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On a Friday night in April 1966, 16-year-old Norma Ingram was one of seven young Aboriginal women formally “presented” as part of the inaugural Sydney Indigenous debutante ball at Paddington Town Hall. “It was a lot of that old English stuff, ‘coming out into society’,” the Wiradjuri woman says of the event, which was attended by some 200 Aboriginal people.
Revellers passed under a boomerang arch to enter the hall, which was festooned with Indigenous motifs in ochre colours. Ingram wore a white ballgown. “We were all just teenagers,” she says of her debutante cohort. “It was fun for us, and we made a whole lot of new friends.”
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At age 12, in the late 1990s, James Tylor learned to carve. His stepfather, a Barkindji man, taught him to make clubs and spears at the old Menindee government mission in far western New South Wales, long since handed back to Indigenous people once forced to live there. But their relationship was fraught: besides imparting cultural knowhow when camping, hunting and fishing together, he says his stepdad could be violent.
Tylor, born in Mildura in 1986, was living on the Barka-Darling River with his mother Christine, a proud anti-war, environmental and Indigenous rights activist of Nunga (Kaurna Miyurna) descent, whose traditional lands include the Adelaide plains.
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As a child in the 1950s, growing up on a cattle station in the dusty red Kimberley, Mervyn Street remembers finding a rock in his mother’s kitchen, with numerical markings on one side. This, he would learn, was a “black penny”.
“My dad had, on the back of the penny, three ones – 1, 1, 1 – I didn’t know what that meant,” he recalls now, wearing a worn bush hat and sitting at Mangkaja Arts Centre near his home in the Muludja community, east of Fitzroy Crossing. The numbers, his father told him, were ration entitlements for flour, tea and sugar.
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