Rapping at Walla Mulla

Museums & Galleries NSW continues its Reconciliation Action Plan journey and is on track to deliver its first ever RAP at the end of this month.

Our second workshop built on the importance of place and continuity of existence of people and culture in the local area of Woolloomooloo, where M&G NSW’s office is located. While our first workshop focused on the local people and culture pre-European contact, this time we looked at some aspects of contemporary Aboriginal life.

It was only a five minute walk from our office to those of the Walla Mulla Family and Community Support Centre around the corner in McElhone Street. Walla Mulla is a quiet achiever you may not have heard of before. The not-for-profit organisation has been around for many years offering counseling, family support, information, referral and advocacy on a range of issues including health, housing, education & training, employment and legal. It is there for the whole community but its work with the Aboriginal community and particularly court support and legal advocacy has drawn requests for the team’s help from across greater Sydney.

Walla Mulla means place of plenty in the local Gadigal language. Even so, we made sure we brought plenty of chicken, salad and bread with us to share with the Aunties. Food is important in so many cultures and for the mob even lunch becomes a relaxed celebration of stories, laughter and connection. The simple lunch was also our offering for the stories and knowledge the Aunties shared with us.

Everyone loved the Aunties for their strength and good humour as they shared stories of their lives and their current work at Walla Mulla. Although they receive some funding from the Department of Community Services, they provide critical Aboriginal perspectives at the grassroots case management level and go to great lengths particularly to try to keep children with their family wherever possible. Some of their stories made for difficult listening but are the reality of many Aboriginal families today, long after the assimilation and stolen generations policies have been abandoned and the impact of those policies echoes through subsequent generations.

After lunch we stayed on at Walla Mulla to work in teams on our RAP plan. The Reconciliation Australia website is fantastic with plenty of examples of successful RAPs, a toolkit with a RAP template and further advice only a phone call away. Working through the template we looked at what work we already embraced such as Welcome to Country at M&G NSW events and what more we could do in the three key areas Reconciliation Australia recommends: relationships, respect and opportunities. Happily everyone agreed we should engage more with the local community through places such as Walla Mulla and events such as the Woolloomooloo annual NAIDOC Week celebration and encouraging our arts neighbours at the Gunnery to join us. RAPs are very practical so we have committed, as one example, to some annual fundraising for the local community through Walla Mulla. Standby for news about the raffle!

Steve Miller, M&G NSW's Aboriginal Sector Programs Manager.

M&G embarks on RAP adventure

M&G fearlessly hoping onto the Mari Nawi.
Image courtesy of Andrew Brettell.

A two hour cruise including a course on living on only natural resources might sound like a pilot for a cross-over Survivor/Gilligan’s Island television show. It was instead how M&G NSW staff began their Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP) adventure. 

Bravery and faith were required but more of the kind needed to face the unpredictable weather havoc of our la nina summer. With water, water everywhere, thanks to last Thursday’s extreme downpour, our fate was in the hands of the experienced Aboriginal mariners of the Tribal Warrior Association. 

Tribal Warrior is the not-for-profit, Redfern-based organization run by Aboriginal Elders. Since starting up in 1998, it has trained more than 700 Aboriginal mariners, many of them from remote and extremely disadvantaged backgrounds. 

The weather meant some last-minute changes to our program. Walking through the Royal Botanic Gardens and its Cadi Jam Ora: First Encounters interpretive display to our docking point was no longer on the agenda. The mob at Tribal Warrior however, held firm that the cruise would go ahead. Sure enough, by the time we disembarked at Clark Island, the sun had come out to welcome us.

Les Daniels gave us the island tour which is easy as it is less than a hectare in size. The fascinating part was in the detail, the commonplace features of the landscape that revealed so much about truly living from the land. We saw the natural rockpools and how they had been adapted as fishtraps: high tide comes in bringing the abundance of the harbor with it and then drains to leave a fish platter. We also inspected the natural aquafier on the island and learnt of the multiple uses of different native plant species found even on this small patch. 

Terry Olsen and M&G demonstrating the emu stance.
Image courtesy of Lorna Munro. 

Terry Olsen then demonstrated some of the many Aboriginal dances of eastern Australia before getting the team up to learn the emu dance. It was great fun and no one was hurt, not even a peck.

Back on board the Mari Nawi, Corey Grech who established bush foods eatery Purple Goanna in Redfern with sister Suzanne, was busy barbecuing up some tasty morsels of kangaroo and seafood with salad for our trip back. Corey is branching out with Kool Purple Kookas, teaching young people to cook healthy bush tucker in a fun way. There were many interesting conversations on the return trip including with Lorna Munro who earlier in the day had given us a presentation on the Aboriginal connections to the Woolloomooloo area and beyond. As living culture, some of these connections are still practiced today but probably invisible to the non-Aboriginal population. The natural landscape, the escarpments and the bays, also reveal land use patterns, including men’s business and women’s business, places where tools were ground and others where ceremonies took place. As an educator, Aboriginal history and politics are natural to Lorna whose bloodlines on both sides mean that such conversations were an everyday occurrence for her growing up. 

 M&G's Steve Miller, Corey Grech and Terry Olsen on the harbour.
Image courtesy of Andrew Brettell. 

The M&G NSW team were enthusiastic about this introduction to Aboriginal culture here in the centre of Sydney. Sydney Harbour after all is one of the most significant outdoor galleries in the world for rock art. As I’ve seen before, it helps to understand the layers and interactions of widely different cultures that have contributed to an area’s development. It adds meaning to a sense of place as something more than where you work or live.
Information on how to develop a RAP can be found on the Reconciliation Australia website.