This is my Mum, Mimbardda, from whom I get all my Dreaming stories. Stories that I go and tell in schools. They all come from my mother. Behind is the country that we come form. This is our country, the WONG-GU-THA country here, and over there is where Mary’s country is, way on the border of the Northern Territory. Docker River.
The skin groupings that these two are using at the moment is made up of how everybody married a long time ago. The six skin groupings of the desert. It was a clean way of living and it was to stop interbreeding and all those sort of things. So, today we refer to each other through the skin groupings of our areas.
In a minute we hope to go to where that lake is and we’re going to draw the stories in the sand and tell the stories in the old-fashioned way, of the Aboriginal way, the real traditional way of telling the stories. How we used to do it a long time a go.
As I look out over there I feel very sad inside, because in our Dreaming stories of the Seven Sisters, the stories tell us that this was the last cut-off point for the Seven Sisters when they had their time here on earth. In the Dreamtime.
Over there is a boundary line that tells us that that’s a cut-off point into someone else’s territory, so the Seven Sisters spent a lot of time here, as their last time on earth, before they went back up into the Milky Way. This place was once so beautiful that the Seven Sisters lived in these caves here. But now as we look over here, we can see that the place has been completely desecrated.
Mining people have come in here and made big open mining pits here. All the caves are wrecked here today.
This is why we need these Dreaming stories so much, because we need to tell our children all about our creation-time stories and all our Elder Aboriginal people that live in the towns here; in Koolgardie, in Kalgoorlie, they know these dreaming stories out here.
To actually sit here and look at it today and see how it’s wrecked completely the caves are all different today from how they would have been in the Dreamtime. Nobody comes here any more and learns or tells their kids about the wonderful Dreaming stories of the Seven Sisters. It is very sad for me to sit here and look at this, knowing the story from my mother.
Mimbardda:
It’s very good us following the lore now, today. It’s very good what I see.
(Josie Boyle and Mimbardda. Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, 1997)
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