I just want to add that I had the best time doing this interview. You never know the amazing humans that share our hood. Sitting in their house in North Lismore, we laughed so hard, I drank freshly squeezed orange juice and was given a gift. Such a beautiful afternoon. Thank you Joey and Kim for a gorgeous afternoon. Enjoy this wonderful story. 
Denise
Joe Gala – (Part 1 of 2)
“ I was born in Maryborough QLD in 1965. I was a little flower power kid and they tried to turn me into a drag queen very early in life. Well not really but Mum forgot to put the baby clothes in to take me home from hospital so I had to wear my cousins pink dress home. She was born a week before me.
There was 9 of us kids, the 3 youngest lived with Mum. The other kids and I lived with Grandma. It was tricky. This was back in the welfare days. If the welfare came around we had to be out of the house. If they came while we were there, we’d hide in the attic. Eventually that changed but they still played God with people’s lives. I tried to do a welfare course later in life but I couldn’t do it because I kept getting flashbacks of all that stuff when I was a kid. When I was in Grade 6 my Grandma passed away and she didn’t want me living with my mothers side of the family so she told my cousin Francis to come and get me. Them other fellas didn’t really like me that much. I found out later that the people I thought were aunts and uncles were actually first cousins and my grandparents were actually my great grandparents. My aunty trained me up to fight for land rights. I used to go to the meetings. Fellas come up to me now and say – Why don’t you still come to the meetings and I say ‘Because I want to come to a meeting, not a f%#king argument. People bullying and standing over others isn’t a meeting. Nothing get’s resolved.’ I’m still one of the main talkers back home. When they want stuff done they ring me up here in Lismore and I go back up.
I’ve stayed up in Hervey Bay most of my life. I’ve travelled a bit and worked in different jobs. I worked at Centrelink in Maryborough and Telstra back when it was Telecom. I was working long before that though. When we were kids my aunty would come pick us up at 2am to take us up to Bundaberg to go bean picking. We’d work all day, come home and the next day we’d have enough to all go to the pictures and have a feed too. The reason we left at 2am was, my aunty was a part of the turtle driving crew. She drove so slow…too safe actually. It was only about an hour to Childers for breakfast and we took 5.
I did a lot of Walkabout. When we left home half the other crew would get homesick when we got to the border of Hervey Bay and Maryborough so they’d walk back home. They wouldn’t leave the bay. When I returned home it would take me a month to settle back in. I’d have to go around to all the different houses and tell the stories of what I’d seen.
This mate of mine was trying to track me for 20 years. He finally found me and wanted me to be a tour guide for a 3 week safari from Darwin to Katherine and on to The Kimberleys. I get over there and I’m sitting reading a biography of The Doors at Darwin airport. I look up and spot the lead singer from Yothu Yindi chasing his bag back through the carousel for the second time. I’m laughing behind my book, see him finally get his bag and he sees me keeping a straight face. I yelled out.. ‘Hey Yothu Yindi brother!’. The next day we had to go shopping to take 24 retired Australians on this safari. We are at Casuarina shopping centre coming down the escalator and I said to my boss…’There’s my mate Yothu Yindi.’ He said..’Nah, do you know him? I said ‘You watch this! Hey Yothu Yindi’ and him and his mob all waved and yelled back, ‘How ya going brother!’ The boss said..’Gee, you know some people Joe’. (laughs).
I ended up getting back into the culture in 1995. Ever since then I’ve been teaching it all over, schools, Uni’s. When my partner Kimmy and I go back to the island we teach 200 backpackers a night and I get painted up and do a welcome to country. We are the only ones who are allowed to light a fire on Fraser Island. I’m from the Butchulla tribe. K-gari is the word for Fraser Island and it’s a woman spirit. It gets a bit too matriarchal (laughs). The things I love about Fraser are the coloured sands which are living organisms called Cyanide Bacteria. On the mainland when the vegetation falls from the trees it normally takes 6 months for it to digest into the earth. On Fraser Island it only takes 6 weeks. The theory is it’s one big beautiful white sand island. On top you have the trees and not too far below is the nutrient level. You have the tap roots but all the feeders from all the plants and trees are woven together like a big carpet sticking on that nutrient level.
There was a time just before I started working over there where they didn’t want Aboriginals working as Rangers because the boys who were working before us were bunging on – ‘We’re Butchulla’s and you can’t do this…we’re Butchulla’s and you can’t do that.’ These fellas got sacked. Me and my nephew went over and worked respectfully and then they loved us and developed faith in us so they brought those other fellas back on the island. We proved them wrong. My nephew was worried about the big boss man and I said – ‘Bugger him and the horse he rode in on. Let’s work hard and show them that we’re deadly.’ We worked so hard and by the end of the first week that big fella and his wife were driving us around in the back of their car like we were the prodigal sons.(laughs)
Lot’s of spiritual things happened there. I was working on a pump, behind me there was a bit of a sand dune and I felt something ominous behind me. I go back to working and I feel it again. I turned around and there was about 2 metres of Taipan coming fast straight toward me. I got up, we looked at each other and he slowly turned around and went back to his hole. Two days later I came back and 6 backpacker tents were set up right there where that snake lived.”