Quae Cast Unite our voices. This podcast is brought to you by on Track Studio. Welcome to Yannier, the podcast that showcases First Nations stories and conversations to help us learn and unlearn Australia's history to work towards a better future. I'm your host, proud barber woman and founder of Blackwattel Coaching and Consulting, Caroline cow We acknowledge the Runderi people and elders where this podcast is taped, but we also acknowledge the lands that you are listening in from today.
It always was and always will be unseated aboriginal and tourist Red Islander Land. Well, I'm super grateful for today's guest. I had the privilege of connecting with Allah Noah Bancraft a couple of years ago at a retreat and I just left feeling so inspired by their gentle but fierce honesty in how you know they see the world and challenge us to think about our places in the world. And so yeah, it's an incredible honor and privilege today
to be sitting down with Alan Noah Bancroft. Thank you so much for being here, my sis, and welcome to yarning.
Up dingy lasses.
Yeah, as we always do on this show. It's beautiful to just sort of check in and ground ourselves with person and place. So I'm wondering if you could introduce yourself how you'd like to be introduced?
Sure, elegaate. My name is Ella.
I'm a proud andreline woman from the northern New South Wales region and also have ties to Scotland and Poland on my maternal line. Currently run an indigenous charity here on country and privilege to work and play and live on my ancestral lands.
Beautiful and beautiful country there, Bundolong country as well.
You're so lucky.
I'm a bit biased, you know. I always think it's paradise.
Fat No, it really is so lovely up there, and I imagine that, you know, the country there would sort of like shape, you know, really deeply. Yeah, some of the places and spaces that you are because you're just surrounded by lush and green and moving with the seasons, I imagine there.
Yeah, And Bungelin is also you know where the five rivers. We've got five major rivers that run through. It's where freshwater, meat, saltwater, and also first light it's the most easily point of Australia. So like literally the sun Yelgin hits that part of Joggon Country first and foremost, but we're with anywhere else on the continent.
Wow. So what time is the sun rising there for you follows.
It's around six ish. Yeah. Yeah, we've got some long days.
I mean, because we're quite close up to the Queensland border, we've definitely got longer days.
But I feel like they're longer and now.
M Yeah, I think that's just because the seasons are very abrupt here and everyone's just working their holes. Also, everything feels long and drawn out and gray.
Good lays.
So you're born and raised on your country, on your homelands.
I was actually born in Gadagall Country and my mom and my dad moved there in the early eighties and mum had a home birth with me and my brother because you know, in our family line, hospitals have never been a safe place to birth. I'm not let alone a safe place for our family, so she birthed us there and both our placentas are buried somewhere in the
inner West of Syday. But when I was about just before I turned five, we moved back up to country and then you know, had a lot of like my primary school life being raised here, and we've always been deeply connected and come home all the time my whole life.
Well, how special and how special to hear that you were brought into this world in a home birth. I think that's just so beautiful and so special. So born on Gadigall. Your placenter's there in the Inner West. I'm actually pregnant at the moment, and I've been thinking about what i want to do with my placenter, and I think I'm still deciding, but I think I'm going to put it in some capsules and eat it back in my body.
I hear, that's really good for you.
My younger sister, we drove we actually kept her pleasenter in the freezer for like ten months and then drove it up in an eski from Sydney.
To Banjoe and buried it on our ancestral land.
How special, Oh my goodness, the legacies continue.
I love that.
Well, you know you you carry the stories as you save many bloodlines. Bundelung woman Scottish Polish. I mean I'm keen to sort of understand a bit more about Yeah, your personal story and you know what it was like for you growing up.
Yeah, I guess as a mixed raced woman. But living in Australia and growing up with my community both on Gatigol, I was always around a big Indigenous community there when I was growing up, and also on Bunjelung. I've always identified a lot with my indigenous side. But as I got older, I started to realize that, like if I wanted other people to not claim the colony and the immature culture we called Australia, I also needed to re establish a relationship with my ancestors on that Polish and
Scottish side. And as I actually dive deeper into understanding some research, I've actually became like, I'm really proud of my Scottish side. I feel like the Scots were really fierce in not only fighting colonization and their indigenous people were called the Pinks.
But they feel like real.
Warriors and like tied in with my Bungelung ancestors. I feel like that's what gives me the kind of fire to walk through the world that I do. I do hope one day to do some kind of pilgrimage with my mum and my sister back to that place, and I always kind of tend to go more with my maternal sign.
Because it feels, it just feels the truest.
For me to be claiming that those ancestral lines. But that's just for me.
Yeah, so beautiful to hear that and hear about Yeah, your early experiences. Yeah, it's interesting I sort of share a similar sort of Definitely, it's very resonant. I grew up with an aboriginal mom, single mom, and didn't really know my dad and way up until later in life, until I was, you know, my late twenties, and my mom's aboriginal. My dad is yes, Scottish English, And yeah, similarly went on like a path after he passed away, just being like, what is this white side of me?
And how do I reconcile my whiteness? I guess or try to understand that and how it's located and defined? And yeah, it was really painful because we came across like all these links between colonizers of course and our mob. But then also yeah, kind of similarly saw that they were fierce anti colonial warriors fighting the resistance, and so sometimes I'm like, oh, is this my white side, it's
my black side, who knows. But there's this real strong sense of fight and justice and resolve on both of our sides, and it's yeah, it's nice to sort of make space for them all in some ways.
Hey.
Yeah, And also like I think I hope to inspire or encourage other people to do their own ancestual work. Like I feel like, as indigenous people in this country, every day we get up and we research more about our families and our culture because it was almost taken from us, you know, So every day we're relearning or learning or getting given the knowledge systems passed down to us. But it's not just like that all just came to us. And so I feel like other people should step into
that space too and reclaim the ancestors. I recently found that that we carry fourteen generations in our body, which equates to sixty five plus thousand ancestors, like their cellular memory is carried within our body. And for me, I'm like, how could you just call yourself austrayan? It just seems like such an injustice.
To all of those people who fought so hard to get you to this place, to be here right now.
And I don't know if anybody knows my work, but I'm not the greatest fan of the colony too, And I think one of the ways that we can really resist it is by not identifying with it.
Oh my god, there's so much to sort of like unpack there. But I mean, firstly, sixty five thousand ancestors, doesn't that give you, like, when you're walking into a room, especially as a black follow that legitimacy of who you are, to know that you carry, that you carry those stories and that strength and that love and reciprocity and that fight.
But yeah, you're so right, And I feel like that's really where we're at right now in terms of like what we're seeing here and global is that there is just countries forge in denial of who they are and how they've come to be, and that it's so people almost divorced of themselves. They're divorced of community, and they would much rather sit in this like very comfortable manufactured sense of nationalism't it, instead of really doing that inner
work and thinking about themselves. And yeah, you're right, we sort of have to do that as well and honor that. But yeah, people are just so incredibly disconnected from all of those ancestors and their stories and then and it's quite sad in some ways. Hey, like as much as it really puts it, you get real wild at it. There's a part of me that just bes like these more be hurting, you.
Know for sure.
And also you know, it's something in the like, how do we retrace the unified story that the colony or colonization and capitalism doesn't actually benefit us, not just mob but us as a society. You know, For me, I feel like until we peel back those layers and find that unifying story of serious disconnect which you know, the doctrine of discovery is one of the seed letters for colonization and how they took over so many indigenous lands
across the globe. But this was happening back in Europe too, when they brought in the commons and they started taking and discolocating people from their lands. So when we reclaim that and our ancestry, we say a big fuck you too, or I don't.
Know if I can say that, but yeah, you can.
You the money, because.
This isn't just our story, but we are touched by it because it's much closer to home, because we sit at the table with our NaN's and our aunties and our uncles and our brothers who are still impacted by colonization today.
So so true.
You know, building on that, I saw that you wrote a think tank recently around this topic, and it's something I sort of had the privilege of being us to
sort of think about too. And yeah, it's interesting, like for for the first time in maybe a long time, and it's an awful it's an awful symptom of the colony and the centuries of harm across civilizations which we have seen that for the first time in a long time, it feels like indigenous like long standing issues of indigenous sovereignty and legitimacy are no longer just aboriginal issues indigenous
issues anymore. And we're seeing it in climate action, in action crime, We're seeing it in like economic collapse, fossil fuel greed. We're seeing you know, this hyper individualization and relationship to imperialism affecting all people from all walks of life.
And you're right, it's almost like we've been knocking on the doors and screaming into the abyss and all these things on looking at this from this holistic perspective, just so like the colony is making us all unwell and it kind of feels like they're is a growing momentum in this space.
I'd love to sort of talk a little.
Bit around you know, what has led you on this path to having these conversations about you know, decolonization and trying to reclaim and return back to our practices, you know where there's some moments in your journey that really led to that. And yeah, I guess these sort of conversations help with this bigger, growing, expansive movement which we're seeing right now as well.
Yeah, I mean, I think definitely the juxtaposition of being born in gadagl and I don't really remember that much, you know, of my younger childhood, but being back on country with my community and we live an hour and a half northwest of Grafton, where my ancestral lands by Jagama from and just being in that space of like, you know, we lived off grid before off grid was trendy, and we had our big washpool river that provided everything for us water, food, entertainment, play, and we got by
that place all the time and we still do as a family. But actually having that lived experience of growing up really disconnected in a way from the dominant society and much more embedded in land based connection and community. And not to romanticize either, because you know, we also in northern New South Wales impacted here very heavily by massacres and the invaders coming through in the late eighteen hundreds, so it was still a mission that was created there.
But you know the essence of just being with my family and just making a fire and swimming in the creek was so simple. And then when I kind of went back to Gadigul, I was like overwhelmed by the city, you know, and also just really this juxtaposition between Sydney and like couldn't get more remote and rule New South Wales. And I think that is probably like the first seed of when I started to realize the difference between these two very opposing cultures that were trying to coexist in
the same continent. And then obviously growing up, like my mother is a very strong black artist and activist, and my whole life has always kind of you know, told us who we are and ensured that we've remained connected to our ancestral lands, our culture, and our family, because she didn't ever want us to just assimilate into what was the wider culture. And so I think I've always been really rebellious because of her in that way, and then finishing school, which, like you know, I was horrible
at school. I had dyslexia. I was like put in special ed classes and I hated it. I hated the whole concept of the Western institution. And so when I finally broke free of that, I actually ended up at Sydney UNI, but I was just going there to socialize, like the little Geminiam. I got out of UNI there to work for my brother's organization AIM and again just you know, trying to support our younger people with an amazing model when he first started that, you know, really
just going into schools and helping high school students. But again I just felt like this isn't the way for me. It's not the way to try and get our kids in those spaces.
For me.
I'm like, we need to actually make society realize how valuable our culture is and how valuable our cultural leaders are. And I guess I kind of disassociated for most of my twenties from Australia and didn't really want to be here. Actually, I found the culture quite repulsive in many ways and didn't feel like it had a lot of substance, especially coming from where I've come from. And I think travel
really put a lot of things in perspective. I started just hitchhiking my way around the world and Mexico, Guatemala, ended up on the west coast of the States, and then met a really beautiful Native American brother and he actually introduced me to the concept of decolonizing, and that was kind of like maybe fifteen years back now, and I think he kind of planted that seed for me, and then I started to kind of investigate it, and you know.
They were really progressive of there a lot.
Of the native indigenous mob over there, so I was kind of sitting with them and seeing what they were talking about, and then come back home and then started exploring that through just recognizing, wow, this is such a juxtaposition, and actually if everyone returned to these more like earth based indigenous ways, we would not only be healthier, but
country would be singing. You know, she would be in a day of joy again, because I really do think the colony is built on us being disconnected from not only the country, but ourselves and each other and it's also a culture that glorifies greed and status. And so this is what we communicate to our young people. We say, we see you when you are greedy and you hold and you accumulate wealth and you put yourself above others.
And we also see you when you place yourself above another being and think you're better than And what I got taught with the law of the Land is like, you don't think you're better than anything, including the jari, the trees, you know, the animals that coexist with us.
And I think this culture is just so dangerous because of these values and belief systems that are really embedded in such a young age to many of us, you know, especially if we went through the Western education system and didn't question it.
Wow, gosh, so fascinating to hear that. Yeah, I guess you know, tracing back, so your early life was living on country, living in pretty humble, beautiful spiritual place in beginnings, and I guess how that sort of like transcends the lessons of your mom, understand Bronwan Bancruft, Your mom, Yeah, deadly, and just that sort of that early experience, like you say, living on country, off grid before it was kind of trending, and then I guess, yeah, interesting to hear that you
had to abandon all that you sort of had learned in search for something that you didn't quite know you needed until you found it. And even even the language. I mean, it's interesting decolonization in a way too, because it still does very much center the colony, isn't it. It's still using that language. But so I imagine coming to this realization, meeting this beautiful person, but first and foremost, going on that real journey for yourself in naming your
experience would be pretty pretty powerful. I want to just quickly ask about your mom. You know, what lessons do you think your mom sort of instilled in you in this sort of conversation as well?
Oh my god, she's like everything.
She's my greatest mentor my biggest teacher, my best friend, sometimes my daughter sometimes, you know, And.
What a journey we've been on.
You know.
My mom was also a single mom.
She also had my sissy eleven years apart, so I was her birthing partner and I helped bring my sissy out of my mom and cut her in bilical cord. And we've just had such a life together, like She's taught me everything, and she is the reason I am the woman I am today.
You know, I.
Always say to people, I was raised by a proud Indigenous, independent single woman, and that's how I feel now that I'm an adult.
My mom always to me, you never through action, not just through.
Words, but you never value your worth in the gaze of whoever your partner is. You know, you don't look for somebody else to tell you what you are and who you are. You find that within yourself. She always taught me to be grassroots and never go too big. She always taught me, I never rise until I bring
my community with me. And even just getting the privilege of being able to be raised around her storytelling through her visual artwork and the Indigenous community that welcomed u Song Gadigl and you know, made us family, was just.
The best experience. Like, I'm so stoked that I picked ITR to be my mum.
I really also only ever seen her work so hard. You know, she doesn't really take holidays, and not that I think that's a good thing, but her fight is for her people and know her stories and keeping our culture really strong and alive, even in the face of growing up in a small country town where there wasn't actually many other Indigenous families either, you know, So I just she's everything to me, and I don't know like
other people who are listening. You know, when you have an Indigenous mother, it's like they are everything for you. In the colony, they tend to disregard their elders. But my mom is going to be by my side until the day she goes, and I will be looking after her the way she looked after me, because that is what the reciprocity of relationships look like.
Well, she sounds like a pretty fierce and loving and staunt person and has instilled some beautiful values in you. And I'd love to sit around the campfire with someone like you and your mum one day, because yeah, I can only imagine the yarns and that sharing and reciprocity that shared. Yeah, and I think it's such a powerful act of resistance to raise strong black kids, our jar gems.
You know, we are trying to seek love in a world that doesn't really love us that and so it's so powerful to to raise self assured and strong and loving black kids. So good on, your mum did a great job, and it's funny, my daughter's actually going to be a Gemini.
So good ways.
Because we got a bad rap, but it's just because we're mutable and we can flou in every single space.
I heard and also really talkative I hear, and I'm like, oh god, I love ya. So my partner might I hear. My partner's really quiet, and so I was like, look, our.
Little Gemini and me going to come and tear things up.
I guess, you know, it's not really a segue, but more kind of you know, thinking about this concept of decolonization. I think, you know, we've got a lot of listeners, a lot of people from international and also our mobs, you know, who really proudly champion this show and shout out to all of them listening, and we love your lots.
But you know, I guess a lot of us are moving in spaces where people like the narratives or the ideology decolonization is ever evolving and shifting and how we think about it, particularly in light of what we are seeing right now, which is, you know, as we've touched on these global ills, and you know, our existence and our resistance and us and our stories and our knowledge is really helping to sort of reimagine and shape societies is so incredibly important right now. But you know, what
does decolonizing things mean for you? Like, what does because I feel like you're actually my take is that you're walking the truth. You live this every day. You know, you're still living in communal living in a country. It's not necessarily a construct that feels out of reach for you, because it's something you've just always lived and known to
be true. But for many, like urbanized black fellows, who are wanting to live in a decolonized way, there's this tension, I guess, between the opposing paradigms in which we sit. And so, yeah, what does decolonization mean for you? And how does it sort of like shape your interactions and your relationships with the world.
Yeah, it's interesting because you know, I think I was kind of talking about decolonization ten or something years ago in my writings. I've seen it pick up and have this momentum. And what normally happens with these kinds of movements is they get co opted, right, we see it all the time, and suddenly there's non indigenous people doing decolonial workshops and it kind of takes away the point of indigenous, lad, and I agree with you, it still
centers the colony. I've been a bit more resistant actually to using it, and actually decided kind of last year to move into more like the word of like indigenized, like how do we indigenize, because again that centers that, but also it centers the people whose land you're on, who are the most oppressed by the system. They didn't have a choice of it. They didn't choose to go to a land. They stayed there and they were forcibly removed and their culture was attempted to be taken from them.
So I feel like indigenizing, indigenizing our way of living is about like reclamation of our true purpose here.
On this planet.
And that is really like getting out of this mindset that capitalism and capitalistic views, which are intrinsically tied to the colony, are somehow what.
We need to do in order to succeed.
And so things like it's interestingly you say, like with the urban Blackfells, like there might be in a struggle, But I grew up with this family, the boss Stocks, and they grew they.
Had a tiny little house in Tempe.
You feed me your boss Stock with the matriarch, or when I was little, it was Nanny Bosstock, her mother, and they had five generations living in one tiny house, you know, and they still all live in that house and their cared for. Every matriarch is that matriarch passed away in the same room and we just barb and you feed me.
A boss stock last year. But she passed away.
In the same room that her My mother passed away with her daughters looking after her and her grannies around her, and they're still in that home. And for me, I'm like, that is indigenizing your way of being within the concept of the urban's landscape because it's a matriarchal household, one where the elders are cared for, many generations living under one roof which it actually is very indigenous because you're sharing and up against like this economic system which buckles
our people. I think it's a way that we can get on top of things is actually to come back to this more intergenerational way of being or living really close to each other's sharing meals, encouraging each other to get out from behind the screens and go spend the weekend in the bush together and just sit by a fire, even if you can do it only once a fortnight.
I mean when we move to Gadigul and every home my mum has ever had, the first thing that she does is go out the back and dig a huge fire pit into the ground.
She always dug a ba via pit.
And I think this like these small ways that we can divert our attention to the colonial capitalist system and consumerism and bring it back to our self, our community and you know, the natural world, which is a part of our community too, is a way that we can learn to indigenize. And that can happen in an urban landscape or a rural landscape here living closer the nature because there's less density of people and there's more nature around us, but it's not inaccessible.
You know. And I think there are any.
Way that we can is a fight to the colony. You know, our people we have to exist within this society otherwise were constantly oppressed. And we shouldn't beat ourselves up for having a walk in two worlds. It's a very complex narrative to try and exist within.
And I think I think.
Yeah, even walking through the world, just identifying as a black Palla and keeping your culture strong through that identification is a powerful resistance to the colony.
Oh my goodness, I could. I could listen to you
speak all day. Yeah. I think it's so beautiful to hear what you say, because I think what I'm hearing, or what I'm taking away from what you're saying, is that decolonization is often about that consciously shifting our perspectives and our actions and our relationships with ourselves community k in, mother and father, and like you say, to center that indigenous knowledge along the way, and that I think sometimes what we find or what I see, especially in like
the organizing and abolition space where we're required to reimagine systems, is that we often yet definitely focus a lot on the perfect system and I guess the end and not the means, And that these small intentional shifts are just as critical for the overall movement as is abolishing and reb yielding, and you know, things like you're saying about prioritizing the kinship structure and having shared living and communal living and sharing the labor, sharing the cost, really embedding
that reciprocity. I think the other thing that I sort of would take away from what you said is that just noticing you know where like being deliberately I guess reflective to interrogate our conditioning and that colonial narrative. You know, so much of what you said is like so embedded and conditioned from such a young age, like we learn scarcity, we learn to, you know, do things that take up our hours that don't bring us joy and connection and healing.
Like with these all learned deeply programmed insidious things that we have to sort of start to notice, like where do our colonial ideas shape us and our thinking and
our work and our interactions our relationships, you know. And I think it's it's also giving people a bit of confidence that as black fellows, we probably are inherently doing this every single day, but we might not be I guess as kind or giving ourselves as much grace because we're just constantly you know, in a racialized society with violence and harm and seeing how oppressive and violent structures are killing, subjugating, silence ever every day that it can
be very hard to sort of like get that perspective that we are shifting all the time and that we are every day challenging these colonial narratives which is just seek to just diminish and erase us. So I think giving people confidence that it's these small intentional acts, these small efforts, is an active decolonization in and of itself, because the colony wants grandeur and you know, these twelve
step programs and dah da da da da. But it's just like, you know, how do we prioritize ourselves and our joy and our rest and our healing. What are the small things getting out on country, returning back to you know, some that that's enough In this sort of we all start to think like that. You just think about the movement that could happen and what the potential is, and that in order to like imagine the system and abolish something, we have to celebrate these beautiful intentional moments
along the way as well. So, yeah, thank you for sharing that. I think it's really important.
Yeah, I agree, no one is the same, Like we've all been put here with a different story, a different purpose, and a different place to go. And I think anything that any blackfellow does within the colony, they should be celebrating it, even if it's just getting out of bed.
Yeah, any any.
Black velow that gets up and gets out of bed is is doing a testament to fighting the colony and a resistance. You know, I think we're in a time of information overload, and I've just noticed in the last few years there's really like so much information about how undervalued we are as three percent of the population, and also battling other people popping up in our societies who are just finding out that they might have an apical ancestor way back when, but aren't.
Necessarily connected to communities.
And then you know, faced with the challenges of that kind of identity complexicity where people are taking big grant money and it's complex. Like I say to people who are oh, I just found an apical ancestor, this indigenous, so good luck to you.
Want to be a black father. It is the hardest work. It is the hardest identity to be in.
This It's definitely about the struggle, there's no doubt about it. But I think it is also inherently about acknowledging the survival, about people to get up every day and to do these things. And you know, like you say, just sometimes just mustering up a shower through the grief and loss, or taking a phone call through all the rage and the violence that you might be experiencing, and that it's
also about celebrating that survival. I just got off a call just actually before I came on here today with twelve titters from across so called Australia, and it's sort of this concept of leadership, but we're really rethinking it. We're challenging the Western paradigm of leadership. But it's all about, you know, sharing stories and sharing skills and sharing our time and being.
A support network for each other.
And I just feel in a world like right now where yeah, it's really hard and painful to be a black following Indigenous person and try to sit in the duality of our joy and our rage. You know, just like that in and of itself just feels like such a powerful active resistance to have spaces where we all of our experiences can be validated and heard and experience as.
In its full human experience.
And that I feel is an act of you know, the decolonization work and digitizing things is like just sometimes just providing those skills of support that time will be back you mob right after this short break.
It's a beautiful question to have.
And I think I don't know about you in your circles, but I imagine every time you have this yarm with people in your work that it looks so vastly different for everyone too.
There's no one way to come at this.
Speaking of which I want to talk about, I guess a space that you have really activated and built and nurtured. I guess which is the returning? Yeah, tell us about the returning. What's the vision? How did it come to be? What does the returning mean for you? Because I feel like that's also a beautiful active in digenizing and returning back to Yeah, I mean.
The returning was seated out of a deep desire for me to see not only our people return back to country and have accessibility to Bungelin country, especially on the.
Coast, which has been so grossly.
Gentrified and is now pretty impossible for most of our people to actually live anywhere near their ancestral lands if they're close to the coast here, you know, I wanted to see a bridging of our people being in their access the holistic health and wellness services that you know are created here in the Northern Rivers and give them an opportunity to see that through a cultural lends. Because I'm a big believer that when we return back to country, our health.
Will get better.
You know, when we eat closer to the lander, our health will get better.
When we sit in circle, our health will get better.
That's just what I believe because I'm spiritual, but I also understand a little bit about quantum physics and energy, and you know, even things just like earthing ourselves with their feet in the ground can have like a dramatic impact on our orvous system.
So I was like, how do we do this.
How do we combat indigenous health issues by also keeping cultural protocols and teachings alive and make a kind of wellness situation around that. It started as a women's camp where we invited over eighty percent of our participants to come back to country on scholarship programs. It was firstly indigenous women making up mostly that, and then also single mums and a time for women to come and share
all their ancestral knowledge. Is another point of call to invite people to stop culturally appropriating, which is really we've got a lot of people in this country on Bungelung who were cultural appropriators, and I wanted to start a women's gathering that wasn't defined.
By that, but actually resisted it.
By wanting women to come and reclaim what they could teach and share. We've always had over fifty percent Indigenous facilitators at that gathering and it runs over three days and two nights, and it's a place for women to come and share knowledge. Is so that we could be
healthier and better together. I think there's a common story here that women can unite around the oppression that we felt through the patriarchy, and it's also another threat that I think when we have these unifying stories, we can come together. We can create empathy by sharing and learning and listening to one another, and we can rise.
Together in that.
And that was kind of like the seed of the charity, and then it just kind of snowballed, and in twenty twenty one we became an official charity and now we're running nine programs across the region and charity starts at home.
So we're all women team, mostly mothers, mostly Indigenous, and I wanted to create a decolonial workspace where ours were flexible for both mothers and mob because so much of the care economy is done on unpaid labor and the backs of women, you know, whether that's us raising our families, looking after the elderly, or just like looking after our entire community always.
And I wanted to reframe business in.
A way that we're able to actually pay those women for what they do and create programs that are centered around women centered societies and rebringing people back to the idea of like how much more.
Beautiful it is when we raise our kids together.
Yeah, I wanted to reintroduce this women centered societies and give women this embodied experience of what it's like to be out on country and have all your kids play together. And what we found is like, you know, the same as when I was little. When you get a whole bunch of little jargeans together, they're going to be looking after themselves.
You're not going to see them for a whole day. They're playing at the river and the.
Climbing trees and the big ones are carrying the babies, and that's how they grow and that's how they learn so much. And then it gives mothers and aunties and thens that break and that rest to just like gather and speak. And so I guess like that's the seed of where the charity came from. But now we're running anything from cultural camps that include language camps that we run just for mob and also cross cultural exchange programs
with the Pacific Island Brothers and Sisters. We have youth programs for teenage girls to reconnect with ancestral plant food and medicine. We've got an arts and culture residency that runs for one year, Writers Residency partnered with the Barn Bay Writers Festival, a postpart and program that's supporting our First Nations mums with six weeks worth of home cook meals.
It's all got native ingredients in it. An elder's healing program that takes twelve Indigenous matriarchs post the age of sixty through our one year healing space, which includes four retreats and one on one no tropathy care. All through that, we do community days in Lismore and Balana and it's just kind of taken on a life and I don't know how it's gotten like this, but you know, we we're just listening to what our community wants and we're
trying to provide a service. I don't know if it's super sustainable to run this many programs with such a small team. You know, we're five Indigenous women who make up the team and two non Indigenous women who make up our accounts and grant writer. But somehow we're managing to get the work done, and we're working with so much of our beautiful community on a needs base. And you know, we're just doing this for this time until other people can step in and take over and run
the programs too. You know, I've got no desire to monopolize, to grow, to get bigger than Bungelung. Like even if we end up in a couple of years just stripping back and only running a few programs, that's better for me. But I don't want to grow and expand and move into other people's country. But I do want to inspire other people to you know, potentially take on these models of care, to support our women to actually do that work.
And look at how we can support other mob and different nations to bring about similar models as us, you know, and now's the time. You know, the not for profit space can be complex and we and like I said, like I'm not an academic person or a business woman. I don't know how I ended up running this charity. But Ban says, to bless me with a whole bunch of good relations that are supporting here on Bungelung and beyond, and so I just want to continue to be the
bridge and redistribute the distribution of wealth. Last year we employed over eighty cultural workers, and that for me is a redefining of what the colony says the value system is, because it's really placing the money back in the hands of our people, who know country, who know the lay of the land, who know language, who know art, sustainable art, who know our ways of being, and to redefine that as like that is an appropriate and beautiful job for you to do, and I hope it inspires the next
generation to know that they don't have to go and get a degree to be a well paid person under this economic system that always tells us that our culture is not value.
I mean, like that just sounds so dead to hear that. Yeah, from this vision of the women's centered society to the returning to now these nine very beautiful holistic programs, I'm like, oh, I wish we had some stuff like that here and on our country. You know, I feel like we still have such a long ways to go in going back
to some of these cultural practices. But yeah, I can definitely see why it's grown because of the grit and the love, and I think when you're moving with the spirit an ethos of community at your center and you're listening and you're adapting and you're providing, Yeah, it's kind of easy for things to sort of like evolve and
grow based off communities needs. So yeah, wow, I mean what are you seeing from some of the people, like some of the mob that come through some of these programs, like any sort of sentiments or things that are shared for how they experience these incredible programs.
Yeah, I mean, we just finished our last retreat for the Elder's program, which is one of my favorites. It's like so beautiful to take these twelve matriarchs on this journey of giving some of them the first facial they've ever had, giving them some of them the first massage they've even had. The introduced them to craniosecral therapies as well.
They had one on one atropathy, which apparently through our data that we collected, magnesium seems to be the thing that can get heaps of our elders off numerous amounts of pharmaceuticals. So one of our elders was on twelve pharmaceuticals when she started the healing program. We put her on magnesium every night to help with the pain that she was feeling. So she got rid of her painkillers, which then indirectly got rid of her heart medicine because
the painkillers were helping. That she's down to four pharmaceuticals. That's all she's taking. Anwo the elder started the program on a walker. She's now finished the program without a walker. And our oldest participant, who's almost eighty, you know her reflection piece. She's still living out on the mission Bugamart, which is really close to where I grew up. Annie Carroll. She also taught me in primary school, you know. And she was saying, like the best thing is coming actually together.
So much of the healing was all these matriarchs from Tweed all the way down to near the border of Yaegel Gumbangy Country and all the way out the past Graft, and that all these women know each other's families and family lines, but some of them had never met, and they got to sit and repatriate all of.
These stories that they knew about each.
Other's families and everything that they had experienced, all the stories that were given to them, and even in that those meetings of just sitting around and having a youarn, so much can be healed, so much can be repatriated, having like us younger, younger women, you know, just show up in service to those beautiful old women who have carried the backs of so many of our people and still continued to who raised our jajams, who still care
for their granny and everyone else. It's such a privilege, It really is.
Such an honor.
Like brings tears to my eyes, because this is what our culture is about, you know, It's about looking after the most disadvantage and the most undervalued in society. And I think this society is like disgusting to their elder women, you know. And I've heard a lot of elder women not even indigenous. If you're indigenous, it's like a whole
other situation. But you know how invisibilized they become in the patriarchy once they go through their initiation into menopausem beyond where in our culture, that is the wisest woman, that is the most respected woman, you know, and it is for us to take that back and look after those ladies with such great care, and that gives them so much worse.
And if we're able to just fill.
Them with one year of like loving them up, connecting them in and supporting them. My hope is that a lot of those elder women who I was deep relationship with prior to because a lot of them come from you know, Bungelung, so I know them or their families. But my hope is that we somehow can help embed them into our programs and provide spaces where elders can just be paid to come and be in the program. They don't actually have to show up and do anything anymore.
They've done it. And this is how we change business from inside the colonial couple system. Is like, we build elders fees into our brands, and we make them valuable and we make sure that they can come and they can be paid to just rest.
I'm a big believer in rest is the revolution, but all types of rest.
You know, environmental rest, community rest, rest around culture. This allows us the time and space to really find our way home. I think that program is probably my favorite, but you know, I'm a bit biased, I guess, but all of the programs are amazing. I mean, the post Partner program runs all year round, servicing Indigenous women all over Bungee Country and we drive the meals out there.
Curly Dawn, who was also you know, a big support during the floods and right by my side at Carey Mail alongside all the other deadly mob naming Mimran and Wayne King and Annie Jackulari, you know, she runs that program and she's a deadly.
Indigenous schooler who's been a birth worker for.
A long time and she's really passionate about educating our women and our names and our aunie so that we can be in the birthpace advocating for our women and not just letting these Western institutions coerce us into doing things that may not be best for us, you know, and just also providing things like Kangaroo Tales do curried
sausages but with all organic ingredients. And we worked with Mindy Woods, who's an amazing, visible, viable chef from banjelannxhos or Master Chef, and she's come out with your love this. She come up with the Keynes curry, but it's using all our native spices and are tastes.
Exactly the same, and it's so deadly like this kind of stuff is like ground.
You know what Nan used to make you and when you're in your postpartum you have to be eating these kind of rich, dense protein foods. I mean, you can eat other foods if your vegetarian or vegan, but you know this way, but having that kind of courage sausage for so many people is so nostalgic. They just said, like, I can't believe this food is like getting delivered to our door.
And it's just like NaN's, oh my god. Well, this is the power of indigenity and indigenizing what we do, right Like you're feeling and experiencing that every day. And yeah, and I mean I think there's no there's really no
like English word to like summarize what you said. But there's one thing that I think that I want to highlight, which is that program you were yearning about with our elders, you know, because they were such in enslaved in servitude to give back to them in that way for them to have that sense of community at the stages of their life when they when they are, you know, because so much of their lives is around care responsibilities, unpaid labor,
how special and native food for postpartum. These are all things that I'm constantly thinking about as I start my birth journey and you know, really wanting to think about how I can protect my indigenoity through that process in a hospital system which is really violent. So wow, you're doing amazing, powerful work. You should be so proud of what you've been able to co create with a mob down there. I guess my kind of last.
Question, and I could speak to you all day obviously.
But I mean, what are you you know, if we were to sit here in ten years, you know time, and have this yarn about the work you're doing and the work that other communities are doing around this conversation around indigenizing our practices and returning back to you know what do you hope that we'd be celebrating?
What sort of changes would you like to see over that time?
I mean a massive return to women's centered societies, which means like the eradication.
Of these nine to five confinements.
I think that not only steal our sunlight or our time and relationship with the sunlight, but allowing mothers and women.
To have more flexible hours, to be able to get paid.
On their bleed days, to see the return of younger women or men being paid to look after their elders. I think food systems are critical in this time, Like in ten years, I'd love to see community gardens and gardens kind of like in the urban space especially, but take over that place because I think capitalism's co opted
our food systems. And in ten years time, if we can do real reclamation not only with our food, but you know, our medicines here on country too, and see First Nations people leading those businesses not being left behind, which does happen in the native food industry a lot, you know, I think it's like ninety seven percent non Indigenous owned in the native foods. Is that like, if we want to see real change, it requires us to
see women and Indigenous people lead. And I really believe that because for too long it's it's not been the way. We've been behind. We haven't been leading, and we haven't been given the respect that we deserve, and everybody suffers. Everybody suffers if a woman or a mother is not at her greatest health. If our vision is to raise the next generation strong and healthy, then we need to be looking after our women.
We need to ensure that they have very good access to food.
And it's dire in this country and I know that the food systems is it's a place of privilege, and it's disgusting that people got to pay what they pay in some rural communities for even just three or four grocery items. I think all of us should be championing and campaigning that we bring our food back and we able to do what we do best because it's what we consume the most of you know. So, I mean, I guess that's my vision in ten years. I hope
like the rivers are restored to good health. We got five major river systems, But the difference it would make in some of these small community towns, like There's more and a Wallumbar, if they had rivers that were swimmable and people and our young people could like return back to the rivers and play, then that would be my greatest dream and I would happily go if I could see that.
It's kind of nice to think about what that might look like. And I think it's these conversations are going to be prolific and guided by people like you and our next generation, guided by our elders who've opened these doors.
But it absolutely requires solidarity in these movements and collectivism right now and for you know, Migloo's and non indigenous folks to really listen and learn and reckon with their own stories, their own histories to really help us, because indigenous knowledge does have the power to.
Help us all.
And you've got to sort of hold on to hope that we can get their hope and a lot of fight, that's for sure. Oh, my sis, thank you so much. I'm going to put all of Allah's details in our show notes her instagram, the returning the programs we can back and support issues and causes and get behind the work.
That you're doing on Bundelung Country.
From the bottom of my heart, I just want to say thank you so much for being here today and sharing your wisdom.
And you've certainly given me.
A lot to think about, but you probably reaffirmed so much of what many blackfellows are grappling with right now in a much eloquent term. But yeah, thank you so so much for being here and sharing your time and your knowledges and your labor given what you're doing in building women's centered society.
So thank you.
Massis guber where Sis, thank you, thank you so much for listening. You mob if you're vibing this season of yarning up. Then please head over to Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts from to show us some love, rate, and review. Alternatively, you can get in contact and give us some feedback by visiting www. Dot Caroline Cool, dot com dot au