Wudjari

Transcription

>> Kim Scott: The line of command, the boss, has asked that I read a little bit. [laughter] I was a bit reluctant to do that because it seems to me, I wanted to talk more generally and not just about me and my writing and it's a new short list and everything. However, I need to look after my position at the university here. [laughter] So I'll start by reading just to half the first page or something and then see if I can riff from that into what I wanted to be talking about. Speed it all up and make sure I don't hold you up too long. Though, I am very tempted to lock the doors to make sure I [laughter] get through all of what I wanted to say. So let me start like this. Kayia, kayia. Writing such a word, Bobby Wabalanginy couldn't help but smile. Nobody ever done writ that before, he thought. Nobody ever writ hello or yes that way. Rose a whale. Bobby Wabalanginy wrote with Dan chore, brittle as weak bone. Bobby wrote on a thin piece of slate. Moving between languages, Bobby wrote on stone. With a name like Bobby Wabalanginy, he knew all about the difficulty of spelling. Bobby Wabalanginy wrote rose a whale. But there was no whale. Bobby was imagining, remembering. And I'll pause it there, if that's enough to get by. [laughter] And I'll leap away from this modesty of mine that's been mentioned. And I -- I will say that some years back, it must have been 2006 or something when I started thinking about writing that novel. And having experienced some discomfort, believe it or not, last -- with my last novel being when it won the Miles Franklin, wondering about how -- can you forgive me if this is a little bit too precious -- how useful was that to say, I know my community even for one -- even for someone relatively disconnected like me. How useful was that for that community and it's a sort of post colonial dilemma, as some put it. Your Noongar people with whom you identify are a minority of your audience as today. You're writing in the colonisers' language, some say, for those that have concurred your people. So it's an awkward -- much as I like the prizes and as much as I like writing it -- kind of an awkward thing. So I thought I would try and write a novel as the same time as I worked in a sort of community way with regenerating Noongar language. And even that very beginning, starting with the word kayia, and emphasising that it speaks of confidence and generosity. Yes and hello meaning the same word, is part of that task. And I thought if I could manage to win prizes like I did with the last novel -- this is how foolish it was -- I could try and use that to shine a light on the other sort of work that I was doing, which involves a lot more people and is not just a solitary act of writing. And that relates a little bit to what I want to talk about today, you know, indigenous literature and the possibility, as far off as it may be, that it's aboriginal literature, that it's regional aboriginal literature that informs a regionally-based Australian literature. And for that to also serve aboriginal interests, which is a little bit awkward. So having started like this, I've already tangled my notes and John and others have already indicated a little bit about what I wanted to start with, pointing out that Miles Franklin didn't mean quite the same as what we might mean -- oh God, that's a terrible start. Here we go. If I can get through this. Back through, I go. >> Yes. >> Kim Scott: Okay. So this is a quote from Miles Franklin that John indicated there. "Without an indigenous literature, people could remain alien in their own soil." It may be worthwhile even pointing out that for many aboriginal people because of the nature of our history, the stall in country, the disposition, all that stuff, feel alien -- have not only geographically dispossessed -- displaced, linguistically dispossessed and displaced, alienated in their own country, their own sand and their own earth. And alienated from the wider society as well. That's probably a -- I hate to say this, as a literary person, that's probably a more serious issue than this. So to try and find ways to bring all that together and make literature work in that context and that scheme of things is what I want to attempt to talk about tonight. As I think Miles Franklin meant something like literature grown here despite an imported language, and a literature appropriate to this geographical place. And she was no doubt aware that literature needed language and forms -- such a literature needs language and forms to be stretched and adapted to the experience of living here. That different experience to where the language originates from, English. And I think, one can say in those terms, there has been considerable success. You look at early literature, West Australian literature, I'm mainly thinking of, and you see it shift. So we have Prichard, Herbert, Hungerford, Cowin, Durack, Haslach, Hewitt, Stowe, Drew, Winton, Jones, my colleague Wish Wilson, working with place in the crime fiction, particularly, is an interesting way to work with literature in place. So we can say there's been some degree of success and perhaps today, when we say indigenous literature, we mean, as I've indicated, aboriginal literature and the WA aboriginal literature is, I think, strong. There's what I regard as a seminal land theology co-edited by Rosemary Vandenberg a Noongar writer among others. Those who remain will always remember, he's got a long list of West Australian aboriginal writers. And probably Jack Davis and Sally Morgan are foremost amongst WA aboriginal writers and as Wikipedia tells me, Noongar's particularly strong with the written word. And that's right. Alf Taylor, Collard Bennal put those names together, if you don't mind. Lend me doing that because there's a whole series of different individuals. Wilkes, Vandenberg, Dickson, Wally, Winmar. Again, with all these lists, you have to be very careful, that's why I'm going through them quick because you're going to miss out people and -- I'm sorry about that. I'm just trying to quickly get into what I -- the guts of what I want -- I'm talking about. But -- and I should add that that Noongar writing includes a lot of books coming out of bachelor -- University Press at the moment in Noongar language. And a few coming out of UWA Publishing. A little lesser number in Noongar language. And I need to stress in my quickly skimming across things here -- I hope I'm not going too quick in my nervousness. Anthropologists like Burnt and Staner and Strillow, if that's how you say his name. In their writings, I pointed out the way there are these great aboriginal epics that would stand, in their opinion -- and I don't know these texts they're talking of outside of Noongar country -- that would stand equal to any of those other ancient texts, home or in the like, of the northern hemisphere literature. That also began -- if I'm right and I may not be -- but also began in an oral tradition. Word immediately in print. And in fact, formed the foundation of western literature. So being who I am and coming from where I do, I think about, so what about in Noongar country? Could Noongar language in some way be a foundation for literature, for stories and narrative of place and inform a regional literary tradition? If so, who would that serve? No good if it just serves privileged mob like us, I would argue. And as I was saying to Len earlier on, some of the work he's doing with Noongar place names, lead toward this. Help us to realise, hey, all those names, if that's all Noongar language. So's Gidgy. And all -- so is Kylie Minogue comes from Ki-el, kooyley so already that -- that's there as a potential. But it's probably necessary. Am I going okay here everyone? I know I've come up here a bit frantic. I danced up and then had to dance back. I've had the microphone on and off and everything. However, I think it's fair to say also, there's been a lot of damage done to that Noongar language and those story traditions and I've already mentioned that problem of alienation in one's own land and alienation from a wider society. It's all these -- this preliminary stuff that I'm rushing through is really to talk about the complexity of using a phrase like indigenous literature and that there's at least two sorts because we have this Miles Franklin indigenous Australian literature in the context of which indigenous literature, aboriginal literature, seems to function as some sort of a subset. Not the cornerstone or foundation or is some sort of niche and I've spoken elsewhere of our -- when I won the Miles Franklin with Benang, slipping in to some Sidney bookstores to see if my book was there and finding it wasn't in the literature section. It was in Australiana. That's some of the dangers of that niche thing, I think, and very different from something being the foundation or cornerstone. And there is a sense that it's inevitably inferior, I think, in some minds, and I'm thinking of a commentator I recently read speaking about the national curriculum and pointing out there's no black Shakespeare. And in an incredibly arrogant, narrow way, I think. So having started in this messy sort of way and rushing along, what I want to try and do -- but first, to keep being messy. [laughter] You know, because really, I haven't got a big plan here or a big scheme or a lot of content. I'm going to float ideas and fragments taken from history and language and hope you'll help me or will start -- that will start us working on a way to bring them together. But I probably need to try and tie up a little bit some of the way I'm being, I think, necessarily loose and slippery with some of my definitions for want of a better phrase. So when I say literature, I'm not necessarily even, you know, privileging print, but I'm really wanting to talk about some of the motivation for the story telling relationship, reader and writer in print as an exemplary and intimate instance of that relationship, that story telling relationship. And in doing that, I'm taking my lead from and I'll go internationally here, before I get back to here, I'm thinking and -- forgive me those of you who've heard me say this many times before of the writer, Eduardo Galeano, who has a long anecdote, which I won't reproduce now, but it finishes with him speaking with first nation people in South America and they're trying to work out what paper's all about among other things. And it ends up being translated as the skin of God. What do you do with it? The monks are asked, who've pulled this out of their saddle bags, what we do with this skin of God is we send messages to our friends and Galeano says, that is what we writers, stroke, storytellers do. We use the skin of God and we make little marks on it and we send messages to all our friends, many of whom we do not yet know, and we embrace them with our language. That motivation for literature, for story telling, that intimacy that's implied there, particularly in publication, one on one, one at a time, several hours together, I find a very attractive way to speak about this whole business. And then I'll go to someone who's sort of unfashionable in academic literary circles, I think, Nevacoff -- at least, that's how you say his word -- who speaks about the importance of not prime -- literature is not -- stories are not primarily about conveying ideas or opinions, not even the big ideas. It's about enchantment and magic and creativity in the reading and the writing. Again, there's that collaborative intimacy he's talking about, but while the story lasts, the reader and writer embrace in a way. Closer to home, moving back here, Elizabeth Jolley and I referred to this a few months ago -- also it talks about reading or story telling as a creative intimate collaboration between reader and writer, listener and teller, and stories providing "sophisticated spaces in which people might meet and those meetings being the gift of literature or stories." That's -- so that -- that's part of my preamble, is that's what I wanted to put at the nub of things, not whether it's print or even eBooks or whatever but voice and an intimate and creative relationship, a collaboration. And in books, there's that voice that makes a narrative sensibility, a way of looking at the world, a way of storying the world that helps us get to something else than what we've already goes readily available to us. So, what I want to talk about in the time that's left -- thank God. That's taken a lot of time already. What I'm hoping to speak about is a bit of a long shot for some of us perhaps. Noongar culture's propensity to move into literature and this is a lot of what inspired That Deadman Dance. And then tentatively, how aboriginal language, Noongar language, might possibly with a whole range of qualifications inform a regional literature. Not as a subset or a little niche that you can pat on the head and ignore but is something at the guts and the core of identity place in belonging, which is what this is trying to get to. So let me share some early fragments and I'll give myself about 5 or 10 minutes for this if I can be quick enough. From early -- shared history, early contact that might indicate what I'm calling that Noongar culture's propensity to move into literature as I've defined it. Literacy -- is that a problem for us? I say no. Selvado, if I tell you to say his name, up at new Norcia here in the 19th century and his journal talks about meeting some Noongar kids and within 10 minutes -- I checked this -- within 10 minutes they've learnt 40 letters of the Spanish alphabet presumably, 40 letters uppercase and lower case, he's talking about and they can reproduce the sounds -- this is in 10 minutes -- and then they can also write them backwards, mirror image. So that -- what that says about visual acuity, one of those important fundamentals of literature, and the business of making meaning from small marks, can reproduce the sounds as well, remember, should never have been a problem. It's our collective shame that it has been a problem. It's my shame, in some ways, being called the first indigenous writer, though, that, hat I don't because I should not have ever been when I look at that. But there's more. There's the language facility that Noongar culture enable. So Sterling coming up the river here, if I recall correctly, talks about Noongars on the riverbanks. This is before the colony, calling out when they're fathoming the next depth thing in English. I imagine was saying hello sailor, but [laughter] I don't think they were right up to that just yet. And Henry Lawson in late 19 century talks about meeting a Noongar man down on the south coast clad in a kangaroo skin who speaks fluent French. So these are -- these are -- that language facility's part of what's required. Little bit more, if I get this right this time. We can ignore that. This is a pen and ink map from 1833 produced here in our -- in Perth by a Noongar fella who asked to get on a ship to come up to Perth. This Swan River Colony, check it out. That's very post modern way to be behaving, I think. Presumably had never used these sort of tools before, I don't know. And it's not a particularly sophisticated example but that readiness to grab the new tools is of interest, to me, at least. There's a book came out a couple years ago, Penny van Toorn, Writing Never Arrives Naked, where she talks about how the cultures of reading and writing became entangled with the oldest living indigenous cultures in the world and that books -- and she gives lots of examples like this, I'm just picking Noongar ones and trying to emphasise south coast stuff. She says books weren't seen as the evil or foreign or irrelevant but curious -- curiosities to be assimilated into our own traditions. And here is an example. Again, from about early 1830s, first few years of colonisation and is down in Albany, the diarist Collie, talking about Nakina and pointing out that they'd been on an expedition together. They got back to Albany, Collies been writing in his journal and he witnesses a recitation, a performance of their expedition by the guide and as it points out there, it is structured -- used as a structural characteristics of the expedition journal is what's implied there. That is pretty high literacy, I would think. That sort of borrowing. It also implies incredible cross cultural skill, not only the conversation they must of had but him to pluck that out and as van Toorn says, apply those to one's own traditions. Another example that some of you would have heard me before -- it's a very popular example, 1830 to a first 12 months of colonisation in Albany, Mocary sitting in a soldier's hut. He's with soldiers, his brother when they were still paying the rent and he was still in a position of power, that's a pretty crucial thing in this scheme of things here, his Noongar brother enters the room and Mocary sings out, where have you been all the day Billy boy, Billy boy, in English, a song, and I think what's going on in there -- that is one of those sophisticated acts of making space in which people may meet as I earlier spoke of his stories, I know your songs. It's a functional statement. It's also talking about Noongar traditions and the importance of song and your sound and so on. Daisy Bates wrote down a song, a Noongar song that I want to again offer as this propensity to move into literature. My old people, our eyes spearing, something like this, cutting through what's becoming bad at King George Town. So there's an English place name in a Noongar text, which allows us to start thinking about what I talked about earlier, the possibility of colonial experience and language and cultural products being contained within this frame created by those who first created human society in this part of the world and somehow working with that rather than a disjuncture and we start off again as a young country. There's another song Daisy Bo but I haven't written it down -- but Daisy Bates records. It starts off in English, a Noongar song, Captain on a cruel sea. Captain on a cruel sea, it starts off and then moves into Noongar language to talk about the captain looking through his telescope at the composer on the shore. And I think that's really interesting in terms of a literary point of view exercise and the empathy or the inclination to empathy and to put yourself in the shoes of the other and what an enormous contrast, that is, with the way indigenous aboriginal people are most often represented in colonial texts. I think that sort of tradition, you can -- I'll give you some more examples in a moment even though I'm rushing here. You can see it continues. So late 19th century, cusp of the 20th century, there's Fred McGill, there's John Kicket, very eloquent letters, but they tend to be more of a protest nature by that stage, inevitably, and I want to offer in terms of this at least nascent Noongar literary tradition. An example from Bessy Flower, 1870s in Albany, educated in Albany at a mission. Very talented. This is an early letter of hers she wrote about her leaving Albany being sent to Victoria to work and teach on a mission, an aboriginal mission over there. Beautiful voice, I think, in this and very fluent, not stilted. So very literate, very articulate on the page and compassionate and inclusive, I think. A much later year, some years -- a much later letter [ Noise ] It's all right. I'm here everybody. Don't worry. [laughter] [ Noise ] What's going on there? It's not an assassination attempt. [laughter] Though some of you may be thinking of it at this stage [laughter] of this lecture. Here's a later letter from Bessy Flower. She's become -- she's scared, she's politicised. She's learning the reality of what it means to live in 19th century colonial Australia and making these international comparisons, which again, is a pretty deadly thing coming out of a Noongar cultural tradition that is really quickly ready to get global and international as that example of the Noongar fella getting on the ship to come up to Perth. Use the ocean as a means of communication. Tiffany Shellam, the noted historian of the south coast pointed out that Noongar people were very quick to get on ships to extend their kin and geographic networks. My argument here is, literature is the same. It's just another cultural product or print -- and the English language -- to use and see what you can do with it. But by this stage, and moving in to the -- a fair way into the 20th century, and still now probably, there's this need to use writing and language in an instrumental way, political way, and the whole experience of oppression has made a loss of playfulness and subtlety. And I think that -- what you see in that little one, 1870s and most of us here would know that whole oppression that shared history, is meant for probably all Noongar people. Makes the compassion and inclusiveness that you often get in contemporary aboriginal Noongar literature all the more impressive, I think, and contrast and an indicator to me it must stem from cultural roots. But it's that early contact stuff, the Mocary, the Nakina, the Gulupit was a fella that did the map, that most interests me because of the sophisticated spaces, playful whit, cross cultural skill, all those really modern things. And that's before oppression. Still strong in language that's not imported, which was Miles Franklin's problem -- issue. And not having to struggle to make language form sensibility fit place, confident and assured, proactive, not -- this may be unfair to mainstream Australian literature, not in articulate tongue tied or dumb struck. How to articulate self and where they are. Some of those language examples that I gave before, you know with King George Town and the captain and the telescope, lead me to want to, you know, share very quickly [laughter] the potential importance of aboriginal languages to Australian indigenous literature in Miles Franklin's terms. And I do want to mention just to -- in that transition to talk a little bit more about language. This JM Arthur, someone called JM Authur had a book come out a couple years ago, Language of the Default Country, I think it was called. Really interesting in these terms, where she talks about the English language doesn't really fit the continent. Think about the word river, what does that mean? And then go, she gives the example to the Todd River and Alice Springs. How does that fit the dictionary definition? Even that English notion, the default country of a river, how does that fit so well those many rivers, especially on the south coast, that don't reach the sea? And some of them with springs near the ocean, in fact, flow backwards most of the time. And what are we to make of that? And she talks of -- oh, let me emphasise -- one of the things she talks about is the babbling brook, the notion of the river as the babbling brook of English. I don't know if that's all that inappropriate here because somewhere around Williams on the Albany Highway bearing in mind Lens research work, there is a -- I can't remember how it's written down. Something like Wongerlunging Creek, many voices, Wongerlunging, Wongerlungine Creek. Many voices speaking together here. So sometimes it may be apt to use some of those concepts. Arthur also talks of the -- what she calls a strange linguistic and psychological contortions involved in labelling Australia an empty or timeless land and then all that invisible negative stuff, native dogs, native apples, and the place names in English like Disappointment Rock, you know, Misery Rock, Mountain Stake, Useless Loop, [laughter] All these things. They are West Australian ones. Contrast that -- and there'll be others here much more able to speak about this than me with little bits of Noongar, you know? Bodyah, Bodyah is earth. Bodyary, pregnant. Naark is sun in many dialects. That's also mother. Beel is naval and river. Mort is family and mally as I understand it. Deep roots under the ground and little bits above and they've connected underneath. So I think there's -- I say those things to mention there is this enormous potential but to -- who will it serve? Now, we've got about 5 minutes, I think, and I've got all these slides backed up here because what I wanted to do, if you'll bear with me and I'll go really quick here, to talk about all this potential of Noongar language but it's an endangered language. It's more prevalent than most of us realise with those place names and how it's infiltrated the English language. But a community of descendants of people that first created human society, a Noongar community, many of us, are linguistically displaced, as well as geographically displaced and dispossessed. So it's no good to just slip the Noongar language wonderful stuff into literature. I don't think so. In that context of stolen country, disposition, cultural denigration, the whole power relationship that characterise our shared history. It just further dis-empower aboriginal people if language informs the mainstream community literature about identity and belonging and place and that community, those people are not in the loop, get further dis-empowered. Further alienated in all those sorts of ways. So as the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Art Board says it's very important and stated as a mission, a little slogo, the importance of claiming, controlling, and enhancing heritages including language. And I think -- I'm speeding up so I hope you're still with me my dear friends, thank you very much for turning up. I think within this, there is -- and I want to share a little project, this side project going along with the novel. I think within there's a volatile, messy mess. [laughter] There might be a story of sorts of recovery and I'm using -- let me go back. I've lost something here. I've lost something. I think it's Genie Bell or Leslie Jolly talking about language regeneration so I can't give you the quote. Quick paraphrase. The very business of language retrieval, regeneration, of people getting together engaging in those sort of processes could give us a narrative, is a narrative of aboriginal resilience, survival, potentially, self-determination, sovereignty, getting at the centre of what it means to live in society here. That's what I'm getting at is the potential narrative, that's a process in doing that. So then I want to -- just -- I'll just give you a little magic lantern show here is what it's going to become. A little slide show. Talking about a project I've had some small involvement with, Noongar language historic project that seems to do that sort of -- tries to do that sort of thing, claim, control, enhance, share a heritage, work across the most readily available polemic or discourses and contribute to place belonging in identity in ways that hopefully empower that home community of descendants. And I'm going to show, in name, people who've passed away. But I've been to their funerals and used their names and images there and I'm confident the mob -- the extended clan would see this as a way of paying further homage and respect to them and it's really crucial to this business of putting the right people at the centre of this share -- this sharing. So let me see. Am I going backwards there? You're a very patient audience. So -- and this process is about people who carry language, sometimes only fragments and marrying it with archival stuff. So I named them. Helen Nelie, Lomis Roberts, Gerald Williams, Hazel Brown, Audre Brown, and who have been very generous, to some extent, to give me a little smatterings of language they already know and entrust me with some of those obligations, I think. And also, we managed to, by luck, chance, somehow, get material collected in the 1930s by dads and uncles of this mob and we agreed on how it might be -- what we might do with it. And what it's about is return the material to its home community, to the children of those informants, to the linguists. Retell with a small community of those descendants and lead by these people, who do you want to come along, retell those stories, you -- and reshape them. Share them in a controlled way, not only with these ever expanding concentric circles, but we also do school tours and stuff. You'll see from this. And then look at reconnecting some of those stories and the memories of these elders with landscape. That's basically what it's about. So it's archival and oral, consultative heritage in a home community of descendants, ever widening concentric circles. You get more people at the interface, not just individuals like myself and many of us that operate in this situation. So I just went through quick, and a few though, I'm going a little bit over time. Forgive me. If I can get the right way, this is 50 people, community meeting in Albany. Within 10 minutes, everyone's crying. All we're doing is handing your dad's stories back, your uncle's stories back. I won't show all of this. Then we look at a couple of them. Read it aloud from the linguists to see what else we can bring in, which is a lot from the people -- from people sitting around. This is some of the people at that first weekend. We've had a few of them. Then having come up with a story rooted in precolonial times, carried through. Then get someone who knows about this stuff to work out how to illustrate that as a picture book. It's a way of further consolidating it in a home community so those elders are inviting who they want. It's also a way with -- my experience anyway -- sometimes I get very sensitive and disturbed psychologically with a language that I should have grown up with and I haven't, and issues to deal with identity. I think it's -- there's always -- it's a very emotional intense experiences for these for everyone. This is Roma Winmah - a story about a whale. That's why I mentioned them in That Deadman Dance is because we did a story in this project about a whale. I want to create a certain sort of relationship between the cultural literacy. This is in a prison. That's why it's such a lousy photo because you're not allowed to identify people. It's a wonderful things there -- how an Albany prison and inmate starts running workshops, calling them culture and healing workshops with material we're developing outside of the prison. That's in the prison. Then we get a larger group, a larger circle of people together and we hand out 50 or so copies of these storybooks we've come up with, with a CD of a few of us reading them aloud. And not as experts, but to make that gesture, an effort, as much as anything. Have an exhibition of the art work that's produced. That's Helen Nelie, so this is her dad's story who died when she was a toddler and some of her family she's sharing it with. That's her and her brother, uncle Russell who features in the indigenous culture and health unit that we have at Curtin. And that's their dad in the background. So this is what I'm trying this reconnecting sort of thing, and we're making ourselves, I like to think, instruments for this language and sharing this sound. The wonderful Ed Brown wrote a song in Noongar language coming out of this process. Sang it at his school couple of weeks later. The whole school sang that song in Noongar language at an assembly. Some of the elders and some of the kids, and what starts happening here, is there's this shift in power relationships. Who's telling the stories for a change? Who's up the front of these classrooms? Who's saying to those Noongar kids that put their hand up, saying I know a story something like that. This is Noongar people, so there's a power relationship that's shifted through that story telling relationship that I tried to talk about earlier. Collaboration, intimacy, paradoxically, perhaps, being empowered through sharing. That paradox in there. If you control it in a shrewd and careful with it. This is part of in hostile devastated country, taking the story back to its text on rock, another time. Again, the whale story back to the coast. Loris Wood, Roma Winmah, Hazel Brown. Lomis Roberts talking, using these projects and this experience to put colonial experience, the fireplace and the corrugated iron shed he lived in with 12 people at Juramonga homestead, putting that experience in this Noongar language and culture context. Not just a poor me stuff. This -- it's colonial experience contained within that cultural frame. I'm thinking, I may be wrong as I rave here. This is a group of people at the launch of a couple of books that came out of that process that took 5 or 6 years. Albany Entertainment Centre, the flashiest place in town. That's part of the power relationship. A lot of young people there as well. That's part of the shift that can happen. It's not apolitical or non-political. It's intensely political this but it does it through story and perhaps seduction, intimacy. I wanted to add a couple of things if you may, about how stories can potentially shift stuff around. Of course, I'm bias. I'm just selecting stuff. You know all that. This man, Aunty Hazel and her siblings and the rest, insisted that we invite this non-aboriginal man to where we're handing out these 50 draft copies so everyone could have a book a couple of years before they get published. Member of the Hassel family who -- what do you say -- pioneered, opened up the land, but has a relationship with some of those elders. An awkward thing for a political animal like myself to work at. What do you want to invite him for? That mob stole our country [laughter] and they treated you like slaves. [laughter] But there's a powerful thing to do to be generous like that. Unusual whole discourse emerging, and look at the next shot. I think he's crying. Now, there's a powerful relationship. A further one, this is near the end -- this is in hostile country, spirity country, down next to Raven sort. The wonderful, much beloved to me, Ed Brown, again being invited onto the homestead where all this killing occurred late 19th century. First time Ed had gone back there, went back as a group and because of these processes, these stories, these other discourses, and an inadequacy of their -- if you don't mind me talking like this for a moment -- their own narratives of place and belonging and identity. The people that have owned the massacre homestead, the killing homestead since the 1920s, not their family that were involved in the killing, invite us onto the property and show us the sites of significance, these water holes, Nama. They've still got the slabs over them. And I like the photo that he's on his knees, to tell you the truth, and I don't mean that disrespectfully, but just to signal the potential stories, the shift relationships. If he can do it not as co-modification or handing over to appease the interests of non-aboriginal people -- and I mean that respectfully -- but to do it in a way, what I suspect's happening here, is to demonstrate something lianuke sovereignty. That's what he's feeling. That's what Mr. Hassle's feeling, I think. The tangible reality of sovereignty and language and stories that connect to landscape. That deep, deep indigenous narratives. That's -- that feels like something special but it's just a little thing that might not continue to happen but it would -- it could -- have, as I've said elsewhere, regional indigenous roots anchoring a shimmering nation state to its continent through these sort of processes, possibly and others. More strategic, perhaps. I finished with that. That's another just a humble waterhole. That's another story all together. And I thank you very much for your patience and time. Thank you. [ Applause ]