Liam McNally
Kirrip Aboriginal Corporation has been running a weekly Elders Group for about seven years, in which Aboriginal elders in the Melton area connect, teach culture, and heal together.
During Reconciliation Week on Wednesday, May 21, the group met to learn, practise, and share the language of storytelling within traditional painting techniques.
Star Weekly visited to ask participants what reconciliation means to them.
Wiradjuri woman Michelle ‘Dingo’ Griffiths said her connection to her culture came through her grandmother, who raised her while her mother was sick.
“I deeply connected with her and there’s always been that calling in me to heal what she couldn’t, to know what she couldn’t,” she said.
During her journey of understanding Ms Griffiths connected with the dingo as her animal totem. She encourages everyone to find theirs to help connect them to the land around them.
“If you don’t take care of country, it can’t take care of you,” she said.
“For me the healing and reconciliation comes when we all realise we’re a part of this beautiful earth and we wake up and realise we’re one mob just different colours.“
When Yorta Yorta woman, Aunty Alex Osborne-Briggs was born in 1964, she was separated from her birth mother, and brought up in institutions before being adopted into an abusive household. She said in the last few years she has been reconnecting with the “birth right” that was stolen from her.
“For me, reconciliation is connection, trying to understand our culture… unless we meet in the middle and we learn to work together instead of trying to work against each other there’s never really going to be reconciliation,” she said.
“When you have reconciliation and Sorry Day, it really affects me because I’ve started to learn Yorta Yorta’s side, my mob, and what they went through, the lives lost, it breaks my heart, because I now know that my ancestors suffered, through no fault of their own.
“We can’t change history, history is history, but we need to learn from it, so it never happens again.”
