'Rick Nelson Interview Part 1 at Bet Bet Creek, Dja Dja Wurrung Country'

Lucinda Horrocks: I'm Lucinda Horrocks, and I'm sitting with Rick Nelson, who is a descendant of the Jaara people, also known as the Dja Dja Wurrung people. Rick, where are we?

Rick Nelson: We're on the banks of Bet Bet Creek, which runs into the Loddon River, we're probably a half a K or something from the Loddon, a K from the Loddon River out at a place called Eddington, which is Central Victoria, so in between Dunolly and Maldon or Maryborough.

This would be a typical Central Victorian landscape. There's lots of Red Gums around, Eucalypts around. You can hear Waa the Crow in the background. Waa is one of the Dja Dja Wurrung moieties. Similar to a totem. There's a story of Bunjil the Eagle and Waa the Crow are brothers, and Bunjil the Eagle is a creator spirit, but his brother Waa the Crow ...

Lucinda Horrocks:  ... Waa’s more the kind of trickster.

Rick Nelson: Yeah, that's right. He's actually black because he fell in the fire and got burnt.

Lucinda Horrocks: How different is the landscape now, from when it would've been when colonisation first happened?

Rick Nelson: It's hugely different. Although, when you come to little places like that, there is little areas of old growth around. In reality, most of the country has been changed. It's been wooded, it's been de-logged and cut out. Lots of this is all regrowth. The country was with big, old trees, with huge, big canopies, spaced further apart. You could canter your horse at a half gallop through the bush, you would be lucky to do that these days. Yeah, it's hugely different and changed. The gold has done a lot of damage to the surrounding country. They reckon they dug out a metre or so of topsoil off the country.

Lucinda Horrocks: Even though we think we're in quite a natural landscape, it's not.

Rick Nelson: Not entirely, no. There would've been a lot more bigger, old trees like this then, and these couple other here.

Lucinda Horrocks: Tell me about the importance of rivers and waterways, because the Loddon River was central to the Jaara people, wasn't it?

Rick Nelson: Yeah. They were in known in the earlier days as the Loddon River people or the Loddon Tribe. It was hugely important. People didn't travel too far away from water. As you know, water is a huge lifesaver and life giver. When I worked in cultural heritage protection and stuff, we found out that around 70% of cultural sites are found within 50 to 100 meters of water, people didn't travel or camp too far away from water. If you got to walk 20 miles, it's good to know where there's some water on the way. Also you camp near water. It's a base for your food and stuff, lots of food grows along the banks of the river, lots of the animals would come down to the river to get drinks. It's a life giver, the river, virtually.

Lucinda Horrocks: How was bark in particularly canoes, how did they work into that waterway life?

Rick Nelson: It was quite a big, useful factor in life. We've got instances where people used their bark canoes to go out on the swamps and get duck eggs and things like that. Even on the swamps and the rivers, people used their canoes to get food and stuff. It wasn't really the bark though. We know bark gets water-logged and actually sinks. There's a little layer of wood just under the bark, what protects that heartwood of the tree, and that's what they're after. It's called the cambium, it's a thin layer of wood under the bark. That's what the people were after.

Lucinda Horrocks: I didn't realise that! We call it a bark canoe, but actually ...

Rick Nelson: It's a little wooden canoe, yeah.

Lucinda Horrocks: The way they were made, are you familiar with the way they were made?

Rick Nelson: Only what I've seen in research. I haven't actually done that myself. Hold it over a fire and get it to flatten out or curl the little sides on it. Sometimes they'd pack the end with mud, so that water wouldn't come in. There was a little shaping thing that they done with the fire, mostly I think, what I've come across.

Lucinda Horrocks: What was the impact of when the squatters and the first colonists came for the people who were living here in the Loddon River area?

Rick Nelson: It was a huge impact. It was a virtually devastating impact. Firstly, with the settlers coming and taking up land as we know, taking up the best places that the Aboriginal people had, their familiar camping places, where the best of the waterholes are. Now we find that some of those actually were some of the big old sheep stations were, and in fact some towns were set up on some Aboriginal camping places and the best waterholes. That was a big impact, even in those early days. Then with the gold as well. Of course the gold is found on the river banks a lot and gullies. That was even a further impact again, with disease. It was a life changing impact for the people. Absolutely.

Lucinda Horrocks: Where do these stories of Aboriginal people actually working, finding a way to work into the new economy, so trading, ferrying people across on rivers on canoes, ferrying goods on canoes, how does that story fit into the story?

Rick Nelson: As we've come to find out, Aboriginal people were very adaptable or adapted to the new impact, if you'd like. We've got cases of selling possum skin cloaks to the early explorers and settlers, and the gold seekers, of course for the warmth in cold Victoria. There’s probably instances where they would charge a fee to ferry stuff across the river and people across the river. They would adapt and utilise that, perhaps make a small living from it. It would've been hard to cross some of these rivers. I know, just up in Newstead, there's examples where there was 700 Chinese trying to cross the river and their horse and carts getting stuck, and people having to help them and things like that. They would've seeked guidance from Aboriginal people very early.

Lucinda Horrocks: The thing about this country that the newcomers didn't realise that was that when a flood comes, it all changes.

Rick Nelson: Yeah, exactly. That's right, in a new land sort of thing, it would be quite unknown. Again, they would've seeked the guidance from the Aboriginal people. Aboriginal people didn't just roam around nomadically. They had particular places they could go, and things they could and could not do, go and could not go. Then they would follow food resources, that’s why they'd move around. When one place started to diminish in its food resources, they would move to another place and do things like burn off when they leave so there's all regrowth when they came back next year or next season. Of course when the weather starts to change, the climate changes, they would go a little bit north to the bit warmer places or to a bit higher country. Again, the early settlers would take note of this.

Lucinda Horrocks: One of the reasons why we chose to be here is because we found this story of a particular person who was known as King Tommy, and he is known to have formed relationships with the newcomers, the colonists and the gold miners. He chose to live here when most of his family and tribe actually were either forced out or chose to leave to go to Coranderrk. He lived here. He took his canoe to events. He worked with people. He saved the bridge just over in Eddington from fire. What do you think of his life and his story? How does it affect you personally?

Rick Nelson: It affects me in a way that it is one of the old stories that we can tell of one of the last surviving Dja Dja Wurrung people to live out his days on his tribal lands, and to actually seek out a living on the gold fields almost, if you'd like. Not so much as in looking for gold, but in utilising the non-Indigenous communities. There's stories of him going to fairs in the smaller towns. I think he was born in Maldon. I think he points out that he was born where the police camp was in Maldon. That's close by.

Where I'm from, I'm from Castlemaine. I've spent most of my life in Castlemaine, so that's only 15Ks out the road, that's an impact on how we can tell the stories, as well utilise King Tommy's stories in passing on some of the knowledge to some of our kids and some of the children. My father actually played a small role as King Tommy or Equinhup, his tribal name was, in a story about the diaries of a Welsh swagman, the Welsh swagman took him in and gave blankets and gave him food. That was just out near Maldon as well. That's a huge story to tell people around here. He did live here. They found him sick over by the bridge at Eddington, and he died not much later. There is those stories around, even with some of the Mount Franklin farmers. Tommy Farmer, who's named, because he's a farmer, his wife and children died in the Castlemaine hospital and King Tommy is buried out in Dunolly and died in the Dunolly hospital. There is these little stories that we can utilise and use to teach people.

'Rick Nelson Interview, Part 2'

Lucinda Horrocks: The stories of King Tommy or Tommy Farmer, have they been handed down through families or are you piecing it together? How do you get the stories?

Rick Nelson: We just get the stories what we come through with research. Even in my father's days, the culture had died out and was dying in his father's day, my grandfather's day, they were more, a little bit more into surviving and working and making a living in the white man's society and getting ahead in that lifestyle. So things like the language and lots of cultural practices had died out by then. Now we’ve basically got what we can find with some research and maybe if you go a little bit north you can utilise some of the practices as well. My theory is that a long, long time ago, however many hundreds or thousands of years ago, the people were a lot more closer together. There's practices, what we had in Victoria which they found in Central New South Wales that are similar. Similar words in Victoria as in Alice Springs, similar words, just a couple of different letters. My belief is that hundreds of years ago, or possibly a couple thousand years ago, people were a lot closer together, possibly through trade and song lines and trade lines, they just knew stuff that was going on, hundreds of miles away.

Lucinda Horrocks: You can use those stories to partially reconstruct a story?

Rick Nelson: Yeah, there's similar stuff going on all over the country. It might not be the same cultural practices, but there'd be similar stuff, even with the Kulin nation, the half a dozen Kulin language groups, they could understand each other from 40 up to around 70%, so some of them could understand each other a lot more than some of the other people. Some they got on better with, some they didn't get on so well with. Some they intermarried with. That'd bring neighbouring language in and it would end up working its way into that clan's language.

Lucinda Horrocks: If you have a word that has come from another language group in the Kulin nation, you can sort of do the linguistics and construct a ...

Rick Nelson: ... Construct a pattern in there.

Lucinda Horrocks: Yeah.

Rick Nelson: Yeah, for sure.

Lucinda Horrocks:     Interesting.

Rick Nelson: Yeah.

Lucinda Horrocks: Getting back to canoes and the symbol of the canoes, and this research that Fred Cahir has found of just these interactions on the riverbanks, throughout Victoria, between Indigenous people and non-Indigenous people, at this time of colonisation, at this time where culture is disrupted, but there's also this kind of ... It's almost this recognition of a skill that Indigenous people have, a knowledge, a technology that they have, that's actually really useful.

Rick Nelson:  Absolutely. Aboriginal people and culture they tend to share stuff a lot. If they went out hunting, they shared the catch. The elders would get the good cuts of meat and et cetera, more of a sharing society. If someone come along and was stuck on one side of the river and said to the Koori fellow down there, "Can you help me get across the river?" He wouldn't say, "Bugger off." He'd probably say, "Yes, of course I'll help you." More of a sharing society. It doesn't surprise me that they used them to do certain things like the bridges and ferry people across the river.

Lucinda Horrocks: There's actually stories, not in Dja Dja Wurrung language territory, but other places, of white people being rescued in times of flood.

Rick Nelson: Yeah.

Lucinda Horrocks: Saved at risk to the person in the canoe. Women too sometimes, on the canoes, would go out and save miners or ...

Rick Nelson: Yeah. Like I said, in those photos at Coranderrk, you can see women on the canoes. Yeah, I'd imagine all people would be taught how to make a canoe and how to sail it up the river with a sail or however they did it with the big stick thing. In some of those photos, there's 3 and 4 people in it and a couple of kids. They're quite the canoe craftsmen.

Lucinda Horrocks: It's quite a skill. We were talking before about ... Up in Janevale, at the Janevale Bridge at Laanecoorie, there's a newspaper article from the 1870s of a white man who drowns trying to cross the Loddon River in a native canoe, and the native canoe up turns, and he falls into the river and drowns. You needed to know what you were doing.

Rick Nelson: Yeah, of course. They're not like the canoes that we see with the American Indians or Daniel Boone, with the big, high sides. They're only basically a flat, we say bark but it's not bark, it's the little cambium wood. It's only a thin little piece of wood, a couple of centimetres, usually only had little sides on them, little walls, so it would be a little bit of an art to master, I imagine. If you weren't very good at it, you could tumble off quite easily.

Lucinda Horrocks: Yeah, you couldn't just step on one. A lot of Europeans didn't know how to swim, they weren't very savvy at all around water.

Rick Nelson: Yeah, right. I didn't realise that, but I can imagine.

Lucinda Horrocks: What do the canoe stories say to you? When you hear them, what do you think? What do you feel? What perspective does it ...

Rick Nelson: It give me a bit of a high sense of admiration and to think that the Indigenous people were out there, helping the early settlers and helping the people who overrun their lands. They learnt to adapt and some of them were quite smart and could see what was happening, so they tried to gently steer that process and assimilate into the society. They knew that thousands and thousands of white men were coming and they're going to overrun the land and they had guns. They adapted and learned to assimilate into society and help. I get a great sense of admiration for those people. Absolutely.

Lucinda Horrocks: Looking through the eyes of someone like King Tommy, what sort of choices did he have to make? What did he see?

Rick Nelson: At the time he would've sensed that was happening as well, he would've seen a whole change happening in front of his very eyes. His people dying out and getting moved on, and moving on in some instances. Although, they didn't like to move out of their traditional lands, particularly. He would've seen a great, life changing situation unfolding in front of him. I'm not surprised that he would want to stay here, rather than go to Coranderrk, hundreds of miles away, out of his tribal lands. He'd rather just stay here and battle on in his own lands and his own self, be his own person, and live semi how he used to and try to adapt some white society things into his life.

Lucinda Horrocks: What significance should we draw on that story today, reflecting back?

Rick Nelson: The significance would be a reconciliation type situation. Aboriginal people didn't have a so much of an it’s a mine or a yours thing, it was a sharing society. To adapt and try and change and get into the white man's way of living, that's a pretty smart survival thing. Like I said before, with the technology of making the canoes and stuff, I've seen little stone blades that they've made and I could really touch the blades up to resharpen them. To work out that sort of industry, technology, it's amazing where that come from. Some of its thousands of years old.

Lucinda Horrocks: I think it's the length of that history that as a modern society, in this modern world that we're only now coming to grips with.

Rick Nelson: Absolutely. I think it says something about this country itself. Like I said, about Victoria being overrun so quickly with thousands of people and hundreds of thousands of hard-hoofed animals, they've actually stamped the earth down that hard, that now some of the food resources don't grow anymore. The myrnong daisy, the yam daisy, that's virtually extinct in most parts of Victoria now, but it was fields of yellow of the myrnong, but the hard-hoofed animals have eaten it down and stamped the ground down so hard. If you look at all the Australian animals, they've all got soft paws. That says something about the interaction between the wildlife and the country in itself. It was quite an interaction with the country, and the people, and the animals.

Lucinda Horrocks: What would you like to see told as part of this story that we're producing? What message would you really like to be in this story?

Rick Nelson: A good, strong message would be that we're starting to realise now, more communities, I’m seeing in town, non-Indigenous communities, are starting to know and understand about local history, Indigenous history. For all those little interactions to happen, with the non-Indigenous society, that shows mostly a friendly peoples and that they adapted. There's lots of stories about fighting and the two societies clashing. Of course that's going to happen in early times, but it generally shows that the people were friendly and adaptive, and would just take on whatever happened, that they could adapt and assimilate. It shows an ingenious people, I think.

Lucinda Horrocks: Yeah, it sure does.

Rick Nelson: Yeah.

Lucinda Horrocks: Is it important that we had this conversation here today?

Rick Nelson: We're putting the stories out there into society, into the communities. The more we can make people think about the earlier times and the Indigenous people, if I can make one more person think about it a bit more, I am doing my role. Absolutely, it's important that we get these stories out there and told. More importantly, it's the kids, it's the children we need to focus on and teach about these things, so they can pass the knowledge on again to the next generations. Yeah, we've got a strong push for that in our community. It's all about teaching the kids. If some of the kids can hear some of these stories, you can see them sometimes sitting quietly and still for an hour while we talk and for that to happen to primary-aged kids, that's amazing. They are quite interested in some of these stories, particularly of men going up on bark canoes up the river and ferrying people and goods across the river. I know some kids would love to hear about that.

Lucinda Horrocks: The canoe itself, what meaning does it have to us now, this Indigenous canoe?

Rick Nelson: It's got a lot of meaning. It helped to settle the country, particularly our country, Victoria, Central Victoria. That could be a difference between some settlements being established, and some not perhaps. It's a huge story, a huge impact. It shows that people just helped in lots of ways, not just with their canoes, there's a whole list of ways that Indigenous people helped the early explorers and settlers, and even down to Mitchell, one of the first explorers. I think it's huge.

Lucinda Horrocks: Is there anything else you'd like to add or comment, as we've had this conversation?

Rick Nelson: Just that there's probably a whole book of these stories out there, that some that we still haven't found and some we have and some we need to explore a bit more, so it will probably go beyond my lifetime. I think probably kids that I talk to will take this right along and will still be researching when they're young adults. If I can help get that started, I'll be a happy old man. Yeah.

Lucinda Horrocks: Thank you.

Rick Nelson: My pleasure.

'Uncle Bryon Powell Interview, Part 1'

Bryon Powell: I think this is the rowing course, isn't it? Yes, it is. That's what this road is for. They row up and down here. This is where they have Henley on the Barwon.

This river has changed dramatically since settlement. Now it's very controlled. There's not much water flowing down it. This has changed.  

Lucinda Horrocks: I'm Lucinda Horrocks, and I'm here with Uncle Bryon Powell, who is Chair of the Wadawurrung Corporation. Why are we here, Uncle Bryon, and where are we?

Bryon Powell: We're here to talk about canoes, their use, and the interaction with early settlers, and how it's a much maligned history, because Aboriginal technology was very scantly recognised. Yet we're here right in the place where it played an important part in the early settlers' lives. We are sitting on the Barwon. Do you know what Barwon means?

Lucinda Horrocks: No, what does Barwon mean?

Bryon Powell:  Remember when we walked over here. What was that bird that was right beside us?

Lucinda Horrocks: A magpie.

Bryon Powell: Yeah.

Lucinda Horrocks: That's a Parwan?

Bryon Powell:  Yes.

Lucinda Horrocks: That's a Barwon?

Bryon Powell: Yes.

Lucinda Horrocks: It's the Magpie River.

Bryon Powell:  Yeah. The river was given that name, but it's a corruption of Parwan. If you think about how people heard a language that they had never heard before, and wasn't written down, if someone said, "Parwan," or, in our language, it sounded very similar to Barwon. If somebody says, "Ah, what's that over there?" Pointing at the river. The guy was looking at the magpies, "Barwon." It happens. It happens in a lot of places.

We're sitting on the Barwon, just south of Geelong, and looking at a very changed landscape. We're here to talk about canoes.

Lucinda Horrocks: We've got a story that goes back to this landscape, not far from where we're sitting now.

Bryon Powell: Why didn't it occur right here?

Lucinda Horrocks: Or did it?

Bryon Powell:  Well, we don't know that.

Lucinda Horrocks: I will read out this extract that we have, and then I'll get you to give me your perceptions and your thinking about the meaning of this story. This is a story from ... it was written in 1904, but it refers to a story that happened a lot earlier, we think happened in maybe the 1830s, 1840s, 1850s.

I quote. “How quickly the Aborigine could improvise the means of crossing a deep stream may be told, perhaps, in the words of an old domestic who was in the employ of the late Dr Thompson when the incident occurred. Her story has been preserved by Mrs W Shaw. At the particular time, Dr Thompson lived at Kardinia, on the south side of the Barwon” not far from where we are now.

“His servant passed over to the north side on a visit to some friends in the township, Geelong, where she remained rather late. On her return, before reaching the river, it was quite dark and she lost the track.

“I wondered about for some time, not knowing which way to turn, then I was attracted by a fire on what is now called Bucklands Hill. I made for it hoping to get help. As I neared the fire, two or three dogs bounded towards me, barking loudly. In an instant I was surrounded by a number of Aboriginals, each holding a tomahawk in his hand. I was greatly alarmed, and could scarcely speak, but knowing that Dr Thompson had been very kind to the natives, I called out, "I've lost my way. I want Dr Thompson's."

“Immediately, one of them in his own language, ordered the others away, and seizing me by the arm pulled me off at a pace I could scarcely keep up. We were soon on the bank of the Barwon, where the native with his tomahawk cut a large piece of bark from a tree, and in less time than it takes me to tell, placed it on the water, laid me on it, and plunged into the river beside me. I was conscious of being slowly paddled across the stream. All the time I could feel his hot, naked body touching my face, and hear his heavy breathing. Soon I was lifted up on the other side, and, in the same manner, almost dragged on until we reached Kardinia. The Doctor rewarded the native by giving him food to take back to the camp.

“A few evenings afterwards, I chanced to look up at the window and saw a black face smiling at me. I recognized at once, my rescuer. I called the Doctor, who once more rewarded the native with plenty of food, but made him understand that he was not to come again.'”

Bryon Powell: A couple of points in that. The emphasis on the hot, naked body. Not your usual Victorian way of writing, is it?

Lucinda Horrocks: Not at all.

Bryon Powell: The canoe itself, to be able to make a canoe just to cross a river. The old River Red Gums that were along here. You could strip the bark off it fairly quickly, and to be able to strip a length of bark six, seven feet long, would only take five, ten minutes, if that.

Lucinda Horrocks: Which is what she said. She says, ‘In less time than it takes me to write this, or say this,’ so really, really quickly.

Bryon Powell: Now, the bark itself, in that situation will float. No need to shape it or put it over a camp fire to heat it and shape it. Depends how he sealed the ends. Would have been easy. It still comes back to ... I'm intrigued with why she would write 'hot, naked body.' It's not something that was written in those days.

Lucinda Horrocks: No. It's very unusual, and it's a memory that she's preserved too, so this is related to ...

Bryon Powell: He must have been a good looking fellow. Don't forget, he was naked. In those days they were very modest, had heaps of layers of clothing, so yes, it would have stood out in the mind. Then, to be rewarded for doing that, and for him to come back a couple of days later to be given more food. Yeah, I can see why he did it.

Lucinda Horrocks:     Do you think he came back to visit her? Or he came back for food?

Bryon Powell: It would have been food. It would have been food, of course. Then again, I can't really say that, because interaction between Wadawurrung people and early settlers was fraught with danger. Ask yourself, why did he grab her and tell the others to go away? What was he thinking? Was he protecting her? I know at that stage there was a lot of ... 1830s ... late 1830s, 1840s, there was a lot of killing happening of Aboriginal people. There was a lot of animosity. If he saw her as someone who needed help, obviously he was a man of influence, because the others would not necessarily have just gone away.

Lucinda Horrocks: It's a pretty generous act to take that amount of time and effort to show someone who's lost, particularly someone who represents such a risk to you to help her.

Bryon Powell: It does. It's out of the ordinary. Yeah, it's interesting. It had a huge affect on her.

Lucinda Horrocks: Yeah, she remembered it. She remembered it her whole life.

Bryon Powell: Now, interesting, does it say how old she was when she recorded the story, or when it happened?

Lucinda Horrocks: No. We know that the story was written down in 1904, but it was written down by a man who interviewed Mrs Shaw, who had heard the story from the domestic, so it's a second hand account of something that happened fifty, sixty years before it was written down.

Bryon Powell: Well, that's strange in itself, because even in 1904, to talk about a hot, naked body was very risqué. It's an amazing story, and it had such an effect on the woman.

Lucinda Horrocks: How does the story affect you personally? What's your personal response to it?

Bryon Powell: I'd just like to know who the man was, because my great, great grandfather ... my great grandfather was an Aboriginal man who had two wives. Both of them were white. Now, my grandma was born 1899 to his second wife. His first wife, I think was ... I think they were married in the 1870s, or 1880s. 1880s. Even then, for a white woman to marry an Aboriginal man was really going against the norm. It would have been frowned on. Considering that there was a surplus of men around, so women were in great demand, so for him to do that, and for her to actually live with him out in the bush; not allowed to go into the city, into the towns. Not allowed to live on the missions. They were strong women.

I'm just thinking, who is this man that helped this lady? I know he was related to me, but was it a family trait?

Lucinda Horrocks: It just questions everything, doesn't it, about your perceptions ... our perceptions of history, and what actually happened in those times? These stories.

Bryon Powell: Well, it does, because everything I know talks about struggles between Wadawurrung people and the settlers. Actually wars, massacres, shootings, killings. My old people were shot for stealing sheep when all they were doing was trying to feed themselves, and considering that all the roos and emus and native animals had been driven away, so they had to eat. One animal was just food. There wasn't that ownership that you think about today when people say, "Well, they're my sheep." I know my great grandfather. I think it was my great grandfather, or great, great grandfather, I think he was done for horse rustling. He spent time inside. The ownership of animals wasn't there. The ownership ... the western perception of ownership wasn't there. Animals were there to be used for food and resources.

Lucinda Horrocks: Talking about resources, bringing us back to the river again, rivers were one of the first places that Aboriginal people and Wadawurrung people were cut off from, wasn't it? It was also one of the richest areas that sustains life really.

Bryon Powell: Well it is. Have a look just over the front here, down in the water. You've got water ribbon. Across the other side you've got cumbungi growing, which was another food. You've got the fish, you've got the birds. I can guarantee, around here, along this alluvial terrace, there are old campsites. This is like a supermarket and a chemist shop. The water sustains life. Once you move back into the hills, the resources tend to drop off, so most of the living ... 80% of the living was done along the waterways. Most of the travel was done along the waterways. That was our main source of water. We always gravitated to the waterways. Yeah, they are important. Very important.

Lucinda Horrocks: Aboriginal people could swim, colonists couldn't swim.

Bryon Powell: Isn't that amazing? They would put themselves on a boat and travel tens of thousands of miles by sea to come here, and they couldn't bloody swim. I think that's incredible. Yet they were supposed to be able to colonise this great land, and explore this great land, they had trouble crossing rivers. They have to rely on Aboriginal people to get them across. To me it's just amazing that they survived at all.

Lucinda Horrocks: Yeah.

Bryon Powell: I just find it incredible that early settlers came out here, didn't even think to look at how Aboriginal people survived, and what you say made of the land. Then had the audacity to say there is no food here. Yet, they were in a supermarket. That shows you how much, or what value they placed on Aboriginal people and their knowledge. Yet, today they are valuing our medicines and our foods a hell of a lot more, because they are suddenly realizing that we had to live within the environment. We had to live as part of the environment, part of the landscape. They are starting to see those methods of living now, and especially the way we cared for the environment, as extremely important to ensure the survival of modern society.

Lucinda Horrocks: Even stories like these are telling us that even back then there was a reliance on Aboriginal knowledge, and know how, and skills, that's kind of been forgotten since then. Just the very fact that you needed to use an Aboriginal canoe to get across the river. That was the only way you could get across many rivers. That you could get goods across, that you could get people across.

Bryon Powell: Yeah. If you have a look at the history of settlement in this country, always in the background you will see, or know of, Aboriginal people that supported those settlers. One of the best stories is about the gold rush in the 1850s, and how, if it wasn't for my family, my old people, the gold rush probably wouldn't have happened, and the miners wouldn't have survived. Down here, in their quest to get to the Western Plains, had to use Aboriginal people to ferry their goods across the river. Not only that, it was places like the Werribee, they used old fords, and fish traps to cross the Werribee.

They used the old walking tracks. I know if you look at some of the walking tracks, you'll find some of those are now modern highways. The old original walking tracks. Things like South Gippy [Gippsland] Highway, Calder Highway, they are old walking tracks. The Midland Highway heading up between Geelong and Ballarat, old walking tracks. They used Aboriginal guides that showed people how to move across country. I'm still amazed about Burke and Wills.

Lucinda Horrocks: Yeah.

Bryon Powell: They walk across country, they take Aboriginal people with them, and yet they starve. The Aboriginal people with them were standing their scratching their heads going, "What are these silly buggers doing?" They wouldn't eat Aboriginal food. Yet, you can look at the food, some if it is the best food you can get, it's just different to western food, it's different to European food, but then so are other cultures, and they valued them, but never valued Aboriginal people. Still don't.

'Uncle Bryon Powell Interview, Part 2'

Lucinda Horrocks: This story about the domestic servant who gets taken across the river by the Wadawurrung man. What does that tell you about the Wadawurrung experience in those times?

Bryon Powell: Well, it shows to me the value. The values that the old people had. For this man to send the others away, and then look after this woman and help her, shows me that he respected other people. I know within our culture, women were respected and valued, extremely. The white settlers didn't. Even today, we still have a legacy of superiority of men compared to females. Women are still fighting for their rights. Yet we had equality. We had equality years before it was even thought of in the western world.

For this man to help this woman, I think shows a basic human respect for other people. To do it at a time when his countrymen were getting killed, were dispossessed of their land, their whole life was changing so dramatically, and you remember, the time of first contact to the time when their traditional ways were changed forever, was only about ten to fifteen years. In that time, Wadawurrung people had gone from living in a landscape where they made all their own tools, and used all the resources, to their traditional way of life being gone forever; fifteen years. Yeah, fifteen years. Ten to fifteen years. Massive change. People find it hard to deal with change today. Imagine what my old people went through, to have that change, not of their choice, but thrust upon them. To be moved off their land, to be in an area where you have been living, and your family has been living for thousands of years, if you can imagine ... Let me ask you. If you owned a house and a bit of land, and it was passed down from generation, to generation, to generation, then all of a sudden, someone came in and said, "Get away from here, get out of it. This is mine now." How would you feel?

Lucinda Horrocks: Angry and ... violated.

Bryon Powell: Absolutely. Just think if you had a veggie garden, and some livestock on your property, and that was just run off and destroyed, and this new person that came in, said, "Okay, I'm going to give you some tea, flour and sugar. That will be your staple diet, and we will give it to you out of the goodness of our hearts, because you are primitive. You don't know what's good for you. You don't know how to live."

Lucinda Horrocks: What do you think we should take out of this particular river crossing story?

Bryon Powell: One, that Aboriginal people, especially Wadawurrung people, were human and had values, principles, and ideals. We weren't just primitive, natives wondering across the landscape. That's shown in the story. It's shown that we did care about people, we did have those values of respecting people, and valuing them. Even though it wasn't returned.

I still want to know what she was thinking, though, about this hot, naked body. How could she write that in those times? Must have been a very risqué story.

Lucinda Horrocks: Yeah, there's more to it, isn't there? You want to find out what her life was like.

Bryon Powell: Did she chase him? Did she follow him up?

Lucinda Horrocks: Well, he came back to visit her. Maybe she wanted to ... Yeah.

Bryon Powell: Yeah, maybe he did. Maybe he saw something in her. Did she ever marry?

Lucinda Horrocks: I don't know.

Bryon Powell: Did they get back together? They don't tell you that. Just the story of the crossing. It's so intriguing because of that one comment that changes the whole story from just someone who helped me across the river; it just opens it up to so many other scenarios that you think, "Well, what if?" I'd love to talk to that old lady, and find out what happened after. Did she ever go back and find him? Did she ever talk to him? Did she ever get to know him? It would be interesting, it really would. It's a tremendous story. I think it's a story that just shows that in amongst all this huge change that was happening, not only for Wadawurrung people, but for settlers who came here. How alien was this world? How could they survive here?

Within that, you have these small stories, these small photographs of life where things happen out of the ordinary. Something so simple as being helped across a river. You think about people like Gellibrand who set off from Bellarine and went down to the Western District. He was never seen again. Nobody knows what happened to him. The other two convicts that escaped from Sorrento with William Buckley, came around here when they got to Indented Head. They went back but nobody ever heard of them. They never got back. Buckley survived, but we don't know what happened to them. Buckley was lucky. He picked up the Spear of Murrengurk, and it was because of that spear that the women thought he was a Murruck, a spirit. A white spirit of Murrengurk.

They looked after him. They cared for him. They took him in, treated him like royalty. He didn't have to eat. He didn't have to hunt or go collecting for his food. It was all given to him. He was treated like royalty, a special guest. Yet people say, "He survived." That gets me angry.

Lucinda Horrocks: Yeah. "I survived on the most ideal life."

Bryon Powell: Yes. Survived ... he was kept alive, and looked after, because of the accident of picking up a spear that belonged to a well known warrior.

Lucinda Horrocks: Now it goes back to what you said before, it's human stories, and that's when it becomes interesting, isn't it? That's like this one and the river, it's not just a river crossing, it's these two humans having a human reaction to each other.

Bryon Powell: It is. I always try and put myself in those situations. What would I do? Just imagine what that man must have been going through. There was three of them. They had a couple of dogs and they all came down. He took it upon himself. Did she say she feared?

Lucinda Horrocks: She says, she was surrounded by a number of Aboriginals, each holding a tomahawk in his hand. "I was greatly alarmed, and could scarcely speak, but knowing that Doctor Thompson had been very kind to the natives, 'I called out, I have lost my way. I want Doctor Thompson's.'" So yeah, she was scared.

Bryon Powell: She was scared, but she called out. She didn't say she called out in Wadawurrung. She didn't know Wadawurrung language. Would those men have known ... could they speak English?

Lucinda Horrocks: They must have been able to understand.

Bryon Powell: Or was the key, Mr Thompson? Doctor Thompson. What's the first thing you do when you meet someone? You introduce yourself. It's the same with Aboriginal people. You may not remember everything that's said, but you remember key words. If Doctor Thompson treated the natives with respect and kindness, that would be seen as a generous act, and a friendly act. If she called his name, even though you couldn't understand any other words, you'd think, "Ah, Doctor Thompson." Great, let's get him back.

As I said, they were strategic thinkers. They would have been worried about losing their land, access to their food, access to their resources, and the old people realized very quickly that their life was changing, and they needed to adapt. If they didn't adapt, they were going to become extinct. The one thing about Wadawurrung people, the whole premise of the tribe. The purpose of the tribe is survival.

Lucinda Horrocks: Do you have any stories from the Wadawurrung side of the way canoes were used, and how do you get those stories?

Bryon Powell: Unfortunately, most of the stories we have are stories like this one, that come out of the old historical documents. One of the things that happened 1850s, 1860s, was the movement was to take Aboriginal people and put them onto missions. From there, once they were on the missions, they were controlled very strictly. They weren't allowed to speak the language, weren't allowed to tell the stories, sing the songs, teach the dances. It was cultural genocide. Now I know my Nan, had eight kids, no, seven kids. She only taught one of them to speak the language, and that was the youngest boy, Uncle Laurie. Even when Nan married Pop, Pop was a Scotsman, if they talked together in language, Pop would get angry and would tell them to stop speaking that gibberish.

There really wasn't the opportunity for the stories to be told. A lot of the cultural knowledge has gone. We are learning it back. How do we learn it back? It's done through reading the history books, reading every scrap of information we have. Things like this story coming up. Reading settlers' diaries. Farm diaries, parish records, peoples' journals, but also we have amongst us, our neighbours who have very similar customs and traditions, and stories to us. We know from our neighbours, we can glean pieces of information, such as some of our song lines, some of our stories crossover several peoples' country. They still have parts of their stories, so we listen to that and they tell, in their stories, how we were. We're learning from that. We're trying to recover what was taken from us, or was tried to be destroyed. We will never have it all. We can't replace the knowledge. We can't find that information ... all the information again.

Unfortunately, it wasn't valued. Our history, our beliefs, our spirituality. Even our names for this place ... places such as this, this bend of the river. They weren't considered important. Where we told our stories to each other, and passed it down, early settlers didn't consider it important. They used what they wanted. The rest of it was just native flim-flammery. And because they didn't value us as people, they didn't value our beliefs, our laws, our lifestyle, our history. Which was unfortunate, but we survived. We are still learning, and we're getting stronger. Hopefully, my daughter, my grandson, will learn a little bit from me, and if they can continue on that will be great. At least I'll have done my bit.

Lucinda Horrocks: You've done a lot already. I was just wondering, coming full circle back to the river, back to our journey on the canoe, what's the significance of the Aboriginal canoe? Why is it important? Why should we remember it in stories like this?

Bryon Powell: Why is it significant? Why is it important? Have a look at the river. If we didn't have canoes, if we didn't have boats, how would you get across it? Where would the early settlers have been without canoes? As you say, they didn't know how to swim. Would they have taken much longer to colonise? I look at the river, I don't see a river, I see a source of life, I see a place where I can come along, and I can get food, I can get resources to live on.

And I like to think about how this would be ... What this stretch of river would look like, if we did it the old way. If we got rid of all the introduced species, and I'm talking about the introduced species of trees as well that come from other parts of Australia. If we went back to fire stick farming, what would this river look like?

I know this has been changed dramatically so people can enjoy the river, and this section has been set up and manipulated to use for rowing. How's that? Canoes, rowing. It just connected.

Lucinda Horrocks: It doesn't change, does it?

Bryon Powell: You asked me about the significance of canoes. Well, we're on a stretch of river that is used for sport and recreation for rowing. Oh bloody hell. Maybe we can introduce a new category of rowing? Make your own bark canoe and row up the river.

Lucinda Horrocks: Absolutely. See how far you get. I like it.

Bryon Powell: Yeah.

Lucinda Horrocks: What would you ... Thinking now about our overall project, which is really about these river stories, and about the simple Aboriginal canoe. You could call it simple, I don't think I could make one, but the Aboriginal canoe.

Bryon Powell: Yes you can. I can show you how to make a canoe.

Lucinda Horrocks: Please. I'd love it. Yes.

Thinking about that, and the contribution, just the fact of all of the people and the animals and livestock and goods that were ferried across rivers, in colonial Victoria by Aboriginal people on Aboriginal canoes, what would you like to be said as part of this project?

Bryon Powell: I think it comes down ... this project needs to point out that we don't judge people by our standards. Every person should be valued for the contribution they make to society. If we apply those values to everyone we see equally, I think the world will be a better place. It really would. If we valued each other as much as we value ourselves. I think so. I think it would.

Lucinda Horrocks: Thank you.

Bryon Powell: You're welcome.

'Jamie Lowe Interview, Part 1'

Lucinda Horrocks: I'm Lucinda Horrocks and I'm sitting with Jamie Lowe who is a Djab Wurrung man. Jamie, tell me about the significance of this place and describe it for the audience.

Jamie Lowe: The significance of the place for me is that it is my home. I guess you could call it my spiritual home, something that my ancestors have lived here for over 2000 generations. The scenery here is quite amazing. To have a place like this that you can call home, it's a pretty special place to be. It's surrounded by mountains, surrounded by trees. In the middle of such a peaceful place, it's a special place for me. Wildlife, the nature, just great place.

Lucinda Horrocks: We're at the grounds of the Brambuk Cultural Centre which is in, well it's in the Grampians region in Halls Gap. Why is this place significant?

Jamie Lowe: The significance of this place probably at a more contemporary scale, Elders, 25, 30 years ago got together and so they want to create a meeting place on a contemporary scale and they talked about a vision. From that vision, the Brambuk concept was born. It's a cultural centre, a meeting place for our people. Five communities across the southwest of Victoria.

Something that was traditionally a meeting place where people would have held corroborees here, ceremonies here for thousands of years. Now we have an established building that we can still continue that culture on a contemporary format. We meet here and people come in here. They have weddings here. Have celebrations on that contemporary scale and we still meet here on a traditional format as well and have dances and conversations, and today we're filming a documentary. It's used for all types of purposes.

Lucinda Horrocks: It's just beautiful to be here. It's wonderful.

Jamie Lowe: The building is significant within itself. The name Brambuk, which has two meanings. Black Cockatoo, the totem for this area but also another meaning with the Bram Bram Bult Brothers who were the two helpers of Bunjil the Creator Spirit. Which is our creator spirit in our dreamtime story from around the Victoria region or the south of Australia region. The building itself was significant in building its name but also the shape of the building’s in the shape of the Black Cockatoo as well.

Lucinda Horrocks: The reason we're talking is we're looking at Indigenous use of canoes and how that worked in colonial Victoria. How did the Djabwurrung people use canoes?

Jamie Lowe: Well, canoes throughout Australia for Aboriginal people, they'd been used for all types of purposes. For transport, but also they'd be used for hunting and gathering on the water ways. My people very much the same as that. There's a number of water ways around this area, creeks, estuaries, lakes where we'd use that canoes to transport across from point A to point B. Using them also to collect and gather around this area. There's a number of bark canoe trees which connects us back to those stories around the region which some of them stand 20, 30 feet high. The scar in the tree which we still can see today, which are hundreds of years old.

Lucinda Horrocks: Yeah, it's so visible when you know what to look for, aren't they?

Jamie Lowe: Yeah, absolutely.

Lucinda Horrocks: It's a canoe shaped hole in a tree.

Jamie Lowe: Yes, canoe shaped, yeah. It's amazing. To think of how many there would have been around. I know up on the Murray River, some areas out there that there's 20, 30, 40 scars in one kind of condensed area where they just use the trees to create their canoes. Down in this area there’s not as many visible bark canoe trees but in some areas, it's just an abundance.

Lucinda Horrocks: We're trying to explore what happened with colonisation and how canoes were used in the colonial period. Do you know much about that from a family perspective?

Jamie Lowe: Some of the stories that would have been around, they’ve been lost to our community, especially those traditional stories and those kind of everyday things that we'd kind of use. We still have the big stories, like the dreamtime stories, Creator Spirit of Bunjil but a lot of those, the stories such as bark canoes and whatnot have been lost to our community so I don't know a great deal in detail of the everyday use but we know that from research.

Trying to make a connection back to those stories and recreate culture and regenerate culture. I try to surround myself with people with knowledge, Elders and other people who have done research in this space, so I've got a bit of a thirst for knowledge. Connect back and it's a bit of a journey for me as an Aboriginal man. Every day is a learning for me and just trying to have the right conversations with the right people to gain that knowledge and understanding of whether it be bark canoes or other, kind of traditional kind of practices that my people had.

Lucinda Horrocks: What does it mean to you, personally, this loss of story?

Jamie Lowe: I have mixed emotions. Sometimes, my most pessimistic times, you get angry with the system. I know my Dad, he was really, for lack of better term, kind of pissed off with the system. He'd call it this white man system that kind of made him be where he was. He was brought up on a mission station, taken away from his family. And his story is not a unique story. It happened to so many Aboriginal people around that era. He's a product of the system. As a result of that, being disconnected, oppressed since birth, basically and generations before that, he was in trouble with the law, dependency on alcohol. That obviously filters down to me as well, so I kind of get, we're on this situation because of policies in the past.

So then we get loss of story that build up on that as well. You can't help but feel a little bit of annoyance, but you reflect, also, that we're moving forward from that conversation, so what's the next conversation to have as a community. My people, the Djabwurrung people, my Uncles, Aunties, the terminologies that we use in these days is around self determination and being able to ... We can acknowledge the past and we understand there’s been this disposession but what does that mean for our people in the future, in the next generation? I've got a young daughter, what does it mean for her? I'm lucky enough to be in a position now where I can choose.

I wouldn't say I've gone all the way and have the pure definition of self determination in my eyes, but hopefully to create that space where the next generations, like my daughter, will be able to move freely and choose to exist wherever they want to, and be proud and strong as young Aboriginal people within the system.

Lucinda Horrocks: It's a process.

Jamie Lowe: It's a process, it's a journey. And to keep connected is a strong element of that. You live in an urban environment, you're working 9 to 5. You're doing the things that we all do in general day to day life but still keep connected and keep grounded to your traditional ways and conversations and stories, is something that's really important to me. Last week, we had a naming ceremony at Framlingham, Hopkins Falls. My cousin, he thought it was an important rite of passage for his children.

                                    They're all teenagers and to go through naming ceremony and keep connected to their home. They live in Melbourne, you go to private schools. They do all these things in which most people's eyes, you'd say oh, that's success. You're going to private schools, you're getting good jobs, kids are going to university, they're getting degrees. They're gaining all these knowledge and people will say well, you've made it. There's this other element where we need to keep connected and keep grounded to our culture so nobody gets lost in the conversation of living in an urban environment such as in cities.

It's still important to keep grounded so when you're challenged as an Aboriginal person with your identity, you still know where your home is, you still understand the stories, still can have the conversations, so that is a continuation of culture.

Lucinda Horrocks: Is it important that we're having this conversation here in your traditional country?

Jamie Lowe: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's significant that we're having it here. We could have just had a meeting room and booked out a meeting room in a city and do it that way, but it's important to do it on country. That's a special significance to me, absolutely.

Lucinda Horrocks: Going back to the question of finding your history, uncovering stories through the historical records, what does it feel like to read some of those records? They're pretty, I mean the way they saw Aboriginal people was pretty, what we would now consider would be appalling, so you're reading your people's stories through this ...

Jamie Lowe: Through this lens?

Lucinda Horrocks: Yeah.

Jamie Lowe: Yeah. It was quite similar to the other conversation. You can't help but get annoyed. You realise that there was a period of time, 150 200 years ago wasn't only happening to our people. There was a different way of doing things. You have to have that kind of, I guess in the back of your mind as well. You also can't help but think you're reading it through the lens and where is the Aboriginal perspective or where is my people's perspective on this conversation. I don't think it's changed too much today, to tell you the truth.

We still have the conversations and I think governments of the time and also governments of today are quite strategic in placing Aboriginal people in the right positions so then they can feel like they're getting the community's approval because they've consulted with a Aboriginal person or a selected group of Aboriginal people. We've talked to this black fellow over here and they said it's a good idea, so we can go ahead and do things. The stories, like the native police story where they had other communities rolling to other communities on horseback. They had Aboriginal people doing it so it kind of made it all right to them.

That, in my eyes, still hasn't changed much today. You got Indigenous Advisers to Federal Commonwealth Governments, State Governments. It, in some ways, allows them to be able to get in that process. They represent the people as a whole instead of consulting with the community it’s a lot easier to consult with one or two people.

Lucinda Horrocks:  Yes...

Jamie Lowe: You feel like things haven't changed a great deal. I guess my community has always been very political in the sense that they've always been fighting. Victoria as a whole because this policy is being introduced in the southern states and filtered out to the rest of Australia. The state of Victoria has always been strong in the political sense.

My people, in particular, have always been on the front line fighting for our rights as Aboriginal people, having conversations, marching the streets. Some would say the progress is kind of being halted and been stagnant for probably the last couple of decades, at least anyway. You can feel within the communities the real sense of momentum at the moment. In the conversations that I'm being involved with, especially over the last 12 months, I feel a there’s a real optimism as a gathering of the people and people are starting to have the same conversation.

One of my uncles always say, united we stand, divided we fall is the thing. We're trying to bring to Aboriginal people as a collective. He'll live in the middle of the desert in WA, how do you connect with the Aboriginal brother or sister that's living and working as a lawyer in Melbourne. We need to build that connection, share our stories, have the same message, get on the same page until we move together as a nation of Aboriginal people rather than kind of living in isolation. No matter where you are whether you’re living in the urban environment of Sydney or Melbourne, which can be isolating within itself even though you've got millions of people around you.

As supposed to kind of living at Brambuk or in a place like Halls Gap which is quite remote in the sky of Victoria, or you're living in the desert of WA or Northern Territory. We've got commonalities within our community and we need to draw those commonalities of Aboriginal people as a nation and move forward together as one. We're going to have differences because all communities and Aboriginal, and non Aboriginal have different thoughts and political and non-political sense. We do have a shared history as well that Aboriginal people are moving forward.

'Jamie Lowe Interview, Part 2'

Lucinda Horrocks: Given the really pressing, contemporary issues that you've just talked about so eloquently, is there any point going back to the history and looking at the stories that Fred [Cahir]’s researched?

Jamie Lowe: The more stories I hear of historical records and more conversations I have with people like Fred and other academics that have done a lot of research on this space, which their knowledge exceeds mine in a lot of areas, I make a deliberate attempt to surround myself with those type of people to draw on their, like a bit of a sponge, draw on their knowledge. It's amazing how history just tends to keep on repeating itself. 150 years ago, Fred's done a lot of research around the gold rush era.

There was a whole conversation around democracy which started in Ballarat which is only 150 K’s from where we're sitting today. There's this whole conversation, Peter Lalor, and we want to fight for our rights and democracy of Australia, we want equality. We're still having the same conversations today for Aboriginal people. How can you have equality within a community where the gaps so big in so many different areas.

Life expectancy, still 15 to 20 years difference for Aboriginal people, non Aboriginal people. The true sense of equality and true sense of democracy is that everyone has an equal say. When you've got the whole segment of a community which, you know the closing the gaps, it's well documented, how can we call that equality and democracy within the land that we stand. That same conversation was happening 200, 150 years ago and the more you uncover the layers you peel back, you're just somewhat astonished or astounded by the control that Aboriginal people have been under for so long.

Then we attempt to go back to our conversation of self-determination but what does that really mean? Does it mean you, as an Aboriginal person being assimilated into the white community? What does success mean? That you've got a good job and you're being educated into the white men's way? It's hard to get a true sense which is ... I guess the most important thing to me is my life's all about balance. Then I always need to check back in, what does success look like for me, I’ve got a lifestyle choice. Where do I want to live?

Do I want to live in country? It means I have to sacrifice some other things that I like which I enjoy. Going into a café and having a nice coffee and those kind of things. You make sacrifices and you try and balance your life out which could mean sacrificing other things. The more you find out, the more you understand that it makes you even more passionate to set things right, which is why you still march the streets and still fight for the rights of Aboriginal people because you understand the history and makes you more passionate about today.

Lucinda Horrocks: Tell me about building the canoe here at Brambuk.

Jamie Lowe: Building a canoe is a conversation that – I think Fred [Cahir] and I were kind of just catching up, we catch up for many different reasons. I think he wanted to do it and I said, yeah, that sounds like a great idea. It's just another element of me being able to practice culture and traditional way of practicing it. There's always other ways but I thought it'd just be kind of fun thing to do. We don't really have the usage of a canoe. We're not going to build it so we can go out fishing or something like that.

It's more just something that, yeah, that'd be pretty cool and recreate culture, regenerate it. We had a little bit of a plan. Fred being Fred, did a bit of research in how to build the canoe and whatnot and I rounded up some of my Uncles and some cousins and whatnot so we went out on a journey trying to find trees and whatnot. But you know best laid plans. We just jumped out of the car and axes are flying everywhere, bark was flying everywhere and we eventually got some bark off a tree to build the canoe.

It was actually fairly successful exercise. Done it over a couple of days and the product was pretty amazing. As an Aboriginal man being able to do that and reconnect and just to think, doing it on my country, something that's been a practice for thousands of years and being able to do it. Something that, I wouldn't say it was being lost because there’s still the knowledge there but something that my people haven't practiced for over a hundred years.

It's a special feeling. Being able to share that with Uncles and cousins and whatnot, it's just the conversations that get drawn out. It's a sense of achievement, sense of pride being able to practice that culture. There are some restrictions around even kind of accessing the land to able to do that these days. Even, we had to jump through some hoops to even be able to practice traditional elements of culture on your traditional land. You still have to go and ask someone for permission.

You get back to that conversation around being able to truly self-determinant, can you just go right there and practice culture if you want to today and there are some elements that you can't. You can't go hunting in the bush if you wanted to right now. You have to have that balance of you still have to ask permission to the system to be able to practice elements of our traditional culture. All in all, it was a great exerices. It's a special moment for me, and I know my people that were involved in it they very much see it the same way.

Lucinda Horrocks: You told me earlier that the conversations that you had afterwards were almost as important as recreating the canoe itself.

Jamie Lowe: I think for men, just in general, it's important. We don't talk a lot. We just hangout and how's it going, mate, oh things are all good. I think when there's activity created, you draw out conversations so when men are doing something, the conversations seem to flow a lot easier. The conversations that we had, the group of men getting together doing something, there was conversations about all types of things. It's a real political conversation, but we're talking about canoes, making canoes.

There's a lot of knowledge here and you have Fred who's done a lot of research, we had our uncle there, Uncle Geoff who's got a wealth of knowledge within the space, myself, my cousins. We're all coming from these different perspectives and different angles and different knowledge bases. The conversations that were drawn out were quite robust. Coming from different angles, talking about making the canoe itself but also talking about those things that we had the conversations, 150 generations of Aboriginal people on this land, this country.

We talked about what does it mean today. We talked what did it mean for our people back in the day. Talked about what does it look like moving forward, partnership started to be created, friendships were established. It's just a special moment to be able to have, especially as that, you can call it male bonding type session, I guess. Practicing that element of culture is just a great way, a format of doing so I think.

Lucinda Horrocks: Are you going to make another canoe?

Jamie Lowe: We’re keen on doing it again, so that was the practice run, you can call it. It's pretty successful. I think we're going to have another couple of attempts at it to kind of refine our canoe making skills, and kind of try and branch out to more communities to get more communities involved. Younger people and whatnot. Sometimes I think when we practice culture, we tend to want to get as many people involved when making something special like a bark canoe, but sometimes that can inhibit us from actually doing so because you can't get enough people involved.

And you’re ringing around. I think this first attempt, we said oh well, let's just do it. Let's just set a date and people can come, people can come and we'll just do it. I think down the track, we can refine that skill and get somewhat a little bit more organised. We can involve more community in it because that's important for the young people to be involved in that and practicing these traditional elements of culture to keep connected to those stories that get drawn out as well.

Especially for young males to be able to keep connected, have conversations with Elders, leaders, mentors around them. It's more organic doing it that way instead of me going into a classroom and saying I'm Jamie Lowe and I'm an Aboriginal leader and this is what you should be doing and these are the stories. Kids are in classrooms every other day of the week so it’s good to be able to get them out. Such a natural setting. It's a different way of learning for our young people and it's a way of learning that we've done for a thousands of generations. It's good to be able to connect back to that. Learning that way again, it still works. It's good to be able to get out of the classroom and into such a natural space to be able to learn in that respect.

Lucinda Horrocks: Yeah, totally.

Jamie Lowe: Yeah, so we're looking to do it again in the right season. There's some different techniques in being able to make the bark canoe. The one that we attempted or we did make was from the stringy bark tree but there's other techniques with the red gum bark canoes and whatnot. We're looking at some maybe exploring some other techniques down the track as well. Hopefully, once we get organised and get the timing, yeah we'll definitely attempt to make some more.

Lucinda Horrocks: I couldn't help but notice that there was a crack in the canoe.

Jamie Lowe: Yes. [Laughs]. I think that we need to go back to some different techniques to figure out those things. How to keep it moist and the burning technique and whatnot. Definitely, refine those skills. There's some experts out there which Fred’s made connection to, so maybe being able to draw on some of their expertise and inviting them down to kind of help us through the process which might be a good idea next attempt.

Lucinda Horrocks: It just goes to show that even though you can make it in a day, it still requires a lot of skills and knowledge.

Jamie Lowe: I think to do it ... That's right, we can make it kind of a make shift type of canoe, but to do it properly, it requires a lot of skills, lot of technique and lot of knowledge to be able to, if it was actually going to be something that was used down in the water ways. The one that we made [laughs], none of us were putting our hand up to jump on it and go out on a river or something like that. It was more of a display piece, but the technology, that would have been passed down that was available at the time and people still hold today to be able to create it and use it, everyday use, would have been quite amazing.

Lucinda Horrocks: Yeah. This is skilled job.

Jamie Lowe: Absolutely. Our people, within any community, there's people, you've got your mechanics and you've got your butchers and whatnot. It no different within our community. We had people with the skills and the knowledge to keep the community running. Whether that be hunting, gathering, making tools, making canoes. Women had their roles as well and men had their roles just like in any community that we live in today. It's good to be able to have that skill still to be available to us today, absolutely.

Lucinda Horrocks: What does it make you feel like when you hear those stories of Aboriginal people in colonial times? Perhaps not necessarily from your country, but Aboriginal people in colonial times saving white colonists in times of flood.

Jamie Lowe: Thing is that I always think one of the elements of those stories is that I don’t think they're of spoken about enough, it needs to be celebrated a lot more. We have got this history, it was kind of with a chequered past and policies that were introduced to Aboriginal people but there's also this whole other element where Aboriginal people had worked together with colonial Australia.

It's important to know those stories as well. For our people, there was, in a lot of areas where Aboriginal people working together with the non Aboriginal community and those stories around the bark canoe where people are being saved in flood areas and used for transportation across rivers and lakes and whatnot.

There's whole range of other stories. The gold fields, Aboriginal people working together finding gold. There was trade, possum skin cloaks, tools, shelter that was offered for non Aboriginal people. There's all these stories as well as where Aboriginal people were actually, their relationship was okay. It was good. Even in this area here, we got a game of Marn Grook which is the traditional game of AFL, which this is the birth place where we are today, my people played.

Lucinda Horrocks: Really? Wow.

Jamie Lowe: Down the road, Tom Wills which is who the name is synonymous with AFL football. They say he invented the game of AFL whereas he was playing the game of Marn Grook, a traditional game that my people played for thousands of years. There's those stories as well, Tom Wills also took the first cricket team across to tour England. First cricket team ever to tour England was an Aboriginal Cricket team. Like not non-Indigenous and Indigenous, it was an Aboriginal cricket team from this district.

Lucinda Horrocks: I've heard those stories but I didn't realise it was from ...

Jamie Lowe: It was all from this area. Our two national games which is cricket and AFL, this is the place where history began as far as AFL is speaking. Also, we've got a strong connection to another national sport which is cricket where Aboriginal people were touring England. This is all in a period of time where there was a lot of destruction but there's also these other stories of where Aboriginal people and non-Aboriginal people were working together. I think that's important to know those stories as well because I spoke earlier about balance.

You need to have balanced conversations. There was this destruction, there was people being placed in mission stations, there was massacres, there was devastation to the Aboriginal community but there's also this other side where Aboriginal people and non-Aboriginal people co-existed, as we do today. There was some good news stories out there as well. It's important to have that story as well as the other stories as well because you can get caught up. You can get quite jaded if you only listen to all the bad news stuff because when you research, there's a lot of it. It's important to be able to read those and listen to those stories around the good news stuff as well.

Lucinda Horrocks: What thing would you like to see an audience take out of this story that we're creating? What would you like someone to watch or listen and walk out thinking?

Jamie Lowe:  I think it's important that knowledge is power, it's a bit of cliché but knowledge is power and every day you kind of learn a little bit more. If someone is listening to this conversation, this is just one little snapshot of one story, Aboriginal bark canoes and hopefully for them, if someone's listening to this, it gives them an appetite for more knowledge within this space.

I work for the Department of Education, I do a lot of teacher training, professional development in the space and one of the things that I always say that within this kind of space, you're only going to learn so much. We're talking to each other for an hour, 2 hours, 3 hours, I can only pass so much knowledge on. I always get them to have an affirmation or a commitment to whatever it may be. As an individual, what are you going to attempt to do to kind of build on this conversation? If someone is listening to this conversation, I would say to them, this is just one small conversation, I would say to them attempt to find out more knowledge.

Just as a community member, it's important to know the history. One of my other Uncles always says before you know where you are today or where you're going in the future, you need to know where you've actually been. That can be as an individual, as a nation, your generations before you, you need to understand what's going on before you before you can understand the space and why we're sitting here having conversations about bark canoes and feeling it why we think it's important. Why you're working where you are, because your Dad was a lawyer, now you're a lawyer, your Mum was a chef, now you're a chef.

Need to understand these stories to have the connection of why you're standing here today and in the bush and having conversations about bark canoes. It's something that I always think about. I work in the Department of Education, why am I working in this area? Then I reflect, this is why my passion lies here. Why am I having a conversation with yourself about making bark canoes. It's always important to have that reflective practice to understand anything. I would say to them, go out and find out more.