Outback Heroines

by Sue Williams

  ‘I know we can make a home anywhere, as long as we’re together with our children, and have dirt under our feet. We might do something else for the short-term but I know we’ll eventually end up on our beloved, timeless land, surrounded by a diverse family of animals. They are part of who we are and always will be. I know now I’ll always come back.’

  15

  THE WORST DISASTER SINCE CYCLONE TRACY

  Sister Theresa Morellini, Warmun, Western Australia

  The water crashed into the little township like a tsunami, a great wave roaring up the flooded creek.

  Everyone ran for their lives as houses were washed clean from their foundations, trees were uprooted and cars were swept up and then smashed back down into the earth by the sheer force of the water. A lifetime of belongings was tossed into the air like confetti, with even heavy whitegoods like fridges becoming snared as they fell among the highest branches of the area’s great boab trees.

  And, perhaps even worse, the tidal wave surged into the Eastern Kimberley community’s prized art centre, the home of some of the nation’s most precious and fragile paintings. It flushed many of them kilometres downriver, and totally destroyed others as the water level rose steadily to nearly 2 metres high, within centimetres of the ceiling. An estimated 700 works, worth millions of dollars, were lost.

  ‘It was a terrible thing,’ says Sister Theresa Morellini, of that heartbreaking Sunday afternoon in March 2011. ‘It was like a big ocean coming from the hills. I don’t think anyone will ever forget it.’

  Thankfully, no one was killed in the catastrophe, triggered by the nearby creek bursting its banks after two days of the heaviest rainfall since 1907 – up to 400 millimetres in one day – following on from two already unusually wet months. But that night, many residents could do nothing but huddle on small patches of the highest ground they could find as the water rose inexorably around them, over 1.2 metres in 20 minutes at its peak.

  A number of people watched helplessly in horror as their pets were carried away by the raging torrent. The next morning, a woman was bitten by a snake in the water.

  With 45 of the township’s 65 houses decimated in the disaster – the worst since Cyclone Tracy – and the rest rendered completely uninhabitable, with the power, sewerage and water systems irreparably damaged, there followed one of the biggest emergency evacuations the area had ever seen. Most of the residents of the town were helicoptered to safety to newly built men’s work quarters 150 kilometres away. As storms and showers continued to batter the area, only one man refused to leave: he remained to look after the 120 dogs, a cow and a pig whose owners had already been choppered out.

  But there was the odd moment of triumph. A week after the flood, the Bishop of the Kimberley, Christopher Saunders, found the 2007 Blake Prize-winning painting, Stations of the Cross, wrapped around a tree in a paddock 2 kilometres from the arts centre.

  And Sister Theresa, although she was naturally devastated to lose her cosy little cottage and all her possessions, including her records and archives, in the deluge, was characteristically eager to look on the bright side. ‘I did lose my house, which has been tough for me,’ she says candidly. ‘But it’s been good, too, because I’m now equal with all the other people.’ She takes off her wide-brimmed bush hat to smooth down her tousled white hair, before jamming it back on absent-mindedly. ‘I lost what they lost, and it’s good for all of us to be on the same level.’

  Thirty-three years have passed since Sister Theresa settled in the small Aboriginal community of Warmun at Turkey Creek, halfway between Halls Creek and Kununurra in the Kimberley.

  It’s a small spit of dusty orange land, spiky with mulga bushes and patches of tough spear grass, punctuated by a few grand old boabs, sandwiched between the Great Northern Highway and the creek. As places go, it’s pretty unimpressive, but for the 250–300 people of the Gija language group who live here, it’s home. And that’s important when you have nowhere else to go. The government directive of 1966 that black workers on pastoral properties should be paid equal wages with their white counterparts led to most Aboriginal stockmen in the Kimberley being sacked from their jobs and driven off the stations and land they had lived on all their lives. Many families then headed for Turkey Creek, the site of an old ration depot and a traditional holiday spot for locals during the wet season, when there’d always been good fishing in the creek, a branch of the 150-kilometre-long Bow River, itself a tributary of the mighty Ord. This time, they set up camp, and named it Warmun, a shorthand form of the words for the Gija’s Eagle and Crow Dreaming.

  Conditions were extremely basic. Without houses, most people camped or lived in humpies, or rudimentary homemade shelters, and hunted for bush tucker, which would be shared with everyone. As for the children at the settlement, at first they were bussed to the Catholic school at Wyndham, 200 kilometres to the north. But when a child one day ran out from behind the back of the bus and was killed by a car, the elders decided they needed a school to be set up in Warmun. Many people there were practising a unique mix of Aboriginal spirituality and Catholicism, having been converted by the early missionaries to the area, been sent away to the Derby Leprosarium, or nursed by nuns or visited by priests while they lived at the stations. They asked that two Catholic sisters from the St Josephite order, who’d been working in the Kimberley for years, come to start up their school.

  Sister Theresa was eager to help and arrived in May 1979. ‘But back then, there was absolutely nothing here,’ she says. ‘People were living in lean-tos, tents, cars and windbreaks. We lived in a caravan, two people in one caravan, and everyone would have to go down and carry water up from the creek.’

  As for the school, the locals – who immediately nicknamed her Sister T – had a very clear idea of the kind of lessons they wanted for their kids: combining the elements of a basic Western education of reading, writing and arithmetic with teachings about the fundamentals of Aboriginal culture. They called it ‘Two-Way Learning’. While the school’s principal, Sister Clare Ahern, and Sister T would take the conventional lessons, the elders would join in to help with the Dreamtime studies, and to teach their own Gija language, songs and dance, with regular corroborees. The children also started painting their Dreamtime stories on any surfaces they could find. Just as the elders were now forced to live in two worlds – one of their own traditions and culture, and the other of the white man – they also wanted to equip their children the best they could for the future to take advantage of any opportunities in the wider world, while still preserving their own treasured heritage.

  ‘It could have been a disaster, setting up a Catholic school in a community like that,’ says Tom Stephens, a longtime MP for the area in the Western Australian parliament, who was also the first community advisor to Warmun. ‘But the two sisters strongly supported the Aboriginal leadership and culture and worked with them. Theresa is clearly a feisty woman by any standards, and she has an acute sense of justice and injustice and she worked hard to help.’

  So classes at the newly named Ngalangangpum School would begin at 6.30 a.m. each day, with 35 children sitting under the shade of a large bloodwood tree, scratching numbers and words in the dust with twigs and fingers. The main teaching materials were leaves, pebbles, chalk, slates and sticks. Old car bodies were sometimes used as desks. A number of the elders would sit and watch and listen as the children repeated their lessons. Then the elders would take over, talking of their Dreamtime stories, showing their paintings and teaching the kids Gija words and sign language, important for when they’d go hunting out bush.

  Three months on, the school moved into the shade of a community bough shed made of tree posts and interlaced branches. A shed had also been built at the end to serve as quarters for the nuns and for storage. Sister T, with a hearty Girl Guide-like can-do attitude, and a brisk acceptance of any privations her work might involve, took it completely in her stride. ‘I used to call it the “human shearing shed quarters” because that’s what it lo
oked like, with no ceiling, no insulation, no nothing,’ she laughs. ‘They had walled-off rooms; that was all. The ceiling came later on in the early 1980s when they did more renovations.

  ‘But they were happy times. Because, back then, there was nothing else happening in the community, everyone used to come up and we were all together. The mothers would sit with the kids and the men would work around us, getting things done, or have meetings with their elders. We’d all play sports together and would run school until 11 a.m. Then we’d stop for lunch, with a kitchen preparing food each day for the children, and we’d close our doors until about 2.30 p.m. to rest. Later, people would come up and sit and talk and they would share their stories about life on the stations and how the women were used and how come they had mixed blood children. Then they would try to teach us language. I’m not very good at it, even now.

  ‘After that, in the cool of the evening, we would all jump in the back of a truck and go out bush together, getting bush tucker, which the people would have for their supper. We were the teachers, but we learnt a lot from them.’

  Growing up reading about the work of Australia’s Mother Mary MacKillop educating the poor, she was now living the life she’d always dreamed of.

  Theresa Morellini was born a world away, in the little town of Dardanup, 110 kilometres south of Perth, set in lush green cattle country at the entrance to the picturesque Ferguson Valley, with its rolling hills, postcard-pretty valleys and expansive ocean views. Her parents raised their seven children on a mixed farm and, with Theresa’s father an Italian who’d come to Australia in 1927 and her mother of Italian-Irish descent, both were very involved with the local Catholic church. All the children were sent to the nearby Catholic school and taught by the Sisters of Mercy. When it was time for high school, Theresa was sent to New Norcia, a settlement 80 kilometres north of Perth set up by the Benedictines, which remains Australia’s only monastic town.

  It was there that Theresa first encountered the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart, an order of nuns co-founded by Mary MacKillop, affectionately known as the Josephites or the ‘Brown Joeys’ after the brown habits they used to wear. They were renowned for living among their congregation and working for the poor, and Theresa felt a calling to them early on. ‘In my early teenage years, something in my spirit moved me,’ she says today. ‘It’s very hard to express, but it grows within you. It’s something that calls you to respond. I wanted to be, like Mary MacKillop, someone working and living side by side with people, helping them, educating the children, making a difference.’

  Theresa joined the order at age 17, as was usual in those days, and started her preparation at the St Josephites’ headquarters in North Sydney. After taking her vows, she did teacher training and then returned in the late 1960s to Western Australia to teach in Moora, a town 170 kilometres north of Perth in the state’s wheatbelt, and then to Perth itself. In one of those schools, she first encountered Aboriginal children and worried that she knew so little about their backgrounds, she didn’t know how best to teach them. She mentioned her concerns to officials of the government department that represented Aboriginal interests.

  ‘In those days, I didn’t understand what was happening. I was only young,’ she says. ‘It was so frustrating. You would have the kids one day, they’d come in and then the native welfare lady would say, “These kids have got to go to court!” and you never saw them again. They would be taken off their parents and sent away – that was what we call the stolen generation today. It was still happening at that time. Then the welfare lady asked me if I’d like to come out to the reserve, so I went and saw it and that was my conversion. It changed me.

  ‘It was a shock to see the conditions people were living under, I’d never seen anything like that before. It helped me understand why some of the kids behaved as they did; it changed my expectations of kids coming in from that sort of environment and I was able to make some changes to the way I taught that helped them at school. I could empathise with them a little more, and adapt my teaching to what they needed.’

  Then Sister Theresa was sent to Kalgoorlie, the tough mining town 600 kilometres east of Perth, and was asked, 12 months later, if she’d be willing to go to the Kimberley to teach Aboriginal children. It was 1973 and the area was still considered one of the most remote St Josephite outposts, and she was still only in her late 20s. But she agreed immediately.

  Her first position was in the Catholic school in Wyndham, the oldest and northernmost town in the region, 3200 kilometres north-east of Perth, and then in Kununurra, 100 kilometres further east. It was hard work. At that school, she had 58 kids in her class, including a number of bush Aboriginal kids who’d never seen white children before. But Sister Theresa was nothing if not resourceful. She was the first person to take on an Aboriginal assistant for her classroom, and she used to invite elders along from the nearby reserve to run cultural programs with the children, to teach them about their heritage and Aboriginal language and even to take them out bush, so they could learn bush skills.

  ‘It was wonderful there,’ she says. ‘We had a great priest, and many good people in the parish who would join in. For special occasions, the Aboriginal people would get the parish women to join in with the liturgy and the mass on Sundays. They would dance with the Aboriginal people and they let the Aboriginal people have their own hymn-singing.’

  But Sister Theresa was also seen as challenging some of the educational concepts of the time, and was withdrawn from Kununurra as a result. Her replacement was Sister Clare Ahern, a woman with whom she later became close friends.

  Sister Theresa returned to Moora, and did some work with Aboriginal children who weren’t making progress in school and couldn’t read. By the end of the first year, they were able to go back into normal classes. She also began to liaise between parents, the school and the community. ‘Even back then, I felt it was important to involve the parents,’ she says.

  After a few years there, she took 12 months off to take a course studying missionary work, with a mix of theology, anthropology, history and comparative religion.

  It was then that she heard there’d been a special request for her services: to start up a school in a new community called Warmun, along with Sister Clare.

  Sister Theresa arrived in Warmun, not quite sure how everything would work out. But she needn’t have worried. From the very first day, as a member of ‘Mary MacKillop’s mob’, she was treated with enormous respect, affection and gratitude. Furthermore, she was embraced by the family of one of the elders, George Mung Mung, as an adopted daughter.

  It was tough for the two sisters to teach under the conditions they faced, but they had a class eager to learn, and parents and community elders desperate to create a better life for the next generation. What’s more, the newly nicknamed Sister T saw this project as exactly the kind of work Mary MacKillop would have loved to undertake herself: working for the good of severely disadvantaged children in remote and isolated parts of Australia.

  A new kind of Christianity soon emerged at Warmun, a mixture of the sisters’ teachings, the old lessons of the first missionaries and traditional Aboriginal spiritual beliefs. Services were held with every­one sitting around outside in a big circle on the ground, on stools or on crates, singing a variety of hymns and Aboriginal songs, in ceremonies often intertwined. Biblical stories like the birth of Jesus had been handed down early on through the families but, with no knowledge of either shepherds or white sheep in such a red landscape, somehow white dingos appeared alongside the wise men at the stable. Later, missionaries who arrived to spread the word of Christ were startled to be told there was already a corroboree about Him.

  ‘Sister T was our mother, auntie, friend and, when we did something wrong, our enemy!’ chuckles Warmun resident Bessie Daylight. ‘But she was a real good help to us. She helped the kids so they weren’t sent away to school, and she was always there for all of us. She knows everyone here so well and has seen the kids grow up and h
ave their own kids.’

  There was always plenty of heartbreak along the way, however. Of the 35 children in her first class, the lives of six were cut short, through car accidents or alcohol abuse. They’d faced so much social upheaval in their short lives, many just couldn’t cope. It wasn’t helped, either, by the sly grog runners, who could always see a quick profit in smuggling alcohol into town. There was also the time just before the 1980 state election when the community rallied behind Aboriginal political candidate Ernie Bridge. His opponents sneaked into Warmun the night before, delivering a 44-gallon drum of port wine as a ‘gift’ they distributed around in billy cans – used constantly as there was still no running water – planning to wipe everyone out for a few days until voting was over.

  ‘Theresa was among those who shared in the anger and worked to ensure the leadership was able to take control and overturn the drum of port wine into the dust, and kick over all the billy cans,’ says Tom Stephens. ‘Then she helped fetch water and make coffee to ensure everyone was sober enough to vote.’ Ernie ended up winning the Kimberley seat for the Labor Party for the first time in 12 years, and went on to become the first Indigenous Australian to be appointed a cabinet minister in an Australian government.

  After six years at the school, Sister T moved into pastoral care in the community. It was 1985, and Warmun was beginning to thrive. The school was gradually being extended for a growing number of children, now around 120, and a proper building had finally been erected. A library had been opened, and recordings of the Gija language made. By 1987, the sisters were even given a house of their own, while in 1990, a secondary school was established, which meant youngsters no longer had to go to Wyndham after completing their primary schooling at home. The Daiwul Gija Culture Centre was built, as well as the Mirrilingki Centre a few kilometres away, as places to help Indigenous people develop leadership skills and make a difference in their communities. And Warmun art had also begun to be recognised and acclaimed, with artists using natural ochres, charcoals and gums to colour their distinctive works, often a series of deceptively simple-looking mountain and rock outlines across the landscape, coloured in the soft yellows and whites from the area, as well as the hard browns and reds.