Gina Williams

Kaya, ngany Gina, ngan Nyungar yok, Ballardong yok, ngan ngaangk, ngan dembart koolingah wer ngan warangka.

So, hello there, my name is Gina, Gina Williams, I am a Nyoongar girl, a Balladong girl, I’m a mother with three children, and I sing.

I was adopted as a baby into the most loving arms that you can possibly imagine.

My parents, they were Stolen Generation kids, and um, they didn’t identify as Aboriginal. My earliest memories are growing up in suburban Perth with my mum and my dad. And it’s, you know, summertime, and my parents had a record player that stacked albums and they’d choose three albums each and my mum chose country and western, and my dad, he chose the people that he said really knew how to sing. So, on a blanket under the stars, I met Billie [Holiday] and Ella [Fitzgerald] and Nat King Cole, and my dad in his lawn chair, he would conduct the Glenn Miller Band.

My parents separated when I was very young, when I was about 10 years old. My mum started drinking, and people would come around; family would come around, and I never really understood it, but my dad was quite hostile towards these Aboriginal people that my mum—you know, they were her family. I remember seeing my dad’s family only ever once, he had one sister. There was always hostility around Aboriginality, it was something that was never discussed in our house. In fact, my parents, I have memories of sitting at the dining table with my parents, and then they would sit and say, oh, you know, you’ve got this lovely olive skin because of your Indian heritage or because you’re part Malay.

My dad died about three weeks after my 12th birthday, and it was only then that I was asked directly about my Aboriginal heritage and my Aboriginal family, and I had no idea what anyone was talking about. I didn’t know anybody in my community; I didn’t know who my relatives were. My dad and I, it was just us in my notes. My social worker says that, you know, I never really encountered anyone with so few connections to her community because it literally was just me and my dad.

My dad was of the era where certificates of exemption were given, though commonly not, called dog licences. To have one of those meant that you could access public places; you could be seen inside the exclusion zones, and you were given, you know, basic citizenship rights as an Aboriginal person. The price that you paid for that, however, was that you had to make a decision to turn your back on your family, and my dad, I think, made that terrible decision. He was fearful of the establishment because of what had happened to him as a, as a child.

Many, many children grew up not knowing their identity, um, simply because, you know, it had been drilled into these, these, kids on missions that being black was a, was a terrible thing. I guess I got sick of apologising for who I was for being Nyoongar and working in the media. I, I thought that it would be an opportunity to be able to tell stories for people that couldn’t, that didn’t have a voice.

The funny thing was when I first started as this, you know, reporter, I felt compelled to, you know, shout from the rooftops that I was Nyoongar and, you know, who my family was and where they were from. And I remember distinctly being out in the Ngunjurra lands and, um, you know, feeling this, desperate urge to assert my Aboriginality on anyone that would listen and finally one of these old fellas was going, “Well, we don’t care, you’re either black or you’re not.”

I remember immediately taking hold of that and thinking, “Well, I’m either black or I’m not,” and that’s actually really simple, because in my heart, I know I am. So many people that I interviewed, I was related to or I was connected to, and it actually helped me piece my history back together.

I averaged about 36 weeks a year away from home. There’s many long hours spent driving because, you know, Western Australia is such a massive place. So I was writing poems and, you know, on the occasions where pens and paper weren’t handy, I used to make up little tunes in my head to remember things. What I found I had was this enormous collection of songs.

And, uh, my husband at the time said, “Oh, you know, maybe you should do something with this music.” The first album, Brilliant Blue, um, was released in 2005. It’s as autobiographical as you can possibly get, it was my—it’s me telling my story. You know, I’m a product of four dysfunctional homes. I have a biological family, an adopted family, and two foster families, and none of them are together in a conventional sense. So this was an opportunity for me to actually speak my truth, and what I wanted to do was I wanted to honour that in the most beautiful way that I could possibly do. And I found that the whole process was a real healing thing.

I started writing songs in language as a way of helping me to learn my language, and to become proficient and fluent in speaking Noongar, because I love this language, I’m in love with it and I think it’s the most beautiful language. To me, it literally sings. Writing and performing in this language has had incredible responses and incredible things have happened, you know, I’ve been able to tour the country. There’s been international interest in what I do, and I’m really grateful for that.

All I ever wanted was to belong to a family. Um, you know, as a foster kid, all you want is to have your own family. And I’ve got that, except that I’m not the daughter anymore, I’m-I’m the mama. As my case worker noted in his notes, that I had so few connections to community, I now have enormous connections to community, not just my Noongar community, but community across the country. For me, it’s not enough to just to belong to something. I want to contribute and I want to feed into that and I want to see it grow and I want to see other people succeed. It’s really important to me that what I do is inclusive and is generous, informed by, um, four principles which were given to me by my Uncle Tom.

So that’s heart (koort), our moort (our families), ngalang boodja (our land), and koorlanga (which is children), but it’s, um, it’s legacy, and how do we leave this thing, leave this planet, and I’m firmly committed to rewriting the script—not just for myself, but for the space that I live in, and I want people, you know, in ways that I wasn’t made to feel like I belonged to something. I want people to understand that this language is not just an Indigenous history. This is an Australian history and we’ve been here longer, but that our sense of belonging can include everybody.

There’s enough space here for everyone, because we’re all living here now, in developing connection. Not just for Aboriginal people, but for the wider community. It’s important because when we feel connected to each other, and when we feel connected to the land on which we’re walking, then we become powerful, we become united, and we start to defend, and we start to protect—not just each other, but the place where we come from.

I don’t want my language to be kept in a museum and trotted out and looked at with white gloves on. I want it to be taken out, and I want it to be used, and I want it to be stretched, and I want it to be challenged, because that’s how it becomes robust, and that’s how it has any chance of survival—and we need all the friends that we can get on that particular part of the journey, because without lots of people speaking my language, it really does run the risk of disappearing forever.

I often wonder what my dad would have made of this. Every night I still go outside, and I still look up and I still remember him and I hope that this journey, this legacy that he’s left in me is something that makes him proud.