Keeping culture
Roy and June Barker
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Audio Interview with Roy and June Barker, Co-Founders of Goondee Keeping Place, Lightning Ridge.
Recorded at Berkely Suites, Canberra 13/3/01
Interviewed by Cathie Payne and Peter White, Australian Museum
Sound Recorded by Josh Raymond, Australian Museum
[Interviewer's questions are paraphrased. Words with spelling queries are marked with [sp*]
Q. Would you just introduce yourself and tell us which community you come from, and the name of your keeping place?
June Well, my name's June Barker. The community that I identify with is the Brewarrina one where I grew up as a child, on the Brewarrina Mission even though my mother came off the Murray River at Yorta Yorta where I was born on the Cummeragunja and my father was of the Wiradjuri but everyone out in that area, * you were alive and Ngemba are my people. The Goondee keeping place in Lightning Ridge is what we both done, Roy and I.
Roy My name's Roy Barker. I'm a descendent of the Murawari, some 50 miles north of the present town of Brewarrina . I was born on the old Aboriginal mission in the late 1920s. I grew up there in the 1930s and left there in the very early 1940s.
Q. Tell us a bit about the local Aboriginal community and the influences the goondee has on that community.
June The local people, the people, the Aboriginal people come from other areas. They've come down to opal mine and we've got a good relationship with everyone in that community at Lightning Ridge. We went there because, you know, there is tourists come in a lot and I think, you know, respects us there and they know what we're trying to do, what we are achieving anyway. We are working with the local people there, and the schools which is good.
Roy Not only Lightning Ridge but the communities at Bourke, Brewarrina and Walgett. Those people there know the work that we've done over the years. Previous to setting up our culture centre at Lightning Ridge I was a shearer for some 30 years and shore all over the, parts of Queensland and New South Wales and I always had a yen to try and retain the culture as good, as good as I possibly could have done. And so June and I said why should it be lost in our part of the country. We've got other ethnic groups of people coming into the country and they're standing up and being counted so why not our people, you know. There's been so much lost and gone and we don't know how far we can go back with our culture, but it's a start and, you know, hopefully somewhere along the line that - not only our Aboriginal people but non Aboriginal people. We get people there in the Goondee and old Anglo-Saxon Australians in their 70s and 80s and they say to us, you know, why weren't we told these things, what happened and the culture and the weapons that were used in all our areas?
Q. What facilities does Goondee provide?
June In there we present our displays that we have there, the stones, grinding, you know, tools and all sorts of things like that, the ochres, posters of the bush foods and Roy cut a, brought in a coolamon tree, that's with the bark cut out and then we've got a canoe tree in there. Roy built a gunya -
Roy Or a goondee.
June A goondee or a gunya, whatever and - out of bark and malbra [sp*] sticks. We've got all sorts of things.
Roy What we've try to create is say something from the Dreamtime, right around to European contact, as we take the tourists around and to the mission display, photos that we've got that my dad took in the 1920s and the 30s.
June Some from the archives.
Roy Some from the archives, some from the Tindale collection. But most of them we've got in our own private collection that were left in negative form in his tin box after, when he died and we got them developed. So we've got a display there then of the mission, like photos of the mission. Rations that were issued on the missions at the time. Flour tins, sugar, games then that were played after European contact with the rowers [*], tin rowers, utensils, European utensils. And a government bed that was the free issue to our people on the, on the mission at that time. We've got this bed there on display.
June Found it in the *, in bits and pieces and put it together.
Roy And so things like that, we've got, you know. And people then have a different view, if you like, when they come in there and see these things and, you know, on display.
June One thing, we give a personal tour. We don't just let them roam around.
Roy No.
June Because it doesn't mean anything but when you point everything. This is what they done, this is what they -
Roy They go away with a different attitude.
June Don't just let them roam through and look around. You've got to be there with them. And while you're talking to them, you're building a good feeling between you and those tourists. They appreciate that.
Q. Can you also talk about the other activities that you do?
June Yeah, I tell the stories.
Q. And also how you travel around?
June Yes, we do a lot of that to the schools mainly now. We used to go travel out of the area, out of the Yurana [sp*] area but now they come to us. They bring the bus up there on excursion. And when we've got, like if we've got about 40, Roy w ill take half down to his workshop and show them how to make a boomerang while I'm, you know, doing up in the goondee. Got a little shop there too that they can look around at the things in there, yeah, so it's good, that, you know, that it's good even though we came off that harsh mission, that Roy could still make the weapons today and I can still remember the Dreamtime stories and legends and tell those.
Roy Why we opted out of the system with government organisations, that we couldn't do what we wanted to do but we feel that we've done more for our Aboriginal communities in that part of the country then. The organisations that have been set up there and you know they've got no further ahead if you like and we know our people inside out, you know. So as I said, you know, so we, the last few dollars we had we set up our goondee and presented it the way that we wanted to do and perhaps somewhere along the line with a lot of the organisations now in our part of the country, they can take a sample if you like, if that's the right word, from us and to do their own things out there with the, the organisations out there that they want to set up, these culture centres. But what we had in mind was a small culture centre to be set up in all the towns. It didn't matter how small the town was to have a very small culture centre there to keep it going. That was our, that was our long term plans for it with our people in that part of the country.
June When we get people, like school groups coming in there and they've always got a, you know, teacher, these young teachers in there. Older people escorting them in from other towns, you know, a long way away, they always say, oh why haven't we got this over where we come from? And some of them, women I've seen, you know, with tears in their eyes and I've said, look youse can have the same thing too, this didn't cost us anything in here. We'll come and help you to, you know, something together. But you never ever hear but you know they would like to have something too.
Roy Yes, yes. And like the beautiful culture centres that are set, they're great, and you know full of people.
June But there's other people that want to do it too.
Roy They've got all the facilities in them. We feel that it's really important that they have, that they've got to have those culture centres wherever. We were fortunate to have people like Peter and Phil help us out with the showcases. There were some showcases that Australian Museum , I think you were going to hoist them and -
June Yeah, remember that time [laughs] -
Roy You asked us did we want them and we had no way of taking them up there and -
June So they brought them.
Roy Yes, in a trailer and we were grateful for them. And yeah, everything that we've got in the goondee is all second hand. There is nothing new in it, and, yeah.
Q. What does a keeping place mean to you and your community?
Roy Well, I think it means a lot. It's, what we try to explain to people that it wasn't a museum. See a lot of them said we don't want to be, you know, portrayed, if you like, as, as monkeys or whatever in a museum and a lot of them didn't understand the word keeping place. That was there just to keep our artefacts and stone implements, if you like, all in the one basket and so, you know, when they realised it was a keeping place to keep our culture alive, there was a big change of attitude towards keeping places.
Q. Tell us what goondee means.
Roy Well, goondee means a shelter, a bark shelter like, you know, the areas, you know, the culture was so diverse in all our areas that there was different names for different things so we know the goondee as a shelter. What else is there?
June Gunya, my-my, whirly, there's heaps of -
Roy There's heaps of those names, you know, in our part of the country and so that, that's what that means, a goondee.
June But even, even with the modern houses, you know, we still use that - oh this is your goondee, oh come in and see my little goondee or something see and you go into a and this is a goondee here. You go into a nice place now, but is a goondee is an Aboriginal word for shelter.
Q. Can you describe what people see when they come into the Goondee?
Roy Well when they first come in, in the little shop, it's not very big. It's, really it's overall measurement of some 20 by 40 feet in the old measurement, I don't know what it is in the new one. But we've got a partition there and on the door we've got an entry fee and in the small shop we've got, we've got all the weapons on display for sale and we've got a counter there.
June We've got the map, the Tindale map on the wall.
Roy That's right.
June With all the tribal boundaries which we use as a guide.
Roy Inside then where we said from the Dreamtime right around to contact, we've got parks and wildlife animal photos of all our native animals and we've, we've got them all laminated so they won't fall to pieces on us. Yeah, so.
June But we can give little demonstrations in there with the ochre, show them how to cook, you know, and tell them about that.
Roy Yeah.
June There's a lot of things in there. There is more in there than you w ill find anywhere -
Roy In a lot of places.
June . places I think, that small area.
Roy And what we do is speak on all the weapons, what they were used for, all told, say in our * with weapons, with the Ngemba and Warrawoy [sp*] people there was around about a dozen pieces and of course they never carried them at the one time, they were left in strategic positions wherever they were camped on the river or plain country and used accordingly. We talk about those particular weapons. How they skins were tanned, the tribal way, kangaroo and possum skins and those sort of things and people are very surprised, if you like, to know that there were so much done by Aborigines to survive here for so long. And of course I know the myth created when we were kids that the Aborigines lived on witchetty grubs and goannas for perhaps all those m ill enniums was a nonsense and I know that in our part of the country there was food in abundance, and yeah.
June Amongst the photos that we've got on display on the wall in the museum, amongst them is the big house on the Brewarrina Mission and that's a good talking point, you know. There's the big house where the manager lived. These are the little houses that people lived in. This is where the bell rang every morning at half past seven and we'd run down to the treatment room to get our eye drops and that in our eyes. The bell would ring all day, sort of. The next bell would ring for the school, Roy could tell you about that part but I'll go on to - then the ration bell would ring and doesn't matter where the people were, whether they were away fishing, they'd hear those bells and they'd come up and then certain days, if the big bosses from Sydney were there, the inspectors, the bell would ring in another tone and he'd be hurrying up to see the big bosses. And another bell then when it rang real slow you knew there was a funeral. Sometimes you seen the little caskets being carried, people dying and you hear the death wail, all the wailing while we - we had to keep the laws of the Aboriginal ways in death. No noise on the mission. You hear the crying and the death wail at night, it's a real eerie, frightening sound to hear. Sad sound now I know, to hear them all crying. And then after the funeral, everything would go back to normal. And they'd smoke the houses out, you know, the old Aboriginal way. And so, you know, we tell them all about those sorts of things and seeing that we lived through it we can tell it truthfully and we're not making anything up.
Roy Yeah, in other words there on that mission we were controlled by a bell, for all things.
June And then you can tell, show them the display of the rations there, where we weighed them out into a bag there like they used to have with the eight pound of flour and three pound of sugar and quarter pound of tea. And then they'll ask you questions, how big a family, how long did that last? And all that.
Roy We used to call it the three, three, eight and a quarter.
June That's what it was known as.
Roy Known as, our rations.
Q. Where do the objects come from that you have?
Roy Well, the people, the people that I learned to make those particular weapons from 60 years ago, they were living there on the Brewarrina Mission at that time. So I, I say to people I'm going to say that those particular weapons that I learnt to make so long ago are probably the same type weapons that were used centuries ago in our part of the country, so, yeah, that's how they come to be.
June That's why I said to you, even though we came off that, lived that harsh life with our families there, Roy remembered how to make the weapons and he still makes the same ones today. That down in the museum, the National Museum , some weapons that were taken from there in 1912 are spot on with the ones Roy makes today just half an inch out, or something. That's why - over in the museum there, it's got a display of Roy 's things right through there, in the Aboriginal section and especially in the stone things, you seen that there?
Q. So you were taught to make them when you were -
Roy Yeah, we had to sit down, with the old people, if you want to learn to make these particular weapons, out in their workshop. The workshop I'm talking about was a woodheap and if there was unscrupulous kids there, that played out, they were hunted out of it and not allowed to come back in again, so. So this is how I wanted to make those weapons, there so long ago. And that's one thing that they never stopped us from doing, you know, making those particular weapons but they did with the, the dialect there, the language, you know, we were discouraged from speaking Aboriginal at that particular time.
June That's all they used to, in those early days. When we were children I still remember them talking, you know, * English. The old women then would be putting too much onto their good English. Going down town [laughs]. And being with the old women going fishing and all that all the time, they'd be talking about things and legends and stories, that's what I remembered, and with a little bit of learning to read and write, I was able to write the stories down.
Q. So how many languages did you learn on the mission?
Roy Bits of different language from the -
June About three.
Roy No there was the Wonga [sp*].
June Yeah, that's right.
Roy Wonga people too. We knew all everyday words, food and whatever, but to converse like we're talking now, you know, we never learnt it and that was the system.
Q. Is there any historical or cultural significance about the site?
Roy No, not really it was - although it was part of the Ualarai country there, in all that area where we are, it was just a place that we, where we lived and put the goondee up there at that particular place, yeah. Although there is significant sites all around, away from us, you know, scar trees and artefacts of all sorts.
June Lots of bush food in that area, * and things like that in season.
Q. So the main reason you set it up was -
Roy We didn't want to see it lost, you know, that particular part of the culture. There was so much of it of course, you know, that we don't know but as we said earlier, it was a start to do things.
Q. What was the main reasons about setting up your keeping place?
Roy The setting up of it, you mean.
June Why did we do it was to keep the -
Roy Oh right.
June So it wouldn't be lost forever otherwise, but be remembered.
Roy Doesn't matter how little of the cultures around in our part of the country, it's significant to us and it's a big thing to us even though it's only a small thing that we know about, you know, the culture part of it, and the making of the weapons, it was so much more attached to those sort of things, it's lost to us.
Q. Have you found out more since setting it up?
Roy Oh yes. Yes, and we get people say, Aboriginal inmates from Silverwater and those sort of places who know nothing about our culture and, and they are involved in, in the culture itself, languages, you know, even a few words of the language that was spoken there, we get a lot of young women from our part of the country who -
June Down in Silverwater, Mullewa is it?
Roy Yeah, Mullewa.
June They bring them out there.
Roy Yeah, they bring them out to our place.
June To look around out, you know, that part of the country and they make you sorry. They say we don't know nothing about our culture. And on the side I say, you never know anything being down in there but they've got to know too.
Roy But we get backpackers, we get a lot of, a bus load of backpackers every week and they're mainly from the Scandinavian countries and Americans, Canadians, English.
June And Germans.
Roy And Germans.
June They're really interested in -
Roy Aboriginal culture.
June Aboriginal culture. They've even said to us, they've said to me, you know that the Aboriginal culture is the only living culture in the world today that believes in things like, they say, spiritual things and I said, like we still believe in the birds w ill bring us a message, death and things like that. And they say, yes, that's what we mean. And you go on telling them about how the curlew cries at night and things like that, they like those sort of stories.
Q. How did you actually go about setting up the goondee?
Roy Well, we, we wanted it to look like a gunya with a, with a, you know, an oval -
June A round roof.
Roy A dome roof if you like. And so we got in touch with the guy in Dubbo, no, Mullalong [sp*] and we asked him could he do it with the frame, and yes, he said, I can do it with a little bit of extra money. I said, well, you know, do it. And anyway up the material come and we put the concrete block down ourselves and started off to build it, it's like a Meccano set I suppose but we used to make * and that, and I think we had a video there they'd sent up, every time we made a blue we'd run in and put the video on and, and, you know, go over how it worked again and rectify it. And we eventually got it up and put a couple of air conditioners in it and -
June Still not enough.
Roy It gets very hot, you know, it's not lined or anything like that and - but it's quite good in the cold winter months, but in the hot weather we've got to get them in early and out.
June Yeah, we only open early in the morning.
Roy And close up during the hot -
June Heat of the day.
Roy Heat of the day and then late in the afternoons again, yeah.
June Our son, Roy Junior, he helped us too financially to put this up.
Roy Yeah.
Q. Can you tell us what the building is?
June Costs.
Q. Well -
June What it's made out of?
Roy Well, it's a steel frame and the ordinary, I don't know what sort of iron it is, the roofing, ordinary tin roof and the sides are corrugated -
June You see fences -
Roy Yeah, I don't know what they call it, but anyway it served the purpose and we put, what five windows, I think, in, and there is five windows with curtains. Put a carpet right through it and built the goondee in one corner and the canoe tree that was knocked over by a bulldozer some twenty miles out, we drug [sic] it in and put it on a trailer and brought it in and stood it up.
June And that canoe tree has been cut with a stone axe.
Roy Yeah, was cut before contact and we explain that to them. And we know that after contact with the introduction of the steel axes which was as we know is a far superior cutting tool to our ancient stone axe, in my view and as I remember as a boy, these particular stone axes were cast aside and the steel axes used, and how we know this and we explain to the tourists that come there, that when the steel axes were used it left an impression from the steel blade part in the dead wood and the trees that were cut with the stone tomahawk, it hasn't got the imprint of the blade mark in it. So this is another thing that we explain to the people that come there. It's all those sort of things that you can explain and how things come about and, yeah.
Q. So when you set up goondee did you come up against any obstacles?
Roy Yes, we did with brochures that were done and -
June Local map you mean, little local tourist map.
Roy Tourist map. Yeah, we come up in a little bit -
June And we joined the tourist association and they put out a map every year of all the tourist things in the town, all around everywhere. And we thought, oh this is good, you know, we're down here now with all these other tourist things and Roy looked closely to it and he said, look can you see anything there? No. And he said, see how they've just got us there in a little tiny print, little tiny grey print and the others was all in big sort of black print all around, yeah. And the ramp coming into town was a little tiny grey thing and here's our little tiny grey thing here and next door to us the potter, he's in nice black print.
Roy So we had to wait for 40,000 of those brochures to be given away before we -
June But the next time, we told them, you know, the next time around then it was in black, yeah. Things like that, you know.
Roy So we run into things like that.
June That was the only real sort of thing
Roy And I think it's a lot of people -
June We work in with the tourist, they send, you know, people to us and all that, you know, so it's good.
Q. Was there anything that happened very easily?
Roy Not really. We thought -
June We liked doing what we done.
Roy Yeah, and we thought it was easy right through really.
June It was a big job for us, Roy done most of the work then.
Roy We thought it was never hard at any time really and so, you know, we done it with confidence.
June Especially when we heard people come in and, you know -
Roy Congratulate us.
June And even Aborigines they still come in there now, like strangers to that area, or even locals w ill come in there and they say, oh, yeah, you get a special feeling, you know, how our people used all these things, you know and we don't know nothing about it or our kids. So we know, we get comments like that all the time.
Q. How long did it take to build?
Roy Oh not long. It was cool weather at the time and . a month I suppose.
Q. Building up?
Roy Yeah, we had the building up in a month.
Q. You were in business?
Roy Yeah, we were in business. We ** up there, had to get a bit of help to put the canoe tree on its feet, as we had it. But for everything else -
June * and you building the little goondee.
Roy Yeah, what I done, with the goondee, and the canoe tree and the coolamon tree, I put some logs across and with the * some red dirt and some black dirt and f ill ed in right along and we made it like a real scene, if you like, with the goondee, with the skins thrown in, and mussel shells in a coolamon that we glued in there, we glued them there, emptied the animals out of them.
June Spears are all in -
Roy Yeah, and -
June Seeing like if they lived there.
Roy Just as though they lived there. And replica of a fire.
June . imagination, your memory go back, you picture how they were.
Roy And a few fish bones there.
June Fish bones on the coals, charcoals there.
Roy And a turtle shell, a big turtle shell alongside of it. And so it was the scene of a real goondee.
Q. When were the goondees st ill being used?
Roy There were still there when we were kids on the mission even though there was government houses built there at the time, a lot of the old people were very independent, they'd get on the bank of the river and build their own goondees.
June Build shelters and -
Roy Wind boats and whatever.
Q. That was in the 1930s?
Roy Yeah, in the late 1930s.
Q. So you've recreated from memory?
Roy Yeah, just from memory, yes, just from memory. And the thing that we never done there was a, a reproduction, if you like, from memory, of the Brewarrina Mission but we done it for the cultural museum of Brewarrina [coughs]. Yeah, so everything was done from memory that we set up there, you know, as we remembered it.
Q. How many goondees would have been round?
Roy Oh, I'd say there would have been a dozen or more, you know.
Q. This is outside the mission?
Roy At the mission itself.
June On the river, away from the houses, they wanted to be on their own, you know, down near the river somewhere.
Roy Yeah, and so they used to have those goondees there and, and so from our memory -
June And the last one we seen was in South Australia , hey, in the sixties.
Roy Yeah, that was the last one we seen.
Q. Still being used?
Roy Yeah.
June We have found remains of old ones in the bush, hey?
Roy Yeah, we have.
June Where they have rotted over, they must have been there for years and years, 80 to 100 years, and they're just collapsed now.
Roy But that's the thing that we remembered there was these, these goondees or gunyas there as they were and we created them out of our mind into the, into the goondee there now.
Q. How did you fund the goondee?
Roy Well, through our own personal, little bit of money we had, saved up. So we ploughed it into the goondee.
June No government money.
Roy No, no.
June I think when you're private like we are, they don't fund you money, don't give you a grant or anything.
Roy No, we couldn't get nothing.
June We did try through our-
Roy Yeah, so the only way then we said is, you know, before it, you know, before we are gone from this scene to try and do something about it, you know, in our own way, and you know, instead of waiting for perhaps months for funding to put it up so this is what we done, and I guess touch wood, if you like, we are still here. But we have that in mind that if, you know, if we were gone and something happened to either one of us there would be a little bit more gone, lost to our culture, you know, if it wasn't brought out as we thought fit to put it on display as we knew about it.
June And when we are away like we are now we've got two girls there that -
Roy Our daughters.
June Our daughters that can do the same -
Roy Yeah.
June We've trained them there. They hear us talk all the time and the tourist bosses and the bus drivers, oh the girls looked after us really good while you were away, you know.
Q. You know everyone.
June Oh, yeah, we know everyone.
Q. So if you don't receive government funding, how do you do new things?
June What sort of new things?
Q. Updating the exhibitions.
June Well, we've had them there now for five years and -
Roy You've got replace them every so often and if someone comes there and buys half a dozen boomerangs or a dozen boomerangs, I'll replace those boomerangs from the workshop.
June But he means from the collection inside.
Roy Oh.
June No, I think, you know, they're there, that's how it will be. You can't update Aboriginal, a goondee into a more modern one. It's got to stay like that. Those stones w ill always be there. They're the original things that the people used. Everything in there w ill always stay there so we won't be looking for any money to do that, the only thing we would have liked to have added to be a cool place in the summer which we haven't got the money to put the air conditioning into it. We did try to, one guy came and said, oh yeah, we can spray this stuff on the roof and all this and that, $7000, dearer than what the building was [laughs]. So that's the only thing we would look for.
Roy Yeah.
June And an outdoor toilet.
Roy An outdoor toilet. Our toilet is inside.
June We let them go in.
Roy Very embarrassing.
June That's all that we want.
Q. When did you set it up?
Roy Five years ago, when was that?
Q. 1996.
Roy Somewhere there.
Q. In the middle of the year?
Roy It was in the middle of the year, it was in the cool weather, yeah.
Q. How long had you been thinking about it?
Roy Oh, forever as the saying goes.
June Well, after we finished with -
Roy With the Brewarrina one. So we said that -
June We actually had a little thing going before the Brewarrina one too, you know, with Rob * coming around to Barwon - when we lived on the river bank.
Roy But when we finished with the Brewarrina one we were going to move into a different area like Lightning Ridge and set another one up there in our own way and, you know, and so that's how that come about.
Q. You set up one in Brewarrina, a goondee?
Roy Yes, a keeping place.
June That's the big one you're talking about, that's the -
Roy The government funded one.
June We were involved with that.
Q. You were involved with the development of that?
Roy Yes. With the setting up of everything in it, you know. We got a canoe tree and built a goondee there.
June And we found the bed too there in the gullies and put that together.
Roy Yes, all those sort of things.
June And the table, an old mission table.
Roy So we set that one up.
June But before that was there, when we lived on the river bank around the river there, the tourists used to come there and the shire sent them to us because back then they were looking for Aboriginal things, and everyone said, why don't you go around to them, two old people around there? And -
Roy So that's how we come to get involved.
June Roy would throw the boomerang and show them how a boomerang was made and tell them a story and that's how we got started and we were keen then to help with the Brewarrina one then which is got a, won the award for museum thing, didn't it, one year?
Roy See when we were young, when we were kids, anything Aboriginal was nothing, you know, this is how we grew up. And to say that anything Aboriginal was no good. So when we saw the light, if you like, with the, these people from overseas coming around to see us, this is how we got started you know. Do you know how to throw a boomerang? Do you know the aerodynamics of it and whatever? And we'd explain to them, how, you know, it was, so much taken off one side of the boomerang and the other side and I'd explain to them that in some cases to get the, the aerodynamics of the boomerang was to put them down in the hot ashes and give them a twist like an aeroplane propeller and immerse them down in the cold water and they set in that position and so you could throw them and they'd come back. What explained to them that there was so much, I don't know what the word is about our returning boomerang, my boomerang won't come back and all these sort of parodies on our returning boomerang. But what we said, you know, when they are made properly, they do come back and, you know, a lot of people expect you to throw them out and bring them back and land them in a * between your legs, all this sort of business and what we explained to them about, but if you can bring them back within about five or six feet of you, you're doing well, and all this, you know. And we explained how to throw a boomerang and so, yeah, we got a lot of people interested in things like that.
June Often people up there, when I'm down there, they see all the boomerangs, they pick up, oh yeah, this is what they copied this off the aeroplane wing. Hey, I say to them, the aeroplane wing must have copied off this because [laughs] -
Q. How long back would that be?
Roy Yeah, not quite 20 years. What 18 years?
June What, interest in Aboriginal -
Roy Yeah, interest in Aboriginal culture and whatever.
June Yeah, about 20 years.
Roy And I think the, yeah, the overseas people I think kicked it off.
June Yeah, looking for Aboriginal things.
Q. So it was interest from outside the country?
Roy Yeah, it was. The outside, from, you know, those countries that really took the whole, we thought, there was no interest from the old Anglo-Saxon Australians, there was no interest at all.
June It was all overseas people.
Roy Yeah, it was those people that we concentrated on then and we've kept in contact with the backpackers and those sort of people.
Q. So have people come back?
Roy Oh yes, yes. Yeah, we've had people come back lots of times.
Q. You've got links all over the world?
June Yeah.
Roy Yes.
June We're known all over the world. It's true.
Roy What we found out that 70 per cent of the tourists from overseas come to Sydney and they disperse from there, up the coast or wherever, so we were getting a little tiny sprinkling of those people that come into our area, you know we are fortunate to -
June People have said to us, like to me, who trains you to talk to tourists, because I can talk to people who can't speak English - Japanese, Swedish, or any of those sort of people, in a way you can get them to understand what you're talking about with actions and your eyes and that. Yeah. And then that, we didn't get trained, that just came naturally to me, I know how to talk to people.
Q. In achievements, what are the good things that have happened?
Roy Well, the, you know, the, the culture itself and that was one of the main aims that we had and we thought we'd achieved in our way. Yeah.
June We have done good in that way, of passing the culture on. That's been good because we get good, you know, feedback from people and other good thing is that we are supported by the Australian Museum , Peter, work there. They were the first ones that came from any sort of a government thing to us and they are the only - we haven't had anything to do with any other government organisation, like ATSIC and that.
Roy But the relationship now that we've built up even with Anglo-Saxon Australians, they are very interested today like they never was before and we get a lot of those people there, you know, into our -
June You know they care.
Roy Yeah, they care.
June And we know they care because they wouldn't come in there.
Roy No.
June And a lot of them say, sorry, and all this. And we say, no, we understand.
Roy Yeah, we understand.
June We know that you wouldn't come here. And people have got a lot of emotion when they come in there. I'll just tell you briefly, it doesn't have to be on there. But this old couple came in there one day and I was telling them about the mission part. And our language where we lost, you know, our language, it's sad to lose your language, your culture and they were standing there, and next minute, you know, I looked around, and here's this old fella crying, I'm sorry, old Englishman, two old English people. I'm sorry, they come out here and what they done to your people, and here I said, I didn't mean to upset you [laughs]. I was comforting them. And she was *, he'll be right, she says, he's just very sad, she said, that you've got to be standing here and telling us, you know, what happened your people. So you meet people like that, you know, *, I give them cuddles and all this and that.
Roy We get a lot of -
June A lot of people.
Roy A lot of people that -
June Coming in, shake your hand.
Roy Sit in the goondee and get their photos taken.
June Yeah.
Q. How people come to the goondee in a year?
Roy Well, we've got a - what do they call them?
June I've never counted them.
Roy A visitors book, we can count them up, we haven't - but we estimate that we've had like backpackers, all told since we started, we've had something like 10,000 -
June Might be more.
Roy Might be more.
June Because they don't all sign the book.
Roy No.
June So you might get 20, and then ten w ill go out to smoke and -
Roy And then the next minute the bus is gone.
June The next minute they w ill be gone.
Roy So I'd say we - the last count we put on our, on our book that had signed it, there was, oh, seven and a half thousand or something like that. That's a lot of people.
Q. That's not just backpackers?
Roy That's just backpackers, all sorts of people -
Q. Over 10,000 people.
Roy Over 10,000.
Q. What about people from the local area?
Roy Yeah, we get a few people like that, you know.
June School groups and that, you know.
Roy Yeah, those sort of people.
June We've * schools from over on the coast.
Roy Kempsey, those towns.
June Coffs Harbour and Lismore kids. They bring a bus over.
Roy What we've got to do when we get a big bus there, we've got to split everybody up because we haven't got enough room inside to fit 30, 40 people in there, you know. So that's, that's, it makes it a little bit embarrassing but I entertain them. I go down -
June We get bookings now. I've got a group booked in for April. There's forty, there's children too, you know.
Roy So we've got to -
June And the guy that booked them in, he was, he was a Swede so I don't know whether, who's in the group, whether he works at the tourist place or what, down there in Sydney .
Q. There is an entry fee?
Roy Yes, yes. It's very, very cheap.
June Only a couple of dollars.
Roy Two dollars for -
June We don't want to make it too high.
Roy No, and a dollar for pensioners which is, you know, and we don't make all that much money out of it, you know, we keep our heads above water, just enough money to pay the power bills and the phone bills and that's it.
Q. Just keeps it going.
Roy Yeah, it keeps it going, yeah, yeah. And -
June People say you want to charge more than that.
Roy No, no.
June But we know that suits people.
Roy Yeah, that suits people.
June You know people when they come in there and sometimes you get people that w ill come in there and they w ill put something in your hand, you know, that, you know, well to do sort of people, and then you go, and you might have ten dollars or twenty dollars or something like that, so **.
Roy Yeah, all those sort of things. But most of the people that come in there are -
June Tourists, you know who's got money and who has not. I do, you know, you get to know people by the look of them and I, you know, the shoes or something in their jewellery and things. But you treat them all the same.
Q. What about official visitors?
Roy Yeah, we've had, yeah, we've had a lot of official visitors.
June That Mr Ruddock there, he was the last one.
Roy Yeah, he was the last one.
Q I've got to stop - oh another five minutes. So Mr Ruddock.
Roy Mr Ruddock, he was the new Minister for Aboriginal Affairs.
June He wasn't back then.
Q. Immigration guy?
Roy Immigration, yeah.
June Immigration because there is a lot of ethnic people in the Ridge. There's 68 different languages spoken I think it is. See it's a mining town and you've got all sorts of people. Just down the road from us is a Serbian church and all those sort of people.
Roy But we get people like, you know, from the ministry, like, we had the police minister, people like that, and commanders from the * area, when they come there, they come out there and visit, have a bit of a relationship with the Aborigines.
June A lot of police coming out.
Roy Yeah, we get a lot of police.
June Even local fellas, when they come.
Roy They come down and introduce themselves.
June We get all the new teachers and things like that, school teachers.
Q. Your relationship with the schools?
June Very good.
Roy Yeah, very good relationship with the schools.
June See, we used to do it voluntary once but now they've got like Aspa [sp*], well, they can pay us for coming down.
Roy Pay us, a few hours of work, yeah.
Q. Are you teaching them or telling stories?
Roy Telling stories and what we do we take the whole of our weapons down and of that three or four different sets of weapons made for those, you know, particular purposes that we do and I just speak on the weapons. How they were used, what they were used for, you know, everything like that, and mission history and sometimes we, you know, we don't like getting too far on the, the political side of things, we just sort of straight ahead but then sometimes we do get on it with people that come there and ask us awkward questions, you know. And I remember one guy coming there and he said, he said, you haven't got much Aboriginal blood in you, you know. And I have an answer for that and well I said if you were around 20,30, 40 [noise], 60 years ago, and - [interruption] - anybody that had * a mixture of Aboriginal blood in them, they were classed as Aborigines, you know. And I said, you're trying to reverse that trend to suit yourself but it won't work. You know you've got to have little bits of answers like
that which is not insulting.
Q. Part and parcel.
Roy Yeah.
[interruption - Peter enters]
Q. What advice would you offer to anybody setting up a keeping place?
Roy Well, if, if you're about to build one get the right people in there, you know, get an architect to draw up your plans and whatever, and get stuck into it, if you've got the dough to do it. Don't hesitate. F ill it up with artefacts and everything else that is relevant, if you like, to, to our culture.
June And if there is anyone out there that has a real desire to do what Roy and I done, on our own without any funding.
Roy When we first went into the schools, like in Dubbo, in Trangie, in Narromine and all those towns and we had Aboriginal students there in the classes that wouldn't look up at us. They'd look down. They were ashamed of us talking about Aboriginal culture. And what we used to say them, you know, there is nothing to be ashamed of our Aboriginal culture. Lift your heads up and be counted, and you know once we got this through to a lot of the Aboriginal students, you know, they were all for it. They were asking questions and previous to that we were getting more questions from the young white students than our Aboriginals. And, but once they got to know a bit, not too much about Aboriginal culture, they were right in it. But previous to that, they were, you know, shame they were, you know, and they wouldn't look up at you and we used to get stuck into them. You know get your heads up, no looking down, look straight up at us and all this sort of business, yeah.
June It can be done, it can be done, even if you want to do things we can't. It can be done, if you came to our place and see just what is there but the main thing in there is that we've got our culture and history and it w ill always be there to pass on and that's what it is all about is to pass on, because a lot of us there, I tell them that we have school groups there and a lot of fair-skinned children amongst them and they say, he's not Aboriginal. But I always like to tell them, it doesn't matter what our skin colour is, the colour of our eyes, we are still the descendants of the first people of this land and not a lot of people can say that, hey.
Q. What kind of relationships do you have with the media and do they support the goondee?
Roy Oh yeah like -
June ABC.
Roy We've had them up there.
June Radio.
Roy Had documentaries with those guys from the ABC. Yeah.
June And we ran into Karen Duranti [sp*]. She's from Brisbane . She does, she does interviews over the phone - she done one on you too didn't she Roy? She done one with you the other day but I sort of just knew her voice, I'd spoken to her a few times and she is from, what do you call it? The ABC in Queensland . And the stations too in Bourke, the, we done * with the 2WEB when it was a community run, Aboriginal station there, 2WEB. And now they've got another community service there, just Aborigines, Mudda [sp*], so we've got some stories and that on there.
Q. And they have approached you guys?
June Yeah.
Roy Well, June had a program with her Dreamtime stories on the local station there and every week it used to come on.
June They asked me to do more but I haven't got around to it.
Q. Is that TV or radio?
June Radio, yes.
Q. That's the local radio.
June Local, down in Bourke, yeah.
Q. Can you tell us about some of the other things you've been involved with?
June Yeah, like with David Cause [sp*].
Roy Yeah, I've done a lot of work with David. He's, what's he? An anthropologist.
June He's a curator.
Roy Curator of here, set up all the artefacts here. He comes out there and we videoed a bark canoe cut last year, I cut one last year just before the flood and it was on display down at Penrith Lakes there with the rest of the kayaks and whatever, those sort of things yeah.
June Another thing Roy and I are both involved with, a young historian, who was interested in Roy's father, reading his father's book, the Two Worlds of Jimmy Barker, and he came out there to Roy and Roy took him into Mauri Mauri [sp*] country, into the mission and he made a CD. I'm on it too.
Q. Martin Thomas?
June He won the award.
Roy Yeah, we won the award and got a few bucks out of it, nice and handy.
Q. Is there anything else you'd like to say?
Roy What we'd like to say with the, the other groups of people that have got culture centres set up and about to set them up, you know, we've got a little bit of good health left in us and if there is anything we can do, well, you know, we are only too w ill ing to go and give a hand and, you know, the making of boomerangs and whatever, in all those areas. It's not very far to travel. We feel that if we can be of any help that way, you know, we can. In our retirement, as the saying goes, we've got a little bit of time up our sleeves and can go and help those communities, you know. The last lot we set up was in Bourke and so they are on the way we believe to a big culture centre. They're right on the Mitchell Highway and yeah.
June Yes, it's - I don't know what ** but she was the boss of the regional library in Moree and they purchased some artefacts, a full set from Roy . So we got a phone call the other day and she's up in Brisbane now and she said there is nothing in any of the libraries up there in Queensland like the display she put on down there. So she said, well she has ordered a full set again, but the one where she works, and so we've got a good, you know, relationship with her. Maybe some more artefacts to go that way, because she said there is no one in that area making anything. Yeah.
Roy And it hurts us today to see our young Aborigines walking the streets like zombies. You know, with nothing to do and we don't know how to overcome our problems in our communities and they don't know nothing about our culture. Whereas the non Aboriginal kids growing up to see how good they were and what I say to people, you know, after the conquest of our people we got no recognition of helping to pioneer this continent and what I say, you know, talking about the drovers, the fencers, the timber cutters, the women domestic servants, people who brought great herds of stock down through the great stock routes of this land without a fence to guide them, we've yet to get recognition for helping to pioneer this country. It was never the preserve of whites who pioneered this country without the aid of our, the help of our people. You know these things have got to be put across we feel and this is what we tell people and for far too long, as far I'm concerned, non Aborigines have used Aboriginal place names, symbols and design s to heighten their own national distinctiveness and to underline their own separate identities while our people have been on the bottom rung of the ladder. And we feel this has got to change and we go to a lot of peace liaison meetings in our part of the country and, you know, we get into a few words with them, and what I say, I remember there was a couple of young police, lady policemen, talking about, they were talking about this young Aboriginal guy in Walgett. They couldn't get him in the paddy wagon and whatever and, and so I, you know, we were at this meeting and I put these guys to a test and I said there is nothing derogatory about their background, the police background and - but I wanted to know their background, you know, and I said to this young guy. I said, I'd like to know your background. Well, he said, my people come from, my parents come from Germany . Well, I said, I can * you out and I said to the young lady, I said where do you come from? She said, Gilgandra. My people have got a small farming property there. And, you know, I said I don't want to, and the other guy is there, your grandfather could have helped to build the harbour bridge, I don't know. But I said you can go out into any Aboriginal community and pick any derelict or any Aborigine in the street and get their background, and they've had something to do with helping to pioneer this country. You know, this is a fact of life, you know, even say your people, for instance, go back on your people there and you, they were fencers, they were shearers, they were you name it, and these guys, you know, this is how it was, and we've got to get that across to these people. And this is part of it, you know, there is nothing bad about it and the truth has got to come out somewhere along the line, because we get people, old, as I said, previous, old, non Aboriginal Australians and they say, you know, why weren't we told these things happened. All these sort of things. Yeah.
Q. That sounds like a good end.
Roy We feel people have got to understand, how our people lived and all those sort of things.
End of interview
Contact details
Peter White
Aboriginal Project Officer
Aboriginal Heritage Unit
Email: Email Peter White
Copyright © Australian Museum, 2003
