“I’ve written a play called Natives Go Wild and years ago when I was making documentaries, I did a story on a man called Con Colleano. He was born in Lismore. He was actually Wiradjuri and he was born Cornelius Sullivan. Con’s father had come to Lismore because of the boxing tents. He had his boxing troupe and he knew all the great Boxers came from here. While he was here Con was born. He is one of Lismore’s greatest homegrown. Con Colleano was the highest paid ever circus performer still globally and he perfected the high wire. He was known as the Wizard of the Wire. They had to change their name to the Royal Hawaiian Troupe or the Akabahs. They had all these different shows because they could not be Aboriginals, no-one would have come and secondly they wouldn’t have been allowed to do it. Hence he became Con Colleano The Spanish Troubadour. I did a doco on that story and the amazing things he did in that circus.
The saddest thing is the greatest showman Barnum was setting up his big new show in Chicago and London. He’s getting people out of asylums, he’s got the human zoo and he’s making heaps of money. He sends his henchmen at the very same time that Con was perfecting his high-wire. He sends his henchmen to kidnap Aborigines from Palm Island and Hinchinbrook. They’d end up touring and they would come out and do a Corroboree, they were kept in the worst conditions. Jumbo the Elephant was a part of the circus as was Tambo, a gentleman from Palm Island. He was a great song-man, a great dancer, a boomerang thrower and more. Barnum had selected him as part of the human zoo shows and he would sleep beside Jumbo. Tambo and Jumbo developed a caring relationship. Tambo dies because it’s freezing, it’s Europe and Barnum realises he’s going to lose this huge income so he embalms him. He then gets Tambo’s wife and children to come out and do their performing monkey thing, remember they’ve been kidnapped, no way of getting home, no passports or anything in those days. They don’t even know where they are. So they wheel out Tambo, embalmed so people will still pay to come and see. This is Barnum the greatest Sociopath. I thought, how do I tell that story about a man who was so entrepreneurial that he didn’t give a shit about human life. How do you tell that story through satire? After Tambo dies, no-one knows what happens. 1986 or a bit later they were rebuilding the Chicago Museum and they dig up the floors and find Tambo’s dead body. They just left him there. We managed to get that back to Palm Island and we did a big exhibition in the Dreaming Festival of Tambo and the story. Telling his story was really important.
Barnum joins forces with Ashtons who were just as bad. There was one circus in Australia, The Wirth’s Circus, they had the integrity. Anyway they employ Con Colleano and pay him 1,000 pounds a week. He gets his own apartment on the train. He is the huge attraction and they make a lot of money. Years later Con buys all this land in Allentown, Pennsylvania and has all his family there. Sadly he comes back to Forbes and buys a pub. This is the greatest circus performer in the world. He marries a beautiful English girl, Winnie. They don’t know how to run a business so they lose everything and end up in Florida and he’s still doing his high wire act in a car park. Winnie came back out here and died in a nursing home.
The circus played such a big part in Aboriginal history but people only celebrate. We need to celebrate, against all odds in a complete shanty town that every house was so loved and so cared for but this Council decided to rip it apart and they ripped apart families. They don’t realise by bulldozing Cubawee, the fragmenting of families from a very cared for community which had its own school, it’s own church, it’s own shop. My Grandfather called it Cubawee, they walked off Cabbage Tree Island, it was a strike because Grandfather refused to be told how to live by an old drunk mission manager. You weren’t allowed to leave with the curfews imposed. They rode in the middle of night. Only two families left with Grandfather, they could have been jailed or killed. They walked along the old song-line that is Wyrallah Rd and they headed out to North Lismore because the Indian market gardeners were there who said come and live with us. The Council finds out and says…no fraternising with natives so they move out to Coffee Camp. Finally they end up at Dunoon and it was there at the camp that Grandfather says, this is our country and we want our land back so they fight for years and finally they get this 6 acres at Tuncester. In the space of two years they built a school, a church, a shop, houses and they were there for 34 years but the Council in the 60s felt it was an eyesore. The 60s was the time for assimilation… So stop being dirty blacks and come and live like white people. That strength of Grandfather walking his family off Cabbage Tree Island, there’s no history about it. He could have been hung and no-one would have blinked an eye.
This is the strength of the family that comes through and why you get someone like Francis, who goes to the Olympics, he’s asked to have dinner with the Emperor. This Emperor has done genocide. Again it’s look at the principles, look at the man rather than the title. At the dinner is Dawn Frazer. I’ve been trying to get more info about that because Dawn was Gay and had to keep that a secret. He’s there dealing with the worlds Emperor only to return to Cubawee to see all he’s ever known turned to rubble and his old Aunty sitting in front refusing to move. The bulldozers just came in anyway. That’s what the Lismore City Council thought of us. Some of them still do.
As my father would say, let’s look at the good things of the community. When the flood occurred Koori Mail set up a hub here with food and help. A white lady comes one day and she’s elderly, anxious and she doesn’t know what to do and one of our high profile actors (people came from all over the country) walks up and the elderly lady says, Is this just for Aborigines? No! it’s for everyone. She couldn’t believe the generosity. We piled up so much stuff that she needed so I think that lady shifted her thinking. I look at my brothers and it makes you realise how people deal with things. Another cousin dies, another person is murdered or in a horrible situation. We care! We care about our family and then to see my brother who’s come from a big loving family to do better, do better and then his young son suicides. To bring it back so closely, it just says that we have to tell stories, everyone has a story. When you understand the circumstances you perhaps can understand the person, but also why are we seeing youth suicide? We need to talk about it. In Aboriginal communities we are doing funerals every week. We are funeraled out and dialogue like this is another way to go…you are not alone. Also more than ever and I think of my brothers here, men don’t express, they don’t show their emotions, they were brought up in those eras. I think if you know a little bit more about us, it might open your world and I’d say there isn’t an Aboriginal family who hasn’t been affected by children, and babies being taken at gunpoint and being put in homes like Uncle Fletchers children. Grandmothers who didn’t eat because there wasn’t enough food. Down and down the generations of the battles. Even today you can’t rent in Lismore if you have the name Roberts, because you might rip up the floorboards. You might understand why we are seeing these increased numbers of people giving up.
After October 14 last year, we nearly all wanted to give up. When you live in a nation where you know who you are, you’ve been told all your life, one side of your family is from here and the other side is from County Tyrone and how fabulous that is. They told us in Richmond River High or wherever we were that we were the black kids and this is all our capacity and value was, so stories like this can increase the value of who we are. We are the Native Title Holders of the Northern Rivers, South East QLD and yet this community decided to say NO. Why are they so fearful of us? What do you fear? Because all we will do is give you knowledge. So when your dam fucks up or you can’t get food, we’ll show you how and where to do it. We have a different philosophy, It’s not about material ownership, it’s about kinship. If you are on our country and you were born seven generations ago you would have been given an Aboriginal name and placed in our society. Everyone is interconnected and everyone lives on country and everyone has a purpose of why they are here and have a belonging. For me telling stories like this might perhaps shift that psychology that someone might look at me and think I’m a dirty, uneducated, half caste and instead they might look at me and go, Wow, these could be friends, these are our neighbours, and we showed what we do in that big flood. It’s how every black fella thinks. We take responsibility for people on our country.
In Uluru when they stopped the climb, I worked with that community a lot. Old Aboriginal people the old ways are, if someone dies on your country you take responsibility because it happened on your home so you try and keep the place safe. The amount of people dying walking up Uluru so they could conquer Mother Nature which just doesn’t happen, was a heartache for the local traditional owners, the Native Title holders, because they are responsible for that falling German man because he’s had a heart attack. They would then travel to that man’s country to see the family at their own cost. No reporter talks to them, they just have assumptions, so when Pauline Hanson comes and says…’Just get there and take that climb because the black fellas don’t want ya doin it. It’s just a bloody rock.’ No understanding! If Australians knew just what those family members of Uluru were doing. They would be saying Wow! What diplomats! What ambassadors! because that’s what we are. We represent our country. We don’t want it back from you, we want it cared for. “
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