A middleman between two cultures

Jakamara Nelson, who died last month, was six years older than the community in which he spent most of his 80 years: Yuendumu. The story of his life reflects the huge changes to people and policies that have taken place in Central Australia in those eight decades.

I was fortunate to meet this influential Warlpiri man a few times in his later life, when he shared with me parts of his life story. It began at the pastoral station of Mount Doreen, where Jakamara’s father was a sheep herder. He would have four wives and nine children, of whom Jakamara was the fifth.

The life of his people before the days of white settlement was still close in people’s memories, and Jakamara recalled stories told to him by his famous grandfather, Minyina.

These included tales of a bloody dispute between tribes in the early 1920s. As Jakamara related it, warriors from the north had come down in a raiding party to kidnap women while many of their men were taking part in a ceremony some distance away. When the men returned, they found many old people and children dead.

Jakamara’s grandfather was one of the scouts who successfully sought out the killers and avenged their deaths – as well as getting their women back and taking some of theirs.

A few years later, many Warlpiri were murdered in the dreadful Coniston Massacre, triggered by the killing of a single white man. So perhaps the concept of Yuendumu appealed to the Warlpiri as a safe haven as well as a reliable source of food, water and services.  Jakamara was six years old when his parents told him they were going to move to a rations depot that had been set up there by the government.

As Jakamara told me in an interview for the Central Land Council’s great oral history opus, Every Hill Got a Story: I can only remember my parents saying to me: “Look, the cattle station can’t support us. There’s no tucker, but they’re going to set up a ration depot, or a settlement” — where people from other communities as well, like cattle stations surrounding Yuendumu, were also asked to move in.

Also, people living in outlying countries – their homelands – heard about a place that was built there to bring in all the people, because there was easy access to food, medical needs and also education. So, gradually, people from outlying countries came into Yuendumu and established some community in those early years.

Jakamara’s descriptions of the early days at Yuendumu evoke the decisions people had to make virtually on the run, as they sought to balance elements of traditional culture with the rough serve of western civilisation that was suddenly on tap. Yuendumu offered people regular rations with the expectation of some work from the men in return. Some of this was in building, some in creating and maintaining several productive veggie gardens that supplied the community with fresh fruit and veggies. Meanwhile at night there were large corroborees, and people felt free to engage in traditional pursuits to some extent.

Around about September, October, when they had plenty of rain, that’s when the food was plentiful, like vegetation, that’s when we used to go on what they called walkabout. The extended family used to join up with us as well for an exodus, if I can put it that way, and we used to go on this big trip to certain places where there was plenty of water and plenty of game about, easy to pick. Bush tomatoes, berries, a lot of kangaroos and emus and turkeys.

It was a long time ago, 1947, 1948, 1949. I vividly remember we had a lot of camp dogs as well, that were trained to bring down kangaroos twice their size. It was a pretty good experience for me to watch all these dogs bringing the kangaroos down. They were very strong. We used to call them kangaroo dogs, because they’d been trained to do that particular job.

Another fascinating shift took place in the way people used their leisure time. In an interview for the National Library of Australia sport project, Jakamara described a game men played at Yuendumu when he was a boy, which had been played for generations.

The sport that Aboriginal people enjoyed most was Jabbu Jabbu.

It was sort of rags and grass tied up into a ball, like a ball of wool, four or five centimetres maybe more thick in circumference that they used to pass on to selected members of the team. There were two teams and they didn’t wear any numbers or guernseys, they were naked, but they knew automatically without asking what person to throw the ball to.

It was leisure time for the people when they had nothing to do. The ball was passed from one person to another. No kicking, just throwing and of course high flying. Men used to fly up there to hold on to the ball.

Jabbu Jabbu was on the way out, although it had been  good preparation for what was to come. In the 1950s, Yuendumu’s Baptist missionaries (whom Jakamara praised for the respect they held for Warlpiri culture) and government superintendents introduced the community to Australian Rules. They showed them how to do drop kicks and torpedo punts. In the 60s, along came Ted Egan as the superintendent, described by Jakamara as “the one who really drummed the style of Aussie Rules football in our minds”.

Before long, Jakamara was one of the community’s leading footballers. Dressed in khaki army shorts and white singlets, he and the rest of the Yuendumu team would hop aboard a Government-supplied truck on Friday afternoons and begin the five-six hour journey to meet their competitors in the inter-settlement competition that had been created.

Jakamara’s (and Yuendumu’s) first game was against Haasts Bluff at the age of 18.  He played ruck. As Jakamara recalled, Yuendumu won. It marked the beginning of Yuendumu’s ongoing love affair with football, with the Yuendumu Magpies competing with other communities between April and October and playing amongst themselves in five local teams in the hot months. In the coming decades, Jakamara would see football become a kind of social glue binding disparate communities together through often fractious relationships.

People who used to regard certain communities as being rubbish and people being awkward to live with and work with and play with, by lifting up their standard of football a lot of recognition and praise has been won by those people, who had been in the bad books of our people in central Australia. It’s a healing force, and a sort of forgiveness: people aren’t that bad. They’re very good at the sports, but they’re not good as far as public relations are concerned.

By this time Jakamara had received what he described as a “standard education” at Yuendumu, up to grade five. He recalled that he enjoyed school and he enjoyed attending – which was just as well, because truancy was not a viable option in those days.

The parents were told if the kids can’t go to school, you won’t get any rations. We used to get rations at the end of every week. If the kids missed out on school, the manager or superintendent in those days would be told that so-and-so’s children didn’t attend school, and they’d deduct  maybe tea or sugar. But we knew that if we didn’t go to school, parents would be punished, by not getting proper rations, like flour, tea and sugar, tin of meat, a bit of tobacco, chewing tobacco, jam, butter, those sort of things.

Jakamara got his first job apprenticed as a diesel mechanic in 1959 after he’d left home and taken part in ceremonies. He got extra education from the Baptist missionaries Tom and Daisy (Pat) Fleming. The tuition helped him to become one of the first Aboriginal teachers after he’d finished his apprenticeship.

He spent five years as a teacher, just as the age of self-determination was dawning. In Jakamara’s words: To a certain extent it didn’t work, and some of us just lived on and carried on with the life and accepted the responsibility given to us by the Government with this self-determination and the land rights thing, self-governance.

After five years, Jakamara gave up teaching to become an assistant community advisor. He was also active as a facilitator in the homelands movement, and, in the spirit of the commitment he had made to self-determination, eventually became an outspoken critic of the NT Intervention.  But as he looked back on his life ten years before he died, Jakamara saw himself as a middleman between two cultures, communicating from one side to the other because of his fluency in both cultures.

So, while he sometimes considered himself  “stuck in the middle”,  he emphasised this was “not to say that I should chuck away what I’ve been taught in the western world or forget about my culture.” Like many of his generation brought up under now discredited policies, he clearly valued not only the skills he had learned from both worlds, but also found a unity between those worlds in their spiritual perspectives — while acknowledging they were “kind of different”.

Getting back to the creation … we believe in God and we use the Tjukurpa. It covers everything, the history, the cultural significance, which lies in the history of our present day living, and we don’t ignore that. We sort of grow by that and make a comparison with the Christianity. We don’t know what God looked like. It hasn’t been explained to us. We just use that term Tjukurpa. We follow the dreamtime story of the Tjukurpa.