Putting Black History on White Paper

We were staying at the Pines because it was cheap, and a number of us all bunked in together. There were about a dozen of us Ngarrindjeri women down there, and that night we gathered in my bunk room and I talked to them all about the things I knew that were important to women about Kumarangk. We yarned for a long time that night and they all listened very carefully to what I had to say. Some of them said they had heard little bits and pieces from their relations and what I was saying fitted with that.

Sarah and Doug Milera were living in the Mouth House, Anne Lucas’s little place at the mouth of the Murray River, and the next day we had a meeting there to talk over what was happening. As well as the women I talked to the night before, Shirley and George Trevorrow, Victor and Glenys Wilson, Glenys’s sister Bronwyn and their father Brucey Carter and his wife Cathy, Doug Milera and Tim Woolley from ALRM [Aboriginal Legal Rights Movement] turned up too. A few more women then arrived, including Dorothy Wilson, who took the time off from her job as Program Director at the Lower Murray Nungas’ Club to drive down. I was pleased to see my cousin Billy’s wife, even though they had separated, and I knew she was fighting with Victor [her brother-in-law] over things happening at the Nungas’ Club.

I didn’t think nothing much of it; feuds like these have been ongoing in the Ngarrindjeri community, sometimes since we were kids. Certainly I had never had a good relationship with Dulcie Wilson from the time we were little. I always had the feeling that Dulcie, being a whiter coloured skin, considered herself superior to me, even though I led a very respectable life.

This time I talked again generally about the fact that there was some very significant women’s knowledge to do with the island but I didn’t go into detail in front of the men. Nobody objected or complained that it wasn’t true, including Dulcie.

We spent all day discussing ways of dealing with the problem. We decided to send a letter to Alexandrina Council and elected a committee to deal with it. The decisions that the meeting made would be processed by the committee, who would represent our views to the State. We thought that was the right and proper way of doing things. I didn’t want no violence.

While this was going on, Doug Milera pointed to the map and said the area represented women’s internal organs. I said to Doug, ‘If you know so much, how come you’ve missed the most important thing?’ And the most important thing is that him being a man, he’s not supposed to be talking about that, because it’s women’s business. Of course, later on the media said that the men had told the women about ‘women’s business’. How ridiculous. Women knew there was men’s business and men knew there was women’s business; just not the details. The important thing was not to talk about it.

We discussed what we could do to protect the area against them building a bridge, and Tim Woolley said the best thing to do was for us to write to Robert Tickner and ask him to put a ban on it, so that’s what we decided to do. The women, including Dorrie Wilson and Sarah Milera, got together at the University of South Australia’s centre at Goolwa, Ngarrindjeri Pulgi [Ngarrindjeri house], and wrote a letter, but we weren’t prepared to give him any details. Tim Woolley said this wouldn’t be enough; that we’d have to reveal some of the information for it to be possible for Robert Tickner to act. But that was forbidden. Over my dead body would I tell a man! I was feeling very stressed out about the thought of telling more. I left them with it. I was planning to write my own letter. But I understand that Dorrie Wilson was one of the ones that signed that letter to stop the bridge and that it was sent off in the afternoon from ALRM.

But it was this protest meeting that got the media going. Apparently the Chapmans had first proposed the bridge a few years earlier and some people saw it as Aboriginal people were only raising a stink at the last minute. I don’t understand what they thought we were doing it for — whether they thought we were just being bloody-minded or what. But people don’t realise how out of touch a lot of Aboriginal people can be. A lot of us live on former missions away from the cities. Aboriginal people don’t have much money to make long-distance phone calls all the time. Many people don’t have transport; I don’t even drive, and it’s hard work catching long haul buses all the time. Organising meetings and getting together costs money, something not many Aboriginal people have. So very few people knew anything about it until then. But when I spoke out I didn’t know much of what had been going on in the lead up to the bridge proposal. But I didn’t intend to hurt anybody; I did it because I needed to protect something that was important to my people. I actually never thought nothing much about the Chapmans at all. To me, they wasn’t even worth thinking about.

After receiving my letter, Robert Tickner banned the building of the bridge for thirty days and appointed Professor Cheryl Saunders to undertake an investigation into Ngarrindjeri heritage to see whether the bridge should be permanently stopped. I didn’t see why they needed an investigation, but if that’s what it took, okay.

Controversy over the bridge was starting to brew into a storm. On 5 June an anti-bridge protest was held at Goolwa, attended by about 800 people. Then five days later the pro-bridge mob protested, and they got a crowd of about 600.

Cheryl Saunders was coming to talk to us, so a meeting was organised for the women to get together beforehand to talk about what we were going to say to her. The meeting was held at a conference centre called Graham’s Castle in Goolwa on Saturday, 18 June. Graham, the owner, was happy to have us there.

I was getting ready for the meeting when I had a phone call saying that Rocky Marshall, a gunya whose family had lived in the area from the earliest times of white invasion, had published a letter to the editor, telling details of Ngarrindjeri women’s business his grandmother had told him about. I got hold of a copy of the paper and I just couldn’t believe what I was reading. Now that old lady must have been close to the Aboriginal women in the area and learnt a bit from them, but not enough to know she shouldn’t pass things on to the men in her family. I was furious that this had been published in the paper.

We got into the minibus and headed for the island. When we got there over the ferry, I happened to see Deane Fergie. Deane was appointed by ALRM to be their anthropologist to assist Cheryl Saunders. I thought that was wonderful, but I was surprised that they appointed her to work with me, because Deane and I was good friends and we done a fair bit of work together. Deane was with the University of Adelaide and would sometimes come over to the Family History Unit. She had invited me on a trip with her to the tribal country up north, but I was too busy in Adelaide.

I jumped in Deane’s car and told her to drive. I gave her directions to Rocky’s house. I didn’t know him well, but I met him through all this. Rocky and his wife were having a meeting at their house for the Friends of Goolwa. I marched in there and blasted Rocky for publicly telling our knowledge. Sarah Milera and Amelia Campbell were at that meeting. Afterwards, I wanted to talk to them about what they knew of women’s business, but they wouldn’t talk to me about it, so I left.

I told them that a lot of the women had been raped by white settlers in the early days and that’s where the women used to go to abort these babies. I didn’t go into how they did that then, even though I knew it, because I didn’t want the younger women to hear that. I told them that kumari