My name is Joan, and I do, as much as I possibly can, to be part of my community in Port Hedland. I’m a mother of four and a devotee of the community.  

My first memory is as a two year old to about two and a half, getting on to the plane, as we were departing to go down south to Perth. It was a DC-3 and the plane had its own steps as part of the engine and it’s really a clear memory because I can remember the chain that held the stairs once they opened from the plane. I remember the leather around the outside of the chain. I remember the type of seats – they were vinyl covered – and I remember the straps that were holding luggage or apparently grass seeds up at the back of the plane, and getting a Coca Cola. It’s very, very clear, the day I got into the plane to leave Port Hedland for the first time.  

Dad just joined us in with whatever things he was doing and enjoyed our company, you know, and always talked to us as adults and joked with us he was funny. They loved each other. She was always first and best in his life. I went to stay at a girlfriend’s place in high school, and her father used to drink. Even that, to see him with these two long neck bottles which, I mean most blokes is to have two long necks, and he wasn’t violent or nasty or anything but just the fact of him coming home and drinking and I was like ‘woah’. And not greeting his mother and his wife. Like my father would greet me, father would make a beeline from between all of us kids until he got to Mum and put his arms around and, ‘hello dear, how was your day?’ Once you found that out, then we come into play. And yes not, not like everybody else.  

I was left naive in the world thinking this is how it is. That’s how it works. I’ll have some of that. Thank you. Pretty much my siblings have done pretty well like that. But my relationship didn’t really go the distance like theirs did. They went for 59 and a half years. And to the day my father was in hospital that the greatest joy was Mum to come in and give him a kiss.  

We came up here when our living situation had got desperate. My husband had gone into business that he had no mind for and no skills at, and just got deeper and deeper in debt. And so, when the youngest boy was four or five, I just thought well, we’ve got to go somewhere where he can earn some proper money and there was a job going here.  

I came up to nurse, that was the job I came up to, to work in the children’s ward at the hospital here. The work was good and it was the old kind of camaraderie that you need to get through the trauma that can be nursing Yes, right and quite a strain. And when you see, for me children that don’t get the joy as upbringing that I was blessed with, it’s quite heart wrenching. And the result of it was that one particular little woman, my daughter that I fostered, and I kind of decided with her if I just really can help one person. She’s my one person. 

I didn’t know the full care of you know, it was a learning process even as a nurse, how to manage somebody that had all of these things that were needed, where to get the splints from who made the best splints to hold a leg square. What were the best kind of catheter to use and you know, and she was up here in the bush and there were no specialist staff. There was no program that said, okay, you’ve got this condition. And normally you would have a massive bunch of appointments to the developmental clinic and you would be guided in the best kind of catheters, the best kind of splint. Up here, you’ve got none of that.  

When she’d be in hospital, they’d come and visit and I’d say to them, you know, look, she’s very frightened of people that are drinking. You need to take that into account and come see her more often. And I encouraged them to try and do more, be more. What I loved was that her, and I didn’t find this out until way later, that her father had done his own verbal research, which is the way and asked one of the relatives, what kind of person I was, what kind of family I had, were we the kind of family that he should entrust his daughter to.  

When we came back from her having major intervention surgery to do like reconstruction surgeries she had to have, and this was after my divorce, so I had the youngest boy and her and we got back from that to the news that her beloved father had passed away while we were away. And she went into this grief, this soul sudden grief that was just, when I took her over to her family to get the news of the loss and follow the pathways, I sort of said like what you want me to do, do you want her to stay with you? And they kind of guided me along, no you take her with you, bring her back over tomorrow and we went between each other. And her mother, birth mother, says to me, ‘I think we need to take her to the hospital’. So here we are, a circle of you knows, white chocolate and dark chocolate, standing around her bed all worried and all concerned over and they admitted to the hospital. And she went into this, like catatonic state, I suppose. Where she could breathe and move for herself, but she wasn’t there in the there.  

A friend of mine who does like, other world stuff, I suppose, and her daughter sees people from the other side, said she’d had a whole bunch of Aboriginal spirits come into her house and conveyed to her that she was doing this soul journey for a bunch of people. A whole soul group of Aboriginal people, and that’s why she’d gone away, and wasn’t in her body, and that we could say a prayer to get her to come back in short time, our time.  

And so, she just slowly came back into her body and started talking again. And I wasn’t a great like this was all outside of any kind of realm to anything that I’d been read to, and kind of that she’d been read to. And in the time of her recovery from that, she told of travelling, spirit traveling with her father. And they visited her aunt on one side a mother’s sister who had passed away, and her father’s sister who passed away with her father. They spirit travelled down to visit her uncle that was in Perth. She said, ‘We came looking for you Mum and you weren’t there’. I said ‘No love. I was sitting by your bed worrying myself sick. That’s where I was.’ And she’d been on the top of the water tower, the three of them and sat on the top of the water tower. She could tell all of these things that she’d done while she was with him.  

And then in this conversation, she had one side she said that she’d met the child that her mother had fell pregnant with but never got to full term. They met him, she met him on the other side and her and her father had named him, called him Christian. And I said ‘Where was he?’ ‘Oh, he’s sitting with Jesus.’ Now she wasn’t religious. This was you know, it’s where all the kids are. And then I said to her, so what about my kids that didn’t come onto the planet? I’ve had two children that didn’t make it onto Earth. And she said which one mum, the girl or the boy. 

And I was just, you know, it was amazing that she could describe how they looked. The boy looks like just like the youngest and the girl’s got blonde hair, Mum. And I thought that one that didn’t get her, you have taken place your white girl. It’s magnificent.