Dr Margaret Bromley, an invited speaker at the recent Hidden Stories event (September 2016), shares her story.
Professor Maggie Walter and I were invited to The Indigenous
Literacy Day Symposium Hidden Stories to discuss the continuing silences
that surround white peoples’ acknowledgement of Aboriginal people and their
culture.
Maggie is a Pairrebeene woman from the north east of
Tasmania. Maggie told of her travels to the country of her Aboriginal
matriarchal family in the Bay of Fires area. When she asked a shop keeper what
was known about the local Tasmanian Aborigines in the area Maggie was told “I
don’t think there were any around here”.
Evidently the shop keeper’s knowledge of local history was
restricted to that of the early European pioneers and she had no idea of the
origin of the name of the place where she lived.
This resonated deeply with my experience of the ways in
which Australians work hard at not knowing their family and local histories:
what Maggie refers to as “the epistemology of ignorance”.
My family emigrated in 1967 when I was a teenager from London
to Gulgong, New South Wales: to Wiradjuri country, the home of largest inland
Indigenous culture of Australia. The signage in the Gulgong Pioneers Museum
informed us that “There were only a few small tribes in the area”.
Recently I spoke with the current operator of the museum. Decades
later the sign was still there and he reiterated this popular history when he
told me that the gold diggers were the first to inhabit the district. “There
was not a tribe here because there was not a river”. Clearly, he had not read
Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu, which tells
how Wiradjuri people managed the landscape and stocked their waterholes. The
place name, “Gulgong”, is Wiradjuri for “a deep water hole”.
I was told that Gulgong was “…not an Aboriginal area. It was
not a good place to be…as…it was a bad luck area for Aboriginal people”. My
response was that it probably was a difficult place for Aboriginal people
because white people were so harsh to them. According to the museum proprietor
there are no Aborigines living in nearby Mudgee. He obviously hadn’t noticed
the flags of the Mudgee Local Aboriginal Lands Council office in the CBD.
When my mother was still living in Mudgee, I said to her “Do
you realise that the ancestors of your solicitor, Mr Cox, organised massacres
and put arsenic in the flour that they gave to the local Aborigines?” To which
my mother replied “Oh, I hope you’re not going to make trouble for these local
people!”
This was an amazing response to me. Mum was still an
outsider in that rural community, a migrant woman, a divorced single parent,
working as a community nurse. Clearly she didn’t want the silences to be
disturbed by this knowledge. According to Maggie Walters, my mother’s fear of
“making trouble” expresses an underlying white fear, the legitimacy of being
there, or the fear of the exposure of a difficult past.
The Hidden Stories Symposium revealed a strong interest from
the audience who stated that they were motivated to find out more about the
place in which they live. Some parents’ curiosity had been fired by their
children’s teachers and Tasmanian Aboriginal cultural educators. Exploring and
exposing the hidden stories has the potential to elicit respect and pride in the
heritage of our local areas whilst being a powerful tool in the construction of
Aboriginal identity.
Tasmania is certainly not the only place where Aboriginal
heritage and the history of displacement are silenced by local communities; a
silence which validates the invisibility of Aboriginal people and their
cultures. However, Tasmania could be a leader in
Australia in telling those hidden stories. The robust discussions held in
Hobart to celebrate Indigenous Literacy Day on September 7 and 11 were a significant
step to breaking the silence of the past.
Dr Margaret Bromley
Australian Capital Territory
Editor’s note:
Margaret’s contributions to Hidden Stories were significant in setting the
scene for this valuable two day experience and I reiterate the sincere thanks
of the CBCA Tasmania and the Tasmanian Writers Centre for her participation.
