Aboriginal Culture Trip

Back on October 5-7, I went a field trip for my Indigenous Politics class. Although it was for class, only one other girl, Brionee, from my class went. The others were exchange students - Jess, Josh, and Laurissa. So it was a small trip. My lecturer Terry drove and some of the women from the Ngunnawal Center on campus came along too. It turned out to be a great trip: interesting, educational, relaxed, and some new experiences that I wouldn't have had otherwise.


It took us about 6 hours to get to our camp in Wollombi, a town of 1000(?) people maybe, but that was with stops on the way. When we stopped at McDonald's Terry magically dropped the price from $100 to $60. We don't know why he did it, but we were glad!

We had a rest stop in a town called Mittagong where there used to be an aboriginal orphanage where the kids were trained to be servants. Our first real stop was along the Hawkesbury River. Terry told us a story about the creator asking the Rainbow Serpent to make a place for man to finish, so he ran into the land, creating the Sydney Harbour and then dug in further, creating rivers. Terry explained that he really shouldn’t be telling other peoples’ stories. He also said it’s considered disrespectful to speak one Indigenous language on another language group’s land (there are/were hundreds of language groups in Australia). Two language groups would have been separated by this river, but they would marry people from the other group to mix blood lines and make sure they didn’t marry someone they were related to.

Next stop was Somersby Falls, where we could see the grooves in the rocks where people had carved out tools and weapons. We climbed around the falls, rested in the shade, and had lunch. Terry’s brother was our chef for the weekend – and we ate well the whole time. I noticed the burgers looked a little different, but didn’t think much of it until someone asked, “So have you had roo before?” Jess said she would have rather waited till she was finished eating to know what it was! It was my first kangaroo burger… don’t know how to describe the taste, but it wasn’t half bad!

When we arrived in Wollombi, we did a smoking ceremony – they’re supposed to do certain ceremonies when entering someone else’s land. For the smoking ceremony, branches of eucalyptus leaves are burned over the fire and each person takes a turn to stand in the smoke to breathe it in and let it cleanse you of harm and worry.

The first of our guides, Mick, led us up the hill behind camp. I was second behind Mick and he stepped off a little ledge, I went next, and Laurissa behind me yelled, “Snake! Snake!” I turned around to see two flashes of slithering body beneath some brush… about one foot from where I had just stepped. I said, “Where? Where?” cause I 1. wanted to make sure to back away in the proper direction and 2. to confirm that I really had just seen –and almost stepped on – a snake! It slithered away under the leaves and twigs. Mick didn’t see it but from our description, we determined it was a brown snake – one of the world’s most venomous. I'll be honest - I think that's kind of AWESOME!!


don't worry, I didn't take this picture, but this is the type of snake we think we saw.

Mick took us to a cave to see the hand paintings. He didn’t know how old they were, but the small cave was filled with the shapes of hands and boomerangs. In this area of the country, most of the hands were in white ochre. Ochre is a clay-like substance they use to paint. In this area of the country, white can be used by anyone. Yellow is for women and red for men. This cave was a family cave, although they don’t know if it was mainly a home or a temporary residence for ceremonial stay. Putting up a handprint is like signing a guestbook. The paintings also show how knowledgeable a person was – the more arm they show, the more wisdom they had. One hand was painted to point towards women’s caves somewhere on the mountain. Mick said he and another guy wandered up that way once, but the blue sky turned gray and there was a clap of thunder – a sign they shouldn’t be there, and they bolted down the hill.


hand stencils

Another guide, David, who was a great storyteller and pretty much awesome, showed up, and before our dinner of steak and lamb chops, they took us for a walk along the river bed, which was pretty much destroyed from a huge recent flood. David brought along ceremonial boomerangs and sang a song about the wind, which he said is important to his mob (tribe).

That night around the campfire was fantastic. David did most of the story telling. I really wish I could have recorded all of those few hours. He talked about Biamie, the creator. Most of his stories ended up being about hairy men. He mentioned the small human-like skeleton found somewhere – which I knew from the National Geographic special about “Were hobbits real?” that Ivicic and I have watched and laughed at – and how indigenous people think it’s rediculous that scientists are shocked by this little person because small hairy men are talked about in most indigenous cultures. He told us about the small ones – about an aboriginal elder that was trying to a heal a woman when the little hairy men came to him, spoke to him in a foreign tongue, and helped heal her. There was also the old farmer missing an arm that someone met in a bar who said he lost his arm when attacked by a hairy man after he had whipped an aboriginal servant. The little hairy men are also mischievous… they told us stories about the disbelievers at their camps for aboriginal boys, and how those are the ones who find hairy men at the windows, get dragged out of their cabins while they sleep, or wake up to being attacked by giant bed bugs.

They also told us about big hairy men... yetties, big foot. A lot of their stories involved Uncle Paul, who runs the camp for boys. David talked about a time he and Uncle Paul tracked giant footprints through the woods. They said there’s a nearby stretch of highway that Mick won’t drive through at night because sometimes truckers get flat tires there and when they get out of their trucks the yetties, taller than a tractor trailer, will shake the truck. They also talked about a farmer whose cattle were being slaughtered on one corner of his property. Uncle Paul found an elder who could help the farmer – the problem was that the cows were walking over the portal between our realm and the yetties’ realm.

David and Mick all night referenced their own little hair men incident, which they finally told. During a camp at a night, they were hiding from the boys along the river, right where they had taken us for a walk before dinner. David was hiding behind a tree when he heard a rustling in the bushes beside him, then footsteps getting closer and closer. He then heard whatever it was jump into the water, and he knew it wasn’t the kangaroo he was hoping for. So he moved his hiding spot and offered the tree to Mick. Mick said he wasn’t there long when a pebble hit him in the back. He didn’t turn around, as you don’t want to actually interact with a hairy man. Then two small shadows started circling the tree and him, running around and around. Then one of them scurried up the tree, and in the fork of the tree one of them perched and he watched its silhouette lean back from the trunk of the tree, almost like doing push ups against it. Soon David made a noise and they were found by the campers. Noticing that Mick was obviously shaken, David asked what was wrong and they discovered they both just had a run in with the hairy men.

They also told us three rules for night: Never whistle because you might communicate with the spirits. Don’t draw in the dirt because you’ll disturb the dead. Don’t throw bones or meat in the fire because you’ll attract the hairy men. Of course, as he told us not to whistle, we all heard a loud strange whistling from that corner where they had encountered the hairy men…

The next morning on our drive to another cave, we stopped and looked where one tribe carved trees or rocks on mountaintops to look like men acting as sentries to scare off rival tribes. We also saw the mountain that was believed to be the goanna (lizard) that turned into rock after not returning to heaven with Biamie. The cave we went to was a large open cave with a huge painting of Biamie, the creator, looking out on the land below. They said the painting was a bit faded since no one keeps up with it any longer. They said certain elders were responsible for painting Biamie and restoring the painting every couple hundred years. Because Biamie is above everything, you weren’t allowed to paint anything above his picture and there would be punishments if you did.


Biamie

For the afternoon, we went to a point where Mt Yengo was visible – this mountain is very sacred to the people of this region, as it’s believed to be where Biamie stepped up to go back into the heavens. While we were up here, Andrew played the didgeridoo for us, until other people came walking up the path.

Next we went to a map site… rock carvings in the ground that directed people where to go. There was a Biamie carving, an emu woman with emu foot prints heading towards a women’s site, and birds whose feet pointed to the bush turkey people, water hen people, and emu people.


Biamie in rock

Returning to the campsite after dinner at the tavern, 2 fires were set up and burning. We gathered around the one fire while our guideswere running out in the trees somewhere, ready to start a night of dance performances. With the clap of ceremonial boomerangs, their dance began. The first one was my favorite… fully painted, they appeared out of the darkness carrying spears and approached us. They seemed to threaten us and inspect us, then symbolically broke the spears to signal that we seem to be friendly. They then did a welcome dance. After that they started explaining their dances, ones that told stories about people or that imitated animals. They taught Josh to be a kangaroo and the girls to be emus. It was fun! And after they were done we had them teach us the welcome dance and one other one.




The night ended with more stories, including one about Andrew dealing a guy into their card game and then realizing he had hooves for feet – he may have dealt in the devil. They told us more stories, many to scare us I think, including a few about the ghost of the guy from the neighboring property who committed suicide.

That night I slept terribly, waking up absolutely soaked in sweat from head to toe. Josh had been accusing me of being a “grumpy gus” all weekend and now this morning I was REALLY grumpy (I'm sure most of you have had the misfortune of experiencing me in this state). He and Laurissa apparently found this amusing and laughed at me all morning.

David and the guys took us to another cave where we could try to make our own hand stencils. They mixed up some white ochre, we poured it into our mouths, and spit it over our hands. It tasted like dirt, but wasn’t that bad; however, I have no stenciling skills and spit the first batch onto the ground accidentally, got it all over my shirt, and my final stencil was barely visible. Haha, oh well!

On our way home, Terry stopped at one more rock carving site, just so we could see differences from the other ones.

So yeah, a really great weekend.

If you want to see more pictures, including one of the wombat we managed to NOT turn into roadkill, go here:

http://gmu.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2100804&l=a28c1&id=15600311