their culture, communities and future. But first, what is a condominium? Wikipedia gives a nice definition;

In international law, a condominium (plural either condominia, as in Latin, or condominiums) is a political territory (state or border area) in or over which multiple sovereign powers formally agree to share equally dominium (in the sense of sovereignty) and exercise their rights jointly, without dividing it up into 'national' zones.

The Samuels’ essay is so important is because the Professor gives the historical and theoretical underpinning, from a legal western perspective, as to how full Aboriginal sovereignty is not only possible but can in practice be implemented. It’s all done under western law. It’s in their legal history and theory. They can’t argue that it’s unworkable and impossible because it’s been done before under their system. In fact there are a few condominia which still exist in the world today. If one’s thinking about sovereignty, self-determination, healing, rights and dignity for Aboriginal people proceeds from the concept of condominium then the way forward for not only Aboriginal people but all Indigenous peoples around the world – except, hopefully, the Sentinelese… (but don’t hold your breath) – becomes pretty clear.

Talk about “empowered communities.” So what would a condominium between the Commonwealth of Australia and a federation of Aboriginal (and possibly Torres Strait Island) nations look like? Well to start with, condominium would have to be achieved through a treaty. It would be the centrepiece of a proper treaty. A treaty with substance. Not some mealy-mouthed piece of paper which does nothing but “authorise” the Australian state to carry on as usual and deliver nothing substantive to our mob. Which is what the current constitutional referendum debate is all about – white guilt-reduction. The central basis of a condominial treaty must involve the core economic basis of the new state. There can be no escaping... Australia must pay tribute. "Tribute” in this sense is perpetual payment for the use of our land. Land was never granted by us and it never will be.

I don’t think the Australian nation as a whole has ever understood the simple concept: This isn’t your land! But as the basis for treaty Aboriginal people are prepared to grant perpetual leasehold to much of the land deemed freehold, etc. today in Australia. Let this be the central plank of treaty negotiation. How would tribute be paid? In practice this is up for negotiation but my belief would be, say, a perpetual 1% levy on every land sale in Australia, freehold or other, to be collected and transferred by the states and the Commonwealth in perpetuity for the use of the new Aboriginal state without condition. Australia can afford it and it would go a long way toward finally creating “practical reconciliation”. It would mean Aboriginal people could cut the funding puppet strings the Australian state has been yanking since the end of the frontier war era. That’s the great myth about the endless white whining about “all this money we’re spending on Aboriginal people.” In reality it keeps them firmly in charge. It’s the modern form of state coercion since the missions got closed down and the protection acts got repealed. When I hear the old “we can’t keep throwing all this money at the blacks. What a waste!” I respond “then don’t… give them power instead.” Tribute would be the economic basis for the new state.

It is right and just that tribute is paid. Aboriginal land will never be ceded. Ever. But tribute is an acceptable and reasonable way for both peoples to move forward in the spirit of healing and goodwill. True and “practical” reconciliation. Tribute would be distributed centrally on an equitable basis for the use of all mobs. Just because the Sydney Aboriginal communities would be sitting on a tribute goldmine doesn’t mean they should keep it. Aboriginal people value reciprocity. It is a core cultural value. A world-view. Those remote communities will finally have the funding they need to function with dignity. What about all the jobs flowing from running their own hospitals, schools, local councils, media organisations. Not to mention their police forces, University campuses, prisons, fisheries, mines, emergency services, etc. Once the economic stability is established the fine-tuning could begin.

How would the laws of each state apply to individual citizens of both states? Aboriginal people would always be tried in Aboriginal courts, have Aboriginal passports, go to Aboriginal gaols. They would be subjected to the same laws as Australians on, say, the roads and in other equivalent areas. There would be many areas of the continent which were solely under the jurisdiction of the Aboriginal state. In others, there would be agreement as to how citizens of each nation would be policed by each separate law enforcement body. For example, the Australian police forces may detain an Aboriginal citizen for a few hours but must instantly contact Aboriginal police and have the prisoner transferred. Obviously the nutting out of these laws would be voluminous and beyond the scope of this article. This doesn't mean such a complex undertaking is not possible. Of course it is possible.

What would the name of the new state be? No-one will ever agree because we were all disparate nations, fiercely independent, but if Aboriginal people can adopt a flag in common they can adopt a name. My own belief is that it should honour Pemulwuy the great resistance leader of our people because he stood up for the maintenance of sovereignty from the start. He saw what Arthur Phillip - the most successful people smuggler in history - and what the rest of his lot had to offer and said an emphatic “no”. Pemulwuy’s death and the cruel saga of his remains are also an insight into the ruthlessness of the British. And that ruthlessness is the direct foundation of the Australian state. It’s exactly how it all came into being, not at Gallipoli as they’d like you to believe. Next, the location for a seat of government. A capital city would not be as important to Aboriginal people because our mobs are community based and much of their power would be retained at the local level. But you do need a supra-national body to deal with Australia, collect, distribute and maintain finances, resolve disputes between our nations and all that.

So you need a location. I believe that should be at Sydney. It is close to the important Australian centres of Sydney and Canberra for the ongoing close relationship needed between the two states. It would also be a symbol of resistance and triumph over the adversity Aboriginal people have faced since the European arrival in Sydney in 1788. Sydney is also an important centre for the evolution of the Aboriginal sovereignty movement from the 1930’s onward. Not to mention the political movement out of Redfern in the 1970's. The greatest value of a condominium arrangement with Australia though would be the removal of the Australian state in decision making over Aboriginal community life.

A condominium would mean the end of hundreds of years of entrenched suffering at the hands of the Australian state in many areas. Gone would be the various state Community Departments (for example, the dreaded Department of Community Services or “DOCS” in NSW) having ultimate power to remove children. It would be Aboriginal national or regional governments with those powers. Sure they’d make mistakes. But they would be our mistakes, which we would learn from. That’s empowerment. It’s also the Aboriginal gift to Australia… it would become truly legitimate as a nation state because Aboriginal people would finally recognise them as such. I think deep down Australians realise the lack of legitimacy Indigenous people regard them with.

So they go all quiet on Australia Day now. Well, some do. It’s been like that since the Bicentenary in 1988, really. Finally they could have a bit of real pride about their foundation knowing some amends have been made. And a treaty with condominium would allow Aboriginal people to well-wish them on Australia day. Why not… it would be a sign the Australian state had finally matured and been honest with itself. Of course it will always be a day of deep mourning for Aboriginal people. But I believe the 26 January 2038 is the perfect date for the birth of the new Pemulwuy state. Hopefully the “handover” would occur at the Australian Hall in Sydney. What a fantastic location to justify and honour those brave Kooris who organised the “Day of Mourning” in 1938, protesting the sesqui-centenary of the first-fleet landing. It’s the basis of NAIDOC week. Or maybe at Sydney Cove itself. The Pemulwuy state would not be perfect. Far from it.

No post-colonial national government ever has been. But that is the journey Aboriginal people must take. Has any former colony ever appealed for the colonial power to come back? Not many. That’s instructive. I don’t see Timor-Leste begging Indonesia to “come back all is forgiven.” Condominium is a radical solution to our problems. However, those problems are so profound and the trauma so deep there is practically no other way. I hope the people of North Sentinel Island never have to face the same bloody and traumatic history we have had since the colonials arrived here in 1788. It would be nice to think they could continue living their lives as they see fit. Aboriginal people have to exercise sovereignty in a different way. Through condominium there is hope for the future and for another 50000 years. And beyond.