Warning: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that this article contains images and names of Indigenous Australians who have died
We’re bumping along a rugged bush track when the scrub clears to reveal the spot our guide calls “the east coast Uluru”.
“It’s a bit of a surprise,” says Carl McGrady, a Gomeroi elder. “It’s almost hard to believe this place exists in this environment.”
Boobera Lagoon stretches before us: a vast body of water spanning 7km, fed by an artesian spring beneath the dry plains of north-western New South Wales. There is no sign for the turnoff. The track is deliberately rough. Traditional owners would prefer to keep this spot hidden.
The sacred waterhole has been a meeting place for Aboriginal people for millennia. And now it has become a place of baptism for Gomeroi people returning to country – which, on this scorching spring morning, includes me.
“For mob who come home for the first time, I say go to Boobera and jump in the water, then you know you’re home,” Uncle Carl says.
Pelicans on Boobera Lagoon
It has taken me 34 years to get here, even though I was raised just three hours away. I am a proud descendant of the Kamilaroi people (also spelled Gamilaroi/Gomeroi/Gamilaraay*), whose lands cover a sprawling patch of NSW, from Tamworth up to the Queensland border.
I grew up hearing tales from my pop, Neville Binge, of yowies and bunyips – and, towards the end of his life, about the mission days. I had visited my country, usually for work trips. But I had never visited the place where Pop’s story, and so many of our Kamilaroi stories, began.
For the past few months I’ve been speaking to First Nations communities who are reclaiming languages that were stolen from them during colonisation. Thanks to the work of elders, the first steps to learning language for my generation can be as simple as signing up to an online Tafe course. But I have never found the right time to start and it has riddled me with guilt.
The few basic words I’ve learned – yaama (hello), yaluu (see you again), yinarr (woman), dhinawan (emu) – I’ve gleaned mostly from apps, workshops and books. While reading JM Field’s essay on Gamilaraay kinship, The Eagle and the Crow, I was struck by how much is lost in translation.
He describes yarragaa – “the warm wind that kisses the trees to make them bloom”. The direct translation is “spring”.
It bothers me that my understanding of these concepts is not grounded in place. As Uncle Carl says, if you’re learning Japanese, you need to go to Japan. If you’re learning Gamilaraay, you need to “come out and taste the dirt”.
So I’ve travelled to my late grandfather’s country around the tiny Aboriginal town of Toomelah, just shy of the Queensland border in north-western NSW, to learn how language, country and culture intersect, and to find my place within them.
Carl McGrady on the banks of the Macintyre River in Boggabilla
Uncle Carl, 72, has graciously agreed to be my guide. The self-professed “king of the border” is inundated with requests to share his culture. He agreed to mine largely out of loyalty to Pop, who coached him as a young footballer in Tenterfield, three hours east of the Toomelah mission where they were both raised, a decade apart.
Our first stop is a patch of bushland about 50 minutes’ drive west of Toomelah (Dhumalaa, meaning “people who move a lot”). Kamilaroi families were moved between several sites after the NSW government restricted Aboriginal people to missions and reserves.
This one, known as Old Toomelah, is where my great-grandparents lived from about 1926 to 1938, surviving on rations and bush food – or the odd scrap of offal from a neighbouring farmer.
As we crunch through the dry grass, Uncle Carl plucks a leaf from a saltbush tree and chews on it. In his youth, he says, people would eat goannas but never gumuuma (small lizards). He points out the names and uses of native shrubs: the eurah tree (“blackfella’s penicillin”); warrigal greens and the sacred bambul (orange) tree, said to embody the mother-in-law of Garriya, the rainbow serpent.
“Back when things were being created, everything had spirits: rocks, trees, people,” he explains.
Above: Uncle Carl and Ella explore Old Toomelah
Below: Uncle Carl grew up eating bush foods
All that remains of the mission are a few house stumps, a large clearing where “the old people would be dancing around the fires” and a collection of headstones, which Uncle Carl points out as we clamber through a barbed-wire fence.
A headstone at the Old Toomelah cemetery
“The cluster of small ones is part of the reason why they had to move,” he says.
An unknown disease had swept through the mission, killing about a dozen babies in six months. It is a ritual to come here and touch the tombstones as a mark of respect.
As we drive into “New Toomelah”, the last mission site for Gomeroi families upon which the present-day town was built, Uncle Carl gestures to the junction where the Dumaresq and Macintyre rivers meet.
“Your Pop would’ve known every blade of grass along there,” he says. “That was our playground.”
After school, he says, the kids would swap their uniforms for threadbare shorts “more like lap laps” (loin cloths), disappearing into the bush to hunt until sundown. They were too young to understand that their lives were dictated by the strict protocols of the NSW Aborigines Protection Act, which wasn’t repealed until 1969.
Adults needed permission to work in town, and the two-bedroom houses – usually home to at least eight kids sleeping top to toe – were routinely inspected for cleanliness. Parents lived in constant fear of having their children taken. Speaking language was forbidden.
Above: A cottage that would have housed up to 12 people in Toomelah
Below left: an old photo of people at the mission there
Below right: Toomelah legend Charlie Dennison
“The fear of that far outweighed the hunger and need to want to pass on the culture,” Uncle Carl says. “Unfortunately here we are a hundred years later … trying to resurrect it.”
He grew up speaking mission English – mostly English words arranged to mimic the fluid word placement of Gomeroi grammar. It was a sly way to retain some Gomeroi words and language conventions without drawing the ire of the mission manager. A standard greeting would be “Where you from come?” I never heard my Pop speak his language.
It wasn’t until Uncle Carl started teaching at a local school in the 1990s that he and other teachers set about trying to revive his mother tongue – initially by furiously scribbling notes as the aunties reminisced over billy tea by the river.
“Those days were the first sort of realisation that our language was not dead – it’d been asleep,” he says.
Ella and Uncle Carl visit a classroom at Toomelah public school
Those scribblings turned into books, which helped shape the school’s first Gamilaraay language course. There are now more than 90 Gamilaraay speakers, ranking it among the top 10 Indigenous languages being revived nationally, according to a 2019 survey by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. Schools in a dozen NSW towns study Gamilaraay/Gomeroi.
These days Uncle Carl reckons he’s about 30% fluent but he knows enough to “chuck a few lingo words” into conversations with his grandkids or students.
“My language is my country,” he says. “I couldn’t see those things ever being separate.”
Sometimes the 72-year-old takes youngsters to Boobera Lagoon to share its creation story, as he does for me.
Standing at the water’s edge, he tells me the waterhole was traditionally the resting place of the Garriya, shunned by the local Murris who dared not disturb his spirit. One day they decided they had to find a way to hunt the teeming wildlife along its banks, nominating their bravest warrior, Dhulala, to confront the serpent.
“Loaded up with his super spears and boomerangs and shield, he came down to the point and cooeed out, ‘Garriya, ngami-la ngay! [Look at me!],’” says Uncle Carl, his voice booming across the water. “Garriya came to the surface and saw this cheeky fella and started coming towards him.”
Garriya fended off Dhulala’s weapons and chased him across the plains, carving channels across the landscape as he went. Dhulala found shelter under a bambul tree – Garriya’s mother-in-law. It is a Gomeroi custom that you do not acknowledge your mother-in-law, so Garriya returned to the lagoon, where he still rests.
Gomeroi people will not visit the waterhole after dark. “It’s just a no-go area,” Uncle Carl says. “To me, it’s part of my religion.”
As our trip nears its end, I return to the lagoon.
Uncle Carl’s words are fresh in my mind: “Putting your toes in the water at Boobera, touching the headstones at Old Toomelah – that’s a different level of being on country.”
Ella stands at the shore of the waterhole
I do not yet know my language. But I’ve tasted the saltbush and I’ve heard the chatter of birds descending on the lagoon as the sun dips, and that feels like a good place to start.
I step into the milky water and feel the grainy mud between my toes.
A gust of wind sends down a shower of leaves. It feels as though someone is saying hello.
It isn’t until I get home that I find the right word to describe the sensation: yarragaa.
*The spelling of words and how stories are told can change depending on what has been passed down through different families and cultural groups
