HOME TRUTHS: Aunty Zeta
Name Aunty Zeta
Age 74
Lives in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs on Wurundjeri country. I’m Wurundjeri through my father and Yorta Yorta through my mother; my totem is the emu.
Please finish this sentence: Home is … where my family is, on Aboriginal country. We have the oldest living culture in the world and a spiritual connection to the land.
Describe your childhood home
My childhood home was a tin hut on an orchard – we lived on the outskirts of town in Shepparton. I have a clear memory of our home; the hut had a tent attached to it, like an annexe, which had dirt floors. We were always sweeping and sprinkling water on them to settle the dust. But it was always clean, we all had our jobs and chores around the house. I remember my dad would always be up early to make the fire before we all got up to warm the place up. But we lived in many homes, as we moved from place to place. We had no electricity; we had candles or kerosene lanterns back then, the tap was outside the house. In a lot of the places we lived we had to walk to get water with a bucket. My mother loved gardening and flowers and she always put a bunch on the table. There were 13 in my family, mainly all sisters; my oldest sister is 90 years old and I have one brother, who is the youngest.
I have all good memories of that time. We had very little, but we had lots of family that were living in the same situation and, in our culture, we see our cousins as brothers and sisters, so it was a very strong family clan connection with lots of happy times. We used to have concerts back then, a lot of Aboriginal families were involved. There were dances; I remember all the girls were in lovely tulle dresses with sequins all over them, handmade by all the mothers. There were lots of singers with beautiful voices – both the men and women. I remember our mother would put our hair in dampened rags the night before the concert, so we would have lovely ringlets for our special occasion. The concerts were held in different little towns all around the country – all the farmers would also come and attend. I have happy memories of growing up in the country, and that's still with me today, of how things were for my people.
During my growing up years, the struggle that my parents had, along with other Aboriginal people at that time – they all had the same struggle – was that there was not much work for a lot of men. For instance, my father did seasonal work. He would pick fruit, then he would prune the fruit trees when that was finished, then we had to move. So he would cut wood and sell it in the winter time. A lot of Aboriginal men were also shearing sheep, but everything was just seasonal, there wasn’t any permanent work. So my dad always moved, to be able to feed us all. We lived in little huts continuously for most of my growing up years, until we moved into a Commission house and it had electricity. There were two bottles of milk out the front that were delivered each morning by a man with a horse and cart. And that a was like magic for us as kids! When I look back now, I see that Aboriginal people didn't have the opportunities that other people had and we lived differently, but we were all close.
Did you ever have to make a home away from home?
When I was a teenager I moved down to Melbourne and lived in an Aboriginal hostel in Northcote, with a lot of other young girls who were all trying to find work around Melbourne. That was a good thing for us, but I know that the wider community didn't understand (or care to understand) Aboriginal people, but we did have our strong cultural beliefs. My parents, along with other leaders, struggled for rights on our country as we didn’t have citizenship until 1967. It’s important to honour those who have made a significant difference to Aboriginal people across the country. My sisters, brother and I have followed our parents’ involvement in Aboriginal affairs through Justice, Education, Culture, Health, Childcare and Sport.
Where’s home for you?
I live in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs and have for many years. I live with my husband Edward, and have three children and ten grandchildren who all live in the same area. I’m Wurundjeri through my father and Yorta Yorta through my mother. I live in the traditional land of the Wurundjeri people; Yorta Yorta country is a large area along the Murray River around the greater Shepparton/Echuca area. So that's why I’ve lived in the areas that I have.
What does home mean to you?
Being with family, that's what home means for me. It means being on country. Our belief is that we are part of and belong to our country and it is part of us.
Do you have any ‘home truths’ for people dealing with the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic?
Thinking back on my history, and how the ancestors coped with first contact with new settlers on our country – it was like a pandemic over which our people had no control, and we are still feeling the effects of this today.
And later, when my people lived on the Aboriginal mission stations, the government had made a policy that all Aboriginal people had to have an exemption paper to move around, and made a policy that the children would be removed from their parents and trained as domestics. Our people didn't have the right to go to town, to shop or do what other people did, without this exemption. So that's coming to mind when I think about today. And there wasn’t a pandemic going around.
But there was also an epidemic that affected a lot of our people in 1938, and that was the polio paralysis epidemic; a lot of our people caught that. One of my sisters, she was only six years old, she caught polio and we lost her. This was devastating to our family; there was much sorrow that was felt with her loss. It’s something that lives with us still. That was in Echuca; they went to the Echuca hospital and there was no iron lung. They had to send for it but, by the time it got there, it was too late for my poor sister.
So, today I think, it’s important to just keep safe until everything is back to normal.
Interview Maria O’Dwyer Illustration by Emma Leonard