conVerge - Knowledge Systems - Kevin O'Loughlin

Knowledge Systems - Kevin O'Loughlin

I'm going to share with you a little story and I guess you know that Aboriginal people like to tell stories. This is a story about Aboriginal people surviving and changing in a modern society of Australia in the early 50s. This guy that I'm going to talk about is probably universal, he's well known through TV and Walt Disney produced him some time ago.

As you probably know a lot of Aboriginal people are in prison, the highest prison rate in the world for Indigenous people and in 1950, it wasn't as bad as it is today. Anyhow this bloke, he's done a lot of time for what people would say were smaller crimes and he was in possession of alcohol and they locked him up for six months - if you know Yatala, here on the outskirts of Adelaide.

They let him out and he walked to Gepps Cross Pub there on Main North Road to wait for the bus to pick him up and take him back to the mission. Anyhow the war had just finished, the Second World War and they gave him a pair of army boots, those hob nail boots and the big army over coats with pockets on the side. They gave him a couple of bob shillings and as he was getting near Gepps Cross Pub he could smell the fumes of alcohol. We can all smell alcohol can't we sometimes? Is that true?

Anyhow he got closer and closer and he wanted to have a little sip before he got on the bus to get to the mission. He sees this other old bloke who was a non-Aboriginal person and he said 'Hey mate, look I've got a couple of bob would you like to get me a bottle of wine' and the fellow said 'Sorry we can't, the Aboriginal people are not allowed to have alcohol'. So he bribed him and gave him a ten shilling note and the bloke went in there and got the wine and brought it out to him.

So the bus was another half and hour coming, so he had a little sip and sat down waiting and two young policemen came by and they sang out to him and said, "Hey, come here." He took no notice and they said, "Hey, come here." So he got up and he went over and he stood about two or three feet away from the policemen and they said, "What's your name?". Of course if we gave our Aboriginal name it would be so long, you see and he wouldn't be able to write that up so he said, "My name's Donald." The policeman got on to the radio headquarters and said, "Look we have an Aboriginal bloke here and we want to know if there are any warrants out on him - his name is Donald." The fellow on the other end of the radio said, "Ask him his other name" and this bloke said, "Duck", so he got on the radio and said, "We've got a fellow by the name of Donald Duck here. Any warrants on him?".

Its before the computer age and so there's paper rattling and stuff. The Officer he says, " No we don't have any warrants out on a Mr Donald Duck." So Mr Donald Duck was set to go free. You couldn't do that today with computers, DNA and those sorts of things because science can almost catch you off guard today. Anyhow he got on the bus and he was home free.

Australians should know what the moral of that story is? You can't do this today. You can't have an alias or whatever. In those days we could do that. Today Aboriginal people can't do that because there is every statistic on every Aboriginal person in Australia at the push of a button on some computer. This is how clever science is and computers are today. But you can still fool a computer - that old bloke can adapt that today, most of us can do that if we want to. I'll leave you with that story and I'd like you to ask a little question of that story because it relates to some of the stuff I might talk about today.

I teach Aboriginal cultural to tour guides at Tauondi at Port Adelaide. I've been doing it for about 10 years now and I've been in this game 20 years on and off. Going around visiting schools and talking about Aboriginal culture. Now Aboriginal culture as we know is very diverse. There's over 600 different Aboriginal groups and different languages. What you heard me say was my language, of which there is not much left. I've got a little CD over there which you might like to hear later but that language probably hasn't been spoken in 100 years and I guess I'm lucky in that I was living at the tale end of this part of Australia where our language is dying out very fast, because the old people weren't speaking it or weren't allowed to speak it.

I guess this gentlemen was saying that there's a relationship between trees and the land itself. Or if trees are chopped down and we can't give that tree a name, or if there's a boulder (like all these moss rocks being moved around in Adelaide and put in people's gardens) there for our dreaming stories that are being removed at a rapid rate, and those little insects that were lying under it. 'Mate the garden looks nice but you're destroying all those little things that relates to a lot of Aboriginal people's dreaming.'

You all know Susans in the Mall, the clothes shop. Anyone been in Rundle Mall. There is a relationship and there is a cycle. Everyone lives in a cycle - everyone's got that same make up. We can almost look and identify Aboriginal people almost specifically even on the way they speak, the way they move, the way they have body language and so forth and where they come. I really can't tell the difference between non-Aboriginal, I mean European people. But I'm just trying to learn that kind of thing.

In our own culture we understand that we can pick people by curly hair, straight hair, broad nose, eyebrows, long limbs, flat feet and so forth. And the colour of our skin may be a lot lighter than normal. We can't get melanoma for some unknown reason and if an Aboriginal fellow went up to the snow country his colour will fade cause he's in the light so much. Maybe the sun has got something to do with our make up.

Animals have got that too whether it's nocturnal animals that will come out in the night. So there is that relationship of day and night. I think that a lot of the old people understand that really well. As I said, I got on the tale end of this and it's very difficult for me with my culture, I am trying to find out as much as I can before it dies out completely. So I've been doing the Narrunga language now for 12 months and we've got about 250 words and now we're finding out we've got about 2,000 words where we can get sentences. But there's no good having that language if we can't take it on our dreaming tracks to find our food and our water and our land. If we're cut off from our land (we're not allowed to go onto someone's private property because of all sorts of issues) and Ribna mentioned one there with Native Title. Because there's always this suspecting thing that Aboriginal people are going to make Native Title claims. I think Ribnga could probably expand on this. I think 300km North of the high water mark, around the coast of South Australia, that we can't stake a claim on land. But elsewhere we can I guess. I'm within that 300km of zone which I can't claim, other than the mission itself which is roughly about 16,000 acres of poor country. And we existed on that country without the hunting of kangaroos and emus and lucky we got fish. Our diet would become staple with fishing during the summer months. And there are ways that you can catch fishing. So if you can't sing your song at a sacred site, then you really can't get your spirits, this gentleman again described the relationship with spirits. We believe in spirits. Aboriginal people have always believed in that. We have our smoking ceremonies. We can't go to a place where it's men's business or women's business. And what's been detrimental to a lot of Aboriginal people I think in South Australia, especially the Nurrangeri people is that their dreaming story of being investigated by two Royal Commissions. And we find that really offensive. And what we try to do is to understand where people are coming from. But you have to understand where Aboriginal people are coming from being around for 70,000 years or more. And a close relationship with land. Because all of us have a sacred site somewhere. Whether it's our Mother's rose bush in our garden where we planted it. And if you find someone destroying that you become very sick. I mean physically sick. So it's the psychological effects of being disconnected with your land. As you know a lot of Eucalyptus trees are good medicine. There are poisonous ones. There are poisonous fish you can eat. One of the little things is that every April, May we can go out and fish down this end which is our Barramundi I guess, and if we sing that song, go down to the site that we smoke, we're sure to get that fish. Which is a very curious fish. It comes up and he can change all the colours under the sun. Whatever camouflages himself. And in our minds we understand what he's going to do next. If he goes into sand he looks like the sand, pure white sand. Only one little clue that will give him away is his fluorescent dot on his tale. And if you've ever seen an aeroplane wing, or a fish tale. That if it changes in colour, becomes lighter in sand. But if you got that fact, just get a glimpse of that thing then you know by the dot, you know where the rest of the body is. You don't have to see the body. All you have to see is the dot. So that's a bit of tracking which is in the water. When he turns over a shell. It's the same with a kangaroo. If we know the habits, and we've all got habits of social habits as well as out own domestic habits in our own household. And that's passed on. And genetically passed on I guess. Might not be right there but I guess from my perspective of view we have. We take on something. We might hear someone do something and watch him for the rest of our lives. Subconsciously you'll take that on. And you'll do something with it and your kids will pass it on. I think that's how knowledge is passed on. And what I have to do with Aboriginal people who've got culture in them, which I think is dormant, to get them up to talk and to take them out to the natural world. And out Premier used to say in South Australia that we must have infrastructure. John Olsen always used that word infrastructure. Aboriginal people, I have to say infrastructure. The natural infrastructure which is our country out there. Because if I say natural infrastructure then you know what I'm talking about. If I just say bush, anything could be the bush. So I'm going to talk in two different languages. One just to communicate with non indigenous people in the language they know and understand. And the language I know is my language. Some of it is verbal. A lot of it is just body as well. And if I could say one word to a lot of blokes and they know what I'm talking about. I don't have to finish that sentence. So that's communication by either sign language when you're doing some tracking or something in the bush. Like I said I'm lucky to have seen some of those old tracking skills. I'm not the best tracker in the world but I know just enough to get by in today's world. The only tracking skills I haven't got is in to understand all this technology in the ages. Like computers and the dollar signs. But I'm learning there because I need to understand those sort of things. But if you take one another and you see Survivor in TV a lot, any one watch Survivor. You see them how they do their hunting skills and stuff like that. That looks pretty harsh when you get people that have been in the city all their life and shoved on a bit of remoteness and then get a battle. Out there Aboriginal people would be taken for granted because they would know the country very intimately through song and dance and story telling. Where to find witchery grubs and snakes and so forth. I watch a lot of people walk through high grasses, even park rangers. It scares the living daylights out of me that in there is a snake and they've trodden through there full belt. Now you've seen Crocodile Man and how he goes around hunting snakes and crocodiles. Maybe that's not foolish but he knows his job fairly well. But Aboriginal people know where to go and what not to do in those sorts of things. And that's passed on either by observation or direct telling or indirect. Most of you like to be told indirectly. Lot of Nunga fellows from my country are told indirectly without communication. Otherwise it breaks down if we tell them directly. So it's a round about way. Who's ever asked a girlfriend directly for a date? We've got a promise system as well you see which goes back to totems, kangaroos, emus, crocodiles, snakes are all totems to us and if they die or get killed or something, then those persons who's got those totems will feel the pain and suffer and even die themselves. I've got to take a lot of kids through and a lot of old fellows who sort of grew up in an era where the culture was gone completely. And when we take them out bush and do a bit of things like making spears of boomerangs and stuff like that. Now all this is technology. When we're talking about a boomerang we know Andy Thomas took the return boomerang around the moon. Well that same boomerang was found at the South East in some swamp. So when we talk about aerodynamics that we throw something and make it come back, you're looking at someone who's got the equivalent of Einstein in Maths or whatever I guess. And Aboriginal people related even today and Flinders and Catherine Cook said were the most primitive and retched people in the country. But when you look at how the Aboriginal people can make things for survival, then it's amazing. Who could make a spear today or a club? It's a simple little thing. When you think out the process of making it. The selection of wood, weathered wood, whether it's hard material whether it's soft material. How long it's going to last. You don't have a steel axe, this is in the old days I'm talking about, to reproduce is not like a production line thing. They all have to be done in the process of a certain amount of time when the weather permits. And the weather determines your movement.

One more question and then I'll pass it on. Who was born in March? Any March babies? Nine months back what was the month you was conceived? July. If you're born back then there is a process and a reason why you are born there because all kids must grow up almost the same age when they move in what they call walk about. I'm a March baby as well. And I stumbled upon this accidental as well. And what I'm trying to find now is what was the idea. And I'm still finding stuff because there were five generations of people all born in March. One was 100 years old who was born in March. One was 70 year old, born in March. One 50, was born in March. And there are kids still born in March. Now if you look at it you take your girlfriends out and your boyfriends out, and you have table wine and artificial lighting. And it works, you still have children but you're not born in the context of. Because the Luna, the moon. Aboriginal people worked out when to be born. Those cycles are there. Well we think its instinctively when things do happen. The conceivement of every animal of the Earth from where I come from. The snake will come out in September, goannas and you all know about the birds and the bees I guess. True? Well you can see that little pattern there.

Thanks.