Importance Of Seeing Australia Through The Cultural Lens Of Its First Nations People

Aleney De Winter explores the importance of seeing Australia through the cultural lens of its First Nations people.

“Can you tell me another story?” my son asks shyly as my daughter runs the spiky flowers of a callistemon brush through the lengths of her hair. Jenny, founder of Galamban Extraordinary Aboriginal Culture Experiences and a member of the Wreck Bay Aboriginal Community in Jervis Bay, happily acquiesces, sharing an enchanting yarn of how the land and the people were created by ancestral spirit brothers who took the form of wind and sea. While my wee Gumnut Baby is distracted by the pretty fern frond crown Jenny has kindly crafted to keep the sun off her little face, my spellbound boy laps up every word – as do I, adding them to the mental box of treasures I’ve been collecting since I was their age.

A connection to Australia’s Indigenous peoples and culture has never not been a part of my life. As a child, I listened with rapt attention to my father’s stories of his teenage adventures going “bush” in the Northern Territory to witness ceremonies and lore sacred to the men of the Larrakia language group. A seaman who found himself in Darwin at the end of the troubled 1950s, when Australia’s First Nations people were yet to be even officially recognised and the government’s removal policies were in full swing, my dad rejected the enforced divide. Instead, he embraced the culture of the Larrakia people as readily as they embraced him.

Having passed on the wayfarer gene, dad proudly waved me on when, at 17 and straight out of school, I hightailed it north in a beat-up old Kingswood. While confronted by the reality of my own privilege, I too connected with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and their Songlines – traditional storylines that cross the country connecting geographical and sacred sites in Aboriginal culture.