I didn’t expect the room to be so big. Gary Foley, curator of the Australian Aboriginal exhibits at the Melbourne Museum, led us towards another room of stacked white boxes. As we peered down the row, he explained, “There are 70,000 spears in here, most if not all stolen from Aboriginal grave-sites and communities. Damned if I know what we’re going to do with 70,000 spears.” As we left the regulated atmosphere in the collection room, he pointed out two doors on our right, “Aboriginal secret and sacred objects and human and skeletal remains, both highly restricted areas,” he said.
The magnitude of Aboriginal history in Australia hadn’t struck me until that point. The previous week was filled with lectures about the destruction of Indigenous peoples throughout Australia—assimilation programs and refusal of the present government to say sorry for their mistakes. Despite this, the context of the situation wasn’t clear until I found myself in a room holding literally millions of objects still belonging to their Aboriginal owners. I started to feel very pessimistic about a history that wasn’t my own.
Camp Coorong is a three hour drive from Adelaide along unpaved roads. For the first time, I felt like I was seeing ‘real’ Australia— low scrub, a dusty windshield and heat rising off the landscape. The camp itself is located on this scrub land, minutes from the Coorong, an inland waterway separated from the Great Southern Ocean by a thin bar of sand running for 100 miles. When we arrived, it was almost evening and Uncle Neville was waiting for us inside.
Uncle Neville defies description. He is a Ngurrindjeri elder, the traditional owners of the Coorong and the land surrounding it. He has fought every dangerous animal in South Australia, and has the scars to prove it— especially impressive are the teeth marks on his shoulder from a run in with a saltwater crocodile. He plays the guitar upside-down, speaks 16 languages and can remember the name of everyone who has ever lived on this land. He also didn’t finish fourth grade.
Uncle Neville and his "mob" (group) run Camp Coorong to demonstrate to the rest of us that Aboriginal culture extends into the present. Their culture is not dead, like some museums would have us assume. The next day Grant, Uncle Neville’s nephew, takes us on a bush-walk. Every 10 feet he stops to show us another plant— old man’s beard for arthritis, tea tree for food preservation, coastal daisy as an insect repellent, and Spinifex for glue. Grant explains that everything anyone could need is in the bush and after an hour, I’m beginning to believe him.
After the bush walk, Grant takes us to a midden site, a garbage dump of sorts for shells and bones. As we walk towards it, he stops us to explain, “Where there are midden sites, there are always burial grounds, so this is as far as we go.” Instead, we walked over the dunes and met the ocean. Walking along the beach, Northfield felt very, very far away.
Back at camp, Grant’s dad, Matt, talked to us about the Aboriginal history of the area. He took out a map and drew in the missions where his people were removed to when the cattle farmers moved in. He pointed to the boys’ and girls’ camps that housed the Stolen Generations and drew in the boundaries of present communities. Halfway through, Uncle Neville came in and sat down. Before long, he got up and pointed to a small island off the Coorong, “That’s where they put my family, in a two bedroom house with a worthless roof. So you know what we did? We put tents in the house!” Uncle Neville laughed deeply. Matt, Grant and the rest of us joined in as Uncle Neville began another story.
