Jacqueline Pelczar

Intro: Hello, my name is Savannah Travia-Dann, and I’m a Nyul Nyul woman from Winawaal Country on the Dampier Peninsular. 

Welcome to a collection of stories shared by Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Australians in various locations across Walyalup. 

Walyalup is the Noongar name for Fremantle, located on the south-west coast of what is now known as Western Australia. Like the rest of the continent, Walyalup is ancient Country and home to one of the world’s oldest continuing cultures, the Noongar people. 

In this series, you will hear live recordings from people who have shared difficult truths, hidden histories and visions for the future. It was created as part of the First Stories collection and funded by Lotterywest – bringing First Nations truths and lived experiences to new audiences. These stories reflect personal experiences of colonisation, resilience, connection and belonging in Walyalup and across Australia. 

Produced by the Centre for Stories in partnership with the City of Fremantle, these recordings were captured on Noongar Boodja. We pay our deepest respects to Noongar Elders past and present, and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who since the beginning, have been the custodians, carers, knowledge holders and storytellers of this land. 

Before we begin, please be aware that this episode may contain references to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures, histories and experiences that belong to the storytellers. It may include themes and language that some listeners may find distressing. 

We acknowledge the ongoing impacts of colonisation and the importance of truth-telling in creating a more honest understanding of our shared history. We also recognise that these stories may be particularly challenging for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander listeners. 

If you’re feeling distressed or triggered while listening, please reach out to 13 YARN on 13 92 76, where you can speak with an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander Crisis Support Worker.  

In this episode, you will hear from Jacqueline Pelczar. Jacqueline is a Polish, Austrian and Burgher Sri Lankan woman. She explores the intergenerational effect of the White Australia Policy, her grandmother’s immigration story, white privilege and the history of Sri Lanka’s colonisation. This is Jacqueline. 

JP: So I am sitting on set with an actor waiting for the camera to set up for a new take on a web series that I was directing at the time. And earlier that week, my Mum and my grandma had joined us on set, and it was a really special moment for me as a young filmmaker. And after we’d finished discussing the scene and how it would play out, there was a moment of pause and the actor turned to me and she said, you know, it was so great to have your Mum and your grandma come join us the other day. And I said, yeah, no, I’m, I’m really grateful we could make that happen. And without breaking eye contact, she said, you know, when you told me that your Mum and your grandma were Sri Lankan, I didn’t realize like how Sri Lankan they were.  

I didn’t really know how to respond to this. I didn’t know if it was a question or a statement or a statement framed as a question, but it kind of felt like a real-life reenactment of the 2004 comedy teen film Mean Girls, where one of the characters asked Lindsay Lohan, ‘well, you’re from Africa. Whyare you white?’  

And so I said, I guess when I told you that they were Sri Lankan, what did you think I meant? And she was like, ‘oh, you’re just so not.’ And it’s not the first time that someone’s been surprised when finding out a little bit about my cultural heritage. And I’m not surprised that they’re surprised. It usually comes from a place of curiosity.  

But I guess this story really begins when my grandmother arrived on the shores of Walyalup as a pre-teen from what was then known under its colonial name as Ceylon. My grandma immigrated here under the White Australia policy. And my aunties and uncles tell the story of how they had to prove that they were 70 per cent White to enter. My aunties and uncles, along with my grandma are Burgher, Sri Lankans, not like with fries, Burgher spelled B-U-R-G-H-E-R. And it’s a Dutch word that translates to ‘citizen’ in the early 16th and 17th centuries.  

Sri Lanka was colonized by a series of European countries, the Dutch, the Portuguese, eventually the English. And as they colonized and settled on the land, they raped and they intermarried and thus we were born, the Burghers. And there’s some Sri Lankans, you know, I’ve met, whether it be Tamil or Sinhalese, who will remark when, you know, talking about the Burghers as, oh, they’re not really, Sri Lankans. And there’s some Tamil people that I’ve known that even have a hard time identifying as Sri Lankan, because Sri Lanka was a name given to the country in the early seventies under a corrupt Sinhalese government who had originally, back in 1958, introduced the Singala Only Act. And that was kind of part of the beginning of decades of civil war and genocide against Tamil people.  

Identity in a post-colonial world holds a lot of tension. And my grandma, she had a really hard time growing up in Australia, and she reflected on this in small moments later in life. She was always told to sit at the back of the classroom with the few Aboriginal kids that were in the corner, and she recalled how the other kids would pull their desks away from her, as if they thought her skin was contagious. And as she recalled this story to me, she looked me dead in the eye. And she says, ‘Jacqueline, you never forget these things. You never forget how they make you feel.’ And then she proceeded to laugh and said, ‘well, now it’s fashionable to have dark skin.’ She was told to stand at the back of cues even though she’d patiently waited towards the front. And she wasn’t allowed on the bus because of the colour of her skin. And she didn’t like Australians much. Who could blame her? If you were a bad driver, you were Australian. If your food was tasteless, you were definitely Australian. Nothing against apricot chicken… 

But yeah, these stories kind of filtered down to my Mum’s generation. My Mum being first generation Sri-Lankan, first generation Australian. And she was covered up by her grandmother with an umbrella whenever she walked outside to not have her skin get any darker. And her and her siblings would scrub their knees and elbows where the dry skin would build up and make their skin look darker. And she was sent with a secret mission when invited to her friend’s house for a Sunday roast.  

My grandma had heard all about these Sunday roasts and wanted to know how they did it. She was horrified when my Mum came back and relayed that apart from meat and vegetables, the only three ingredients were salt, pepper, and oil. Maybe a sprig of rosemary, not 10 or 25 different spices.  

And then there’s me. And apart from people maybe wondering why I am so fair, I’ve never been racially profiled. I’ve always gotten a seat on the bus. We talk about the White Australia policy and a lot of these policies as a thing of the past, as a thing of history. We don’t often talk about the implications they have today, how they’re framed narratives. And there’s a classic image when if you’ve ever studied or looked up the White Australia Policy of an Aboriginal grandmother, her lighter-skinned daughter and her child, with blonde hair and blue eyes. And they knew that if the grandmother had some European in her blood and they continued to marry White, marry and have babies with White people, that the culture would eventually be erased, and the colour of the skin would become fairer.  

And so I guess in answering, you know, how come I’m just so not like my mother and my grandmother? I suppose because it worked. The White Australia policy worked in some cases. And whenever I’ve struggled to identify or have had a bit of shame around embracing a culture that brought me up, that taught me love and community, it’s always been my First Nations friends and colleagues that have taught me to not be shame, to hold onto those stories, to hold onto that connection, because they know what it’s like to have cultures completely erased, languages lost and children taken.  

And that doesn’t take just one or two or even three generations to repair. That’s ever present and it’s still present today. Today we live in a space where we have the ‘third-space’. Academic Homi K. Bhabha identifies this space as a liminal place between cultures, where they clash, challenge and negotiate, forming new hybrid identities. And so I guess my question is, how can we acknowledge the histories that we maybe didn’t enact, but belong to, while still celebrating cultures of today as Burgher Sri Lankans? Can we understand why other Sri Lankans might have a hard time identifying with or allowing us into that space in that culture? Yeah, we can kind of understand that as White Australians. Can we understand why Indigenous Australians still hold a lot of trauma, hold a lot of mistrust? Yeah, we can kind of understand. And if we can’t understand, can we learn to sit in that tension? Can we learn to listen? Because fundamentally, we are all just searching for a place to belong. Thanks. 

Outro: Thank you for listening to the Backyard Truth Telling Series. This collection of stories was made possible through the generous support of the City of Fremantle and Lotterywest and was produced by the Centre for Stories. 

To learn more about the City of Fremantle’s commitment to reconciliation, visit fremantle.wa.gov.au. 

If you’d like to hear more stories from the Backyard Truth Telling Series, visit centreforstories.com. 

Centre for Stories is a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to uplifting diverse voices, fostering connection and creating spaces where stories can be shared and heard. If you’d like to support this work, please consider making a donation through our website: centreforstories.com. 

This podcast was produced by Savannah Travia-Dann, with storytelling training from Ron Bradfield Jnr and Mariela Espino Zuppa, and sound engineering by Mason Vellios and Cobie Mason. 

Thank you for joining us and thank you for supporting the storytellers who have generously shared their truths, experiences and visions for the future.