Part of Chart Collective's Legend series
Audio produced by Jocelyn Richardson
Editorial by Jocelyn Richardson
I could have listened to Bruce all day. He spoke at length while we drank tea and ate cake and all around us birds made melodic bips. Last summer on the far eastern coast of Victoria, we sat in his yard around a fire that had been burning continuously for 207 days. It was to burn for 237 days in total in protest against the proposed 237 outstation closures in Western Australia. Bruce’s own ‘outstation’, as he wrote on Facebook, was ‘strictly no alcohol, no drugs and no violence but just as strictly it is pro laughs, pro work and pro lore’.
Down the hill from the fireplace was Bruce’s crop of murnong, an indigenous root vegetable with hardy green stems and small yellow flowers. As you’ll hear, he’s been experimenting with cultivating and cooking it. It’s one of many traditional crops that Bruce and the other growers from Gurandgi Munjie have been resurrecting.
One more thing – if you haven’t already, you must read Bruce’s award-winning book, Dark Emu. His research starts to undo some of the immense damage done by the widely taught generalisation that pre-colonial Aboriginal people were exclusively hunter-gathers. I know that’s what I was taught at my suburban primary school; there was no mention of sown fields, grain silos, baked cakes and built villages, all of which Bruce found evidence of in the journals of early colonisers.
I wish Bruce had been my teacher in primary school but I’m glad we had a chance to sit with him, and that you have a chance to hear him here, recorded as we wandered in his garden and sat by the fire. If you like, you can imagine you’re gazing at the flames, smelling the smoke and feeling the breeze that comes off the Wallagaraugh River.
[Images by Sophie Allen]
