Making comics with kids on Darkinjung Country and an Elder sits at the table with us. He watches the kids drawing, glancing every now and then at the pencils and blank comic paper. I offer him a sheet and invite him to join in.
"I can't draw bub," uncle says. It's a sentence I hear a lot. People often feel like they need to be artists to make something meaningful. So I say to him what I say to everyone doubting their ability to make a comic.
"Doesn't matter unc, it's a comic...doesn't have to be a masterpiece, just start making marks on the paper however you feel."
Uncle picks up a blue pencil. For a long time he just holds it, staring at the paper. Instead of drawing, he starts yarnin! He asks me about my old people and we yarn for ages about all the turmoil I experience over my identity and belonging, he tells me his story too. Slowly, as we're talking, uncle starts to make blue scribbles on his page.
And then he says:
"The stories of our Ancestors have been a lot of suffering for a while now and eventually people get called back home...every broken story starts again somewhere."
And he dotted the pencil loudly in the middle of the page of blue scribbles. The sound seemed to underline his words, telling me that there was something important in them that I needed to think about. Uncle left his scribbles with me after that and I did think about them for a long time...until suddenly, the scribbles of an Elder who said he didn't know how to draw started revealing patterns and shapes.
So I picked a spot and started to draw the story hidden in his scribbles until the face of my Ancestors, my grandmother wrapped in possum skins, looked back at me from within the blue tangles.
I've been learning and reconnecting with my culture slowly for 10 years. I've made mistakes, trusted the wrong people, and had to unlearn and relearn. I don't know my family connections completely, my family weren't a mission family...our story was different. I do know my apical Ancestors names, I dream their faces and hear echoes of their voices.
I try to be of service to Elders and community as much as I can and keep my mouth shut, eyes and ears open...because I don't really know how to 'draw' yet. I don't yet feel that I have earned the right to speak culturally.
Yet people with a fraction of my years of learning and connection are speaking in our communities - sometimes too loudly. Sadly, this has included my own relatives who have chosen not to engage or identify culturally taking it upon themselves to define who our Ancestors were without having earned that right or any having a cultural compass from which to make those assumptions. It breaks my heart, because what they say of our apical Ancestor comes from colonial interpretations. It's not what I have slowly come to know about her life and the lives of many Aboriginal women of that time according to Aboriginal people themselves.
The cost of doing things proper way - slowly, asking and listening to your mob, building relationships and understanding connected stories - is that there's more wrong way stories about my Ancestors in the public domain that do a great disservice to their descendants who are still living culturally in very tough, highly political and traumatised Indigenous circumstances.
But every broken story starts again somewhere. Quietly, gently, slowly...messy like a blue pencil scribble that has a way of coming together until the story isn't quite as broken as it was before. My cousins and I were the pencil dotting loudly amongst the scribbles. The reconnection, the true meaning emerging from her story and sacrifices. The truth about who we are, who and where we come from, and our right to speak with (not for) our Ancestors voices will eventually be revealed to those who are listening proper.
Thanks heaps uncle Phil. 🖤💛❤️
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