With Reconciliation Week 2021 in Australia drawing to a close, Streets of Your Town speaks to trailblazing Aboriginal entrepreneur and proud Wiradyuri man Birrunga Wiradyuri.
Birrunga is the co-founder and principal artist of the aptly titled and multi award winning Birrunga Gallery & Dining, in Brisbane.
He’s overcome the challenges of COVID to become the only Indigenous-owned and operated commercial Cultural hub in Meanjin, otherwise known as Brisbane.
“When you get down here there’s no ambient noise,” he says.
“It’s the only place in town like that. It’s a bit of an oasis away from everywhere else.”
He invites us all to visit his gallery during Reconciliation week and beyond, to come and listen to his stories and the stories of his people.
“I’m Wiradyuri, my home area’s around Bathurst,” he says.
“Our sacred mountain down there is Wahluu.
“My family lore is storytelling which was taught down on the Murray around Albury Wodonga. And my personal lore is the law of the sky.
“My totem is the sky. I was named after my great grandfather Birrunga. In my case it goes back to a creator, an ancestor around the area whose law is the sky.
“The reality is it never starts or finishes like everything else.”
The first aspect of Yindyamarra, Wiradyuri central lore, is “to do slowly”.
“Which means you consider rather than react, to be polite, to be gentle, to honour, and respect, but you have got to do all five at once. So you don’t get to fudge and just do the convenient ones.
“That underpins and informs everything we do, every aspect of business personal life, professional, spiritual, everything, family, community the whole lot. And we’re one of three businesses in this area at least, who hold our cultural currency high and we never let it descend.
“The norm is for black businesses to operate in the mainstream you’ve got to be less black, rather than more black. So your cultural stuff needs to sometimes disappear.
“We work in non-linear time. When you hear about Murri time or Koori time it’s usually in derogatory terms. But it’s a thing. And it’s because we work when the time’s right. Not when we’re meant to be there.”
He’s also helped established the statewide Independent Indigenous Tourism Operators of Queensland.
“Truthtelling is an incredibly important part of what we do. What we do here, what we do in tourism, what we do in our day to day,” Birrunga says.
“So every opportunity we get to do that astutely offers us the opportunity to build relationships and sometimes that leads to alliances and often if not all the time it leads to a shift in perception.”
As well as being an accomplished artist of international renown, some of the work of which Birrunga is most proud happens inside prisons.
“As I understand it there hasn’t been another civilian black fella who gets to wander around,” he says.
“We work with what’s best for everybody, what’s most useful for everybody inside the wire on every given day and that’s the staff as well as the fellas doing time, whoever’s doing time.
“We just chip away at it slowly. The kids are really up against it. Our focus in that regard is the people that our young men look up to are the fellas in community, and through colonisation there’s this ridiculous thing coming up now where fellas anticipate ‘doing time’ as part of coming of age and they want to get the big one out of the way first. All this entirely unnatural introduced stuff that’s killing us.
“So if we have senior men who come out and don’t go back in, and are serious individuals…that’s what we’re working at. It’s a really long game.
"As Wiradyuri I work six to nine generations forward, and six to nine generations behind. It means that what I do today if in six to nine generations time the penny drops then that’s time well spent. It takes the ego out of it.
“It’s a long game. We’re a long game people. All this quick fix, instant gratification bullshit, it just doesn’t work for us.”
In other good news
Hopefully you’ve all heard how the Disability Royal Commission (DRC) has been extended to September 2023—hooray! As you know I’m an advocate for the DRC employed through a great organisation called Speaking Up For You (SUFY) to help people with their submission. I can’t tell you what a relief it is especially with COVID still wreaking havoc to have a bit more time to get this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get information from as many people with a disability and their carers and families as possible.
Would you like to make a submission to the Disability Royal Commission (DRC) but don’t know how?
Think you should contribute your lived experience to the Disability Royal Commission but wonder if it’s big enough?
Wondering what the Disability Royal Commission is really all about?
Then feel free to contact me just by replying to this email or send me a message at stories@nancehaxton.com.au. I’d love to give you some more information about it, and how you can take part.
The six Commissioners at the DRC want to hear your stories of violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation as someone who has a disability, or cares for someone with a disability. They’re doing this with the aim of enabling systemic change to the way people with disability are treated in this country.
And if you need help, there are advocates like me who can help you put your story together. It’s important your story is heard so that the DRC has as broad a picture of life for people with disability in Australia as possible.
You don’t need a degree to do it, you don’t even have to write it. You can write a short poem, or a 20,000 word document, or anything in between. You can even record your story on your phone and send that in as a submission. We’ve had a couple of artworks submitted. It’s all up to you and how you feel it is best to tell your story.
Now that the DRC has been extended until September 2023 there is time for you to have your voice heard.
Behind the scenes
Thanks for your understanding all during my podcast hiatus these past couple of weeks. I was producing a lot of work for a lot of people, and had a bit of podcast burn out. But Birrunga is fabulous, so I’m stoked to be back with such a fascinating episode.
Some of the other podcasts I’ve produced include these two episodes of The Gender Card podcast for the Gender Equity Research Network. Who knew that midwifery had such a political history! This was a firecracker!
And I really enjoyed breaking down the Federal Budget 2021 in this episode of The Gender Card- kicking off with the classic line from Professor Susan Harris-Rimmer—“just calling it a women’s budget doesn’t make it so”. Indeed!
One of the best parts of Reconciliation Week for me is that it kicks off on my birthday!
I’m so proud of that because while there are many days in Australian history of which I’m not proud, on May 27 1967, Australians voted to change the Constitution so that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples would be counted as part of the population, and the Commonwealth would be able to make laws for them. It’s shocking to realise that until that day Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders were not recognised as part of the Australian population. But thankfully more than 90 percent of Australians voted yes to change the Constitution. That high yes vote was recorded in every state and territory, making it one of the most successful campaigns in Australia’s history.
The dates for Reconciliation Week are the same every year—starting on the anniversary of the successful 1967 referendum and ending on Mabo Day, June 3, which marks the momentous High Court victory overturning the legal fiction of terra nullius, or “land belonging to no-one”, and honours the legacy of the man behind it, Eddie Mabo.
Read: What is Mabo Day and why is it significant?
Enjoy Reconciliation Week! Please take this year’s theme to heart: More Than a Word—Reconciliation Takes Action.
Talk again soon my Wandering Journo tribe! Thanks so much for your ongoing support—and please share this with your friends.
Nance
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