Deb Duthie: I will introduce Chris McGregor. I'll tell you a bit more about him shortly. But, first of all, I acknowledge the Yugara and Turrbal people as the traditional owners of the lands on which we are meeting and acknowledge that this land and waters have never been ceded.
Chris McGregor: Thank you. I’m going to do a Welcome for you today. Usually, my aunties and my uncles or grandfather would come and do it, as we know with NAIDOC [week], our mob is in high demand, which is a good thing and a bad thing. We want our old people, especially, to be valued for their experience and their cultural knowledge and their humanity all year round. But I'll do a Welcome for you today. So, on behalf of my Elders, my Ancestors, my Family, I welcome you here today onto Yugara Country. I'm a Yugara and Mununjali man, and I always like to pay respects to those who come before me. They went along the hard road because people in my generation definitely have it a lot easier. And then, hopefully, when my son comes up, he's got it easier again, and basically knows that he's valued and has a place of belonging, as a young Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander, South Sea Islander boy. So welcome, welcome the Good Bullanga, and the Good Spirits be with us.
Deb Duthie: Thank you. Thank you. So, as you said, this year's theme is For Our Elders. So, we reflect on the roles the Elders have played and continue to play in the lives of Indigenous peoples. The guidance that they've given new generations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and communities. Without our Elders and their guidance, their activism, their knowledge, we would not be where we are now. So, their struggles actually help us move forward. So, we pay our respects to the Elders, to those we have lost and to those who continue to fight for us across all our Nations.
I just need to tell you that there'll be photos taken here today. So, if you don’t want your photo taken, just let the library staff know.
I’ll tell you a bit about Chris. We do have another person coming, Jake, but he's actually lost wandering around at the entrance at the moment, so he'll be here shortly.
Chris is a proud Mununjali and Yugara man who grew up in Woodridge and Caboolture and has always felt a strong sense of pride and connection to his family story, which he now strives to pass down to his son.
Chris captures and shares this connection through his art, he's creating murals that depict his family strength and stories. Chris' great, great, grandmother on his mother’s side was part of the Stolen Generation taken from Julia Creek when she was a child.
Chris works with Community around cultural education and is also working in his family business, Wirrinyah Conservation Service. The goal is to revitalize the native ecosystems through cultural burning, revegetation, education, and collaboration.
So, you’ve got a Bachelor of Business. He's done a Master of Management and Indigenous
Leadership, and as of this week, he is now a PhD candidate. Chris is looking at how original ways of storytelling and oral histories influence Indigenous models of food sovereignty. So, it will be an interesting one.
[Man enters and sits down].
Deb Duthie: Everyone. This is Jake Anderson. You'll have to tell us about you.
Jake Anderson: I'm Jake and I'm Murrawarri man from northwestern New South Wales and Southwest Queensland, at the Culgoa river. Then my Nan, she was moved to Cunnamulla, and then from Cunnamulla to Toowoomba, so that's my little journey to Toowoomba.
In Toowoomba I started doing land management, but more the cultural burning side of things, and we've learned a lot. So, I was working up the Bunya mountains for about three and a half years and then, my time finished up there. It was a good time, and then we moved down here, and I jumped on with the Wirrinyah, with the traditional owners down here, with Chris' mob.
Now we're kicking off all that stuff and getting into all different spaces of learning, different land management techniques and all that, and just the cultural side to things, so it's pretty good.
Deb Duthie: Thank you. So just in linking with the themes, this week is NAIDOC. Why are Elders important in your eyes?
Chris McGregor: Elders are really the roots that sort of keep me so grounded in everything that I do. Yesterday I took a few of my aunties and grandad and my uncle to the Golden Oldies, Triple A hosted an event, Golden Oldies at Bowen Hills there. It’s an event that's been running for many years just for our community. Just sitting there and watching all the oldies get up and jive, and that, and with a live Aboriginal band there, and just enjoying themselves in the spirit of who they are, their struggles, their resilience. Again like, I said, we are coming behind these people, these are the people that forged the way for many years. They do it with a smile on their face, they do it with humility, they're not always looking for attention and stuff like this.
Especially when we look at things like culture, my generation, we talk about culture as if it's something that is a specific thing. When I look back to my mum's generation, my mum and dad, or my aunties and uncles or grandparents, they just lived it. They just were of culture, because they struggled to survive, to put food on the table for family. At the end of it, if not for them, we wouldn't be here today, so yeah.
Deb Duthie: What about you Jake?
Jake Anderson: Yeah, it’s very important. Chris touched on our Elders, our old people and that.
I’ll touch on our Elders that are still in the bush there. So, all our big parent trees, all our big trees there out bush, they are our Elders. What they do is they hold everything in place, they bring the animals, they bring the type of species that you need. Without them, they're not going to bring in them types of animals, they're not going to keep that ecosystem running. In the bush, where most properties I go to now, I'm looking at all 20-year-old trees, all young trees. We like to reflect back and think, imagine if it was just all 20-year-olds running around here? It would be all happy man, because you know, we need the Elders there to keep things in place. So, out bush, it reflects back to the people, and without them big trees there, sometimes we can't even tell what type of Country it is. But, if we’ve got that one big tree there, then we can tell, we can go off that one big tree on that property, and we can manage it through that one tree.
So, it just shows you how important, even our Elders out in the bush are, those big trees. They're very special, and we need them. Now it's going to be another 2, 3, 4, 500 years before we see them proper big trees again. So, that's why it's important that we keep the big trees there
because they keep everything in check. It's very important, just to look out in the bush too, as the Elders out there.
Deb Duthie: Are there any Elders in particular, that have been a big influence for you?
Chris McGregor: Yeah. So, my first would be my great, great, grandmother, Nana, she was really our matriarch of our family, important in her and her sister’s. They both come up in a generation
again where they really led the way for our family. There weren't many men in my family specially leading the way, so really these strong, staunch, women who were born on Thursday Island. Their mother, she's my great, great grandmother, she was part of the Stolen Generation and then married my great, great grandfather an Indian Torres Strait Islander man.
You’ve got these kids, including my grandmother, they just had something instilled in them about what it means to have your open house policy. Feed the family, what's yours is mine, what's mine is yours. This idea of share, share and just this idea of staunch Black women in our community is important.
Which is why me and Jakey, we always talk about our generation now, and as fathers coming up, how we're bringing back the role of our Black men in our community. Especially as fathers, but also leading the way for our young nephews, and those roles as caretakers of not only land and Country, but of our family as well.
Deb Duthie: That kind of reciprocity is just something that’s ingrained, isn't it? That you share, and you give.
What were your experiences with culture and spirituality as you were growing up? It forms the basis of your identity.
Jake Anderson: Yeah, where I grew up, there wasn't a whole heap of culture around. It was more, just look where we are sitting here now, we are just trying to get a job trying to have a feed and survive. I could see that's what my Nan did, because she got moved around a lot and for her just to be like, ‘right, we just got to get our things sorted here now’. Just the way of living, just having food, just making sure all the families were right, little things like that.
As far as like song and dance and that side of things and like being out bush… I didn't really have anyone there to show me and teach me. I had to go out and look for it and to look for people who had that knowledge and to be able to share that stuff. Growing up in Toowoomba too, it’s a small place, but it's big enough for everything to go on there. I sort of had to go out and look for that.
Also, all my aunts and uncles were just trying to live, they weren't too worried about trying to bring all that stuff in, because it was tough enough just trying to live.
Deb Duthie: Survival?
Jake Anderson: Yeah, that's basically what it's been about. But luckily for me, I had an older cousin who was into the cultural side of things and spiritual side of things. He picked up on it very early, and I was very glad that he was there to do that, because he passed a lot onto me.
He's up in Toowoomba now and he's got his own dance troop, they do a lot of song and dance, and they do smoking ceremonies, just all that type of stuff. I'm down here now, I'm out bush so hopefully, one day, we can come back together, then we can share everything that we've learned and pass it on to all the young ones and really set that culture in.
When I was younger, we'd play the Didge, and we'd do all them things, and we’d go out bush. We weren't really looking at the way I see things now, it was totally different. In the last 5 years being out bush and working, I see how it reflects, back and forwards. So, for me, I had to go out and look for that stuff and be lucky enough to have Victor come down from Cape York and for him to share his knowledge. He dives into a lot of that spiritual stuff and knowing your identity and all that type of thing. And once again, we didn't have that knowledge down here about the bush and about burning. It was stopped down this way pretty early, and all the mobs up north kept doing it.
I'm glad that he came down because he really touches on that spiritual side of things, and he can point at the ground anywhere in the bush, and he’ll be able to talk to you about so many different things just in that one little spot. Then talk about the spirituality side of things and talk about, having your identity and all that. For me, I sort of have to go out and look for that, and we did.
Like what Chris said before, even just a family having a Sunday roast, that’s culture, that’s like ceremony too, because we're all sitting down, we're going to have full bellies. All the kids are going to run and play, and the adults are going to do what they do, just them little things. Me now, back then, looking at just having a feed, I'm thinking, oh, that's not culture that's just eating.
But then, when you actually realise, when you look into it deeply, you can see there's that ceremony, that spirituality thing, that connection between your family going on.
Deb Duthie: It’s about the identity of the whole family as a community.
Jake Anderson: Yeah, yeah.
Deb Duthie: What about you Chris?
Chris McGregor: The things that I grew up with. I remember being little, my Nanna, I was just talking about before, and my Auntie Dulcie. My Nan would always play strum guitar and my auntie Dulcie would play slide guitar, and they’d sing songs like old TI, like where they’d come from. Really just having those get togethers as family, again as kids, when you're a kid, you don't think of it as this cultural thing, or whatever. This is just our lives, and how we were raised.
Besides the gatherings, art was huge for me, was probably the first thing that connected me to my culture. It was a bit of an outlet, still, at school, you get derogatory terms, like ‘abo’, and all this, and you still grow up with all that shame of being a Blackfella, being Aboriginal. So, seeing my Mum, my uncles on both sides, just a lot of my family paint, not for commercial purposes. My Auntie Lucy used to grab a tire or something and paint it up, hang it up. She would make all these little trinkets; she would do it for gifts and stuff.
But you look at it, I see how powerful it is now for people to do that in our families, because these are all the things that we stripped from us.
Deb Duthie: Taken away?
Chris McGregor: So, if we talk about the destruction of our kingship, our expressions, art and dance and song and language, all of these things, were the things that were taken from us. Today, in whatever form it is, whether it's music, art, all of this, I love it. I love seeing our mob express themselves, especially economically now, we’ve got a lot of Black businesses popping up, we've got our family business.
Deb Duthie: It’s about having that voice in like, different ways.
Chris McGregor: Absolutely. I told Mum, I grew up with Mum going back 20 years ago. It was an extension of slave labor, really, you'd have these corporations, usually a White man at the top, you'd have a hundred Aboriginal painters painting for 20 cents a Boomerang. At the time, the mob were doing it, just not thinking too much about it, because again, just trying to survive. But I think back now, and I said to Mum, if you are painting today, you would have your own little business, you would be set up, you'd be able to express yourself and make a career and employment for yourself.
Deb Duthie: So, you've done quite a few murals around the place. Over at the Enoggera Army Barracks there and at Michael’s school.
Chris McGregor: Yeah, I just did that with my Auntie Kath, who’s out the back there. Yeah, And I love taking this follow along with me, because again, like Mum, she did a mural at my school growing up, that was something for us to be proud of. So, taking my little fella these days, I'll get him to do his little bits, paint a tree or something. But again, all of these little parts are
strengthening, revitalising our connection to kinship, and who we are. It’s different for every Blackfella, we all have a different way of connecting, and one way is not better than another way, it’s just who we are.
Deb Duthie: Tell me about Wirrinyah Conservation Service. How did that begin, and what roles do you have there?
Chris McGregor: Wirrinyah means ‘coming back’, it doesn't exactly translate, but in Yugara language it's like revitalisation. So, coming back to culture, revitalising our old ways of doing and knowing. It was started by the Sandy Thompson family out at Ipswich, two or three years ago.
We had a loss in the family and my Auntie Lorena Thompson said, I need to be out on Country.
Do all the things we've been talking about for years, don't know how to. But I need to be out on Country, or I'm going to basically go into a bit of depression and stuff like that.
So, my cousin Linda straight away, started talking to Council at that time, how to set up the business. Not in the restraints of Native Title, or anything like that, but just set it up as any other commercial business would be set it up.
So then, I think before I come on about a year later, they just started with the crew of five doing small contracts with Healthy Land and Waters Council. Then I came on board to help with more the management and HR side of things. When Jake came on board, that's when we sort of started to look at the power and impact of ‘fire’, and how revitalising fire knowledge and application can strengthen our family, heal Country, heal ourselves.
Deb Duthie: You made a comment about when we heal Country, we heal ourselves, and as a Yugara man it helps you feel grounded in your roles as a caretaker of Country and landscape.
Tell me about that. Explain how you think.
Chris McGregor: Yeah, I feel powerful about that, because, if we're talking about colonisation at once upon a time, the destruction of the Black family and our kinship system. The Stolen
Generation focuses a lot on the child and the mother being removed from the family. But what also happened is as a tool of colonisation, removing the Black man from the family, so removing the father, our roles as fathers, as uncles, as caretakers of Country and the family.
So now I've got this opportunity to work on Country, I see, young brother boys like Jake, my nephews with their young families. Some of them might have just got out of lock-up, or they’re going through a really hard time. But as soon as I see them on Country working for a few weeks, it's powerful, there's a strength there that mainstream society can never give us. We can only get that by working with our mob on Country, speaking our language, doing things that our
ancestors did.
Deb Duthie: Jake, how about you?
Jake Anderson: Yeah, yeah, for sure. One thing I'll start with is, I think, just as humans, we naturally, we're meant to be outside. We're not meant to be boxed up like this, and that it
blocks a lot of our senses, that we should be using all the time. Being outside working with Wirrinyah, it's really powerful, because it's also the start of independence for the mob. To do things without having to go through so many people, just to be able to do it off their own back, it's very, it's very special. Just going out there working with all the mob, with all the different fellas, and hearing all the different yarns while we're working, while we're chopping at the Lantana with the machetes. It's hard yakka, but when you look at all the benefits from it, you're outside, you're learning so much, you're staying fit, you're meeting new people, you're talking, you get so much out of it.
The land management side of things, it's a big part for us Aboriginal people, because back in the day, that land, that was our economy. If the land was healthy, we're wealthy, we’re rich.
It's like today, we go out bush, you go to some properties, and it's hard to feel good, because it's just so messy and dirty, and then that's the reward. Once you clean it up and you look at it, it's like, wow, look what we did here. It's very powerful and it's creating that independence for ourselves too.
Deb Duthie: It's a really hard thing to explain, isn't it? About what it is like to be on your own Country. There is something about it that makes you feel good.
Chris McGregor: Yeah, it's at the heart of our identity as Blackfellas. If we are a part of the Stolen Generation or something, there's always that gap in our lives. Especially if we're growing up on someone else's Country, because it was not by our choosing that we're not growing up in our Country. I do feel privileged that I walk on my father's Country, we have those opportunities, it’s important.
Deb Duthie: So, what are some of the projects that you do in Wirrinyah?
Chris McGregor: Mainly it's all about, if we're talking about conservation, it’s about re-
vegetation, getting rid of the invasive species. For Lee and Victor, sometimes they like to talk in these metaphors, but they're powerful. He was talking about managing the invasive species as if we're talking about the relations between White and Black in this Country. He always says, ‘it's important that we strengthen the native ecosystem and bring it back to its true identity.’
But we also have to realise that we can never turn back time, and that the invasive species, which is Lantana, depending on which Country you are, it's about managing relationships. So, when Victor and Lee, who helps with our family, talk in ways like this, you can apply to life. It's very in sync when we're talking about bush, the environment, it's very in sync.
Chris to Jake: Do you want to talk about some of the fire projects?
Jake Anderson: We've been doing burns on private properties; we've been working with a lot of the agencies. It's good, because working with the agencies, they have, not totally, but a very different way of land management compared to the way we do things. It's good, because, working with them, well, they can teach us a bit, and we can teach them a bit. We can have this strong symbiosis thing; we got the Western side of things and we've got our Cultural side to that.
Like knowledge, we bring it together because we live in a new world now. It's important that we also learn from the agencies, national parks and the council. We live in a new world, we've got houses, infrastructure everywhere, and we've got to be careful with some things. Working with the agencies, most of them are private properties.
But, we also have this network, it's like a little fire network now, it's sort of in South East Queensland. What we're doing now is, we'll team up, and we'll go up to the Bunyas with the
Bunya rangers up there, and we'll be burning with them for a few days or so. I was up there last week for 3 days, burning with them. I think next month, or in a few weeks, will be going over to Fraser Island, and then we’ll go over with them and burn with them. It's also building that knowledge of different ecosystems, out there on the sand, on that beach on that coastal heath Country. Compared to down here we got a lot of Ironbark out at the back of Ipswich, we are learning a lot about that, learning a lot about that Country. As I said up the Bunyas, they’ve got a lot of grasslands there, so it's good because we've got a big network, we're bouncing around helping each other to really build a strong knowledge base.
Deb Duthie: Do you think burning in particular, is being more and more accepted? It always frustrates me when we have all these huge bush fires, yet no one sort of wanting to uptake cultural burning.
Jake Anderson: Yes, it’s tough. At the at the end of 2019, I think, when all them wildfire, our last big wildfire happened, for a couple of years we got a bit of a move on, but I think that's because everyone got a bit scared. Now, it’s slowed down again because there's not raging fires
everywhere again. That's the thing, is that they get a bit, too, what do you call it, complacent. In a few years’ time we could have another big dry spell, and everything could go up. I've been through so many properties that are just, it's like very bad. If a spark hits that, it will take everything.
It's very important, because you don't want everything to burn. When we burn, what we aim for is just to burn the grass, not to burn all the sticks and all the leaf litter and all the twigs. But because it's been a long time, there's a buildup of fuel. That's where we got to be a bit smarter, we can’t just come here and burn at the right time. We might have to burn it at a different time.
And then yes, it just can be all over the place, but it shows you how important it is for that
identity to be there to have that one big tree, that one Elder there. It can tell you so much, and the Country it'll speak to you, and it will talk to you, and it'll tell you, ‘look I need to be tidied up like this, because there's all this Lantana here, we got to get rid of this.’
The Country is always speaking to us, it's important, because the way I've noticed the Country speaking to me when I’m out bush is, it can reflect back to everyday life, you could operate better. So, from me, being in the bush, and me understanding and learning all these things. I can see so many similarities within just everyday life, it helps me navigate through things.
Chris McGregor: And going back to our Elders, my Auntie Pearl passed away last year, bless her.
My Uncle Henry and Auntie Pearl used to come out, and even when we're weeding or doing a little burn, they'll just set up their chair there, have their lunch and watch us, like just being so proud. These are things that they weren't able to do, and it's just taken time, but in this
generation for them to see that, like they are so proud, they get teary, because they see that power and that strength being brought back into all this knowledge, it's beautiful.
Deb Duthie: You do quite a bit of revegetation and that sort of thing.
Chris McGregor: Yeah, so we tend to go along with our principles. Women's Business is often associated with waterways, we associate Men's Business with the fire. We work in both, but in terms of leading the conversation, the aunties will often work along the creek lines, the repairing zones, clean it up and get rid of all the invasive Lantana and all that and then start revegetating.
Then the uncles will lead with the fire, applying the fire, then we switch, and wherever we're needed as well, and passing on that knowledge to both sides. Rayanne, you know my cousin, she's leading with the fire as well, you know the girls love it just as much as the men, so that's important that we both get that exposure.
Deb Duthie: When it comes to cultural burning, it's probably a question for you, Jake. What are the main principles that you think people should know about?
Jake Anderson: There's so many different principles. One of the biggest principles, I'll say now, is, you’ve got to have the traditional owners there, for it to be a Cultural burn on that type of Country. If you've got them, that mob that belongs there, you can train them up, they're going to stay there, they're not going to go off and go somewhere else. So, one big thing is if you want to do a Cultural burn, then you have got to have the traditional owners there. It's not just having them there, it’s their feet walking on that Country. If they're going to speak that language, the Yugara language down here, the trees, the animals, they know that language. English has been here for how long? How long has our language been here? A long, long time, so the animals, it's instinct, they know that language, they can hear it, and they can feel that mob that's there. For the first thing, if you want to do Cultural burning, one of the main principles is you got to have the traditional owners there, that's very important.
With all the other stuff, there's so many principles. Just trying to narrow down the main ones.
Definitely, one of the main things is when you get there, you can't just light it up. You got to read that Country, and that's what we've been learning to do is how to read the Country in a different way. Back 7 years ago when I was driving through the bush, I couldn't tell any tree apart from any tree. Now I can sit there, I can point every little thing out, the grasses, what type of soil is there. I’d definitely say, you have the traditional owners there and to be able to identify the Country, read the Country, and then to I.D. it. When you I.D. the Country, you're just looking at the trees, you're looking at what's there. And then, if you see all these weeds there, you don't worry about the weeds, worry about the native plants that are there. If you worry about the weeds, you want to burn them all down. You put fire up that doesn’t belong there, because you're putting a fire in for the weeds. If we're putting a fire in for the Kangaroo Grass or the Spear Grass, that is what you'll see come back. Our idea is that we want to favour our natives and focus on our natives, not focus on the weeds.
The way we’ve been doing that now is, if we got a property that we want to burn, we won't go in there we won’t spray poisons and herbicides. We want to go in there and let the fire do it. Most of the time the flames are about only this high, it's a tiny flame.
Chris McGregor: They don't get up to the canopies. Before growing up with these sorts of Westernised approaches, it's a fire application, sort of just scorching the earth. It's important that fire does remain here. One of the principles, burning and patches, when we burn this little patch, all the species and animals here, run away, and then the next time we come back we burn that patch. Having the right type of smoke, because when you burn litter, when you burn the bad stuff, you'll get the real dark black smoke. What you want to see is the nice white smoke that's coming up because that'll let all the animals around you escape or go to a safe place. But again, it never gets to the canopy.
Jake Anderson: And that’s the animal thing Chris is talking about. That's why when we burn, we only do one ignition point. When you light up a bit of fuel there, it'll move out of there in 360 degrees, it'll push everything out, it's not trapping anything inside. Even all your small insects, we want to see them on us, running up on us, running up on the trees. We want to see all that, because that's showing us that we're doing the right type of burn here. What we'll do is we'll look at it, let it do its thing for a little bit. You’ve got all the smoke coming up, you can see all the insects, all the animals running away, the wallabies going that way, the snakes cruising over here. That's good, because it’s showing you, that these animals know this type of fire. What they don't know is that drip torch being run straight around the property and trapping everything in.
It just closes everything in on itself, that property won't be the same for another 10 years, 20 years. That's why it's very important, you have got to put that right amount of heat, and it's very
important to follow your principles. Like Chris said, the fire must never hit the canopy, that's one of the main principal laws of burning, it must never go up there. That's a different world up there, that’s where all the possums, the birds… we can't walk up there.
Our job is to keep the fire down. What it is, it’s burning before it gets too hot. But it gets very complex with the burning because you've got a Gum tree there you've got on Ironbark on the ridge here, we got another tree over here. That Gum tree is a different burn to the Ironbark over here and different to the Bloodwood tree over there.
Chris McGregor: So, then you got mixed Country now, because we haven't been taking care of it for a while. You'll have even Wattle, even though it's native to Australia, it might not be native to that area, but then that itself has become an invasive species. Then you have to control the Wattle and move it back to its Country.
Deb Duthie: You said in an article when you were a ranger up in the Burnett that your fires are really cool fires. You can stand right next to them. You can touch the ash from when the fires have gone through, and it's nice and cool. Explain that… I don’t get it.
Jake Anderson: So, you think about it, you go somewhere, and you light a fire. It's not cool, it doesn't make sense. But if you follow the principles, and before you burn that type of Country, you should have read that Country, and you should know the amount of moisture you should need for that Country. If we went to say Ironbark Country in summer with no rain, and we light it up, it's going to be a hot fire, but if we go there and we follow all our principles.
Chris McGregor: We've had a big storm, you know.
Jake Anderson: Yeah, if we had that rain, it would go in there, and we'd look at the soil. We’d dig down for some type of Country; you need a lot of moisture in that ground to be able to burn it because of the heated gains on top. So that fire there we did, I’m pretty sure that was, I can't remember what it was, but I'm pretty sure it was Ironbark and because followed all our principles and the laws we were meant to follow with the burning, we've got nothing to worry about. We don't even have to do a break down the bottom, because we know it's all wet down there.
Chris McGregor: And sometimes property owners or council have a timeline that's different to our timeline. You might get a property owner going, ‘oh, I want this done by the next month or two months’, but if it's not the right time, Victor Stephenson who has led the way on this, and Lee who works closely with us, we don't operate by that timeline, if it's not the right time to burn, well, then, we don't apply the fire.
Jake Anderson: If you do, you're doing more damage to it than good. It's important to have that moisture in the ground for the seeds. You don’t want that fire to drill a seed bed, you want that fire to just tidy the top off. Even after that fire goes through, you knock the ash away. There should be little bits of stick and grass and leaf that didn't even burn. That’s the organic matter, that's very important you don’t burn that little bit there. That tiny little layer, that's important, and if you burn that layer, then you can do a lot of damage to that Country.
That article there, it was all about just showing and explaining, ‘look we’re here at the right time, we followed everything we need to follow and we’re letting the Country tell us when it's ready to be burnt’. But sometimes it's not always like that, sometimes it's like right, we've got to go in, and we've got, as Chris said before, we've got to cut all this Wattle down and we've got to take it out, because of the Wattle, it'll go for 20 years, and it will die off. We got all this fuel just sitting
there, like Chris said, the Wattle in some areas will dominate, and it will grow so close next to each other, you can't even throw a spear or a Boomerang through.
That's why our people, we’re so into looking after the land, because it was our economy, it's our food. If we burn this every year and we come back in a month or so, there's going to be
kangaroos and emus everywhere, that's our food there. We go on to the next camp and we'll burn that camp, and then we'll move to the next camp, and we come back around. It should all be nice and tidy and clean and there should be all animals there.
With the burning side of things, it was all about food, it was all about getting food. We burn to make it easier for us to get food. Because we burnt that Country and it's all clean and tidy now, and everything's intact and we've got our food here now. We're going to go back to our camp, and we are going to cook him up and we’re going to have a big Corroboree, we're all happy now.
It just shows you that our people, we got pretty close to perfectly looking after the Country. We had plenty of time to sing and dance, and to laugh and have fun, we learnt. We thought right, we're going to make it easier, we can go home earlier, and play the Digeridoo and sing and dance and have fun. It just shows you that that side of things is important too, you have got to have fun.
Deb Duthie: So as Black men, and fathers, what does working on Country mean for you?
Chris McGregor: My main thing, what I want to show Michael [son], are things that maybe I’d never seen growing up. So, not only working on Country, but he can also have that strength, from going out learning about the ecosystems, the trees, the Country. I didn't have this knowledge growing up, I feel privileged to be learning it now as a man, working with family, as well as roles as caretakers. So then, that's just going to be secondhand knowledge to him growing up.
But not only working on Country, to me, us, as a Black community, Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islanders, we can progress our people in many different ways. That includes working on Country, having our mob in community, protesting, marching, having our mob in government, doing their little bit. Having our mob in university, like me, I've been exposed to all these different people in my family growing up.
My Auntie Liz always spoke to me about, from a political sense, for Blackfellas, in what I need to do my life to have a voice and express myself. Then, I've got my Dad's side where they've shown me this connection to our language in our Country and stuff like that. I've had many family working in government doing their little bit. Doesn't matter how big or small, all these little things that we're doing are going to strengthen it for the next generation.
As Black men, when this fella [Jake] first came on, we would have to drive for two hours out somewhere and prep for a burn or something, and that’s all we'd talk about for two hours. We talk about our fathers, our uncles, the men we grew up with but then also the strength of the women. But also, how we wanted to change things for our nephews and our sons, and you know that's where it all comes from. Because women in my family have been holding the fort down for so many years, that I feel that's my place as an Aboriginal man. That strength carries on, and we can look after our young boys and give them pride in the sense of belonging. In previous
generations that's been stripped from us, that pride and that sense of it, and the role as caretaker for Country and family, that's important for me.
Jake Anderson: Yeah, for me, it’s just learning all that stuff out in the bush. It is very special and it's very good. But also, it's like Chris said, we're building early now, in 10 years’ time, the same with my son, I want him to be out burning too, and so for me, it's definitely about identity. Over the past 6 years, it's shown me more about myself, I used to play footy and basketball and going down to the shops, and all that when I was younger, and I didn't know who I was. I didn't have a
clue, but me being out here and doing all this, it's slowly getting me to where I want to be.
There's so much you gain from being out in the bush on Country.
Deb Duthie: It's quite often you hear people talking about, how being on Country is healing and that you find your sense of self when you're in that place, and I think, with these sorts of changes, I think the younger generations are probably going to be a whole lot more educated and
hopefully sort of practiced in their own cultural ways of being and knowing and doing.
Chris McGregor: Absolutely. But again, it's not about, we have to realise that privilege, us younger generation have that access to that knowledge and the ability to do that. We're comfortable enough now where we can revitalise these things for ourselves and our kids.
Whereas again, previous generations, just hustling to survive, they didn't have this chance to go and do these beautiful things that we go and do.
Jake Anderson: And also, with what you touched on before. It's all my younger cousins that I see and they're looking at the older cousins that are getting around drunk and on drugs, stealing cars, doing all of them things. That's the pathway that is set in now, that's what I see for all these young fellas. So, to be out on Country and to be building all this stuff, hopefully in 10 years’ time, all them 13, 14, 15-year-olds are like, ‘oh, yeah, we’re going out burning this weekend, we're not going to go out and take these cars and do this and that’, because it is a big problem. And I see a lot of my young people back up in Toowoomba, it’s getting pretty bad up there. For us to be able to start setting things in now, so that hopefully in 10 years’ time, they are all like, ‘yeah, we want to go out here and we want to do this, we don't want to stay in the in the city’. So just to be able to put all those things in place for the younger generation is very important.
I can already see that, when I was working up the Bunyas, you know, we would have trainees come through, and I knew a few of them trainees and what they've been through. I know their families, and it’s good to see how they reacted to things and that they loved it. They wanted to come out all the time, they didn't want their 6-month traineeship to end, they wanted to keep going. One of my mates was really sad it was ending, you know it's bad for me to say this, but it's good to see that. He was sad, he wanted to stay, he didn't want to just go back to doing the same old stuff, he wanted to keep doing it. It’s not just being out bush learning, like with what Chris does, me doing all the stuff he does. I don't see too many Black folks getting around doing that.
It's important, we set these things in now. In 10, 20 years’ time, hopefully there's the majority of us are doing things like this. So yeah, that's why I think, especially the fire stuff, we are going to kick a lot of it off. To make that fire you’ve got to have mob there for it to be a cultural burn, it’s going to give us that independence, to be able to speak up for ourselves. I think the fire stuff is going to take us a long way, even though it's not just about the fire stuff.
Deb Duthie: Its sovereignty isn’t it?
Chris McGregor: That's it, it’s wellbeing. Whether you're White, Black, it doesn't matter your background. We all know when you go to the beach, or something, it clears your head. When you put your feed on the grass, it makes you feel better about your life. I think we all get caught up in this Western society, trying to live this fast-paced life that we can all be disconnected from nature and conservation. That's what we've just seen, in Wirrinyah, everyone taking a step back from that fast pace, even the way we roster our family. It's not overworking everyone to the bone, it's 5-hour days, making sure that there's family time at the beginning, at the end and that we're connecting with each other, it's a natural form of therapy and healing for people.
Deb Duthie: The university system could probably do with a bit of education about that.
I might actually just open it up for questions, if anybody's got any questions for Chris or Jake.
Audience member No.1: Yeah, I don’t actually have a question. But what I did want to say is I think what you guys are doing is absolutely awesome. And it's just so nice to hear the passion in your voice when you talk about Country, it tears me up.
Audience member No.2: These burns that you do. You talk about council, and you talk about private property, so are they really big spaces? Or if you had smaller spaces, is it all right to do that?
Jake Anderson: Are you talking about backing onto houses or properties?
Audience member No.2: I'm actually being really selfish; I'm talking about my place. We’ve got acreage that backs onto a valley, there is like thousands of hectares of bush and a lot of it, is quite pristine, it's on Yungaburra Country, but there is a lot of the invasive stuff. So, the next-door neighbours’ dead Wattle, there are buckets of it, and I'm just looking at it going ‘fuel’, you know, then there is the Lantana and stuff. So, I was just wondering, I know somebody who is doing it, burns now up there on Country. Do you have to have a specific amount of space? Do you know what I mean?
Jake Anderson: No, and I think that's because it's all pretty new and early down this way now.
We haven't done burn like that, but it's definitely something that we want to do. We want to be able to burn, do backyard burning to protect properties.
Audience member No.2: For me it’s like protecting the valley. If something gets in the valley, there is no way, fire will gut it all.
Jake Anderson: Do you know who owns that valley?
Audience member No.2: It wasn’t given back to Country, but it's been, it's been bequeathed so that it's never going to be built on or anything.
Jake Anderson: So, it’s sort of protected.
Audience member No.2: Yes, exactly.
Jake Anderson: Well, yeah, that'd be something to see.
Chris McGregor: That's important, identifying. You might reach out to us, then we'll go, that's out of our sort of boundary, that's in Mununjali Country or that's at Jinibara. Then we'll get in contact with each other, we'll pass that information on to the next mob, so we'll never step over our boundaries.
Audience member No.2: So, what happens up where I live, is that there are, everyone has built their English gardens. All the lawns are manicured, and all the plants are there, and you’ve got all these invasive species and we're not doing that. So, we aren’t doing that, and we get kind of put down a little bit, because we aren’t using poison and that sort of stuff. We are just trying to work out how we could, because with this season coming, people are just clearing all the stuff, and that's clearing it with graze on it, poison, and stuff, and we don't want to do that. So, I'm trying to work out how we can protect the land in a positive way. I've picked this book up, and I'm like I don't understand it.
Chris McGregor: Well, see, it just starts with the conversation with the local council, with the local, however the local mob likes. For us we have our entity, but a lot of mob work through the council closely as well. So sometimes it's just a matter of starting that conversation up.
Jake Anderson: Did you say, Jinibara?
Audience member No.2: Yeah, yeah.
Jake Anderson: I'm pretty sure that we've got a couple of fellas in the network. We'll be able to figure it out and see and we can talk about it after. That's the idea of having that networking, there’s a mob up in Toowoomba in the Bunyas that want to burn, and we can be like ‘Oh, yeah, right, we’ll swing you their number and contacts. We might even come along with the burn too’.
Audience member No.2: Well, I think we need to do that because I mean, a little while ago they started doing back burning out at Mt. Coo-tha.
Deb Duthie: Well, that was good Black smart.
Audience member No.2: That’s what I was going to say. That made a lot of people sick and made a lot of Country sick.
Jake Anderson: That burning, they're putting too much fire in at once, they should be
slowly burning it, but at the right time, too. I know that a lot of properties, the fuel, it's crazy. You could always put a fire in, you might just have to do a bit of manual work. If there's a Wattle that is halfway up to the Gum trees, we might have to cut them down so the fire doesn't get up there.
Or we might have to cut some grass lower to the ground, so the flames don't get high, there are so many ways. They are putting way too much fire in there and that's not good at all. The
burning they're doing is they're just keeping that cycle of the ecosystem staying the way it is. But if you have that right amount of heat into the ground, you'll start seeing the changes straight away. So, we’ll be able to figure something out, out there.
Deb Duthie: So, it's obviously a skill to burn.
Audience member No.3: Thank you for your fantastic reflections. I'm a biologist, and I love these ideas, connection and also analogies. So, I think one of the things that you were talking about in terms of burning small areas, you're creating violence of healing, you know, where you’re allowing small patches to heal. I’m a wound biologist so I study burn wounds. If you get a really bad burn, the way wounds heal is you get a superficial burn, you get violence of healing out of the hair follicles, it destroys them. You get a deep burn, destroy everything, and then you can only really heal from the outside in. That takes a bloody long time. So, there’s this weird analogy where you sort of see in Nature that’s commonalities with how things work. I sort of feel like that, I see these weird patterns, they’re not weird patterns maybe they are just patterns in all of Nature. I get a lot from what you talked about, in terms of like the small patches of healing and allowing things to heal without too much temperature.
Chris McGregor: So, I think it just goes back to the Indigenous world like connecting with Country. We're not separate from it, we're part of the ecosystem. Everything that happens in the environment, we're a part of that. We've gotten to a stage where we start to separate from it, but no, we are one of the same, you know.
Jake Anderson: It's funny that you mentioned that because Victor, one of the teachers of the fire stuff, that's what he was talking about one day. He said, ‘you know if you put a big dozer through the property, you can see the scar that’s put in the land, that scar is always going to be there
now’. He said, ‘it's the exact same with if you get a big star on your arm, that scar is always going to stay there.’ It's sort of the same with, when you burn, if you burn at the wrong time, you burn too hot, you are going to see a black scar.
Driving from, the other weekend, I went up to Kingaroy and I saw heaps of properties. Their canopies are scorched, how does that look good to them? Is that what they want? I think it's also that they just want to get rid of the fuel. They want to get rid of that hazard, but what they don't understand is this, now, when the wind blows, all the leaves they just killed are going to hit the ground and that's going to be the hazard. They just keep doing it, and it's a big thing. Whereas if they just slow down and listen to us, put the right amount of heat in, do it at the right time. You’ll only need to burn a few times, and then you'll see it'll be back to how it should be.
After the first burn, a lot of property owners have been saying to me, ‘oh, you know, this is going to come good after this burn.’ I'm like, well, this is the first but we need to open this Country up so we can see what's in this Country. Then we can be able to narrow down when the best burn for it is, and all this and that. Sometimes, you just got to juggle around a bit.
Deb Duthie: Yeah, do you think there's more and more interest being gained in people really taking this stuff on board?
Chris McGregor: Bloody oath, obviously, like climate change is the big key word at the moment.
But climate change is just looking after you, when we go out to Lockyer valley, or, on the north side of, we're on Yugara Country. We're not worried about solving the world's problems, we're worried about looking after our community. If everyone looks after their own little community, you know what I mean. The beautiful thing I do love working with non-Indigenous people in the environmental space as they get it. When you’re working in corporate or in any other space, often there's a justification, and you got to constantly explain what it means to be a Blackfella and the Aboriginal person. You get non-Indigenous people working out in the environment they just get why it's important. Linda, my cousin, who's the director of Wirrinyah, we're like, this is just natural reconciliation. It's not this big strategy or anything like that, this is just truly White, Black and everyone working together because we have a common ground about the
environment.
Deb Duthie: Okay, any other questions or comments?
Audience member No.4: I’ll be changing the topic a little bit for Chris. There's a lot of talk in the media, obviously about The Voice. Lot of different opinions, and then I, through my learnings at QUT, I’ve heard through Indigenous people that place importance on treaty more so than voice. I never heard anything about, truth. People are obviously really connected to your culture of Culture. What is the importance that you see in truth, particularly as it might pertain to say, your son’s getting justice down the line.
Chris McGregor: Yeah, truth telling is important. I think there's a lot of Black academics at the moment talking about truth telling and stuff like this. But exactly what we're doing on Country is truth telling, because when we're walking out with ‘firies’, and we see that it's unhealthy, there's no way to approach it but to talk about, why is this Country unhealthy? It's because Indigenous people have been removed from this Country, it's because of all these injustices in the past that now, we must revitalise not only Country, but language and all these things. In that process there has to be truth telling about the history of Australia, there's no other way to do it because we didn't just forego our kinship, we didn't just give it away, these are things that were taken from us.
Truth telling… I take my son, he's been with me to lectures on racism and White privilege, and all these things, and he knows I talk to him about our family and Stolen Generation. They might be very raw hard truths, but it's important to me that he knows who he is and grows up with a sense of pride and identity.
Audience member No.4: How do you see that in terms of truth telling into the non-Indigenous population, so they have a better understanding of everything.
Chris McGregor: For me, it's, and this is only personal, I can't speak for every Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, especially with The Voice stuff going on. Everyone's got their own ideas about it, and that's okay. One is not right, one's not wrong, but sorry, what was that question?
Audience member No.4: As a non-Indigenous person, who has been studying and QUT and studying some Indigenous units, that I was ignorant before I did those. I'm sure there's much more for me to learn. I guess, do you see it as very important that truth telling also is with the Non-Indigenous community and that they're getting the information so that they have an understanding in what has gone on in the past.
Deb Duthie: I guess, we know our truth, we know what the truths are. It's not about us learning it, we don't have to reconcile anything. I think the non-Indigenous people also have to be
committed to finding out things for themselves and educating themselves as well, you know, rather than it being put on us to educate others.
Chris McGregor: There’s also the thing of… think about it as this way, if we're in an educational space, I'm more than happy to speak in that context, say if we're in a lecture, or I'm teaching a course, absolutely. If it's a personal, casual conversation about it, I'm happy to talk about my experiences. But like Deb said, I’d like to put it back on other people, doesn't matter where you are, to do your own research and education as well. Often that's where that knowledge is retained, when people take the responsibility themselves. The other side of the coin is a lot of our mob are still relearning our stuff. A lot of us don't know a connection, our stories or our language, and sometimes when we are approached by it, it can cause a lot of anxiety for us, because we're still on that journey ourselves to discovering who we are and reconnecting.
So yeah, sorry there's not one clear answer for you there, but it's just about knowing the
Aboriginal person you're talking to, and they might not even have the capacity to educate you the way you want to be.
Audience member No.4: So do you feel there would be some onus on non-Indigenous people, maybe to pass information onto other non-Indigenous people.
Chris McGregor: Yeah, like allies. If you think of any minority group, trying to get their voices and their expressions heard. We need allies, we need non-Indigenous people to be walking with us, but then also to be educating other non-Indigenous people. We're only, what, three percent of the population, we can't do it on our own. It's important that people just walk with us and take that leadership as well. So yeah.
Deb Duthie: Tracy, did you want to ask a question?
Tracey (Chris’ Mother): I just wanted to let you know that I’m Chris’ mum. I’ve never come to any of Chris’ talks or anything. So, this is the first time he has seen me. That’s my son and I’m quite proud.
I feel like I’ve missed out on what they are doing, I wasn't there. This is my half-sister, and my Dad owned property and we lived in the bush at Beaudesert. I didn’t know I was running around
Christopher’s Country, which is his father’s, and going back there I knew nothing, I didn’t know anything about the land either. But I did get, that’s the good part, I got a father that owned land, that’s my Whitefella. I did get to grow up on some property and I loved it, but there was no Culture there, there was none. But it’s so good to see my son getting all this work and I feel it.
I live at Bribie know and I’m seeing all the bush there, and I’m a bit scared of going through the bush, because of all the life experiences.
So, we would go through this bush behind me, but now that I do go through, I didn’t realise that there is not too much bush. It looks like it’s huge when you drive past in the car, but when you actually walk through, it’s just a strip. This is Bribie Island, this can’t be, where’s the all bush?
You think you are looking at all this bush because you are driving through it. When you get up there and you actually start walking around, and you think, how much is gone? They just motor a thing right through. My son has been teaching me, he’s teaching me, I don’t know any of this stuff. I’m quite proud.
Deb Duthie: Thank you so much for this, this has been just enlightening. I really appreciate you coming in too, Jake. It's been really good. I guess there’s heaps of food probably left, so feel free to get something to eat. Have a chat with the fellas if you want to.