National Library of Australia - Digital Collections - Audio

  • Ginibi, Ruby Langford, 1934- (interviewee)
  • Ruby Langford Ginibi interviewed by Frank Heimans [sound recording].
  • 2000 3 digital audio tapes (140 min.)
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Transcript (page 8 of 10)
Frank Heimans: So they were two of three ...
Ruby Langford Ginibi: The two eldest, yeah, within eight months of each other I lost them.
Frank Heimans: How did you feel about that?
Ruby Langford Ginibi: Oh, I hit the piss, I drank, I hit back at the world, went silly. But life goes on, we usually have other children and they need you, so you just pick yourself up and dust yourself off and start again, and thats what I did.
Frank Heimans: Let me take you back to Coonabarabran again, because we jumped ahead a little bit. What was life like there where you were living in Coonabarabran?
Ruby Langford Ginibi: Well, me and Sam were staying with his mother and we lived on the Gunnedah Hill in a tin shack, a tin shanty shack. Do you know what I mean by a tin shanty shack? Just bits of galvanised iron made into a hut, you know. And these places, people dont know what they were like but they were home and comfortable. We used to line them against the winter wind and stuff with paper, paper from the Pix, the Womans Weekly and whatever newspaper went. You made up this paste in a big old pot of plain flour and water and rubbed it all over with a paintbrush and stuck it up against there and it stuck. Oh, yeah. You had to have an old dog tied up out under the tree there. You had to cart water buckets on yokes from about 200 yards down the hill somewhere to fill a drum so youd have water. It was hard.
Ruby Langford Ginibi: (continuing) Her old husband, old Harold Leslie, he used to be a rabbit catcher, trapper, and he used to put a hundred traps on the handlebars of a bike and pedal out to the bush to set that, and hed be out there with a little sleeping bag - not a sleeping bag, a sleeping rug, you know, just a rug - and hed be out there for a week setting those traps to catch rabbits, and hed come in on the weekend. The rabbits used to be picked up by a fella in a truck and theyd put the bike in and bring him back into town, the old fella, but hed pedal out to these places. It was bloody hard, you know.
Frank Heimans: What about like sanitary facilities, what was there in the way of toilets?
Ruby Langford Ginibi: Well, you had the toilet. The towns people brought a pan over and you built your own toilet, you know. When I lived in the tent with my kids all those years ago I had three pine trees which was my toilet, around which a hessian bag was hung and the council left the pan and you had the toilet seat and stuff there. But you had no roof on it. There was an umbrella there that I used to keep in case it rained and you wouldnt get wet. Three pine trees in a triangle like that, you know.
Frank Heimans: Was Sam there all this time with you?
Ruby Langford Ginibi: No, he used to go away to work and that and come back, you know. He worked on the sawmills and that, you know. His mother, her name was Ruby too, and so there were two Rubys there. We hit it off wonderfully well. She was a dear old friend of mine, his mother.
Frank Heimans: Now, why did you leave Sam or why did he leave you?
Ruby Langford Ginibi: I left because he was brutal. When he was working hed buy me a nice dress and if I put a pretty dress on and looked nice and wed go off to town and some of his friends that he grew up withd say, Gee, how you going?, and stuff like that, and hed be thinking that I was running around with them, you know, and yet it was him that was the one that was doing the running around, and hes got kids all over the place, you know.
Frank Heimans: How many more kids did he have after you?
Ruby Langford Ginibi: Oh, I dont know, I lost count of them. But, anyhow, I just got away from him. My father sent me home to my people. I was three months along with Dianne when I left to go home to Bonalbo, back home that way, yeah.
Frank Heimans: And Dianne was your third child from Sam?
Ruby Langford Ginibi: Third child of Sams, yeah.
Frank Heimans: So how did you meet the next person in your life?
Ruby Langford Ginibi: Well, at this time Mother Nell and Father Sam, they were living in Ipswich in Queensland, and Mother Nell was very sick, she had a tumour. She had a change of life baby, which is my cousin Judy, and she wasnt expected to live so my father put me on the train with my little mob and away I went to see what I can do and help Mum Nell and Father Sam. They lived in the housing estates up there in Ipswich and thats where I met Gordon Campbell, the gubb. He used to board with Mother Nells eldest daughter, Shirley - Midge we called her - and her husband.
Frank Heimans: Sam was an Aboriginal, wasnt he?
Ruby Langford Ginibi: Yes.
Frank Heimans: And Gordon was white, was he?
Ruby Langford Ginibi: Yes.
Frank Heimans: In your language its a gubb, is it?
Ruby Langford Ginibi: Gov, we call white people Gov. Its an abbreviation for government who always had control of our lives.
Frank Heimans: Thats very fitting.
Ruby Langford Ginibi: Do you understand?
Frank Heimans: Yes, I do. And what was Gordon like?
Ruby Langford Ginibi: Well, he was a hard worker and that, but he was a person that drank a lot too, you know. I had three children to Gordon - there was Nob, David and Aileen. We lived in the same street as Dad and Mum Joyce, in Great Buckingham Street. Dad got a place there when we come back to Sydney. From there then we went back on to Coonabarabran to take somebody home and the car broke down and we ended up back in Coonabarabran to get on the damn Gunnedah Hill.
Frank Heimans: Went back to the Gunnedah Hill again?
Ruby Langford Ginibi: Mm.
Frank Heimans: In the same shack?
Ruby Langford Ginibi: Hey?
Frank Heimans: In the same shack?
Ruby Langford Ginibi: No, not the same shack, no.
Frank Heimans: What, a slightly upgraded one, was it?
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