AustLit

'I am Ku Ku Yalanji Bama. My name is Karranjal John Hartley, and I was born in Kogarah, New South Wales, in 1956. My ancestral homeland is in far north Queensland. 

'I wrote this spoken-word piece for a men's talking circle when I was in my mid-thirties, some twenty-five years ago. It covers some of my earliest memories over a period of some thirty years, from when I was four years of age and living in returned soldiers barracks at what was then called Herne Bay and is now known as Narwee.'  (Introduction)

'I can remember Jones Street in Cairns, where I grew up. The street was flat and straight, no gutters. If it rained for more than a day, the puddles would become lakes then rivers. My siblings, Toni and John Paul, and I would have fun splashing and catching tadpoles When it didn't rain, we rode our bikes up and down Jones Street. One day I strayed away from our street alone. A kid on a dragster bike called out, 'Get out of here, blackie.' My legs pedalled fast to get back home.'  (Introduction)

''You wouldn't know what it's like, I guess,' he said very casually down the phone to me. 'Your mob is from top camp - that's not a real mission. You probably don't know what it's like to be really Aboriginal.''  (Introduction)

'From the first moment of taking a breath, I had the salt air in my lungs and the wind on my face and my mother's touch. My mother, Pearl Marriott, gave birth to me on a speedboat racing from Yarrabah Aboriginal mission to Cairns base hospital. My mother was Aboriginal, originally from Lockhart River (Kaantju), and my Dad is Irish from a town in Ireland called Carlow.'  (Introduction)

'Red, flat and dry. Condobolin was hard and didn't take too kindly to the weak - and no won was as tough as my pop. Even though I'd started school and was a big boy now, he could still hold me above his shiny bald head, looking up at me with his round chubby face and his wide Koori nose. I was so high - if he'd dropped me from up her I would surely die - but his big smile would ensure me I was safe in the King's hands.' (Introduction)

'That day, 21 December 1967, didn't start out as anything out of the ordinary, but then I was only seven years old; how would I recognise extraordinary anyway? No, it started out like every other day I had ever spent at Joyce Wilding OPAL (One People of Australia League) Home in South Brisbane, with me and my younger sisters, Coralie and Lillian, waking to the smell of hot Vita Brits from the nearby factory. Although my memories from OPAL Home aren't good ones, I still love that smell!'' (Introduction)

'My people are the Palyku and we are born of the red dirt, purple hills and blue skies of the Pilbara. But I grew up amongst the tuart trees and winding rivers of Whadjuk Noongar country in the south-west of Western Australia. The arrival of my branch of the family in Perth was the result of a journey undertaken by my great-grandmother that was not her choice. Like so many others, she was a member of the Stolen Generations, as was my grandmother after her.' (Introduction)

'My father enlisted in the army as an engineer about a year after I was born. He would have liked to remain on the coast, surfing and knocking around with is mates, but he did what was expected of a new husband and father back in that era, and no doubt felt the pressure all the more for having hitched up with a seventeen-year-old Aboriginal girl. We moved down south into a fibro-board house in the western Sydney suburb of Holesworthy. Reportedly, it was a rough and peculiar place at the time. Dad was often away, either at barracks or out bush on exercise, leaving my barely eighteen-year-old mother to care for me and my younger brother alone. Perhaps because of this situation, my paternal grandfather, Jack, used to drive the seven or eight hours it then took to travel from the mid-north coast down to Sydney to collect me and take me back to my grandparents' home in Kendall.'  (Introduction)

'Black bum: these two words mark the first time I realised I was different because my difference was pointed out to me. I was five years old, in my first year of primary school in Canberra, and this small barb was thrown at me by another girl in my class. It hurt me emotionally and so I decided to hurt her back. I pushed her, and she fell to the ground. My five-year-old brain didn't record what happened next, though my Kindergarten school report - which still exists in my mother's albums to this day - outlines a girl who showed advanced capabilities in most subjects but who needed to learn how to 'control her temper'. I think it's reasonably clear to work out who was seen as the problem in this circumstance.'  (Introduction)

'David Unaipon, Albert Namatjira, Evonne Goolagong Cawley, Oodgeroo Noonuccal. These names that are legendary and inspire out people - faces that are recognised by all.'  (Introduction)

'When I was a young girl, my uncle told me and my older cousin about our family. He told us that family is the most important thing in you life; he told us about our history, our family and who we are as people from the Wiradjuri tribe; he told us these stories so passionately. To me, these stories were the small mustard seeds that we - the next generation of the Wiradjuri tribe - grow to be strong trees and branches that can withstand challenges and hardships. My family has faced many challenges: losing my grandmother and my great-aunty; my grandfather being diagnosed with diabetes; my cousin being born with autism; and another cousin being crushed by a motorbike and breaking her leg. Even through all of this, my family never changed: it stayed the same; it stayed beautiful, like a peaceful butterfly. ' (Introduction)

'It has become one of those family anecdotes: the time a stranger thought my dad had stolen me. 

'Dad was walking around a shopping centre in Liverpool, where I was born and lived for a few months in infancy, when a perplexed man came up to him and asked, 'Is that your baby?' The implication was that he was worried I had been kidnapped.' (Introduction)

'[...] I once had a friend who said to me, somewhat confused, 'If your mum is white and your dad is black, then why aren't you grey?' I was ten.

'I laugh sometimes when I think of that remark, not because it was humorous but because, funnily enough, that's how my life felt most days. My world was often grey. Every area was a grey area, because of who I was: a grey Aboriginal.' (Introduction)

'I am a Noongar woman who was born in the central wheat-belt area of Western Australia in 1947, at a town called Kellerberrin. It was a very hard life for Aboriginal people at that particular time in the past. We did not have the choices and opportunities that our young ones have today in society. When I was growing up, the governent policies made living conditions very difficult for us. The protection and segregation policies forced our mob to stop speaking our language and practising our culture, and separated and isolated us from the main towns. The authorities expected us to adapt to the European lifestyle and abandon our traditional way of life. The effects of these policies had a devastating impact of our lives, and many of us still suffer from the effects today. I hope by telling my story it gives the younger generation a better understanding of how different things were for us in the past, compared to how it is for them now.'  (Introduction)

'When did you first realise you were Aboriginal? I remember the first time I was asked that question, just after the Stolen Generations report had popularised the notion that those of us who didn't look 'black' were stolen or the children of those who had been. Certainly there was no concept or idea that we grew up Aboriginal; our appearance apparently constituted our identity.'  (Introduction)

'I am Koori. My tribe is Yorta Yorta.

'I didn't know I was black till I was seven years old. I didn't know that people would eventually cross the street to avoid walking on the same path as me. I didn't know that people would define me as 'not looking that Aboriginal', as if it were a compliment. I never foresaw that people would think they understood my story before they heard a word pass through my lips.'  (Introduction)

'What's it like growing up Aboriginal? My gawd, how well I remember.

'Some of my earliest memories come from the time I spent in a native mission. All I wanted was to hug my big brother - my hero; my world. I just wanted some comfort from him. I couldn't stop the tears that rolled down my face. I was not allowed to talk to him, even though we were in the same mission. I was six years old, for goodness sake, and couldn't understand why they wouldn't let me touch him. This is when I first remember an emotional hurt, a hurt that stays with me forever. I got a belting that day from the missionary lady for trying to hug my brother.'  (Introduction)

'I grew up an Aboriginal Australian from the north coast of northern New South Wales - we refer to ourselves as Kooris. My grandmother Kathleen Kelly, a Gumbaynggirr woman, was born and raised on a tiny Aboriginal mission outside of Nambucca Heads called Bowraville, locally known as 'Bowra', deriving from the Gumbaynggirr place name Bawrrung. My grandparents Iris Kelly and Earl Skinner were born and grew up in the regions adjacent to the Clarence River in Bundjalung and Gumbaynggirr country. Like my family before me, I grew up on the far north coast of New South Wales, and call the regions of the north and south of the Clarence River - the Bundajalung and  Gumbaynggirr nations - home. It is the place where my ancestors walked before me, where my relatives reside today, and where I visit frequently to walk on country to reaffirm my identity and learn to be a Bundjalung and Gumbaynggirr man, a Koori, an Aboriginal.' (Introduction)

'After many years of travelling from town to town and living in tents, paddock shacks and rented houses, we were finally going to get a home of our own - one that was stable, one we could call home. Our house in Condo had burnt down many years ago, and since then we had been travelling fro one paddock to another, one place to another.'  (Introduction)

'I'm an old fella and have gotten used to being called 'Aboriginal'. I accept Indigenous too; I don't argue, since the two - Aboriginal and Indigenous - are very close synonyms. Any fine distinction between the words is lost on most whitefellas anyway. I have seen myself in different ways at various points in my life, given the different situations I found myself in -  but always, somehow, still Aboriginal.'  (Introduction)