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Voices and Memory: Australian Oral History: 8 March 1997

The 'Seven Years On' Project / Jackie Huggins and Peter Read

This paper must begin with thanks to the National Library, particularly Mark Cranfield our good friend and mentor. We thank him for the original idea for 'Seven Years On'. Of all the various things we do, neither of us enjoys anything better than working on this project! We have to thank the Oral History section, and the National Library, for supporting this project so generously.

Our program, then, is called Seven Years On, and it is designed to find and interview promising young Aboriginal leaders, or potential leaders, at the rate of 10 or 12 per year for six years. Since beginning we have interviewed two Directors of Land Councils, a lawyer, a welfare worker, a medical student, an art student, a doctor, two archaeologists, a publisher, a footballer, an actor, a theatre director, a poet, educator, teacher, public servant, sculptor, and several people still at school.

Just recently we and interviewed a range of young people in Perth who happened to be the children of famous parents; for example Layla Yu, the daughter of Peter Yu, who is of Chinese as well as Aboriginal heritage, and very proud of both. We interviewed also Megan and Jaymea Riley. Rob Riley was a very important figure in Western Australian, so it was especally good to be able to interview his two elder daughters. Soon, we hope we will be able to meet Christine Anu the singer and entertainer, as well as a broadcaster, an academic, and an historian. We have tried to interview Kathy Freeman, but her manager said that she gives only 30-minute interviews, while we needed her for two to three hours! So some of our subjects are at the point of beginning their careers, or studying, and some have already arrived.

To give you an idea of what our program is about, and the way we work, here is the introduction of our interview with Sandra Phillips, a publisher with Queensland University Press:

Sandra: It's the 30th of June 1996, and Jackie Huggins and Peter Read are interviewing Sandra Phillips for the Seven Years On program of the Oral History Unit, National Library of Australia.
Thanks Sandra for coming, and we're very glad to be with you. It's great to have you, and we are very keen to talk to you. Peter and I are doing a collection of interviews with indigenous people right around Australia. They are with people who are studying or are outstanding in their field, Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islanders. We have just come from Sydney where we spoke to Les Patten the footballer, who plays for South Sydney. We're trying to work with a mixture of males and females.
It's a fairly detailed chat that we like to have. We'll find out a bit about you personally, and I guess your vision for Aboriginal affairs, particularly as it applies in your field, and how you see yourself in seven years time. You see, we plan to return to revisit the people we spoke to in 1996, again in 2003, and then 2010 and so on. So we hope to visit you in seven years, which will be 2003. So towards the end of this interview we'll discuss where you think you'll be in seven years time.
So just to kick off can you tell us a bit about your background, where you're from, where you're born, how many brothers and sisters you've got, and generally who's your mob?
Sandra: Well I was actually born in Bundaberg in coastal Queensland, but my mother's people are from Gayndah, Wakka Wakka country. They had four daughters and I was the second youngest ...

We believe in taking the Diana Giese approach in terms of being fairly casual. We believe in letting the interview run. We don't have any notepads of questions, and the interviews are fairly unstructured although of course we have our key questions. It's a relaxed, informal kind of approach which we believe tends to produce the most relaxed answers. If we think the interview is being taken away too much then either of us will come in, but generally we don't. In one of our Perth interviews, a young Nyoongar woman in Year 12, who had grown up in the Kimberleys, was talking about her trip to England. Maybe it seemed a bit irrelevant, but she still had the excitement of a young girl as she described seeing things like the underground railway and the green English parks for the very first time and from that point she came out with some astonishing memories. It will probably bring back some very vivid memories when she hears the tape again in seven years.

Sandra Phillips began by talking about herself, but much of the later interview was about her work in the University of Queensland Press: that is, what it is like to be an Aboriginal publisher pushing through an Aboriginal program at that particular time in 1996. Here, as we do elewhere, we follow up the themes of contemporary work. We have interviewed, as we said, a couple of Aboriginal archaeologists. Imagine what it is like to be one. Seven years ago there were probably none in the country, now there are many young graduates. Each of them has had to explain to their own or another community that archaeology is a legitimate activity for Aboriginal people. In some areas it is still viewed with suspicion, but in seven years time, the profession will probably gain acceptance.

We follow up important issues in daily life. We have talked to people, for example, who are gay. In a sense there are two discussion areas in these cases: what it is like for the individual as an Aboriginal gay man and what it is like for other Aboriginal gays at this time. We finished the interview by asking the person to make some predictions about how both their gayness, and gayness in general, will be accepted within the Aboriginal community in seven years' time. In a sense this is not oral history at all, but contemporary commentary. To that criticism we would reply, 'But it soon will be oral history, and certainly it will be in seven years'.

There is another important advantage in this 'slice' approach. We know that one of the difficulties of oral history is that people don't remember very well what they felt like at a particular time long ago. They can remember what they did, and what happened, but neither we nor they can ever be sure how accurate their memory-feelings are. 'Contemporary commentary' is different. When Sandra Phillips listens with us to her tape in seven years we will know exactly what she thought and felt on 30 June 1996-the exact moment when her ideas and feelings were recorded.

We plan to come back to Sandra in seven years time and seven years after that and seven years after that until we are ready to ask our last question! What happens after that we don't know. We hope that someone else will take it on, because naturally the people we are interviewing will outlast us by many years. But it is fair to ask 'What are we going to do with this fascinating material?'.

We can look horizontally at the material we collect and ask, 'What was the indigenous view in 1997 based on the 10 or 12 interviews that we completed that year?'. Or we can look at it vertically to say, 'Here is one person's life. At the end of 50 years of interviews, and maybe seven separate visits from the SevenYears On team what does it say about that person?'.

Let's think about the horizontal first. As we said, we have just come back from Perth where we interviewed six young people, and a very interesting aspect emerged from these interviews which perhaps is a sign of the coming times. Possibly what we picked up has been around for a couple of years, but now we have it on tape. We discussed it between ourselves, and made sure that it was part of our interviewing discussions for the week.

Here is was what we found. Three of the six people we spoke to in Perth made a point of explaining that they were of Aboriginal descent but descended from another ethnic group as well. There is nothing unusual, of course, about being of mixed descent, but it has been more unusual, in the last 20 or 30 years, for Aboriginal people to be open about it. Last century it was different. Aborigines in the south were often descended also from the Scots, Irish or English, as well as from Afghans or Chinese, and in the north there were the South Sea Islanders, Filipinos, Malays, Japanese and others involved in the pearling industry.

The three young people who mentioned to us their second, non-Aboriginal ancestry were part Chinese, part Italian, and part Scottish-Irish. They all made a point of it and, what is more, they made a point of telling us that they were proud of both their ancestries. We think that is a really interesting development, and an unexpected one.

In part this kind of re-identification must be influenced by changes in multi-culturalism. Let's suppose that a woman migrated from Turkey to Australia in the 1960s. She would be known as a Turkish Australian because she was born in Turkey but lived in Australia. The second generation is different. The woman's son would also be known as a Turkish Australian, but now because he had a Turkish mother, an English father, and was born in Australia. That son has a joint Australian ethnicity different from his mother's. And then here are these young Nyoongars saying to us that they have a joint ethnicity too, and they are proud of it. Now if we look across the spectrum of what younger Aboriginal people were saying to us in 1997, the message may be: 'We have a different kind of way of relating to our Aboriginal heritage, no less proud of it than before, but different from the way in which the previous generation thought of themselves as Aboriginal'.

We think this may be quite a significant development which largely is still unnoticed. You don't hear much of it, for instance, in the national land rights debates amongst older contemporary Aboriginal Australians. Re-aligning identities may just be a straw in the wind. After all, the presupposition of the Wik judgement is the sharing of country rather than the apportioning of it out to different claimants; here are young Aboriginal people going some way towards sharing an identity.

Second, we can look at the material vertically. Provided the National Library continues to sponsor the project, in about six years and ten months time, we will send a copy of the tape back to the subject, especially to find out whether the predictions made in the last half hour of their interview have come to pass.

One person whose life we would like to share with you is an actor. It would be good to tell you what she had said seven years ago and then what she said last week, but of course we can't because our project has been going only for two or three years. So we do the next best thing and show you a tiny bit of the interior and exterior life of Deborah Mailman. She was the lead, and sole, actor in the production Seven Stages of Grieving which toured much of Australia last year. A wonderful show with a superb actor.

Deborah grew up in Mt Isa, without a lot of acting experience at school. Now she works at the Aboriginal theatre company Kooemba Djarra in Brisbane. She co-wrote Seven Stages of Grieving with the company's director, Wesley Enoch, whom we interviewed on the same day. Already she has a powerful reputation. She took the lead role in the Brisbane production of Kate in Taming of the Shrew, and is about to tour with another production of the company, a play by Louis Nowra.

Appearing below is a brief extract from her interview to give an idea of what Deborah's growing up was like, and then later some of the play itself. The interview is an interior voice, the play an exterior; the private person contrasted to the public person (the transcription from the audiotape is used with her permission). We asked her if there had been any Murri (Queensland Aboriginal) drama at school:

Deborah: Oh no no, it was very basic speech and drama. You know basic elements of drama, look at the history, Greek anthology, and where drama originated, and European drama. We did ancient history, speech and drama, your science, your maths, your English, business principles, home economics and catering and so on, and there was no kind of teaching of Aboriginal issues, none whatsoever ... It wasn't something that you felt strongly about, I mean I knew I was black, that I was Aboriginal, and that was it. There was no sense of trying to support me on that, like our traditions, there was no pressure, no emphasis, no interest in any way.
Question: What about your other brothers and sisters?
Deborah: It's interesting, because I was talking to my brother about a month ago and he's been living in London for the last few years, and he comes back and he sees his little sister being very active in the role of indigenous art and stuff like that. And he phoned me up one day and he said, 'Deborah, I just can't understand, I just don't understand, I can't relate to you at the moment because I've been away for so long that I can't relate to my little sister being so active in this area, I just can't relate to it'. He says he is [active] when he wants to, but he's been so separated from that for so long that he didn't know how to kind of get back into it. That was really interesting, and he said I'm really glad that you're doing this. So there is a lot of teaching between each other, 'this is what I do', and he's learning a lot from what I'm doing.

The interview went on more than two hours, but what was emerging was the view of a person growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, finding her feet as an Aboriginal person, coming down to Brisbane and beginning her career as an actor. We hope, and certainly all the signs are there, that Deborah in time will be one of Australia's most distinguished actors. It may be useful for her, and to her biographers, as well as very useful for our program, to be able to say that was the interior, the private voice of Deborah Mailman 1996, compared to the things she was saying publicly about the time that she and Wes Enoch wrote Seven Stages of Grieving. This scene comes about half way through that play:

[Delivered in the style of stand-up comedy. A spotlight].
Have you ever been black? You know when you wake up one morning and you're black? Happened to me this morning. I was in the bathroom looking in the mirror and I thought: 'Nice hair, beautiful black skin, white shiny teeth I'm BLACK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!'
You get a lot of attention, special treatment from being black. I'm in this expensive shop and there's this guy next to me, nice hair, nice tie, nice suit, waving a nice big gun in the air and the shop assistant says 'Keep an eye on the nigger... eye on the nigger'. Hey where did she get that accent from?
OK so I went to try on a dress and the shop assistant escorted me to the 'special' dressing room, the one equipped with video cameras, warning to shop lifters, a security guard, fucken sniffer dog. 'Get out of it'. Just so I don't put anything I shouldn't on my nice dress, nice hair, beautiful black skin and white shiny teeth.

Lastly, someone asked us if our interview subjects are optimists. Absolutely. They are very optimistic. Some even see themselves in politics, though whether that's being optimistic or pessimistic we don't know! Often they are the only people in their profession that are working as they do, so there is a lot of pressure building upon them to speak for indigenous people. For example,we don't know if there are any other indigenous publishers besides Sandra, except maybe at Magabala Books in Broome.

All of the Seven Years On participants hold great plans for the future. They are very optimistic, and probably a little bit reticent about the present, but they are all striving to be leaders in their field. That is why we are interviewing them now.

1. Jackie Huggins also presented a paper at the National Library of Australia's 1995 seminar 'Women Writing' . That paper, titled 'The Theory, the Practice and the Frustration', is also available online.

2. Peter Read also presented a paper at the National Library of Australia's 1996 seminar 'Private Lives Revealed'. His paper 'Private Papers and a Sense of Place' is available online.


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Last updated 17 November 1997
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