Holly Story

LM: Hi there. My name is Luisa Mitchell, and I’m a Nyungar woman. Today we present to you Backyard Truth Telling, stories from Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians that were shared in local resident’s backyards all around Walyalup. Walyalup is the Noongar name for Fremantle. Located on the southern end of what is now called Western Australia. 

Just like the rest of Australia, Walyalup is an ancient country and belongs to one of the world’s oldest surviving cultures, the Whadjuk Nyungar people.
In this collection, you’re about to hear live recordings from people who spoke about difficult truths, hidden histories, and reimagined futures, all reflections of their lived experiences of colonisation in Walyalup and Australia.  

In partnership with the City of Fremantle and produced by Centre for Stories, these stories were captured on Whadjuk Nyungar boodjar. We pay our respects to Whadjuk elders and all Aboriginal people from the beginning, who are the knowledge keepers and custodians of this place.  

And before we get started, a brief disclaimer this story may contain references to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures, histories, and practices. It may also include language that some individuals may find distressing or triggering. We acknowledge the ongoing impact of colonisation and the importance of truth telling and respecting Indigenous perspectives and experiences. We also know that these stories may be most triggering for mob; to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. So if you’re struggling while listening to this story, please don’t hesitate to connect with 13 YARN on 139276 and talk with an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander crisis supporter. 

In this episode you will hear Holly Story’s story. And no, that wasn’t a mistake. Holly’s surname is indeed Story. Holly shares her experiences with what is now referred to as the Great Australian Silence, and the forced erasure of Aboriginal people. This is Holly.  

HS: First, I’d like to acknowledge that I’m on Whadjuk Noongar land and pay my respects to elders, past, present and future. The first storytellers, and I’d like to thank the Centre for Stories for involving me in this project.  

So my story starts in Perth in 1970. I just finished Year 12 at an all-girl English boarding school in England, and I came out as a 10-pound pom to join my family. We had moved here from Bangkok, where we lived for ten years. 

I knew nothing about this place. Perth could have been on the other side of the moon as far as I was concerned. I had all these pictures in my mind. So I gave away all my winter clothes because I thought Western Australia was just desert. And I seriously thought I would see kangaroos on Saint George’s Terrace. 

It was just such a foreign place for me. When I was in primary school, we coloured in maps of Australia, and we went blue around the edge for the sea, and then yellow, and then in the middle it was red for the desert. And there were little pictures printed on the map. So there were fat, woolly sheep, mine heads, and right in the middle there were a couple of figures. They were Aboriginal men standing on one leg, holding a spear. So, these were the stereotypes I came with. I mean, they were, they were absurd. But I don’t think I was that unusual. Not many people in the 70s in my sort of life knew anything much about Australia, and less about Perth. 

I knew very little history. I knew that Captain Cook had discovered it in 1770. And, when he came, I believe there were almost no people living here, and they offered no resistance, and they sort of disappeared. And those that were left lived a traditional life up in the north somewhere in the desert. 

So nothing that I saw when I came here and went to live in Floreat Park challenged any of these ideas. And also, I was 17 and probably a lot more interested in my social life and how I was going to make a new life in this place. So the year after I got here, I went to UWA and I was curious about Aboriginal people, so I enrolled in anthropology. I thought that would help. It was a really traditional course. So I learned a lot about very complex kinship systems, about moieties, about mother-in-law avoidance strategies. And even though two of my lecturers were Ronald and Catherine Berndt, who I later found out were quite vocal in the land rights movement in protecting sacred sites; I had no conversations about, Stolen Generations or, any of those things. It was just starting to go on in Perth in the 1970s. Those conversations about town curfews, about missions. They were just not in the institutions at that time. And I was really not listening either. I was still not able to let go of what I thought Australia and Australian Aborigines were about. 

The only exception to that was there was an organization on campus called AB-Schol, and I later learned that was national, and it existed to support Aboriginal students through high school and to get through university. And some of my friends belonged but I didn’t join. And, here’s another great big stereotype, because I thought, they’re not doing a great job. There aren’t any Aboriginal people on campus. I had this really fixed idea of what Aboriginal people looked like, and I think that still operates. I think that’s still a huge thing.  

So moving on. A few more years, I was in a student share house in East Perth, Claisebrook. And it was a typical rundown, once-was beautiful house, with a big garden. And down at the bottom of the garden there were these this sort of boggy place that was all overgrown with cane grass and reeds, and we never went in there. It looked a bit a bit snaky and not appealing, but I started to notice this pattern; that was every Friday night, a group of people, some of whom I could see where Aboriginal, would come and settle down in the cane grass and party on. They were pretty loud, but they were they were not interfering with anybody else. And then every Saturday morning, a paddy wagon would ride up and two policemen would get out and take off the overnighters, drive them away. Now, this just went on every weekend. And whilst I realized that there was a pub around the corner, I didn’t know that in 1970, it was only in 1970, that Aboriginal people were allowed into pubs to drink, and still only in the public bar. I did know that that was a pretty wild place, and a lot of white men were drinking in there, and they had never gotten into trouble. I felt there was something unfair going on even then. The pub wouldn’t have been a very friendly place for people to go, but why did they keep coming back to the same place, knowing that they would be taken away?  

We had a neighbour in the area, Marg, who was doing postgrad studies at UWA and she was doing a big research project on the area, on Claisebrook and East Perth. And I told her what I’d seen, and I wondered if she knew anything about it. And she said, well, that boggy place down there, that’s what’s left of the Clay’s Brook. And those people come every week to gather because they always have, that’s a traditional meeting place. And that word just really jumped out at me when she said, always. I thought always? There’s a history here that’s really deep and old, and it’s not one that I’ve ever learned or heard about. So that was the beginning, I think, of my wake up to the fact of Aboriginal sovereignty. And always was, always will be.  

In the 80s… now, I was really starting to get curious now, slowly. In the 80s, I lived on the south coast with my family, my husband and children, and I asked lots of questions. Maybe not to the right people. Where were Aboriginal people? What had happened to them? What were the signs that they had been here? And everywhere I asked, I got the same story. I’ve even had this story from the East Coast, too, in those days: ‘Oh, there weren’t very many of them. They just passed through. They never stopped. They all got measles, influenza. They died. They don’t come here anymore. It’s taboo. There are no Aboriginal people here.’  

So once again, it was just like a door closing. There was just this absence. That really, really bothered me. Anyway I started reading, I read Sally Morgan. So I learned that Aboriginal people had had to hide their heritage in case their children were taken away. And I read Stephen Kinnane about living in Perth or on the edge of Perth in the ‘30s. I read Anna Haebich, so I saw how even the law had been changed to stop Aboriginal people from earning their own living, being self-determined on the land. I read Henry Reynolds, ‘The Other Side of the Frontier’, and other books, which was the completely opposite story from the one I’d been learning. 

I was really shocked then by how hard this society and all its systems, how hard it’s tried, we’ve tried, to make Noongar people, didn’t know the word then, make Noongar people disappear. Their language forbidden, their children taken, forced off their land, put into missions, not allowed into towns. I just got an insight in what they’ve had to deal with and how they’ve survived. 

So, it wasn’t ’til the 2000s that I started to learn some language. I learned the name Noongar. I did some walks on country with the elder Noel Nannup. And this was another huge experience for me because through the Wheatbelt, lots of the towns still have their Noongar name, or at least the name that was given to that area. And I began to see how country and culture and stories were all interconnected. It was a really important time for me, and it affected the artwork that I was doing. When I was working with materials from country and I began to see how everything I used had a very strong resonance in this place. 

Now this is a bit of a theme you may have picked up in my story is that I’ve been learning and learning and trying to learn about the true history of this place. And it’s been through books. It’s been through books and institutions and courses and workshops and that’s my, that’s been, that is my way of learning. That’s my comfort place. But when I went to one of these truth-telling sessions just recently, my friend Nandi Chinna, the poet, told a story and she said, at the end she said, we’ve got to remember, us white fellas have got to remember that there’s a big difference between learning about Aboriginal people and learning with Aboriginal people, and that’s a huge gap. That’s a huge gap in my life that I’m going to try and cross. So, this being involved in truth telling, is one of my first goes at doing that, and thank you.  

So, 50 years, 50 years since those reeds at Claisebrook, I know a lot more. I know Whitlam and Uluru. I know about Mabo. I read the amazing and generous Statement from the Heart, and I could see that was a map. That was a map that was written by Aboriginal people, an incredible document. And when the Voice was something that we were going to vote on, I really thought, this is it. Something’s going to change. I’m going to see an amazing change in my generation. So I walked across the Matagarup Bridge. I wore a yes badge. I campaigned, and I was absolutely devastated and shocked that my country said no.  

Anyway, here we are. We’re doing truth telling and I know Aboriginal people will never give up, and I would like to be there when it counts. Thank you. 

LM: This collection of stories was made possible through funding from the City of Fremantle and produced by the Centre for Stories. To learn more about City of Fremantle’s dedication to reconciliation, visit fremantle.wa.gov.au. To listen to other stories in the Backyard Truth Telling collection, visit centreforstories.com. Centre for Stories is a registered, not for profit organization fuelled by a passionate, dedicated team.  

If you’d like to support our mission to uplift diverse voices and champion inclusion, consider making a small donation at centreforstories.com. This podcast was produced by Luisa Mitchell, with story training from Ron Bradfield Junior and sound engineering by Mason Vellios. Thank you for supporting our storytellers.