KNOWLEDGE CENTRE

GOSNELLS

Oral History Interview

Mr Ted (Edward) Wilkes

Date: 27 May 2008

Conducted by Dr Mary Anne Jebb For City of Gosnells

Aboriginal Oral History project

This is a verbatim transcript of a spoken interview. The reader is asked to keep in mind that the transcript reflects exactly what was said and is in a conversational style. Only umms and ahhs and some obvious false starts, mistakes or repeated words have been left out. Copyright Ted Wilkes. Permission is given for this interview to be held for public access at the Gosnells’s libraries and reproduced for Gosnells historical research.

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It’s Mary Anne Jebb, it’s the 27th of May 2008 and I’m here with Ted Wilkes who has agreed to be interviewed for the City of Gosnells Aboriginal Oral History project. All copyright in this interview remains with Mr Wilkes but he has agreed that the City of Gosnells will be able to use it for the purposes outlined in the consent and copyright form. So can you give me your full name and where you were born and when you were born? Yeah my full name is Edward Thomas Wilkes. There in lies a bit of a story but I was born in Dwellingup and I was born in 1955 making me fifty two (52) years old. Can you give me the date and the month? I was born on the 14 of the 10th [October] 1955. And your mother’s name? My mother’s name is Judith Margaret Wilkes, nee Davis and my father’s name is Edward George Wilkes. Can you tell me the names of your mother’s mother and father? My mother’s mother was Alice Davis nee McPhee and my father’s mother was Enid Wilkes nee Dirk [her Aboriginal name] Mumanbulla, there you go. That was interesting I used to think about your mother’s mothers and your father’s mothers and an indicator that time certainly slips by and you might not remember those things as poignantly as you once might have but yeah my mother’s mother was a lady from the Kimberley so the name Alice McPhee as I said Alice Davis she married into a Davis man but her McPhee connection is up to the Kimberley around the Doon Doon Station area. She was taken from there as a young woman and brought down here and ended up catching up and having a liaison with a bloke called Bill Davis and they produced thirteen (13) I think thirteen (13) offspring and my mother is the youngest of a pretty big family. Whereas my father is the eldest son of a Edward Thomas Wilkes who was my grandfather and has the same name as I and a woman from Laverton who was stolen or taken away from Laverton as a ten (10) year old and therein lies another story and another connection back to another part of the world but if you’re to talk about Perth it certainly comes down through my Wilkes connection and if we talk about Gosnells certainly my father and other Wilkes people claimed the Swan River and the environs around the Swan River as our traditional lands. Can you tell me some more about your grandparents, where were they born? Do you know where they were born? You said your grandma was born in the Kimberley on Doon Doon. Well my grandmother was actually born in Wyndham but after a long period of not knowing my mother found out that she had a connection back through her mother’s side of the family to the Kimberley when she was probably an adult and really didn’t strongly identify with that connection until she got a little bit older and claimed to be a Nyungar woman because that’s where she was born and that’s where she was brought up. My grandmother who was an amazing woman, I never met her, but she’s the mother of all of the Davis’ that are the Nyungar people that have the Davis name and some of the Davis’ who you might be familiar with are people like Jack Davis whose one of my mother’s older brothers. An oral history is sometimes a little bit confronting because there are issues you learn about other people and they come through life particularly people in eras gone by and you find out things that may not necessarily be as you thought they were so I’ll leave it at that. But there are other

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people in the world of Davis like Dot Collard [passed on] whose now the only last living member of that generation and is now eighty four (84) years old is the oldest Davis, living Davis, person. That’s my aunty Dot whose one of my mum’s older sisters but all the rest have passed on but the children of all of these kids have been successful in trying to activate for positive change in the Aboriginal quality of life. (5:28) People like Dean Collard and Barbara Henry there are a few others around but I mean they’ve passed on, a few of the older cousins but yeah it’s an interesting attachment to this woman called Alice McPhee. My mother found out that she was connected to the Kimberley via a bit of an accident but there was a group of people that came down from what’s called Turkey Creek or Warman community and they came down to do a play called ‘Fire, Fire Burning Brightly’ and it was about a massacre that had occurred up in the region where they lived as young people and a few of these young people saw it and they enacted this play and they have actually taken it across to Melbourne and they did the play in the big auditorium here in Wembley up at one of the open air auditoriums, I don’t now what its called. but my mother and I actually welcomed them to the country but after one of my young brothers was invited to be a prop in the play and this young brother of mine looks exactly like these fellas themselves and we had asked these people if they knew of a lady called Alice McPhee and some of the old people that were involved because there was some quite old people came down for this, sat down and had a bit of a yarn. One of my white mates, wedjela mates came back to me and said ‘This mob would really like to catch up with your mum.’ So I took mum up to the place where they were doing the rehearsals and they had a yarn with mum and after about fifteen (15) minutes of going away with the older women and coming back and they were all crying and mum was crying and I believe that’s when she made the connection that her mother was from, not far from where the Warman community is situated today and these old fellas were able to relate back through their knowledge that yep there was a young woman called Alice taken away from that country in the early parts of the last century, we’re talking about 1900, in the early 1900s before 1910, 1912 I think and consequently coming down here with two bankers. She had actually been somehow I don’t know what you’d call it, adopted or taken control of in that area by these two (2) white bankers but when she came down here she stayed in Wagin with these two (2) bankers and I think they learnt her how to read and write, because she was quite adamant that all of her children including my mother and the older aunties and brothers would all know how to read and write in English and hence I’m probably as competent as I am in English and speaking because of I think back to that grandmother. On the other side, the grandmother on the other side was stolen from Laverton as a young girl. The story goes back that she was the child of a white father an early miner up in that area and an Aboriginal woman and that the white father and the Aboriginal woman had actually created a bit of unrest with one of the local tribesmen who had been promised my great grandmother, it might have been my grandmother as a bride and anyway he swooped into the camp one night and speared my great grandmother, that’s my grandmother’s mum, speared her killed her and had thrown the spears at the old white fella or the white grandfather, that now I know as my grandfather, I don’t even know what his name is you know but anyway the white grandfather apparently got away because he was lucky he had a big long coat on and the spear only pierced the coat and he was able to run away. Anyway my grandmother was left all alone on the outskirts of Laverton and there’s a story about her told in a story by someone who did some research up there, a little book called A Drop in the Bucket [by Margaret Morgan] and there was a reference to this woman, a young girl called Enid who was taken as a ten (10) year old from Laverton and brought down to the Mogumber Mission and its at Mogumber Mission that not long after that she made an acquaintance with a bloke called Edward Thomas Wilkes who’s my grandfather and they married later in life. (10:14)

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He was pretty old when he married my grandmother and had some children and my father was the oldest son of I think about seven (7) children and his name was, he was named after his grandfather, so that’s why I said the Edward Thomas Wilkes name is very important how we connect back. So I’ve talked about the two (2) grandmothers the two (2) grandfathers the Bill Davis’ is actually the son of an Afghan camel driver and an Aboriginal woman I think from Roebourne and this Afghan camel driver was driving the water down into the mining areas down through the Pilbara down to the goldmining areas and consequently had a liaison with an Aboriginal woman and had a son called Bill, Bill Davis. Bill Davis met up with Alice McPhee down here in Perth and likewise with my grandfather Edward Thomas Wilkes met up with Enid and produced my father and my mother and so there you go that’s that little bit of history back into the world of where I have some connections and obviously through the Afghan camel driver I have a connection back to Afghanistan, he’s my great grandfather. Now in connecting all that up then the Wilkes name goes back to England so Edward Thomas Wilkes who’s my grandfather was the son of Edward George Wilkes who was the son of Thomas Hubert Wilkes who came to Perth in 1852 and took and Aboriginal girl down south with him, got her pregnant, kicked her out and she found her way back from Bunbury up to Perth because this is her tribal area, found her way back up here and brought up the child here after getting lots of assistance from the tribes down south so she actually got assistance from the tribe at Bunbury, my great grandfather was born in the Benjer Swamp which is just on [near] the Collie River if you don’t know it, its there and brought him back to Perth and named him Edward George Wilkes. Therein you can make a connection to the name Edward because Edward is very English, very royal, very sort of kingly whatever as is George and as are Thomas, they’re very English names and Wilkes is sort of European in the sense of there might be Vilkes and Wilkes and sons and Wilkies so we connect back to England. Did you know your grandparents, any of your grandparents? I knew my grandmother on the, the grandmother from Laverton was the only one that I can visibly remember, my grandfather Wilkes died when I was about five (5) or six (6) years old so I still maintain I can still remember him being around and touching me and passing on what must have been the Nyungar or the Whadjuk Nyungar because Whadjuk Nyungar is what I am, I’m a Whadjuk Nyungar form the Perth area, we call this area the Derbal Yerrigan. I can still feel that, I feel as though he had a spiritual connection to me, so he I didn’t really remember him in the visual sense but I reckon if someone hypnotises me one day and says I reckon I’d be able to do it. So where were you brought up? Yeah my father maintains that he had no choice but to follow this beautiful black woman down south. He lived in Perth and he used to, apparently there is some good stories around Perth but my father actually went to school in Eden Hill with Rolf Harris and he used to tell the story about how him and Rolf and these other boys would get up to mischief and I said ‘With Rolf Harris?’ and he’d go ‘Yep, yep with Rolf Harris’ and this is way back but I’ve had stories about my father’s involvement around the Perth area and its certainly impressive and I’m very impressed with some of the stories about him. He followed my mother or he went down south he reckons chasing mum because she had her family living down at Boddington and they lived in Ranford and they had a connection around Ranford because of the mill, the timber and the mill. Ranford is on the Hotham River which is a great river to be brought up on. (15:01) In the old days when I was brought up there it was fresh water so it hadn’t been impacted on by the salinity levels today where all the fish, fresh water fish and all the things have died. I was born in Dwellingup my father was a forestry worker at the

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time, had chased up my mum; father worked in the Forestry Department. He and mum got married on the first (1st ) of January 1955 because I was born ten (10) months later wasn’t I, so they got married in Boddington I apparently was born in Dwellingup Hospital. I used to be the pride and joy of my mother in one of those little round sort of cots, prams that used to have, the little cane prams, there was a couple of photos of me when I was younger. I was a little baby in Dwellingup then they moved to Ranford; he worked in the timber mill at Ranford. I remember Ranford because I’d not left Ranford until we were grade one (1) I was about six (6) or seven (7) years old before we left so I had some really fond memories of Ranford because of the river and the fishing and the being carried on my big father’s shoulders as we walked up in the night and we would fish and we’d catch the Red Finned Perch and we’d go hunting and basically lived off the land and I remember in those days goannas were part of the staple diet, kangaroo meat was and still is a part of my diet but bush tucker was commonly a supplement of Indigenous people’s other food sources which were the shop, I won’t say the supermarket because there weren’t supermarkets around in those days and then we moved from Boddington to Collie. I lived in a little town called Fernbrook on the railway line as a six (6) year old until I was probably eleven (11) so I had five (5) years living in the bush and there were no electric lights, no bitumen roads into where we lived, we lived on the railway line between Brunswick and Collie and my father then became a labourer on the railways and helped to maintain the railway line that took the coal down from Collie down to Brunswick and then through to Bunbury where it was exported to wherever. Your brothers and sisters? Did you have brothers and sisters? Yeah I’ve got, we had a big family we had eight (8) brothers and sisters. I’ve got five (5) brothers and three (3) sisters, we’ve lost one of our brothers; I’m the oldest in the family. We lost the second eldest brother a few years ago and we were a very close knit family. We travelled from after living in the forest around Brunswick and Collie we, as I said we lived off the land a lot of the diet we ate then was certainly kangaroo meat we’d snare and hunt the kangaroo with kangaroo dogs and if a person would come with a gun, we’d go out with a gun but not too many Nyungars had guns in those days. Do you remember any favourite kangaroo dogs? Or their names? Oh yeah there were lots of good dogs, there was a kangaroo dog called Single that was a wonderful kangaroo dog as was a dog called No Go and because there was always a Bluey, there was Soxy and my uncle he was a magnificent trainer of dogs, would train these dogs to what we call kill and show. So it’s alright to get a kangaroo dog run down a kangaroo but if he kills a kangaroo two (2) miles from where you are way down the other end of the bush and doesn’t take you back there after he’s killed it that’s of no consequence or no use to you. So my uncle trained them and it was very strategic how he would train them because he would starve them for three (3) days he’d put them on a chain and literally all they’d get was a drink of water and he’d say to us children ‘don’t you dare feed those dogs, if I see any of you children feeding the dogs you’re in trouble’ and then after about three (3) days he’d say ‘yeah they’re ready to run’ and they’d go out because they knew if they killed the kangaroos and showed him where the kangaroos were. So they’d come back and he’d check their mouths to see if they had blood on their mouths and then he’d say ‘right where is he boy?’ and the dogs would take him right to the kangaroo and he would then proceed to carve up the kangaroo, we’d take the pieces of meat off the kangaroo that we could carry like the legs and the back part, usually the dogs would get the top half or what we might call the leftovers but they always got a good feed, the dogs, out of it after they’d killed enough and we’d go home with this kangaroo meat and the

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mothers and the other people would cook it up into stews with the appropriate vegetables. We were always well fed after a good hunt; there were times when we went without I can tell you. (20:26) There were times when I can remember being quite bare in the kitchen and there were times when mum had to really struggle to make ends meet but we got there. So from Collie as a ten (10) year old or eleven (11) year old I moved to Williams and Williams as you know is a small country town on the highway between Perth and Albany. What I failed to say during this time I continually had trips back to Perth probably once a year I would be revisiting Perth and coming, my father would come up to see cousins and I can remember as a young fella going to the Swan River down at the back of the Swan River before any of the houses were developed properly up around Eden Hill and seeing little Aboriginal kids running up and down the river with no clothes on and talking to old Aboriginal men up in the back of the vineyards where the Italians used to put them down the back and say ‘you work for me and I’ll pay you two (2) bob, two (2) bob a day and you can have as much wine as you liked’ but I remember those day and they were funny days because I would think why does dad and why is he taking me back all the time, you know it was encouraging I loved coming up to Perth every now and then it’s a wonderful a big world, different world, that’s when Royal Perth Hospital was certainly the tallest building in the vicinity if you can remember those days. How did you get there? Usually there was an Aboriginal bloke with a car that might come along. My father was pretty well liked within the community and now and then he would be able to get someone with a car to say ’let’s go to Perth’ and I remember it conking out three (3) or four (4) times on the way up here and fixing up tyres, blown out tyres otherwise we would catch a bus or get on the train in those days. You’d catch a train around through Pingelly and Narrogin and up through Brookton and you’d come into Perth via that route. Where did you stay? Can you remember one of the places you stayed at? When we got here we would stay with my aunty and my uncle on my mother’s side who lived in Maddington. Where was that? Can you tell me more about their house? In Maddington, on Kelvin Road in Maddington, before all of the factories and what you see there now there were just houses and I can remember lots of Italians and lots of little, sort of they may have even been little farmlets where they had chickens out the back and roosters crowing and people had little paddocks and you could see little horses and now and then you’d see a sheep I think so it was still on the, it was sort of the outskirts of Perth and it wasn’t so much of a cluster around housing as it is today. What uncle was it? It was my uncle Albert Henry and my mum’s sister Barbara Henry, who was nee Davis, Barbara Davis who’s one of the older sisters. So we would stop with them, I remember going to school in Maddington when I was in grade two (2) for six (6) months and I can remember going to school again in Maddington when I was in grade four (4) so there were times when the transient nature of Aboriginal people in those days kept catching up with family, yeah mum and dad would move up to Perth and we’d go back whenever there was a need to go back. Predominantly we lived in the southern regions when I was younger up until I was thirteen (13) I’d lived down

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south and I probably went to a lot of other different schools. I went to, we stopped with an uncle and aunty in Jarrahwood down the other side at Busselton for a couple of weeks and I went to school for four (4) or five (5) days because mum wasn’t sure when she was going to get back to Williams, but Williams was an interesting adventure for me because Williams was an introduction to indifference and intolerance and lack of compassion and possibly bigotry and racism in fact. Can you give me some examples? Kids chasing you on a bike, white kids chasing an Aboriginal kid on a bike and me being the Aboriginal kid and about fifteen (15) to twenty (20) young white kids chasing around on the bike because I’d done something out on the sport field that they didn’t like, not that they didn’t like, that the big fella didn’t like so if a big white kid took a dislike to you and started running after you and said ‘c’mon’ to all the other little white kids they’d all jump behind him and start running after you and yeah so I’ve had some traumatic experiences as a result of being an Aboriginal kid brought up in some of the towns that I was brought up in but Williams was certainly the town that alerted me to the fact that white kids and white people certainly in that era had a predisposition about where they thought others belonged. (25:33) How did your parents get on with white people? My parents were very intimidated by white people. White people represented evil in a sense, white people represented authority, white people represented a dominance of a land that was ours. Now I’m sad to say that my mother took to thinking that Christianity was to be the saviour because some white people had come in and said if you take on Christian values like us you’ll be saved and again I now know that having studied anthropology, more inclined to study spirituality and other religions and Christianity’s got lots and lots of gaps in it that’s for sure. I don’t knock people for having religious values I think its good but I think you’ve got to practice what you preach if you’re going to do that sort of stuff and try and impress on other people of different cultural backgrounds. The reason we’ve taken your language away from you is because its paganistic and the reason you’re not allowed to eat bush tucker anymore is because its not the in thing to do. So I can look back on it now with a little bit more of an informed basis to what my parents put up with but they were very intimidated by and it was brought on because their lack of knowledge and their lack of English in a sense I think both my parents were probably speaking an English that was really still their second language even though they didn’t speak their first language fluently it was still had to speak English if you didn’t go to school and you didn’t get a proper education in English. I think my father went to grade three (3) and my mother went to grade seven (7) and that was probably on and off in the sense but my mother did well, mum did well. She was pretty smart she could read and write and do some really smart things and she knew how to think. Was there much Nyungar language in your childhood? In my childhood before I got to school there was. I can remember it, I can remember Nyungars having a wonderful discussion some of the old fellas discussing things in language but the older fellas, but the young people and I’m calling my dad and my mum probably the younger people of the time were more inclined to forget about the language because the old fellas didn’t have the ability to pass it down and all the kids at school were being told that you’re not to speak language anyway. I remember going to school and calling a dog a twert and saying ‘Miss there’s a twert in the playground’ and when she asked me what a twert was and I said ‘that’s that thing there’, ‘you mean a dog’ and I said ‘yeah’ and she said ‘you’re never to call that dog a twert again, its not a twert it’s a dog’ and when I think back on that word now I think a

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dog is a dog isn’t it you know a twert is a twert and a dog is a dog and a teacher is a teacher. So I have all sorts of different reactions to things that have happened in my life, I get quite upset if I think about some of the things that have happened to me sometimes and then I think that’s why I’m good at what I do because I have had a good learning school I have been through an apprenticeship and a half probably more. So there was quite a bit of Aboriginal language, of Nyungar language in your childhood? Yeah there was a lot of Nyungar language in my childhood up until probably seven (7) up until then I can still remember it and after that it started to diminish because we started to move around and you’d be mixing with different Nyungars and more often that not as time went by you’d be conversing more and more in English because you were going to school and you were thinking in constructs in English so the kids would be going home to their mums and wanting to know what Nip and Dora and Dick and Mum and Dad got up to out on the seashore with their pail and their bucket. (30:02) Was there much music in your childhood? My father had the most magnificent voice, could play the accordion and mouth organ, the old man would play mouth organ all the time. My mother was beautiful she was a song bird and my mother and father would sing together on Friday and Saturday nights while they were having a social evening using alcohol as a way to get nice and high and happy and that was a part of my wonderful memories. I then joined in with them as soon as I could, as soon as I became eighteen (18) and eligible to socialise using alcohol, not that I waited until I was eighteen (18) we always used to sing with them when we were kids, they would always encourage us to come through and sing. I now play the guitar I play just about any musical implement you can give me. If you give me a bit of time I can grasp the concept of music in the, not that I read music but I understand chords and I understand why there are music sheets and what the all mean and I don’t think it would take long for me to really learn how to read music if I really wanted to I just don’t have time to go into it now but I would have loved the music teacher at the school I was going to, to really appreciate and respect me for who I was. I used to love singing I actually think I’m not a bad musician I’ve sung with people like Paul Kelly and Archie Roach at shows here in Perth in my youth and as a younger man. What were you singing with your family when you were young and you all getting together? Mainly Irish songs, Can you give me an example? Oh there were songs about sadness, about you know ‘Take Me Home Kathleen’, ‘Danny Boy’, ‘Roses are Red, Violets are Blue, Sugar is Sweet and so are you’. A lot of romantic, now and again you’d get the sad songs but a lot of it was about Country and Western and songs of emotional attachment to the land and to one another and about love yeah, we were one of the greatest, and we still are, the Aboriginal mob are still one of the greatest populations of survivors in this world. We have a resilience which is ours to behold and when you think about it the songs and even though men and women got into frustrating and violent situations in the past, I can remember mum and dad having lots and lots of friends around and sometimes there’d be some mix ups and some fights and they’d all wake up the next morning with black eyes and bruises and all cuddling and loving one another and saying ‘I’m

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sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry’. So it was a very intimate sort of relationship with their essential connections and I say essential connections because they needed them and you couldn’t just cut them because you’d just had a violent situation happen around you, you couldn’t cut off a relationship with your man or with your sister or your brother because you’d just had a big argument. We were just too poor not to be able to say sorry to one another. So yeah I remember all those good days and they were good things because mum as a woman in a family and we never had lots of money, we never had assets so we would, you know I never had a TV until I was a lot older and when we got our first black and white TV I can remember that was the most amazing feeling to walk into your house and say ‘we’ve got a TV’ you know knowing that all the white kids in the town had TV’s and you could see all these big antennas sticking up I the sky because in those days you had to have a big long antennas if you lived in a little town like Williams and then we got ours put on the roof and it was a status symbol. The same as the first loo that you got, that was the flushing loo, they were status symbols and I have no doubt that your parents got a bit of a high out of that and certainly as children we got major highs out of those sorts of developments and of course and then the Williams gang, the railway line gang had closed and mum and dad had to move to Perth. I was in second year high school and we had to move back to Perth, we moved to Gosnells and that was in 1969. What address did you go to? We moved to Hicks Street, 154 Hicks Street Gosnells just down the road from the school and close enough to the environment which I would have called mine, the natural environment to be able to allow the children and dad and mum to enjoy a new adventure because we were in a big town now, we were in a big town. We were on a railway line, we’ve got a school down the road which is a bigger school than any of the other kids, I actually had to go to Armadale High School and Armadale High School was the second most populated high school in Western Australia. (35:28) How did you get there? I went on the old steam train, so back in those days and I was one of the last kids to be able to say that ‘yep I hung out of the doors on the old steam trains’ because they were going out when I had come to Perth, they were on their last legs or the bus, now and again we would catch the MTT bus, the old bus. Do you know why your parents went to that actual address? State Housing had a house that was vacated by some previous tenants and my mother had rung up her brother Jack who was a bit of an Aboriginal activist at the time and said ‘look we’ve got to move from down here, the situation down here, Eddie’s got no work, I’m wanting to get back up to Perth. I want to live not too far away from where my other sister Barbara is and a few other sisters’ and I think mum as the younger sister also knew that there were two older sisters in Perth, one was over at North Beach, one was in Belmont or Rivervale and by being in Perth she could have access to her own comfort to one another, like a security blanket in many sense in those days and being the younger sister I now pick up on that, that she wanted to be around older siblings in her family. I mean my dad was a pretty demanding man in many ways I guess she needed to make sure that she had assurance that she could survive with what she had around her. Did your dad find employment? Yeah dad got up here and worked on the Gosnells and Armadale railway gangs and unfortunately after a while the gangs closed, one of them closed down, the Gosnells

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gang and then the Armadale gang and he lost employment again and not long after that he had a massive heart attack and passed away. I was a young man, I was in my early twenties (20s), I was up north at the time I was working in the in the Aboriginal Sites Department so I was out in the Kimberleys doing some site survey work with the Australian Army and some anthropologist who worked at the museum and I got notified that my dad had just passed away and I had to fly back down and it took me a day and a half to get back down here but I then became the man in the family as a young fella and I had these five (5) younger brothers, was it five (5) [counts them] yep five (5) younger brothers so there were nine (9) in our family, five (5) and three (3) sisters and mum. I also had two children and a young woman myself. Can you tell me your wife’s name and your children’s names? I’m no longer with the mother of my children. Some of my children still, they all live around that area. So my oldest daughter lives in Maddington, my second oldest daughter lives in Gosnells, my third oldest daughter lives in Belmont, my fourth oldest lives in Manning, my oldest son now about to move into a house in Kelmscott and my second oldest son lives in Maddington and my youngest boy does a bit of a shift between me and Yokine and Gosnells where his mother stays with one of my daughters. Can you tell me their names? The names are Sonia, so my oldest daughter is Sonia, my second oldest is Sandra, my third oldest is Georgina, my fourth oldest is Elizabeth, my fifth oldest is my oldest son, Edward, the next one is another daughter Sharon and then Adrian and then Ian all very strategically planned believe it or not. When you’re an Aboriginal man and you’re a Nyungar man that need to make sure that the Edward Wilkes name is continued so that you can connect back to Thomas Hubert Wilkes who took the Aboriginal woman from the Swan River. I’ve had to name my boy Edward George Wilkes after his grandfather because he named me after his grandfather because he named me after his grandfather and so on and so it goes back to this white bloke Thomas Hubert Wilkes and all these white Wilkes’ who live down south are all related to us back through this old fella. (40:20) So when you first came to Gosnells what was the experience like for you, you were thirteen (13), you had to go to a new school… thirteen (13), fourteen (14)? I could answer it in two ways, it was an adventure, it was an exhilarating feeling to get away from the muck that I remember Williams being. I knew that getting out of Williams was a positive so I was quite prepared to find whatever it was I had to live in or under whether it was a big jarrah tree or whether it was somewhere else, on the side of a river or whether it was I’ve lived in the humpies down south in where Burekup where all the Nyungars used to put up little tins and make their little mia mias. So I didn’t have any expectations about this fancy little house, but gee it was a deadly looking little house when we got there. There was no real grass growing out the front of it, there was a big white sort of lots of white sand out the back so they’d obviously gone out and cleaned the backyard and they’d renovated this house because it had had Aboriginal tenants in it before and it was pretty worn down old house but it didn’t look like it was worn down, it looked pretty new. Course we walked into in and there were three bedrooms there was a main bedroom for mum and dad, and dad stopped down south for about three (3) or four (4) months before he came up because his job was still going for another three (3) months. So mum was in the man bedroom then there were two (2) other bedrooms. Now at that time nearly all of my brothers and sisters were just about born, we were born one year

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after one another, mum and dad were intent on having a big family quickly. So there were five (5) boys in the bedroom and the girls had the other room so there were two (2) bunk beds this side, two (2) bunk beds that side and that was it and we got bunk beds, you know I mean to have a bunk bed were something you never thought, because you were sleeping foot to foot and usually there were three (3) or four (4) of us on the one little bed sometimes sleeping foot to foot. So Gosnells was an adventure, an experience, I knew it was going to be good and consequently it was not only good it was a reconnecting with what was my ancestral or my spiritual land and having visited on those odd occasions when I did as a young fella and particularly going to Maddington and being able to run around in the area before, its now been developed there were swamps and lots and lots of wonderful little playgrounds for kids of my era where we would go into these tea trees and these swamps and we would catch gilgies in these swamps and now and then you’d see these little fish floating around and in the winter if the water filled up these swamps you would go in there and there were frogs and there were ducks and there were all sorts of other things so you’d be walking around there in the water, sometimes on a warm day you didn’t mind walking around and then it got a bit deeper but yeah it was just a good experience to know that we came down here. I benefited from because I was pretty smart at school, don’t worry about that, because my mother was a good mother, a good mentor and tutor for me when I got home. I had an advantage over a lot of the other kids I think because of my mother, my mother was just a special woman but anyway I got to Perth, as the oldest brother I was the first kid going to high school, off on the train, all the other kids would be going to primary school. So I’m off to second year high school and my next brother down was doing grade six (6) so he was still at primary school. Armadale high school offered such a different perspective on life because if you go into a school that might have had two hundred (200), kids in it at Williams or three hundred (300) kids then you’re into fifteen hundred (1500) or sixteen hundred (1600) kids and living in a city I saw all sorts of different coloured kids, different coloured eyes, different coloured hair whereas in Williams it was just all these little white kids, all these little blonde haired, blue eyed white kids. I saw people with Asian backgrounds with Italian backgrounds coming out of all sorts of different scenarios and I just snugly fitted in, I just absolutely snugly fitted into it. (45:06) I still had an indifference to the white kids in the school because I thought are these white kids any different than white kids down south in that little racist school down in the other place. I had some bad encounters with teachers too, I’ve had teachers pick on me because I’m an Aboriginal kid I know that now, I look back on it and Williams that was certainly the case I had some teachers actually pick on me. A story, my girl came home from the Gosnells High School when we were stopping in Gosnells and we were stopping in Dorothy Street I had a house on Dorothy Street you see I’d actually moved back to Gosnells after I’d been living in Karawara for a while because my family got too big so I decided I wanted a five (5) bedroom house. My daughter came home one day from the high school and said ‘Dad I’ve been suspended from school’ and I said ‘Why?’, ‘For fighting with a white girl’ and I said ‘Oh what’s happened with her?’, ‘She’s not suspended dad’ and I go ‘Well who was in the right and who was in the wrong?’ ‘She was dad’, ‘Are you sure?’, ‘Yes she was dad, she was in the wrong not me’. So I listened to the story of my oldest daughter and I thought yeah something doesn’t sound right here and I said ’Who suspended [you]?’ and she said ‘a teacher, the deputy headmaster’ and I said ‘Who is it?’ and she mentioned this name and she said ‘It was Mr Freckleton’. Now I don’t know if there is a moral part where Rod Freckleton ever listens to this story or reads it but anyway it’s a fact and anyway she says ‘It was Rod Freckleton, Mr Freckleton’ and I said ‘Oh Fred, Fred Freckleton, and she says ‘I don’t know his first name’ and anyway I go ‘Isn’t that interesting I’m going to go up and see who this bloke is tomorrow and ask him about what’s occurred here’. And I had this funny feeling that this might be the same teacher that used to knock me on the head when I was in his science class in

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Williams when I was in grade eight (8), in first year high school and the one that also threw a book at me when I had my desk up and all the kids were speaking but he threw the book and hit the desk where I was and I absolutely crapped myself and put the desk down and I looked up and I saw that he was saying ‘Mr Wilkes you had better go outside, I’m coming out to speak to you in a minute’ and I says ‘but everyone else is making a noise sir’ and so I grabbed the book and threw it back at him and he says ’outside right now’ and anyway all the class were in a bit of an uproar and he says ‘we’re going up to see the headmaster’ and I’d been in and out of this headmaster’s place and I’d had sixes, you know in the old days you’d get sixes for being a naughty boy but all the time I can tell you more often that not it was because of something that had happened between me and some of these racist little white kids and I’d get myself into trouble because I’d react. Anyway this time we were half way up to the headmaster’s office and I said ‘oh that’s alright sir, I said I’ll have to tell Mr Hoffman about the kids that you go around knocking on the head with your knuckles and I said it’s a very painful experience in fact and I said I’ll also tell him about the book throwing exercise and I’m going to let him know that there are sometimes when you actually rat to me’, I don’t know what words I was using then as a young teenager I would probably have been using different vocabulary but I made it quite clear that I was going to let the headmaster know that you were not necessarily without fault. So anyway he spun me around and he says ‘ok I’m going to give you one more chance, back in the classroom and that’s it’ and anyway a couple of weeks later; he trained the local football team, the under sixteens (16s) and I was only a little bloke in those days and he organised a particular drill and it was to come running towards him with the football and see if you could get around him and then kick a goal and what he was doing was allowing all the other kids to run up and he would allow them to dodge around them, when it was my turn he gripped me in the most fierce tackle, slung me to the ground and all I can remember is that I woke up and he wasn’t where I thought he should be, he was a little bit further away from me and he must have crashed me to the ground that hard that I got dazed went into a bit of a daze and I don’t know how long I was actually in this daze and anyway I got back up and I thought wow this man is for real, I’ve got to be very careful around him. Anyway back to Gosnells now and my daughter. (50:38) So I walked into this room and he says ‘Mr Wilkes’ and I go I said ‘Fred, Fred Freckleton’ and he goes ‘no, no, no I’m not Fred Freckleton’ I said ‘oh I’ve mistaken you for somebody’ I said ‘I had a teacher called Mr Freckleton, Fred Freckleton I think his name was’ I said ‘and I remember him being a real nasty piece of work’ and I’m looking at this bloke and I’m thinking this is the same man and I said ‘have you got a brother called Fred?’ and he goes ‘no’ and I said ‘what’s your name?’ he says ‘Rod, Rod Freckleton’. I’m sure it was Fred and anyway I said ‘I’m up here to talk about my daughter’ and I said ‘what I’ve heard Rod is that my daughter’s been mistreated here, I believe she’s been mistreated because of who I am and I’m prepared to take this a bit further unless there’s some damage control put into place now and the damage is repaired because my daughter’s not going to miss out on school and the other girl come to school’. I said ‘there’s a ying and a yang to all this’ and again don’t quote me, I’m using words here that are just trying to promote the story and give it a bit of romance but the fact of the matter is that he readjusted the equation around what had happened and my daughter was allowed to go back to school the next day and I did threaten that I would go to the Director General of the Education Department with this if it didn’t get sorted out. Anyway it was all sorted out, my daughter went back to school the next day and said ‘thanks dad’ and I said ‘don’t you let anybody do this to you and your kids when you get older, you fight people who are making racist or intolerant behavioural sort of things at school’. You’ve got to take it up for your kids because some of these white fellas are deeply, deeply indifferent towards us. A week later my daughter came into me at home and said ‘guess what dad’ and I said ‘what?’, she said ‘Mr Freckleton’s left the school’ and I go ‘yeah?’, she says ‘yeah, he’s transferred to another school’ and I said ‘oh I

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wonder where he’s gone’ and she said ‘yeah I don’t know’, but I know now that it was the same man because I remember it quite clearly and I remember the face and after a while. I actually started to think about it when I got home that night after talking to him and I said ‘yep that’s the same man’ and I’m going to keep my eyes on him and he was gone because I now and in those days I was over one hundred kg (100kg), I’m not as big as I was then but I used to be a pretty big boy when I was the dad of these kids and nobody, nobody messed with my kids and there were times when I actually went to the Gosnells Primary School when they were younger and I walked into a staff meeting at the Gosnells Primary School and they said ‘Mr Wilkes this is not the proper place for you to air your grievance’ and I said ‘bullshit it ain’t, I said this is the right place because there are teachers in this room that need to be told that if you don’t teach and you don’t pass on skills to my children in the way that it should be done you’re going to have me in your face’ and I said ‘there are a couple of teachers here’ and I pointed at one of them and I said ‘you mister’ I said ‘my kids come home and tell me how intolerant you are of some of their behaviour’ and I said ‘you’d better be careful because I can be just as intolerant of teacher’s behaviour too and whilst I might come down here and threaten you I can certainly go to places and make sure that my points of view are aired too’. Anyway so I’ve never been one to step back because of my upbringing by my mum and the wonderful love she gave to me to achieve what I’ve achieved and I want to make sure that opportunity is there for not only my children but all Aboriginal children. (55:07) So there is a little story about, I can go on forever on this stuff Mary Anne. I mean Gosnells had a lovely little river down the road as you know. I’ve fished that river as a kid, absolutely fished it dry of the marrons and there were teedies and anything that swam in that river, there were turtles we would go down there and catch the freshwater tortoise and take them home to dad and he would put them in the oven and just let them cook and I can’t eat tortoise or turtle I don’t know how to cook them but he would put them in the oven and they would just cook and then he would break them in half and it was like there was a plate of food there already for him it was in the shell. He would proceed to eat it and give us pieces of it but When you say we used to go down to the river, who’s that? Oh me and my younger brothers. Were there many other Aboriginal families around? Just a few, just a few there weren’t too many other families in Gosnells at the time but the Rankin’s lived down the road in Seaforth, Ed came along a bit later I think. There might have been other families just at that time you can’t remember who they were but my cousins used to come from North Beach so this sister that I talk about that lived in North Beach and my first cousins they would actually travel to wag school to come down to Gosnells and say lets go down and we’d take off our white shirts, I would wag school as well and I’m in fourth year and fifth year. These were times when it was great to wag school you know, and you’d go down to the Gosnells river and you’d sit down there with a bit of fishing line with a bit of meat on it, put it out, go back and if the line would straighten out you’d know you got a marron on it, you’d pull the marron in and you’d hook it with a little noose, wire noose or sometimes we’d make gidgies and we’d gidgie them if we were really hungry to make sure we caught them properly or we’d walk in there sometimes and just catch them with our hands. So we had shanghais so we could shoot stones at pigeons and birds that we might want to put on the fire so we could have a feed. You made your own fire?

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Oh yeah we made our own fires, the fire story on the Gosnells river that I remember most was a cousin of mine, two cousins of mine had come over, wagged school we’d gone down to the river and we were a little bit hungry and we had the hunter instinct in us and I said ‘look there’s a hollow tree here boys I’m going to go up and check if there’s a possum in this hollow tree’ because I’d done this stuff down south when I was in the forest and my uncle when we were hunting kangaroos would always say ‘oh yes see these scratch marks going up this tree here Ted, this is where the possum is and see that hole up there, he’s down there and if I set a trap here tonight I’ll get him’ and he would invariably he would put a little log going down that way a bit of breadcrumbs leading to a noose and you’d go round the next morning and the possum would be in the noose or you’d set a rabbit trap down the bottom and it was just like catching [rabbits]. Anyway back to Gosnells now so I climbed the tree and I had this nice big long stick that we used to use, a long stick and you’d clear the end of the stick, you’d take the bark off and you’d put the white part of the wood on it and it’d only be as round as your finger. You’d poke it down into the hole and you’d wriggle it around and you’d feel if the stick was moving a bit and I could and I could think ok that’s moving. That could either be a possum or might even be a long tailed goanna or a bird of some sort. Pull the stick out, look on the end of the stick that’s possum hair, that’s possum hair. ‘He’s up here, he’s up in the hole and what I want you to do is to put some green leaves down the bottom there, see where that big hollow down at the bottom of the tree is put some green leaves down there and light a little fire next to the green leaves but don’t let it catch flame just get the smoke going and push the smoke up through this tree ok’. Well about ten (10) minutes later the fire brigade was on its way (laughs) the possum was obviously dead, it had been cooked to charcoal, the tree was well and truly flaming like a bonfire you’d never seen it, it was like Guy Fawkes night and this is about (laughs) one (1) o’clock in the afternoon and there were three (3) young aboriginal boys chucking their clothes on pretty quickly and making a dart to get back over the other side of the highway to make sure that they were back up where they couldn’t be seen or detected and anyway the fire brigade went down there and outed the fire but it was an experience we said ‘wow, we shouldn’t do that again boys because that’s a crime and you can get into serious trouble for doing that’ so I won’t tell you who the other guys were and I’d probably deny that this is a fabrication of the truth if it ever got that the Gosnells Shire wanted to charge me for whatever happened back in those days. There were times when as young boys, young Nyungar boys we got up to a little bit of mischief but we never meant to hurt anybody. There were times as well when we’d jump the backyard and steal a few oranges off of the neighbour’s trees and that but I think that was just kids and the way things happened. (1:00:48) Did you have names for the places around Gosnells that were specially your names? We developed names for places. We developed, there were lots of the places on the river were already named like ‘the Swift’ is a common swimming hole down the Gosnells area and was called the Swift when we got there and it was the white kids that would go there and swim, most of them would go there to just swing on the rope and swim. We’d go down there to dive under the water and put our feet in the mud and chuck the baits in and see if we could catch some marron. We used to catch some wonderful big marron out of the Swift, then you’d walk down a bit further and we had certain places on the river called special places where we’d say that’s Ted’s pool or that’s Teddy’s corner. We built a place where we could actually swing across from one side of the river to the other on a tree and we called that, there was one place we called Robin Hood’s Glen or something so we had all these names and we were using names in English and we did, we identified sites along that river, there was the Seaforth bridge that you’d sort of identify as a bit further up. We would also know that if we wanted to go further than the river there was another wonderful asset

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call the rock pools up in the old quarries, remember, the old bauxite quarries so you’d walk all the way up to the rock pools and you’d go for a swim up there as well and there were other things too, you know, when I was a kid and I came through I got to know a lot of the white kids in Gosnells and I got to go to parties and I got to sit in the backyard of people’s place in Gosnells which I probably would never have done in Williams. You know the little white kids in Williams would have grown up into teenagers and they did, they certainly did at the end of the day they moved all of the Indigenous people from Williams, there were one hundred and fifty (150) Aboriginal people living in Williams when I was there, not one left there today, they’ve all moved to Collie or Narrogin. That’s an indicator of something that went wrong in history when a population has to move out of their local area. What was social life like for your mum in Gosnells? Mum found it a lot easier. The build up of Gosnells occurred around that era where, we were there when the first supermarkets were built, we were there when the highway became a four (4) lane highway, righto there were only two (2) lanes when we first got there. You’re talking about Albany Highway? Yeah Albany Highway there’s Pages Store and there was some Italian bloke - what was his name, anyway, and that’s where you got your shopping done you went down to Pages Store, Good Sammies was just starting up no it wasn’t even there at that stage. The bowling alley was still there we remember, there were rabbits that used to run around on the side of the railway line where the old station is just back up there and we’d chase the rabbits around and around but we could never catch them they were too fast for us. The old fish and chips shop down where Coles is and where all of those where Woolworths all of those major shopping centres are along Albany Highway there were only houses and a few little, there were orange trees and where the Gosnells Shire council is now there was the most wonderful watermelon patch yeah we can remember going up there and knocking off watermelons. I remember my brother, the one who passed away, coming home with big mobs of saltpedo in his back because he’d got up a bit too close and the bloke who owned the watermelons must have known we were into it so he fired his saltpedo up at close range at my brother and hit him in the back and he had all these little red lumps in his back and for a week and a half he was in mobs and mobs of pain but he never let dad know. We went through some pretty exciting and maybe traumatic experiences at times but that was a part of the deal, we weren’t well off so complementing your food source and your nutrients with sometimes stolen goods from watermelon patches and knocking off a few marrons and that. There’s a lot more to it as I told you Mary Anne I could tell you a lot of the sports, you know joining in with the sporting clubs around Gosnells was good to join in with the footy club at Gosnells. (1:05:55) What did you play? I played Aussie Rules. What position? I got into the main team, into the league team at Gosnells. I played full forward for Gosnells, started off on a wing, played full forward for them. I had this big bloke from another team who ran into me, I was pretty little then I was a skinny little fella and he ran into my knee and tore my cruciate ligament and of course I could bend my leg up to my nose and just about kiss my toe, you know that’s how bad it got broken it sort of stretched right here [indicates where] so I couldn’t play football for the rest of the

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year at least maybe two (2) so I decided that my footballing days were over I was working at the museum at the time. I did want to eventually want to go into a university and test out my knowledge whether I could compete in a university setting with other young fellas so I took that opportunity to take off to uni. I actually applied to the museum where I was working for two (2) years leave of absence, leave without pay got it went out to university at Curtin and applied for what was mature age entry, I’d done my fifth year high school. I was a bit unlucky that I didn’t actually, well not unlucky not even unfortunate I actually think it was my destiny that I wouldn’t actually pass my leaving certificate, I did pass one (1) subject and just missed out on the rest of them. Is this at Armadale? Yeah this is at Armadale. So I did this thing at the museum and I got entrance into the university on mature age entry with, at that time with exemptions because of my work in the museum so I went on and did a Bachelor of Arts in social science majoring in, as I said, majoring in Anthropology and Geography and I commenced that in 1978/1979, not long after I finished school. I finished school in 1972 went to the museum and worked there until ’79 so we’re talking about seven (7) years and then went back to uni and never returned to the museum. I ended up working at Curtin University for a few years and then took on a job as the director of the Aboriginal Medical Service in Perth for sixteen (16) years before coming here as an Associate Professor back to the university, this is actually Curtin University’s campus here, we’re not right on the campus but this is the Health Research Campus part. So yeah I did join in with a few things when I was in Gosnells. I remember when I got to Gosnells I wanted to become a boy scout because we’d had boy scouts down in Williams and I wanted to continue with my boy scouting. I’d become a second class scout and I wanted to move into first class scout but the kids in Gosnells were a lot younger than I they were sort of boy cubs more than anything so I decided that I’d move on. So after I finished school I took off up to my aunty and uncle’s place in the bush sort of wandering around in the bush, up in the country, met the mother of my children up in the country. Where was this? Quairading. So I was sort of up and down from Quairading to Perth with the mother of my kids the woman Elizabeth. What work were you doing in Quairading? Anything and everything, me and another young Aboriginal bloke up there were two (2) of the best workers so we’d get most of the farmers coming and looking for us so if it was hay baling season ‘Where’s Ted, we’ll get Ted’, if it was just general farm handing they’d come in and look for me and say ‘Do you want a job?’ and I used to love the fact you’d go and get a job and you’d come back in on Friday nights and have a few bob to go down to the local and have a bit of a spend up and socialise. (1:09:54) Was your mum living in Gosnells all this time? Oh yes mum never moved from Gosnells. Mum never moved from around that area until later in life, really later in life and only moved because State Housing had sort of insisted that she move on; and dad and mum were both around in that period of my life. My father was probably expecting that I might have a grandson before he passed on and I remember my third daughter being born on the 18 August and my father passing away on the 21 August, three (3) days later which is his birthday so a bit of a coincidence. The connection for me around Maddington and Gosnells is that

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I was then able to also, with my father, go to the Swan River and we’d go fishing on the Swan River. My father would relate stories to me about the Swan River and about up at Guildford the Success Hill, this is very special place here, this is where the Wargul had an impact on the river. This is where the Wilkes people and my aunties and my dad and all that were born and we have special connections to this part of the river. He talked more fluently about his connection to the Derbal Yerrigan, he would always throw the sand in the water before he went fishing and its when I came up to Perth I asked him one day about that and he says ‘I’ve been telling you all your, when you was a young fella I used to say ’psewi ngaana dardja Wargul wa’ and I’d say ‘yeah what’s that mean?’ and he said ‘that’s telling the Wargul whose our spirit to bring the fish in here, I’m here, its Eddie Wilkes I’m here ’psewi ngaana dardja, I’m needing a feed of fish, bring them into me please’. So I don’t go fishing on the Swan River now unless I throw the sand in and I encourage all my children to do that and I say the words ’psewi ngaana dardja Wargul wa’ and pardi wa ‘Bring the black bream into me.’ And all my grandchildren are doing it too. I did it one day when they were all standing alongside me and I threw my rod out, threw the line out and I can tell you within sixty (60) seconds I pulled in the most magnificent big black bream in the Swan River and my grandchildren, I have eighteen (18) grandchildren my oldest grandson is eighteen (18) and they were throwing sand in all up and down the river. They go in now they know that they’ve got to throw sand in the river to let the Wargal know that they’re the children of Ted Wilkes or the grandchildren of Ted Wilkes and they’re here to catch fish. Are there any other places in the Gosnells area, you’ve just been talking about the river are there any other places that are particularly significant to you? Yeah, in those days remember Perth was being developed around green belts and the town planners had this wonderful or grandiose plan that they would develop green belts so that we could have fresh air and we’d have this place of greenery to go into but up the back of Gosnells and there still is to a degree there’s a pretty big bush sort of up the back there as you go down towards, what’s that road, you go down Southern River Road anyway and up through there. We would go in there hunting or we would go up to the rock pools up this way hunting so dad would sometimes and I remember now and then taking the dogs but mainly walking through and looking whether we could set the snares on the pads of the kangaroo. That didn’t happen too much after because dad got a bit crook and I sort of grew up and started to do my own thing but the other younger brothers and that always talked about it ‘oh yeah we’d go back in there and we’d go and have a look around’ so those places were important. The swamps, obviously the one near the school we’d go and have barbeques around that and dad would always tell us that the ducks and these places here, these swamps, were full of food and we would always say ‘do you want to go and catch something?’ and he’d say ‘oh I’m ok with my rump steak on the barbie today thank you, I don’t want to be plucking wild duck and things like that at this time’ but he had a wonderful affinity for all those sorts of things. He sold a lot of his bark paintings in Gosnells we used to get the paperbark and he would do paperback paintings and we’d walk around the streets of Gosnells and sell these paperbark paintings and that’s another way we supplemented the income so he was able to. (1:15:00) Can you tell me more about them? What designs were they, were they framed and who did you sell them to? We just sold them to the residences on the street, we’d walk in and out of houses at six (6) o clock to eight (8) o clock and say ‘would you like to buy an Aboriginal bark painting, paperbark painting?’. Yeah I’m not sure if people have still got them on their walls or whether people might still remember but I reckon we would have

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knocked on just about every house in Gosnells to sell these paperbark paintings done by E Wilkes. Have you got any? No I don’t have any of his left, when mum passed away keeping things like that somehow just didn’t really happen, I’ve got one of his paintings at home, it’s not a paperbark painting. He used to love just doing landscapes and scenery. Did he paint any of the Gosnells scenery or was it from memory of other landscapes? No it was from memory of other landscapes more often than not. I can’t remember he painted the Gosnells, I have no doubt he would have, I have no doubt he would have. He did so many paintings and he would have done some paintings of what he would have seen around Gosnells. So did you call Gosnells home? Definitely when I first moved to Gosnells it was proudly spoken of as yeah that’s my place. Gosnells is home, playing with the local football team and being part of the community in Gosnells was a great thing. There were guys that I went to school with that we’d jump in their car, the old cars, not that I’d ever had a car until I was a bit older but some of the young white blokes got cars given to them by their dads that they handed down and would go down to Mandurah and try and learn how to surf and find our way back to Perth. Probably chase the same sort of girl, go to these parties every now and then and try and do the right thing by one another and look after one another but now and then we’d get into a bit of trouble. I can remember having some kerfuffles and fights with the Thornlie skinheads when I was a young kid, we were called the Gozzie Boys so we would all sit down on the road out the front of Woolworths in those days us young boys and whenever there was a bit of a kerfuffle the older Gozzie Boys who were called the Vikings who rode motorbikes would come and get us and say ‘we need your back up’ and I can remember once we heard that some Victoria Park bikies had gone up to the rock pool so the Vikings came down and let the Gozzie Boys know that they needed backup and I can tell you that at least thirty (30) cars that went out of Gosnells bumper to bumper all the way up to the rock pools. A couple of the Vikings had a fight with the leaders of these Victoria Park bikies. I can remember one of my young mates actually being quite agitated by what when on and actually one of the Victoria Park boys got hit very severely with what was only a king hit but someone had a piece of wood in their hand and I was thinking oh my God this man’s got to be dead but he got up a little bit after and anyway they all took off and we chased them out. They never returned they never came back and I’m thinking what’s this all about and it was about the Gozzie Boys being a powerful bunch of boys who were not to be messed around with, this is our area and anyone who wants to come in this area you do so at your own peril. Were there many Aboriginal boys in the Gozzie Boys? Not a lot but there were enough of us, the Rankin boys were a part of it, there was the Wilkes boys, and there were just a couple of others and I can’t remember their exact names. Can you remember about when this is and what you were wearing, what sort of era was it? Oh this is when I was still at high school so I’m fourth and fifth year high school.

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1970. Fourth and fifth year high school and maybe just after high school so I’m still sort of floating around before I took off up to the country yeah so its in the 70s, the early 70s. So you weren’t a hippy? A black hippy yeah I was, I was a hippy. I had long hair I had hair down to the halfway down my back, never washed it, yeah I was flea-bitten, lousy. Aboriginal kids we just slept with other kids when we around into the bush and that so you’d always be sharing your head lice and it was only after much persistence from my mother that I should really start to look after myself that I think I started to realise that cutting your hair short and being a little bit more proactive in that area was a good thing to do. I was always in thongs, I would always be wearing Aboriginal land rights tee-shirts in the early days walking around Gosnells being quite prepared to say ‘yep I’m an aboriginal boy; take me as I am too bad’. I don’t think I would have been able to do that as much in other environments I just grew to be really fond of Gosnells I knew there were some people there who were quite indifferent towards me because of the colour of my skin but that was to their folly, not to mine. That was their bad luck, not mine. (1:20:53) What sort of Aboriginal community is it today do you think? There’s two ways to answer it you could say its traumatised but you could say but they survived, its like I said to you they’re a very resilient community. They obviously are disadvantaged and living on the margins, most of them are I think finding it hard to make ends meet. The socio economic disadvantage of some of the people is pretty obvious. There are families in their own dynamic transition between what I call before as that sort of really traumatised Nyungar as opposed to coming out of it sort of poverty stricken, even in our own Aboriginal world we have Aboriginal people that are quite ok, not as rich and as wealthy as non-Aboriginal people in that context but we’re quite ok but there are others that are just absolutely traumatised and poverty stricken and are caught up in a justice, criminal justice system and alcohol and substance misuse system that makes your heart ache. I think at the end of the day they are resilient, they are Gozzie people; they are there to sustain a lifestyle for themselves. I think they’re a lot more confident now about being Gosnells people and being able to say well the State government and the Gosnells shire are just going to have to make sure that they help us find our place. For the future of Gosnells, if the Gosnells City Council or anybody was thinking about naming places or protecting places have you got any suggestions or advice on what places you’d like to see specially recognised or any places you’d like to see specially named for the Aboriginal community? Yeah I’d like to see some of the buildings and in particular the Gosnells Shire Council given a Nyungar name associated with the, I don’t know particularly what that name might be at this time but you know this is the Gosnells City Council. It might be that we would call it something in the future if there are marron in the water, and water is always associated with Karp we always use the word cup. I tried to catch a Kumul down there it might be Kumulup you know in recognition of a bloke like me it might be that my dad whose talked about the mul-gar we were certainly under a big storm there one day and he says ‘ah that’s the mul-gar’ and I said ‘mul-gar?, that’s like the mulga tree’, ‘no in the Nyungar word the mul-gar is the thunder and lightning and here we are and this is where it occurs. It occurs down in this southern part of the city more often than not it comes up through the Darling Range which we call the

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Mirran Maurra’ and he says ‘it comes down from the Mirran Maurra and it’s the Mul-gar off of the Mirran Maurra bouncing back’ and I’d go ‘oh’ and he’d say ‘yep that occurs here in this region’ and so we could find a context but there’s a need to also understand that some of the longer living families and I think the Wilkes family have been around Gosnells enough to for us not to have something named after the Wilkes’ in Gosnells I’d like to think that there might be a little park there called Wilkes Park one day or Nyungar Park you know or the Gosnells Nyungar Park, who knows or the Gosnells Whadjuk Nyungar Park. (1:25:12) It might be that we can also associate with particular birds that live in that area; it might be a particular bird with a Nyungar name that we can associate with. It’s about reclaiming, reinvigorating some of this stuff. Some of this stuff the continuance might have stopped because people were disenfranchised and diminished in their capacity to hold onto regions, we were moved around so there was a lot of social engineering going on in Perth which is not our fault. So systems of government moved Aboriginal people around to disperse them throughout the city so we didn’t all live in the same street, but they wouldn’t put us in Nedlands, they wouldn’t put us in Wembley but they put us in Mirrabooka and they put us in places like Maddington and Gosnells and these suburbs that are a little bit out of the way and up the back where it’s a bit out of sight, out of mind but we’re there, we’re there. There are Narkles, there are Ugles, there are Kelly’s, there are Garletts, there are Winmars, there are Wilkes’ we’re all living in that vicinity now and there are Blurtons, my daughter’s a Blurton. They’re all there, yeah let’s name some of the streets, lets get the Gosnells Shire to be real and if there are new streets, if there are some areas where we can name after some of the Indigenous or Aboriginal people from around that area, have a connection to it that would only be a good thing. Is there anything you’d like to say to finish off? The Gosnells experience is certainly been one of adventure, its not always been pleasantry its been now and then full of little things like, you might call them traumatic episodes. The changing face of the town and the City of Gosnells I’ve seen. I was there as I said as a thirteen (13) and fourteen (14) year old, I’m now fifty two (52) so I’ve had thirty eight (38) years of living in this City and calling Gosnells my major home, my major base and as I said my children still live down that area and that’s a direct reflection on the fact that the Wilkes’, my mum and dad, who lived there and not only the fact that we came here in, my mum came there in 1969 and my dad had said we returned to my dad’s country and the Wilkes people are genuine ancestral people to the Whadjuck Nyungars of this region of the Perth region which goes from Fremantle through to the Mirran Murra and that way about thirty (30) km up towards Lancelin, to Yanchep and back this way down towards, over towards Boulder Rock and down towards the Serpentine River. We claim all that country within and that our ancestors traversed the rivers and the waterways of this country well and truly before white fellas got here and we Wilkes people came back, not only through my father but through other families, the Headlands, and other families that live in Perth and have Wilkes grandmothers who are the sisters and there were about seven (7) of them of my grandfather who was the only man in the family so the Wilkes name is continued down but the connection of the Whadjuck Nyungar people isn’t only restricted to Gosnells its right throughout this city and we’re all cousins and relations of one another that go back to not only old Thomas Hubert Wilkes but to the woman that he bore children through. So there you go, there’s a strong connection to the whole construct to the whole city we call Perth is but Gosnells for me as a Wilkes person in the modern context is truly my what should I call it, my cup, my place. Its my mia mia, my birthright and to be able to say ‘yep I have a solid knowledge about this little part of the world’ and I can contextualise in the sense that there’s a history and I can contextualise that there will be a Wilkes presence around Gosnells for a long, long time because of my children and my grandchildren.

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If you could just tell me a little bit more about using the river today? Having also a knowledge that other Aboriginal people have their own voice and their own opinions about how and why things occur and that’s accepting that in all cultures you have diverse opinions and diverse views, you could never all be of the same opinion, if you were life sometimes gets very boring but anyway it goes back to me saying we’re not a homogenous people we are very different in many contexts. (1:30:11) Some of our family clans have different perspectives on life because of the way we’ve been treated in history. Today I get very concerned about the developments along the river, that is the Canning River the watercourse that goes up through well I’d call that still the Derbal Yerrigan a part of the Derbal Yerrigan, a tributary to the Derbal Yerrigan. I’m very concerned that a lot of the nearness of the concrete structures and the movement of non-Aboriginal peoples and others is very close to the river and I can see that some older people would have some distinct feelings of distress about that. They would be very concerned because it doesn’t allow us to go and seek the shelter of the river gum trees and the noises of the birds and the shade that comes from the leaves of these river gum trees we don’t necessarily have that anymore, we’re more exposed but having said that and understanding that I do too share that sort of concern. I do know that we still frequent the river whenever there’s a Wilkes barbeque we go straight down to the river next to the shire council because we know there are marron in that river and we’ve pulled them out of there and we know that in the little lily ponds underneath the shire there are marrons in there too and if marron show themselves to us we catch them and we eat them and we don’t really care too much whether the wedjelas are there watching us do it (laughs) and I also know today that my kids are married into the white population righto. My youngest daughter’s got a white bloke who comes from Maddington, my oldest boy’s got a wedjela girl that he’s going to live with up in Kelmscott. So we go back there and we frequent those rivers and we say these are our places. You kids, these are your places and I’m sure in the modern era and with this new generation of children that I call my grandchildren come through they will develop an affinity with this river regardless of what we think today. I think their affinity will be developed because the old fellas said this is ours. Interview Ends 1 hour 32 minutes.

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