There were no children’s books at the Moonahcullah mission near Deniliquin, where Jeanette Crew grew up. They had a reader, but no stories. Fairy tales and fables – stories other children grew up knowing – were left untold.
“One of the most read things was a catalogue, one of those mail-order catalogues,” Crew says.
The Wamba Wamba elder, known to locals as Aunty Jenny, wants children now to have access to the stories that she never read. She chairs the Yarkuwa Indigenous Knowledge Centre in the New South Wales Riverina region, which just launched a series of children’s books written in the Wamba Wamba language.
Called the Pembengguk Wamba Wamba read-aloud books, they are designed to help children maintain a connection to culture.
“We didn’t have any sort of reading resources,” Crew says of her time growing up on the mission. “There was nothing for us.”
Bread and butter, not roast beef
Authorities closed down the Moonahcullah Aboriginal Station in 1961, when Crew was nine years old. In just one day, she says, “the whole mission was moved into town”. Families were forced to leave their pets and other animals behind. “But we took our dog,” she says.
She speaks to Guardian Australia while walking around Moonahcullah, pointing out where her family’s house used to stand before it was bulldozed along with the rest of the mission.
The residents were moved into Deniliquin, 40km away – into small houses that Aunty Jenny’s husband, David Crew, describes as “tin boxes”.
Sixty years on, some people still camp at the mission “because they can’t live anywhere else”, he says.
Aunty Jenny says when the mission closed and they moved into town, they attended a real school with multiple classrooms for the first time, unlike the one-room Moonahcullah Aboriginal School.
“In my head, the school was enormous compared to what I used to,” she says. “Having said all that, it was the first time we’d actually experienced racism.”
It wasn’t until she had her own children that Crew says she realised how the children’s stories and songs you learn reflect “your status in the world”.
She recalls playing with David and their two young foster children, and singing This Little Piggy. In her version, the third little piggy had bread and butter, not roast beef.
“It might have been roast beef for you, but for us, bread and butter was a real treat,” she says.
“It stopped us in our tracks and made us sort of think about what that actually means. I didn’t realise it could have been something about your status in the world.”
She would speak to white parents and they would be shocked that she did not know stories they considered to be universal.
“They said, ‘How can you not know that story?’ And I was saying, ‘Well, we didn’t have those stories as kids’.”
But Crew says they didn’t know the stories she knew, such as Kawir and Kuthun, the Emu and the Brolga. That is why Yarkuwa has published a version of this story in Wamba Wamba.
‘Positive effect to the whole community’
Crew’s father, Neil “Rusty” Ross, was fluent in Wamba Wamba – his whole generation were. But she says because “it wasn’t encouraged”, they stopped speaking it in public.
“When we used the language, the other kids said, ‘What’s that gibberish? Don’t go talking that gibberish here, we don’t know what it means’. We just stopped using it in front of other people,” she says.
It wasn’t until years later when her daughter, Laura Hand-Ross, came across Wamba words in the Macquarie dictionary of languages, that she realised the impact that losing language had on her children.
“She was going through [the dictionary] and she was discovering all these words that she grew up with and she was surprised to find out that they were language words,” Crew says.
“I said, ‘What do you think it was?’ And she said, ‘I thought it was just slang’… It was something that hit home sort of later, because it wasn’t a conscious or deliberate thing – we just stopped using it because no one understood us.”
She says that Yarkuwa hopes the Pembengguk books will ensure children growing up now know the words spoken in their home are in language, not slang.
The word pembengguk means children and kethawil pembengguk means family. Every book in the series has a pronunciation guide for each Wamba Wamba word and the translation in English.
There are five books: Nyapa Lipkwil? (How Many Echidnas?), Kethawil Pembengguk (Family), Nyanya Yawirr? (What Animal Is That?), Penggek (My Body) and Nyakanda Tirrilkata (I Spy In The Sky).
Daryll Bellinghan, a language worker who collaborated with Yarkuwa to produce the books, says it is having “a really positive effect” on the wider culture of Deniliquin and the area.
“That’s something I’ve noticed changing in a really positive way over the last 10 years and it’s something that Yarkuwa should be really proud of,” he says.
“It’s not just maintaining Wamba Wamba culture and language, but it’s also adding such a positive effect to the whole community and wider culture here. It’s really important and we all benefit so much.”
