Natalie – “ I had always wanted to work with Indigenous mob. I hung around at school with heaps of Indigenous crew in Toowoomba. I was kind of like an honorary family member. All the Aboriginal mob would be going to NAIDOC week celebrations and the liaison officer was an uncle of one of my best mates, Uncle Charlie. He’d come to my class and say ‘You wanna come?’ and I was so not Aboriginal but they were family and I was sort of adopted into that family. Wanita and Karla, those women have been so strong in my heart. I’ve always been drawn to the spirituality of Aboriginal people. I’ve always found it so beautiful and intriguing. The ability to connect to a place where you know your ancestry’s existed for hundreds of thousands of years potentially. That your line goes all the way back on this land. The way that has an imprint on who they are as spiritual beings. It’s so powerful. That has always resonated with me since I was very young.
I was doing lots of music and I’d had Raia. I started to get a strong calling to do songwriting stuff with Indigenous kids. I started applying for positions and I was writing to organisations randomly saying ‘I’m really keen, this is my skill set, I’m a singer and a songwriter.’
My own sense of self expression is about wellbeing. I’ve suffered depression, had struggles, things that have been tumultuous for me emotionally. Songwriting was the way I navigated that. I still feel that is one of my callings, to help other kids navigate that stuff through creative expression.
Mitch’s Mum and Dad were up in Katherine and I said to him ‘I have this really powerful urge to be up there but I’ve never actually been up there.’ I decided I was going to go. Mitch was working and locked in with his job. I didn’t think he would be able to come but he said, ‘Lets figure it out. Let’s stay with my parents in Katherine and see how we feel.’ I went with the intention of putting my feet in the dirt and my heart in the place. We flew from Darwin to Katherine, woke up in the morning and went straight down to the Katherine River. The sun, the light, everything looked different. The country there is so exposed, you feel so exposed. There’s nowhere to hide. The country feel like that. Mitch and I looked at each other and I said ‘I would live here’ and he said ‘I would live here’.
There was some incredible synchronicities that led to us landing in Maningrida. We ran into some friends at the Darwin Festival, Tim Webb who we knew from uni in Lismore and his wife Amelia were living up in the NT. Tim was working for the NT music school and we told them we were keen if something came up. That was the seed. We stayed in a house with a friend called Sinem Saban who produced a film called Our Generation and that film had inspired me to try and get work with Indigenous youth. I was introduced to her by my best mate Polly Armstrong who I met up with in the NT. That film was powerful and really pivotal for me so I went and stayed with Sinem around the festival time. Actually and most importantly on that trip was meeting Djiniyini Gondarra, Senior Lore Man Elder from Elcho Island. It was his speaking in the film ‘Our Generation’ that inspired me to act on my feelings to head north and I truly feel I owe this journey to his passion and call to action. Jeff McMullen the Journalist was there too and I had amazing conversations with him. Those conversations really formed lots of my decision making and choices I’ve been faced with since.
The most amazing story for me happened on that trip. Mitch had already gone down south and I stayed for an extra week with the kids. I drove from Katherine and got to the airport really early. I didn’t want to drive on that highway at night so it meant we were at the airport hours ahead of time. Raia was a baby, the airport was packed because it was festival time and there was only one seat left. It just happened to be behind this really amazing Aboriginal woman and her husband. She turned around straight away and said Hi. Her and I spoke flat out face to face, heart to heart, so much honesty for six hours. Her name is Helen Williams…it’s going to make me cry.
It was the most amazing connection. We talked about everything and we got really deep really quickly. Raia was asleep and Zii was just listening. Her hubby who has since passed away would pipe up every now and then. He was an amazing man. She helped me with check in and when were going up the escalator, just before we left she held my hands and looked into my eyes. She had tears in her eyes and she said, I’m going to see you again and I said ‘I know you are. I don’t know how but when I do I will come and find you.’ She was calling herself Helen Djimbarrawala. She told me she was from Maningrida but it was amongst a 6 hour conversation. I didn’t hold onto that as I had not really heard about Maningrida. We’ve gone up the escalator, I’m standing waving to her. I had tears in my eyes and I said to Ziian, I love her and she said ‘I love her too.’ That was August and in February Alisha called saying there was a job for us in Maningrida. She said the Principal was calling us in 20 minutes. Mitch was walking out the door and I was like Stop! There’s a job in Maningrida and he’s like ‘Where the hell is Maningrida?’ I said, ‘It’s in Arnhem land.’
I got on line and looked up Maningrida. This Youtube came up and without even looking I heard this woman laugh and it was like a lightning bolt shot through my heart. It was Helen. She’s the traditional owner of that country. I was like OMG and I burst into tears.
Three weeks later we packed our house up, put everything in storage and we lived there. We landed in Darwin in the middle of a full on cyclone so we had to stay in Darwin. Our apartment completely flooded. It was this full on Baptism of fire to get to this place. Mitch had his horn, I had my guitar. We could only take 14 kilos of luggage on the flight. We battled the winds and the rain on this 25 seater plane flying across Arnhem Land. I felt like I was in a dream. We landed in Maningrida and I went looking for Helen for months. I asked everyone..Is Helen Djimbarrawala here? And everyone said..’Who the hell is that? Are you talking about Helen Williams?’ ‘No! It’s Helen Djimbarrawala’
I ended up meeting these two beautiful sisters walking down the street in the monsoonal rain. I was on my deck and everything felt like a dream. It was so beautiful. Raia was 2 and playing on the deck. I saw these woman and there was something so magical and beautiful about them, just walking in the rain. We said Hello. I ended up finding out later that they were teachers at the school where Mitch was teaching. We met up and I found out that they were Helens daughters. I started hanging out with them and their names were Grace and Alice. I then met their other sister Noni and we started spending a lot of time together. I said ‘I know your Mum, where is she?’ I found out her real name is Helen Williams and her bush name is Helen Djimbarrawala.
Helen was in Darwin for a long time before she came back to Maningrida so I didn’t see her for months and I was dying to see her. I loved those girls so much and they gave me my skin name which meant that they called me their sister. My skin name is Nga-wamud. That meant that Helen was my mother. She is my Kikka. I have made such beautiful friendships and amazing connections up there. My other close friend is my neighbour Dorothy who has the same skin name as me which means that she is also my sister. Her kids are always in my house and they call me Mother. That’s the way it works if you have a skin name. You are intrinsically connected through that title. You have a role within that community. We are coming up to our 8th year and we have another 18 months till we come back here.
I fell pregnant with Selkie 4 months after we moved to Maningrida. That was great story too. I was with Grace and the girls a lot down at the water. It was the end of a big wet season so all the underwater aquifers were completely overflowing. There hasn’t been a wet season like that since. There is a natural spring at the end of the beach called the Djomi spring. It’s a fertility spring. You drink the water and you have mermaid babies. The water was flowing, it was so hot and we were making waterfalls out of rocks. We would go there every day and I was just drinking the water. Four months later one of the ladies signalled to me in sign language indicating something about my belly. The women were talking in language about my belly and they said ‘You have a Djomi. I’m like ‘What’s a Djomi ?’ They asked if I’d been drinking the water and I said Yes. ‘You’re pregnant!’ she said. ‘I am not, I haven’t missed a period’ but I was pregnant and it was Selkie. The community were saying ‘You are carrying a Maningrida baby, that baby is from this country. It’s a Djomi baby which means mermaid.’
We didn’t have a name and Mitch said, ‘What about Selkie?’ I loved it and we found out after Googling it’s the mermaid story from our Irish ancestry. The Selkie is the seal who sheds her skin and there is this amazing mythology around the Selkie which represents the same story as the mermaid over here. She is such a little mermaid, obsessed with being in the water.”