Aboriginal elder, Aunty Merle

Aunty Merle

There is no sign, only a numberless letterbox on a stand and a short ramp that leads to an open door. Inside, the centre is bare and quiet, so quiet that voices echo from one hall to the next. In a glass cabinet near the entrance are handmade necklaces, bracelets and earrings with little yellow price tags on them. Some are priced at $2.00, others $5.00. They are the homemade kind – small bits of amethyst or amber on fishing wire. Hidden among them are bracelets decorated with small beads in patterns of black, red and yellow.

Before the interview, Aunty Merle consults her co-worker, Phyllis. “Should I put my uniform on?”

“Put your uniform on,” Phyllis says.

She deliberates for a moment then disappears into the other room. When she returns, she has her uniform on – a yellow polo shirt with black sleeves and red piping. IWACC is written on the logo.

I was worried that there wouldn’t be a place to plug my laptop in and, if the interview ran overtime, the battery would die. But curiously, and fortunately for me, the centre’s walls are lined with power points. This is what used to be Marrickville Hospital. It has the feel of an old hospital – quiet, eerie, as though people’s suffering seeped into the floor and stayed there. Since 2001, it has been home to IWACC, the Inner West Aboriginal Community Corporation. Its operations are dwindling, but one program still running is the elders program which Aunty Merle heads. Every Tuesday, 22 elders meet here, sometimes to make jewellery.

“We go to the Marrickville High School once a fortnight to talk to the kids,” Aunty Merle says. “Some of them get a bit too cocky at home.”

The youth of today, as well as her own childhood, is a subject Aunty Merle returns to often.

Tenderness and pleading filling her voice, she tells the children not to disrepect their mums.

“I tell them, ‘You’re here to learn, not to mouth off at the teachers. What you have today is because of what we went through.’”

Aunty Merle also works with DOCS, looking after at-risk children, occasionally getting called out at night.

“I work with a little white fella. To this little white fella, dear oh geez, I said, ‘What’s that coming out of your mouth?’ He says, ‘What, Aunty Merle?’”

She waves her finger, as though the boy is in the room.

“I say, ‘Look at all that bullshit coming out of your mouth. You do not need to bullshit to me. No need to make up stories. I love you how you are.’”

About the Aboriginal boys she looks after she says, “They try to smash up things, you see? I say, ‘No, no. You don’t do that.’” She leans forward in her chair. “And I tell them, ‘Besides, you’re on my land. You’re a guest on my land.’ Then it stops. They just need to be aware.”

When Aunty Merle leaves the room to take a phone call, her colleague, Phyllis, talks. Although they call each other Aunty, Phyllis is the younger of the pair. She wears a hearing aid in one ear. She is part of the way through a degree at UTS, though she explains that Aboriginal people aren’t academic. “My deafness and being in a room full of giggling girls made it hard to concentrate,” she says. “We’re too easily distracted. As you can see here.”

Aunty Merle’s skin is smooth and earth-brown. The eyes behind her gold-rimmed glasses are bright and alert, coming alive when she jokes with her co-worker, Phyllis. The two women aren’t related but they get along like close sisters. Aunty Merle tells Phyllis not to give a disapproving look and hits her hand away from her mouth when she bites her nails. One will tell a joke and they laugh like schoolkids, Phyllis’s cackle echoing through the halls.

Born Merle Wright in Narromine, NSW, she is from the Wiradjuri tribe. Her father, a drover named Jack Pearce, died when she was young. Her mother, Catherine Wright, raised her until her death when Merle was eight. She still remembers the authorities pulling up at the front of the house following her mother’s death.

“I still remember the man getting out with the black suit and the black hat on and the lady with the black suit and the white gloves.”

But she was put in the custody of her older brother and sister, Morris and Valerie, which meant that she could stay in Narromine.

She counts on her fingers the different families in the town, remembering their names and what they did. One of the things Aunty Merle prides herself on is her ability to remember names. Mid-story she will stop and say, “The name, see?”

On only two occasions was Aunty Merle the victim of racism in Narromine, once when a boy yelled out at her on the street and the other time when she was at her friend’s house next door.

“Chrissy’s mother asked me to leave so they could have tea. But my sisters were down the street so I waited. Then Chrissy’s mother said, ‘I don’t want that black nigger in my house.’”

Merle’s sister, Shirley, confronted Chrissy’s mother.

“Shirley asked, ‘Why are you calling Merle a nigger? She’s never, ever been rude to you.’ I remember that.”

She holds up her hand and leaves a narrow gap between her thumb and forefinger. “It made me feel that small.”

Thinking back now, it’s as though she’s surprised. After a moment, she says, “But that was it.”

At 15 she finished school and soon ventured to Sydney with friends. The Aboriginal Foundation put them up in a motel – the People’s Palace. On weekends they went to the Emperor’s Hotel; Aunty Merle’s eyes brighten talking about those days.

“I met my husband in the Emperor’s!” Aunty Merle says. Love at first sight? “It was! He walked in wearing striped bellbottoms and a cream jacket. He looked at me and I turned to my friend and said, ‘I’ll spend the rest of my life with that man.’ The eyes got me.”

Aunty Merle and her husband were married in 1969 and bought their own home in Mt Druitt in 1977. They have two sons, Kevin and Ronnie, and one granddaughter who Aunty Merle speaks of with some sadness because they don’t see her.

Her son Kevin, a successful visual and graphic artist, once asked why she never taught them their language. She had to explain that she herself never learnt it.

When Merle was young, her grandfather lived with them. He could speak their language but there were serious consequences if the kids were caught speaking it, so they weren’t taught. “They called it ‘the devil’s language.’ If we were caught speaking it we got removed.”

Phyllis talks about why the elders and programs for them, like the one that IWACC runs, are so important. “Us care workers take a lot of responsibility for the elders because without them, without their lobbying and the things they’ve done, we wouldn’t have our jobs. We have those fighters in our group.”

Proud of their fighters, Aunty Merle and Phyllis think their achievements should be known, passed on to the children in the hope it will inspire. But there is one by-product of those achievements in particular that they disagree with.

Aunty Merle recalls an occasion when she went to a gathering for Aboriginal people from her home town. She asked why a certain group were there and was told that they were Aboriginal. “I said, ‘But they weren’t black when we went to school. Why are they black now?’ I don’t like that.”

Both Aunty Merle and Phyllis are offended when people identify themselves as Aboriginal when the circumstances surrounding their Aboriginality, as well as their willingness to accept it, are dubious. A woman once asked Aunty Merle if she would pick her for being black.

Aunty Merle replied that she didn’t, not because the woman was light-skinned but “because you don’t mingle with us, you mingle with white fellas. So don’t stand there and say that you’re black.”

Aunty Merle clarifies: “This is my land because it’s my ancestral land. I’m allowed to say that because it comes from in here.” She points at her chest. “I’m not saying it because I just found out.”

A ‘sorry’ from an Australian Prime Minister is something she did not think she’d live to see. But she hasn’t seen a change since Kevin Rudd’s apology.

“I thought it’d move us forward. But we haven’t, have we? Blackfellas know that.”

Aunty Merle believes there is still a stigma that accompanies being Aboriginal, inescapable even in the workplace.

“When Aboriginal people get into mainstream jobs you get that little racist remark about how they got the job. That’s why they’ll leave. My oath. It’s not because they’re lazy.”

That’s the reason she gives for the anger in today’s Aboriginal youth. She thinks eliminating the stigma would allow the current generation to move on.

“We can stand up for ourselves,” she says of Phyllis and herself. “But the children of today don’t have the answer to respond back.”

But she is optimistic about the future and does not fear Indigenous culture being left behind. She thinks that as long as children are learning about it, the culture will last and uses the example of the Tjapukai Aboriginal Cultural Park in Cairns in preserving it.

Although she has a great deal of concern for the issues affecting her people, Aunty Merle is a jolly lady, jolly and proud.

What is she most proud of?

“Of being an Aboriginal. I’m not ashamed. That shame is too common. I’ve never been ashamed of who I am.”

June 2009.

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