Something doesn't seem quite right.
Welcome to Not Quite Right.
My name's Ed, and I'm Amanda.
We're here at Words on the Waves.
And today we have an interview with Darren Ricks and Craig Cormack,
and they are the authors of Warra.
Warra.
Why?
And when you look at the cover of this book,
it's absolutely plastered in little award stickers.
Yeah.
Right.
So wine bottle.
Yeah.
It looks like a wine bottle.
It's been critically acclaimed, and this is a fascinating concept.
They went up and down the Australian coast and visited all of the places that
Captain Cook when at the time of organisation and spoke to the communities
there about what had been passed down as their stories and their oral history.
And I suppose from an Australian history point of view,
perhaps one of the first times we're hearing some of these stories from the
Indigenous communities about that period of time,
what most children in Australia have been taught was settlement.
So we spoke to them about that experience and here is our conversation with Darren
Ricks and Craig Cormac.
Well, we're here at Words on the Waves with
Darren Ricks and Craig Cormack.
Nice to meet you both.
How are you?
And you're about to go into your panel or your discussion on how Indigenous
Australians discovered Captain Cook, which is a very provocative title.
And you're here to talk about your book that you've worked on together called
Wara Wara.
Why?
Tell us a little bit about that.
So the concept of the book was began fairly simple,
which was let's look at the places Captain Cook named and find their real
names, find original names and the story goes
that you know Michelangelo when he's paint the sister in Chapel.
He supposedly said, yeah, I've just put an Angel on each corner and
then added and added three years later he was still up there.
So the book was a little bit like that.
We grew and grew and grew, but in the end we travelled the whole
East Coast of Australia from the bottom of Victoria,
right up the Torres Strait Islands and collected all these stories from MOB
about either Cook or colonisation or what had happened at contact and settlement.
And, you know, a lot of mobs said to us, they said, yeah, yeah, yeah,
we've got a cook story.
Yeah, yeah.
But what we really want to talk about is truth telling.
We want to tell you about what happened to our mob in the early days.
Well, so, you know, a lot of people, their history have never really been
recorded this week.
So the stories were quite amazing.
So you had the experience of those stories coming up for the first time
maybe and have been discussed in those communities but never actually surfaced
before.
This is the first time they're they're coming to light for a wider view.
Yeah, that's right.
A lot of them were handed down for a generation, a generation.
So a lot of them held their stories for 100 years, maybe 150,
and ended up telling us their stories and about their lands and how they were taken
off their land and brought back onto their country and how they had to relearn
their Dreamtime stories, some lines, food gathering,
everything within Aboriginal society.
So do you have your own story that you shared for the book as well,
like that's been passed down to you?
Yeah, well, I grew up on the South Coast of NSW down
in Yuan Country, so I knew a bit of the stories of sacred
sites and stuff.
So when we got to speak to the knowledge holders of that country,
I don't understand in any way of that land mass.
But not so much Queensland and some parts of Bungelung like this area,
dark engine and all that.
So did you find that the story changed in different areas dramatically or were we
getting consistent through line?
Pretty consistent in Totem.
Totem was like totems of people's clans and tribes food.
The seasons of when they'd collect certain seafood.
When the flowers are blooming in country in the mountains,
they'd all travel to the coast and collect crayfish if the red flower was
coming out in the mountains and yellow.
So they had different colours for the flowers that had bloom in spring or
autumn or summer, and they'd make their way to the coast.
They knew when to make their way to the coast when the fish were travelling in
schools or lobsters were plenty.
So they read the country pretty well.
And so a lot of people had, you know, guarantee and hear from his voice.
He's Indigenous.
And a lot of people in remote communities, one question we often get asked,
we come in, people say, OK, so which university are you fellows from?
And we say, yeah, we're not from university, actually.
Oh, OK.
OK.
Which government department are you fellows from?
They say, no, no, no, I'm not from the government department.
And where the hell are you fellows from?
Yeah.
What what are you doing here?
Pretty much.
And we explain what we're doing.
Most of them never had an Indigenous person come and talk to them, quiz them.
So it, it made for a different one on one
relationship and we had a sort of passing different test, you might say.
We weren't just given information off the bat.
We had to convince people that were genuine and, and you know,
really convincing.
We're going to be respectful to the stories and so on.
And trust and trust and so on had to be established beforehand before they would
do that.
And, you know, some of the stories were then taken out
of the book afterwards because people said afterwards, you know, retrospect.
Yeah, no.
And so we said that's fine, it's out.
And what had been the experience in the past for those communities with
government and universities coming and visit them?
It was always an ulterior motive that they were sceptical of our guys.
Yeah.
So the, the, the challenge was so you know, the,
the references to Joseph Banks and Joseph Banks went up the coast and he took
flowers and plants and artefacts and foods and waters without permission and
stole them and took them away.
And anthropologists do the same.
They come and take stories and histories and they take them away and the people
never see anything.
So we had a, an ethos we developed early was that
people would always be paid for their cultural consultation.
It was appropriate and we'd always bring the stories back to them and say you go
through it and tell us what we got right, got wrong and what you want to share and
don't.
So rather than saying we're the authors, we were the, I guess,
the custodians of the stories in this book.
And we talked to about 7070 people, you know,
it grew and grew and grew as we went up though.
Also interest is as Cook travelled up the coast,
they sent smoke signals ahead saying he was coming, you know,
saying modern was coming.
And the same as we got further.
Queensland.
Oh, yeah, Yeah.
We've heard of you too.
Yeah.
Words passed along the line.
Yeah.
How do those smoke signals get sent now?
Via satellite?
That's right.
Yeah.
SMS.
And what's that?
Yeah, We don't wait for you guys to turn up.
Yeah.
What did you find?
They were a little bit more trusting once you got there, haven't you?
If if were passed for long.
Indeed it did.
It worked as reference to say, Darren, then people would say, yeah, yeah,
'cause you talk to that mob and they'll come forward with what you did.
So, you know, they said, yeah, they were right.
And what has been the reception of those people to the book?
Have you taken the book back to them and have they been happy?
Yeah.
So I've done a lot of the consult.
The liaison back, sent copies of the book back to everyone.
They were promised they'd get a copy of the book.
And some of them said, you know, no one's ever told our mob story story in
like 25 pages, 30 pages.
And if someone written a university thesis, it's behind a paywall.
And all of a sudden, how young fellas can read that?
You know, young fellas don't have great necessary
literacy skills.
They can read 2530 pages and they can know our dreaming story.
They can know our culture.
They can know what happened to contact.
And they can really feel pride in it.
So it was, yeah, it was a really nice feeling when people
gave us that kind of feedback.
Give feedback.
Yeah.
So is there a consistent sort of view of that time, that period of time,
or is it something that it just comes with all different perspectives?
Yeah.
What would you think, Darren?
That everyone's sort of bit focused on their land, their mob, their own history?
Yeah, a lot of them were yeah.
Yeah.
And that extending other tribes because they're part of that tribe as well.
So that'd share a bit from that tribe and share a bit from another tribe.
So the hell, they hold pride within their culture in
their country.
You mentioned truth telling as well as being important,
and that's a term that is thrown around a lot these days.
What does that mean to the people that you spoke to?
What's important to them?
And when it comes to truth telling, what was important to them was getting
their voice out there and talking about their ancestors,
what the ancestors seen happened to their people and their country and just
reclamation of their language and they're going back to country and stuff.
So the truth telling was dispossession and colonisation of the country,
especially as we got up in the Queensland more.
I think historically when we talk about colonisation or what have you,
the message is that it was all very peaceful, you know,
and that we all just came together and shared.
That's kind of been the messaging that's been taught in schools up until probably
quite recently.
So what is the alternative perspective on that?
What is the other view?
So the historians even like Linda Ryan from the University of Newcastle here,
bless her, she's passed away now.
She did a deep dive into, you know, trying to do an estimate of numbers of
people who were killed and more and people killed by settlers then the
cohorts, then we killed in World War One.
Wow.
And yet we have these massive memorials and Anzac Day commemorations to World War
One where about 60,000 Australians died.
But if we consider Indigenous Australians or Australians and we had wars on our own
land in excess of 60, 000 people died in those wars of which
were SHHH, yeah, let's not talk too much about.
And why do you think that is?
I mean, it's not that we don't ever talk about
war.
Like certainly our history books are full of war and,
and tales of conquest and all of these sorts of things.
So why is it that Australian history has swept that under the rug, do you think?
I think it's been a shame for war.
And we're, you know, World War One and Anzac Day was a proud
for war.
And we have to change the way we think about that because a lot of us are
complicit one way or the other in either not sharing that story or in allowing
that storage to be swept away a bit.
It's a narrative Australia has to come to terms with.
And when you were talking to these communities,
is was there a sense of pain and loss that was coming through around that time?
I mean, you talked about loss of country and
dispossession, but what about life as well?
Well, I talked about that a lot and we didn't
put a lot of that in into the book because horrific.
Some of the stories because I too confront them.
Some, in some communities, they're only there because one person
survived and that one person therefore had children, married.
Otherwise the whole community wouldn't be there.
So it was, you know, pretty very confronting.
Yeah.
And what memories have been passed down of that time?
Like, what surprised you that you learned along
the way?
We sat there and interviewed 4 generations in one room.
And that would really got me and Craig thinking, Oh, well,
this is they pass their stories on to five generations of their people.
So you have young, young people in their 20s,
old people in their 40s and then the Sixties, 70s and 80s.
And then you have a little kid who's probably 6 or 7.
So when we heard that story and heard about their country in the massacre and
how the river was running with blood and stuff like that.
So they talk about that because they've survived.
So they talk their pride within their clan and their people were pretty strong.
Yeah.
The Queensland was central QLD was pretty horrific, really.
And it was sort of off the maps and it was away from the capital cities and it
was out of sight, out of mind.
And there was a strong ethos of, you know, it's the weekend,
Grab your guns were going out too.
It was.
Yeah.
Absolutely appalling.
Wow.
And then we talk about the native police, talked about a lot about the native
police and were the trackers, where were they brought from to a lot
were brought from NSW to Queensland and vice versa, because you know,
you wouldn't do that to your own people.
So what was their role?
The native police is another story that Australia is really to learn about.
So there were, there were native police stationed a lot
of parts of Australia over a couple of decades.
The kids tend to be recruited.
They're basically child soldiers recruited young and give them a gun and
give them a horse, give them a uniform, big man.
Then you take them miles and miles and miles away from any neighbouring clan
they grew up with.
So they had no association with the clan to take them to.
And they'd be there to pacify the locals, which really meant going crazy.
They can track better than others.
We call them black trackers.
They were called years later to make them seem nicer and we met the descendants of
a couple of them and it's it's it's quite hard in to the head in to know that your
own ancestor was traffic mob and probably shooting them.
And so a lot of the records have been destroyed over the years,
but there's enough records have still been found and haunted down to find out
what they do.
So you generally have a white guy who's be the the head of now ex bore war guys.
They're a bit traumatised really from war and they'd have a troop underneath their
control and they'd ride into the Bush and they'd clear out camps.
That made what motivated that clearing the land,
land for the pastoralists because we don't have enough of that here in
Australia, do we?
No, we do.
But the past was considered the Aboriginal people as a pest because
they'd spear, you know, OK, we've taken over your land.
You've no longer got access to Kangaroos and possums because we shot them,
although we've cleared the land where they used to live.
There's sheep there or cows there.
So then just people said, well, I'm a spear of sheep because it's on my
land, you know?
Yeah, you should be one of my sheep.
Then get the gang together.
We'll go now and stop that.
So it was really about an argument of the land.
Whose land was it?
And, you know, the settlers presumed it was at theirs
over there.
And it was pretty pulling the other stories.
Prestige land like them, Yes.
Place down there, Parramatta and all that.
Yeah, yeah.
So I'm, I'm wondering the people that you spoke
to, like hearing all these stories, we've got trauma going back hundreds of
years and all these memories that are still very fresh and not just from 200
years ago.
It's like ongoing.
I'm interested to know what they think about Australia today and the path that
the government is taking in the direction that it's moving.
A lot of the elders said there's been a lot of change,
but not enough change in the country.
So they see the initiatives as positive.
Not, not a lot of trusted governments.
A lot of promises get broken, but forgiving,
which is the thing I find really humbling.
You know, these communities where they've suffered
so bad and they still want to work with white people and live on the land
communally and they still want to.
There's anger in some communities, but the sense of forgiveness that was
apparent, you know that that's a younger generation.
You're not the life who did it.
So let's, let's find a way to work together.
You got to get your school kids involved, got to get changing understanding and see
how we can all live together.
And are there any views on what that might look like?
Are people wanting specific things to happen or is it just this feeling of
moving towards peace?
If we were asked to look across the board, I think the Victorian model of a treaty
has got a lot of people excited and we've been looking a lot of treaty and we
reckon they did the voice to Parliament completely asked about.
So it should have been truth telling, then a treaty and then a representative
voice in that order.
If you get out of order, it doesn't work.
And the reason is truth telling let's people understand the actual situation.
You hear what happened and you think, Oh my God, I had no idea.
That's the thing isn't it?
That's it.
We were never taught this in school.
We had no idea.
That makes people more receptive to say, OK,
we probably should have had a land agreement.
Particularly discovered that Australia was the only British colony that never
had a treaty and there are up to 500 treaties signed across North America and
South America except Australia.
And so why not you know, so you discuss that, you know, OK, OK,
maybe we need to have a treaty that recognises prior sovereignty,
that recognises these things.
Then comes representative put voices in Parliament or wherever a representative
voice that can be accepted and that can be worked out in different locations in
different places that can differ.
But we we can very much to the understand if you don't do it in that order,
you fail.
And that's I think why the voice to Parliament failed.
He never raised enough awareness of why it was important,
how what people have gone through kind of put forward the question without
providing the context.
And people say, well, why before, why was never given.
Yeah, because we're doing the book at the time
was very interesting, very mixed.
Yeah.
A lot of Indigenous communities did not see them on it, didn't want the voice.
Some did.
Yeah.
So you'd have to be tread very lightly when you went into community and we tried
not to talk about it at all.
But when we said we're from Canberra, they'll go, oh, what's this?
Then they said, yeah, OK.
And we'd say, Oh no, we're undecided.
Yeah, well this is the interesting thing, right?
Like you say, oh, there's no trust in government.
Nobody trusts the government like nobody trusts any government.
That's that's the thing, right.
And government initiatives are famously inefficient and ineffective or only
partially effective or too late or indigenous people have a longer view of
history than three year electoral cycle.
Exactly.
And they're famous for programmes coming in setting up change government.
No, no, we're going to change that and given and
it's like you never even got off the ground and changed all around.
Yeah.
And and that's the case for all forms of government initiative.
But I guess some of these are more contentious than others.
And those are the ones that have this roller coaster ride of funding and so on
that becomes like completely stifles any attempts at progress.
So it's frustrating, but yeah, it's like, okay, treaty might be a nice idea,
but also why are we trusting the government necessarily to solve this
problem in a productive way when we know that government or most communities just
wanna look after their own future?
They say, you know, just give us the resources and we'll
manage our own welfare payment.
We'll manage our own health services.
We'll manage our own accounting for country or to Ranger excursions for kids.
We just got to be resourced to do that, not resource for three years and then
lose it.
And then you're constantly wondering when the next.
Yeah, yeah.
So it was Wara, Wara, Wara was.
We went in there as with five main questions to ask communities,
and it grew and grew and grew.
So did you go back to some of those communities and ask more questions?
No, no, no.
We had to stick to that, but they wanted to talk about something
else.
So we'd have to go back to the five questions of Arsene.
What's your dreams Dreamtime stories?
What's your, you know, connection to your country?
What's your main place on country?
Are you a knowledge holder or a storyteller or a song man or song woman?
So we've mainly got all that like landscapes,
the traditional names of landscapes, Dreamtime stories, seasons,
and just everything we could find.
Yeah.
Because country's so important to to modern clan and you have to hear the
stories.
We wanted to start each chapter of the book and there are 18 chapters.
Talking about the land, the formation of the land,
Dreamtime formation, how that impacts how people relate to the
land, live with it.
Like Darren was talking about the floral calendars for the seasons,
how people lived before settlement, then what happened at settlement then and
so on down the line.
So we tried to capture that, that I guess that capture a bit more
breadth until just the one started the endeavours.
Yeah, yeah.
With the traditional people in their country,
because there's one time they stayed in, up in Keene,
somewhere in town in Devon River, 56 days, 56, everybody knows Botany Bay,
only a week in Botany Bay, they were 56 days up on the top.
So they got to meet the people and record their words.
But it's out of remote area.
Most people never heard of it.
What does that title mean?
Why?
Why were the first words indigenous language spoken on the East Coast to a
European?
And for years they thought it meant go away, go away.
Because when Cook ship was, when Cook's boats were coming from the
Endeavour, they write in the journals, they opposed, they're still on the beach.
Two men still on the beach opposes and shouted wara, wara, why?
And they always thought it meant go away, go back.
And this has been recorded in the histories.
But when we talked to the people, they said no.
The history books got wrong, man.
See Cook.
Cook was breaking protocol.
Because when you come to a new land, you stop at the border, your wage turn.
When you're invited ashore, then you come and cooking these boats.
So coming shore, start throwing rocks saying and wara,
wara wara means you were all ghost people.
You were all dead people because you know you're white.
They stunk a bit.
And so this and up and down the coast we got this same story that we thought they
thought that was the spirits of their dead coming back.
Because a lot of places the dead will die and go away to the West and one day come
back from the east.
And they presumed and up in like 1770, they said they watched them.
They're thinking these are your ancestors.
But what happened?
They've forgotten that law and they don't understand what plans to say.
What are they?
It took a while to figure out there were men, but not men they'd ever seen.
That was a weird place 7970.
Very weird.
Even the caller place 7970 is a weird sort of thing.
That's why you get us a name change.
Halfway up Queensland is a tiny coastal town called 1770 as Crook landed there in
1770 and there was a festival on at the time.
We would travel on it, yeah, an Aboriginal festival.
So yeah, spent two days there with them all there,
but we had to earn their trust again.
Again to earn the trust.
Well, it's amazing that these stories have
persevered.
And we get that view from the people who who were there passed down.
And it's surprising, also not surprising that they haven't
been told or heard this.
God just made us.
We said, you know, it wasn't that unique idea to come and
just talk to people.
And people said it was, oh, my God, how did you get those stories?
Yeah, I said we talked to people.
We just asked.
Just asked.
Yeah.
Simple.
I'm surprised it hadn't been done anywhere before for.
Yeah.
And to what extent, Like, you know, we talk about truth telling and famously
with oral histories and so on, things can get embellished over time or
change depending on who's telling the story.
So what was your view on that and how, I guess true to the original experience
that these stories still are hundreds of years later?
I would say from a white felt point of view, we're used to embellishment.
But when you hear a First Nations person tell an oral story,
it doesn't really get embellished, OK?
Because they have a long, long, long history of oral facts,
and stories had to be precise.
Because they would tell you what plants could be poisonous and they could tell
you how to behave in a certain way, and there could be little bits around
that would change.
But the core, central facts would never alter.
And we'd find that if we'd hear a story from one person there,
another person further away, the facts, parts of the story would not alter.
It'd be the same.
Yeah.
Same as like men's areas and women's areas and family areas.
What you've got to know those within country as well and they hand them things
down orally.
Yeah.
And you know, we're used to the written word being
gospel and oral testimony being a bit dodgy of the indigenous communities that
don't seem never changed much.
I guess it's it's the difficulty of marrying those two ideas together because
we talk about storytelling.
When we think of storytelling, it's often fiction or embellished versus
oral history, which we'd like to think is more fact
driven.
And the objective is to communicate fact rather than to entertain or surprise or
shock people so they never change.
Some inherit parts.
Don't they have a generations generation passed down and made sure it doesn't
change on purpose?
Yeah, that intention.
Yeah.
And, you know, and kids are drilled, you know, tell us back that story.
No, that bit's wrong, right?
Well, fascinating, and it's great to hear these stories
being told and hopefully people will keep listening.
Thank you very much for thank you.
Thank you spending time with us.
This has been a special presentation of the Not Quite Right podcast in
collaboration with Words on the Ways Riders Festival.
Check the show notes For more information about Words on the Waves and the books
mentioned in this episode.
If you're new to the podcast, please join us again for our regular
episodes where we talk about media, culture, and the art of writing.