Part 2

 

What do you want most for your children or their children who will live most of their lives in the first century of this new millennium?

I guess that's a pretty hard question in one sense but one of the most important things for me is that they have a clear understanding of their cultural background. That they are able to maintain their culture, heritage and history to the greatest height they possibly can, and be proud of it.

As time goes by they need to understand how they need to embrace their culture. I guess it's going to be difficult for our children because they live in it daily in terms of the involvement with the community and you get an understanding of their culture because it reflects our traditional belief in caring and sharing of community as equals. So I think really, just the fact that our children need to respect their culture and respect their Elders and everything that goes with the culture. This is the basis of everything we believe community to be. It's probably a difficult one to explain to an extent when you're actually living it. If you can somehow step outside the situation and have a good look at why I do this job, you would know that the inner self of the Aboriginal person is my soul motivation.

I hope that children and grandchildren can experience a society that is more tolerant compared to what I come through as a kid. So I think I am looking for a better world for them anyhow.

 

What is the background to the Wathaurong Co-operative?

As soon as you walk through the door of the Co-op you feel the warmth. It's so open and relaxed and that's what we wanted to achieve for our staff and visitors. If you'd seen the area where we were operating out of in Forster Street, where the education, health and children's services still operate. We were set up in little offices like rabbit warrens, people buzzing in and out, with partitions and so forth, it was a nightmare.

The Wathaurong Co-operative, Morgan Street North Geelong

This year we celebrate 20 years as a community organisation. Let me say that this area, Geelong and Ballarat, this opens a lot of sensitive issues to an extent. We were one of the major areas of adopted and fostered Aboriginal children in the State. There were 2 major homes here in Geelong and Ballarat and there's a large group of adopted and fostered Koorie children in Geelong today. A group of us attended some of the meetings that were conducted here in Geelong as the support arm to the Aboriginal Advancement League in Melbourne. The main reason was because the non-Indigenous foster and adoptive parents wanted to have their children involved with the local Aboriginal community, to try and maintain the children's heritage and culture by meeting with other Aboriginal people and so forth.

What our aim was to not only maintain as a group, maintain our cultural heritage and history as such, but also to represent the adopted and fostered children, giving them some knowledge of what culture we had left and also for our own children. So that was really how it basically came about and we met at several different places and houses, had meetings there to sort of formulate a steering group and to really look at how we could establish a meeting place. We met at several homes, my own home included, to start the process rolling. We canvassed the old DAA, Dept of Aboriginal Affairs as it was then, to get an establishment grant so that we could rent the premises to meet and develop programs, cultural programs and so forth.

We weren't successful at that. The next best option was to canvass the Government through political people and I am not sure, I think the Labor Government may have been in. But, we were then supported by two parliamentary people that were sympathetic to our plight and they gave us space within their offices basically to operate out of. They even gave us a desk and an old typewriter. The two parliamentary people were Graham Ernest and Rod McKenzie who basically gave us the start we needed in the formulation of our Co-op. Bear in mind, we were all the time canvassing our rep bodies and Aboriginal Affairs, but they wouldn't look at us because we wanted to run cultural programs.

We wanted to promote and maintain our cultural heritage and history and we wanted to give the children of the adopted/fostered Aboriginal families a chance to be able to sustain their cultural identity by telling and teaching them the stuff about their ancestry and they, the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, wouldn't look at us. The funding body would not even entertain cultural heritage history. It wasn't even a consideration. All they were concerned about was welfare. They were saying to us is that if you got welfare needs, you got people looking for food vouchers, you got people with substance abuse /alcohol problems, we will fund you for that. We said we haven't at this point in time. So basically they forced us to go into the broader Aboriginal community and source problems. Obviously in a place like Geelong, there were people that were having the problems that would attract that sort of funding. Eventually, through that type of program they provided funds for us to employ a part-time secretary/bookkeeper/admin position. It's a very small type of funding and we started off that way.

But you know, initially that wasn't what we were aiming at, and it's just quite ironical now that governments do recognise that because heritage is a high priority - everything stems from your cultural heritage, you know. Sure we have our problems with our housing, health and education and so forth, but that is because of the loss of our culture. That's the root of all evils in terms of that. But they couldn't recognise that 20, 30 or 40 years ago. So governments have now turned around and do recognise those sort of issues now.

So we went on from there. We're also are pretty active in the community in terms of raising our own funds to pay our own rent. We rented an office at the Waterside Workers Union. It was quite ironical that we were renting the office from the Waterside workers, that they bought most of the raffle tickets to pay for their own rent. That's the level of support we got from them and I was quite proud of that fact because later on in life I then became a "wharfie". But at the time I was working on the tug boats and as a seaman and that position allowed me to have sufficient time off to be able to run the organisation and put in time to develop the organisation.

So, I have spent nearly 25 years voluntary work in the organisation and running it. So it just sort of stemmed from that and as we got going, we canvassed different bodies for different programs - health, housing, education and so forth.

One of the strongest things that I feel from our perspective is the fact that our community is made up of Indigenous peoples from everywhere, and I would say that I am very proud of that unique fact. While it's sad that, as I suggested earlier, that there are no known descendants (and that's to be clarified at this point in time) it is great that you can have Aboriginal peoples nationally from all different parts of Australia coming to live here together, united in a sense and being able to care and share. I am quite proud of the fact that we don't turn our back on anybody - everybody's welcome in here as members of the organisation. However we do have our rules and regulations and so forth, but that helps us to operate the organisation. And we've got to the situation now whereby that we are embarking on obviously the long-term strategy of supporting our aims to become self-determined and self-sufficient.

We are developing businesses, e.g. the Wathaurong Glass Community Development Employment Program. In the long-term future we hope that our children and grandchildren can be self-reliant, self-determined and be able to determine their own destiny without governments telling us what to do, where to do it and how to do it. So that's our long-term aim and I think we're heading down that track, a little bit quick too, actually, yeah that's basically the establishment of it.

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