Ella Noah Bancroft on First Nations Knowledge, Feminine Leadership, and Decolonisation

Join us for a thought-provoking yarn with Bundjalung woman Ella Noah Bancroft, a storyteller, artist, and activist reshaping the conversation around decolonisation, community, and Indigenous-led solutions. Ella shares her journey of growing up on Country, the wisdom of her matriarchal lineage, and how she has dedicated her life to reclaiming First Nations ways of being.

We explore the transformative power of women-centred societies, the role of food and land sovereignty in healing our communities, and the importance of rest as an act of resistance against colonial capitalism. Through her work with The Returning, Ella is creating spaces where women can reconnect with cultural knowledge, challenge oppressive systems, and nurture future generations. This episode is an inspiring call to action to rethink the way we live, lead, and connect.

To connect with Ella further:

Follow her on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/ellanoahbancroft_/
Get all other links here: https://linktr.eeellanoahbancroft_

Follow Caroline on Instagram:
@blak_wattle_coaching and learn more about working with Caroline here.

We would like to acknowledge the Wurundjeri/Woiwurrung people of the Kulin Nation where this podcast was taped, and pay our respects to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders, past, present, and emerging across Australia.

This podcast is brought to you by On Track Studio.
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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Podcast Unite Our Voices. This podcast is brought to you by OnTrack Studio. Welcome to Yarning Up, the podcast that showcases First Nations stories and conversations to help us learn and unlearn Australia's history to work towards a better future. I'm your host, Proud Barbara Woman and founder of Black Waddle Coaching and Consulting, Caroline Cal. We acknowledge the Rurundari people and elders where this podcast is taped, but we also acknowledge the lands that you are listening in from today. It always was and always will be unseated Aboriginal and Taurus Red Islander land. Well, I'm super grateful for today's guest. I had the privilege of connecting with Allah Noah Bancroft a couple of years ago at a retreat, and I just left feeling so inspired by their gentle but fierce honesty in how you know they see the world and challenge us to think about our places in the world. And so yeah, it's an incredible honor and privilege today to be sitting down with Alan Bancroft. Thank you so much for being here, my sis, and welcome to Yarning Up. Dingila sis. Yeah. As we always do on this show, it's beautiful to just sort of check in and ground ourselves with person and place. So I'm wondering if you could introduce yourself, how you'd like to be introduced. Sure.

SPEAKER_01 1:48

Um Jingila Blagami and uh Ellegay. My name is Ella. I'm a proud Bunjalung woman from the northern New South Wales region, um, and also have ties to Scotland and Poland on my maternal line. Um, I currently run an Indigenous charity here on country and um am privileged to work and play and live on my ancestral lands.

SPEAKER_00 2:10

Beautiful and beautiful country there, Bunjal country as well. You're so lucky.

SPEAKER_01 2:14

And I'm a bit biased, you know, always think it's those types of paradise, but no, it really is so lovely out there.

SPEAKER_00 2:22

And I imagine that, you know, the country there would sort of like shape, you know, really deeply, yeah, some of the places and spaces that you are, because you're just surrounded by lush and green and moving with the seasons, I imagine, there.

SPEAKER_01 2:36

Yeah, and Bungeland's also, you know, where the five rivers, we've got five major rivers that run through, it's where freshwater meets saltwater and also first light, it's uh the most easy point of Australia. So, like literally the sun, Jelgen, hits that part of Joggen country um first and foremost, but but with anywhere else on the continent.

SPEAKER_00 2:58

Wow. So what time is the sun rising there for you fellas?

SPEAKER_01 3:02

It's it's around six-ish. Yeah, yeah. We've got some long days. I mean, because we're at we're quite close up to the Queensland border. We've definitely got longer days, but I feel like they're longer in now.

SPEAKER_00 3:14

Mmm, yeah. I think that's just because the seasons are very abrupt here and everyone's just working their holes off, so everything feels long and uh drawn out and grey. Good ways. So you're born and raised on your country, on your homelands?

SPEAKER_01 3:30

I was actually born in Gadigal Country and my um mum and my dad moved there in the like early 80s, and mum had a home birth with me and my brother because you know, in our family line, hospitals had never been a safe place to birth. So she birthed us there, and both our placentas are buried somewhere in the inner west of Sydney. But when I was about uh just before I turned five, we moved back up to country and then you know had a lot of like my primary school life being raised here, and we've always been deeply connected and come home all the time during my whole life.

SPEAKER_00 4:08

Wow, how special! And how special to hear that you were born into this world in a home birth. I think that's just so beautiful and so special. So born on Gadigal, your placenta's there in the inner west. I'm actually pregnant at the moment and I've been thinking about what I want to do with my placenta, and I think I'm still deciding, but I think I'm gonna put it in some capsules and eat it back in my body. I hear that's really good for you.

SPEAKER_01 4:34

My younger sister, we drove, we actually kept her placenta in the freezer for like 10 months and then drove it up in an ESCI from Sydney to Bunjalung and buried it on our ancestral land.

SPEAKER_00 4:45

How special! Oh my goodness, the legacies continue. I love that. Well, you know, you you carry the stories, as you say, of many bloodlines, uh, Bunjalung woman, Scottish, Polish. I mean, I'm keen to sort of understand a bit more about yeah, your personal story and you know what it was like for you growing up.

SPEAKER_01 5:05

Yeah, I guess as a mixed-race woman, but living in Australia and growing up with my community, both on Gadigal, I was always around a big indigenous community there when I was growing up and also on Bunjalung. I've always identified a lot with my indigenous side, but as I got older, I started to realize that like if I wanted other people to not claim the colony and the immature culture we called Australia, um, I also needed to re-establish a relationship with my ancestors on that Polish and Scottish side. And as I actually dive deeper into understanding some research, I I've actually became like I I'm really proud of my Scottish side. I feel like the Scots were really fierce in not only fighting colonization and their indigenous people were called the pinks, but they're they feel like real warriors and like tied in with my Bunjalong ancestors. I feel like that's what gives me the kind of fire to walk through the world that I do. I I do hope one day to do some kind of pilgrimage um with my mum and my sister back to that place. And I I always kind of tend to go more with my maternal side because it feels it just feels the truest for me to be claiming that those ancestral lines, but that's just for me.

SPEAKER_00 6:18

Yeah, it's so beautiful to hear that and hear about yeah, your early experiences. Yeah, it's interesting. I sort of share share a similar sort of definitely it's very resonant. I grew up with an Aboriginal mum, single mum, and didn't really know my dad until way up until later in life, until I was, you know, in my late 20s. And my mum's Aboriginal, my dad is yeah, Scottish, English. And yeah, similarly, went on like a path after he passed away, just being like, What is this white side of me and how do I reconcile my whiteness? I guess, uh, or try to understand that and how it's located and defined. And yeah, it was really painful because we came across like all these links between colonizers, of course, and our mob. But then also, yeah, kind of similarly saw that they were fierce anti-colonial warriors fighting the resistance, and so sometimes now I'm like, Oh, is this my white side? Is it my black side? Who knows? But there's this real str like strong sense of fight and justice and resolve on both of our sides, and it's yeah, it's nice to sort of make space for for them all in some ways.

SPEAKER_01 7:25

Hey, yeah, and also like I think I hope to inspire or like encourage other people to do their own ancestral work. Like, I feel like as Indigenous people in this country, every day we get up and we research more about our families and our culture because it was almost taken from us, you know. So every day we're relearning or learning or getting given the um knowledge systems passed down to us, but it's not just like that all just came to us, and so I feel like other people should step into that space too and reclaim their ancestors. I I recently found out that we carry 14 generations in our body, which equates to 65 plus thousand ancestors, like their cellular memory is carried within our body, and for me, I'm like, how could you just call yourself Australian? It just seems like such an injustice to all of those people who fought so hard to get you to this place to be here right now. And I don't know if anybody knows my work, but I'm not the greatest um fan of the colony, too. And I think one of the ways that we can really resist it is by not identifying with it.

SPEAKER_00 8:31

Oh my god, there's so much to sort of like unpack there. But I mean, firstly, 65,000 ancestors, doesn't that give you like when you're walking into a room, especially as a black fellow, that legitimacy of who you are to know that you carry that, you carry those stories and that strength and that love and and reciprocity and and that fight. But yeah, you're so right. And I feel like that's really where we're at right now in terms of like what we're seeing here and globally is that there is just countries forged in denial of who they are and how they've come to be, and that it's so comfortable. People almost divorced of themselves, they've divorced of community, and they would much rather sit in this like very comfortable or manufactured um sense of nationalism, instead of really doing that inner work and thinking about themselves, and yeah, you're right, we sort of have to do that uh uh uh as well and honour that. But yeah, people are just so incredibly disconnected from all of those ancestors and their stories and their leaders, and it's quite sad in some ways. Hey, like as much as it really puts a you get real wild at it, there's a part of me that just is like these might be hurting, you know? For sure.

SPEAKER_01 9:46

And also, you know, I it's something in the like how do we retrace the unified story that col the colony or colonization and capitalism doesn't actually benefit us, not just mob, not just women, but us as a society, you know. Um for me, I feel like until we peel back those layers and find that unifying story of serious disconnect, which you know, the doctrine of discovery is one of the seed letters for colonization and how they took over so many indigenous lands across the globe. But this was happening back in Europe too, when they brought in um the commons and they started taking and dislocating people from their lands, you know. So when we reclaim that and our ancestry, we say a big fuck you to or I don't know if I can say that, but you know, you can say to the colony because this isn't just our story, but we are touched by it because it's much closer to home because we sit at the table with our nans and our aunties and our uncles and our brothers who are still impacted by colonization today.

SPEAKER_00 10:48

So so true. You know, building on that, I saw that you wrote a think tank recently around this topic, and it's something I sort of had the privilege of being asked to sort of think about too. And yeah, it's interesting, like for for the first time in maybe a long time, and it's an awful, it's an awful symptom of the colony and the the centuries of harm across civilizations which we have seen. That for the first time in a long time, it feels like indigenous, like long-standing issues of indigenous sovereignty and legitimacy are no longer just Aboriginal issues, indigenous issues anymore. And we're seeing it in in climate action, inaction, crime, we're seeing it in like economic collapse, fossil fuel greed, we're seeing you know, this hyper-individualization and relationship to imperialism affecting all people from all walks of life. And you're right, it's almost like we've been knocking on the doors and screaming into the abyss and all these things on looking at this from this holistic perspective, just so like the colony is making us all unwell, and it kind of feels like there is a growing momentum in this space. I'd love to sort of talk a little bit around, you know, what has led you on this path to having these conversations about, you know, decolonization and trying to reclaim and return back to our practices, you know, where there's some moments in your journey that really led to that. And yeah, I guess these sort of conversations help with this bigger, growing, expansive movement which we're seeing right now as well.

SPEAKER_01 12:28

Yeah, I mean, I think definitely the juxtaposition of being born in Gadigul, and I don't really remember that much, you know, of my younger childhood, but being back on country with my community we'll live an hour and a half northwest of Grafton where my ancestral lands by Juragama from, and just being in that space of like, you know, we lived off-grid before off-grid was trendy, and we had our big wash pool river that provided everything for us water, food, entertainment, play, and we gathered by that place all the time, and we still do as a family, but actually having that lived experience of growing up really disconnected in a way from the dominant society and much more embedded in land-based connection and community, and not to romanticize either, because you know, we also in northern New South Wales impacted here very heavily by massacres and um the invaders coming through in the late 1800s, so it was still a mission that was created there, but you know, the essence of just being with my family and just making a fire and swimming in the creek, it was so simple. And then when I kind of went back to Gadigal, I was like overwhelmed by the city, you know, and also just really this juxtaposition between Sydney and like couldn't get more remote and rural New South Wales, and I think that that is probably like the first seed of when I started to realise the difference between these two very opposing cultures that were trying to coexist on the same continent. And then obviously, growing up, like my mother is a very strong black artist and activist, and my whole life has always kind of you know told us who we are and ensured that we've remained connected to our ancestral lands, our culture and our family, because she didn't ever want us to just assimilate into what was the wider culture, and so I think I've always been really rebellious because of her in that way, and then finishing school, which, like you know, I was horrible at school, I had dyslexia, I was like put in special ed classes, you know, I hated it. I hated the whole concept of the Western institution, and so when I finally broke free of that, I actually ended up at Sydney Uni, but I was just going there to socialise, like the little Gemini AM. Umy there to work for my brother's organization, AM, and again, just you know, trying to support our younger people with an amazing model when he first started that, you know, really just going into schools and helping high school students. But again, I just felt like this isn't the way for me. Um, it's not the way to like try and get our kids in those spaces. For me, I'm like, we need to actually make society realize how valuable our culture is and how valuable our cultural leaders are. And I guess I kind of disassociated for most of my 20s from Australia and didn't really want to be here actually. I found the culture quite repulsive in many ways and didn't feel like it had a lot of substance, especially coming from where I've come from. And I think travel really put a lot of things in perspective. I started just hitchhiking my way around the world and Mexico and Guatemala, ended up on the west coast of the States, and then met a really beautiful Native American brother, and he actually introduced me to the concept of decolonizing, and that was kind of like maybe 15 years back now. And I think he kind of planted that seed for me, and then I started to kind of investigate it, and you know, they were really progressive over there, a lot of the native indigenous mob over there, so I was kind of sitting with them and seeing what they were talking about, and then come back home and then started exploring that through just recognizing wow, this is such a juxtaposition, and actually, if everyone returned to these more like earth-based indigenous ways, we would not only be healthier, but country would be singing, you know, she would be in a state of joy again because I really do think the the colony is built on us being disconnected from not only the country but ourselves and each other, and it's also a culture that glorifies greed and status, and so this is what we communicate to our young people. We say we see you when you are greedy and you hoard and you accumulate wealth and you put yourself above others, and we also see you when you place yourself above another being and think you're better than. And what I got taught was the law of the land is like you don't think you're better than anything, including the jolly, the trees, you know, um, the animals that coexist with us. And I think this culture is just so dangerous because of these values and belief systems that are really embedded in such a young age to many of us, you know, especially if we went through the Western education system and didn't question it.

SPEAKER_00 17:15

Wow, gosh, so fascinating to hear that. Yeah, I guess, you know, tracing back. So your early life was living on country, living in pretty humble, beautiful spiritual place in the beginnings. And I guess how that sort of like transcends the lessons of your mom. Understand Bronwood, Bancraft Your Mum, yeah, deadly, and just that sort of that early experience, like you say, living on country off-grid before it was kind of trending. And then I guess, yeah, interesting to hear that you had to abandon all that you sort of had learnt in search for something that you didn't quite know you needed until you found it. And then even even the language. I mean, it's interesting decolonization in a way too, because it still does very much center the colony, isn't it? It's still using that language. But so I imagine coming to this realization, meeting this beautiful person, but first and foremost, going on that real journey for yourself in naming your experience would be pretty, pretty powerful. I want to just quickly ask about your mum, you know, what what lessons do you think your mum sort of instilled in you in this sort of conversation as well?

SPEAKER_01 18:19

Oh my god, she's she's like everything. She's my greatest mentor, my biggest teacher, my best friend, sometimes my daughter, sometimes my mother. You know, and what a journey we've been on. You know, my mum was also a single mum. Um, she also had my sissy um 11 years apart, so I was her birthing partner, and I helped bring my sissy out of my mum and cut her umbilical cord. And we've just had such a life together. Like she's taught me everything, and she is the reason I am the woman I am today. You know, I always say to people, I was raised by a proud, indigenous, independent, single woman, and that's how I feel now that I'm an adult. My mum always taught me you never through action, not just through words, but you never evalue your worth in the gaze of whoever your partner is. You know, you don't look for somebody else to tell you what you are and who you are. You find that within yourself. She always taught me to be grassroots and never go too big. She always taught me and never rise until I bring my community with me. And even just getting the privilege of being able to be raised around her storytelling through her visual artwork and the indigenous community that welcomed us on Gadigul and um, you know, made us family was it just the best experience. Like I'm so stoked that I picked her to be my mum. I've really also only ever seen her work so hard, you know. She doesn't really take holidays, and not that I think that's a good thing, but her fight is for her people and you know her stories and and keeping our culture really strong and alive, even in the face of growing up in a small country town where there there wasn't actually many other Indigenous families either, you know. So uh I just she's everything to me, and I don't know, like other people who are listening. You know, when you have an indigenous mother, it's like they are everything for you. In the colony, they seem tend to disregard their elders, but my mom is gonna be by my side until the day she goes, and I will be looking after her the way she looked after me because that is what the reciprocity of relationships look like.

SPEAKER_00 20:27

Wow, she sounds like a pretty fierce and loving and staunch person and has instilled some beautiful values in you, and I'd love to um sit around the campfire with someone like you and your mum one day because yeah, I can only imagine the yarns and that sharing and reciprocity that's shared. Yeah, and I think it's such a powerful act of resistance to raise strong black kids, our jarjams. You know, we are trying to seek love in a world that doesn't really love us back, and so it's so powerful to raise self-assured and strong and and loving black kids. So good on your mum, did a great job.

SPEAKER_01 21:08

And it's funny, my daughter's actually gonna be a Gemini, so good ways because we get a bad rat, but it's just because we're mutable and we can flow in every single space.

SPEAKER_00 21:20

I heard and also really talkative, I hear, and I'm like, oh god, I love a yard. So my partner, and my hear my partner's really quiet, and so I was like, look out, little Gemini and me gonna come and tear things up. I guess you know, it's not really a segue, but more kind of you know, thinking about this concept of decolonization. I think you know, we've got a lot of listeners, a lot of people from uh international and uh also our mobs, you know, who really proudly champion this show and shout out to all of them listening, and we love you slots. But you know, I guess a lot of us are moving in spaces where people like the narratives or the ideology are. Around decolonization is ever evolving and shifting, and how we think about it, particularly in light of what we are seeing right now, which is, you know, as we've touched on, these global ills and you know, our existence and our resistance and us and our stories and our knowledges really helping to sort of reimagine and shape societies is so incredibly important right now. But you know, what what does decolonizing things mean for you? Like what does because I feel like you're actually my my my take is that you're walking the truth. You live this every day, you know, you're still living out in communal living and country. It's not necessarily a construct that feels out of reach for you because it's something you've just always lived and known to be true. But for many like urbanized black fellows who are wanting to live in a decolonized way, there's this tension, I guess, between the opposing paradigms in which we sit. And so, yeah, what does decolonization mean for you and and how does it sort of like shape your interactions and your relationships with the world?

SPEAKER_01 23:04

Yeah, it's interesting because you know, I think I I was kind of talking about decolonization 10 or something years ago in my writings. Um I've seen it pick up and have this momentum, and what normally happens with these kinds of movements is they get co-opted, right? You know, we see it all the time. Uh suddenly there's non-indigenous people doing decolonial workshops, and it kind of takes away the point of indigenous led. And I agree with you, it still centers the colony. I've been a bit more resistant actually to using it and actually decided kind of last year to move into more like the word of like indigenized, like how do we indigenize? Because again, that centers that, but also it centers the people whose land you're on who are the most oppressed by the system. They didn't have a choice of it, they didn't choose to go to a land, they stayed there and they were forcibly removed, and their culture was attempted to be taken from them. So I feel like indigenizing, indigenizing our way of living, is about like reclamation of our true purpose here on this planet. And that is really like getting out of this mindset that capitalism and capitalistic views, um, which are intrinsically tied to the colony, are somehow what we need to do in order to succeed. And so things like uh it's interesting because you say, like, with the urban black fellows, like they might be in a struggle. But I grew up with this family, the Bostocks, and they grew they had a tiny little house in in Tempe. Um, Euphemia Bostock was the matriarch, or when I was little, it was Nanny Bostock, her mother, and um they had five generations living in one tiny house, you know, and they still all live in that house, and they cared for every matriarch as that matriarch passed away in the same room, and we just lost um Barb and uh Euphemia Bostok last year, but she passed away in the same room that her mother passed away on with her daughters looking after her and her grannies around her, and they're they're still in that home. And for me, I'm like, that is indigenizing your way of being within the concept of the urban landscape because it's a matriarchal household, one where the elders are cared for, many generations living under one roof, which it actually is very indigenous because you're sharing, and up against like this economic system which buckles our people, I think it's a way that we can get on top of things, is actually to come back to this more intergenerational way of being or living really close to each other, sharing meals, encouraging each other to get out from behind the screens and go spend the weekend in the bush together and like just sit by a fire, even if you can do it only once a fortnight. I mean, when we moved to Gadigal and every home my mum has ever had, the first thing that she does is go out the back and dig a huge fire pit into the ground. She always dug a big fire pit. And I think this, like these small ways that we can um divert our attention to the colonial capitalist system and consumerism and bring it back to ourselves, our community, and you know, the natural world, which is a part of our community too, is a way that we can learn to indigenize, and that can happen in an urban landscape or a rural landscape. Here, living closer to nature because there's less density of people and there's more nature around us, but it's not inaccessible, you know. And I think there are any way that we can is a fight to the colony, you know. Our people, we have to exist within this society, otherwise we're constantly oppressed, and we shouldn't beat ourselves up for having to walk in two worlds. It's a very complex narrative to try and exist within. And I think I think yeah, even walking through the world, just identifying as a black fella and keeping your culture strong through that identification is a powerful resistance to the colony.

SPEAKER_00 27:04

Oh my goodness, I couldn't I could listen to you speak all day. Yeah, I think it's so beautiful to hear what you say because I think what I'm hearing or what I'm taking away from what you're saying is that decolonization is, you know, often about that consciously shifting our perspectives and our actions and our relationships with ourselves, community, kin, mother and father. And like you say, to center that indigenous knowledge along the way. And that I think sometimes what what we find or what I see, especially in like the organizing and abolition space where we're required to reimagine systems, is that we often, yeah, definitely focus a lot on the perfect system and I guess the the end and not the means, and that these small intentional shifts are just as critical for the overall movement as is abolishing and and rebuilding, and you know, things like you're saying about prioritizing the kinship structure and having shared living and communal living and sharing the labor, sharing the cost, really embedding that reciprocity. I think the other thing that I sort of would take away from what you said is that just noticing, you know, where like being deliberately, I guess, reflective to interrogate our conditioning and that colonial narrative. You know, so much of what you said is like so embedded and and conditioned from such a young age. Like we learn scarcity, we learn to, you know, do things that take up our hours that don't bring us joy and connection and healing. Like these are all learnt, deeply programmed, insidious things that we have to sort of start to notice like where do our colonial ideas shape us and our thinking and our work and our interactions, our relationships. You know, and I think it's it's also giving people a bit of confidence that as black fellows, we probably are inherently doing this every single day, but we might not be, I guess, as kind or giving ourselves as much grace because we're just constantly, you know, in a racialized society with violence and harm and seeing how oppressive and violent structures are killing, subjugating, silencing every day, that it can be very hard to sort of like get that perspective that we are shifting all the time and that we are every day challenging these colonial narratives, which is just seek to just diminish and erase us. So I think giving people confidence that it's these small intentional acts, these small efforts is an act of decolonization in and of itself because the colony wants grandeur and you know, these 12-step programs and da-da-da-da-da. But it's just like, you know, how do we prioritize ourselves and our joy and our rest and our healing? What are the small things getting out on country, returning back to, you know, some that that's enough in this sort of if we all start to think like that, you just think about them, the movement that that could happen and what the potential is. And that in order to like imagine a system and abolish something, we have to celebrate these beautiful intentional moments along the way as well. So yeah, thank you for for sharing that. I think it's yeah, it's really important. Yeah, I agree.

SPEAKER_01 30:22

No one is the same, like we've all been put here with a different story, a different purpose, and a different place to go. And I think um anything that any black fella does within the colony, they should be celebrating it, even if it's just getting out of bed. Yeah, any any black fella that gets up and gets out of bed is uh is is doing a testament to fighting the colony and the resistance, you know. I think we're in a in a time of information overload, and I've just noticed in the last few years there's really like so much information about how undervalued we are as 3% of the population, and also we're battling other people popping up in our societies who are just finding out that they might have an apical ancestor way back when, but aren't necessarily connected to communities and then you know, faced with the challenges of that kind of identity complexicity where people are taking big grant money and it's complex. Like I say to people who are, oh I just found an apical ancestor that's indigenous, so good luck to you. Wanna be a black fellow? It is the hardest work, it is the hardest sanity to be in this.

SPEAKER_00 31:31

It it's definitely about the struggle, there's no doubt about it. But I think it is also inherently about acknowledging the survival of our people to get up every day and to do these things, and you know, like you say, to sometimes just mustering up a shower through the grief and loss or taking out a phone call through all the rage and the violence that you might be experiencing, and that it's about also about celebrating that survival. Um I just got off a a call just actually before I came on here today with 12 titters from across so-called Australia, and the it's it's it's sort of this concept of leadership, but we're really rethinking it, we're challenging the Western paradigm of leadership, but it's all about you know, sharing stories and sharing skills and sharing our time and being a support network for each other. And I just feel like in a world like right now, where yeah, it's it's really hard and painful to be a black follow indigenous person and try to sit in the duality of our joy and our rage, you know, just like that in and of itself just feels like such a powerful act of resistance to have spaces where we all of our experiences can be validated and heard and experienced as in its full human experience. And that I feel is an act of you know, the decol decolonization work and digitizing things is like just sometimes just providing those skills, those support, that time. We'll be back, you mob, right after this short break. It's a beautiful question to have, and I think I don't know about you in your circles, but I imagine every time you have this yarn with people in your work that it looks so vastly different for everyone too. There's no one way to come at this. Speaking of which, I want to talk about, I guess, a space that you have really activated and built and nurtured, I guess, which is the the returning. Yeah, tell us about the returning. What's the vision? How did it come to be? What does the returning mean for you? Because I feel like that's also a beautiful act of indigenizing and returning back to.

SPEAKER_01 33:55

Yeah, I mean the returning was seeded out of a deep desire for me to see not only our people return back to country and have accessibility to Bunjalang country, especially on the coast, which has been so grossly gentrified and is now pretty impossible for most of our people to actually live anywhere near their ancestral lands if they're close to the coast here. Um, you know, I wanted to see a bridging of our people being to access the holistic health and wellness services that, you know, are are created here and the northern rivers and give them an opportunity to see that through a cultural lens because I I'm I'm a big believer that when we return back to country our health will get better. You know, when we eat closer to the land, our our health will get better, when we sit in circle, our health will get better. That's just what I believe because I'm spiritual, but I also understand a little bit about quantum physics and energy, and you know, even things just like earthing ourselves with bare feet in the ground can have like a dramatic impact on our nervous system. So I was like, how do we do this? How do we combat Indigenous health issues by also keeping cultural uh protocols and teachings alive and make a kind of wellness situation around that? It started as a women's camp where we invited um over 80% of our participants to come back to country on scholarship programs. It was firstly Indigenous women making up mostly that and then also single mums and a time for women to come and share all their ancestral knowledge is another point of call to invite people to stop culturally appropriating, which is a really we've got a lot of people on this country on Banjalang who are cultural appropriators. And I wanted to start a women's gathering that wasn't defined by that, but actually resisted it by wanting women to come and reclaim what they could teach and share. We've always had over 50% Indigenous facilitators at that gathering, and it runs over three days and two nights, and it's a place for women to come and share our knowledges so that we could be healthier and better together. I think there's a common story here that women can unite around the oppression that we felt through the patriarchy, and it's also another thread that I think when we have these unifying stories, we can come together, we can create empathy by sharing and learning and listening to one another, and we can rise together in that. And that was kind of like the seed of the charity, and then it just kind of snowballed and in 2021 we became an official charity, and now we're running nine programs across the region, and charity starts at home, so we're all women team, mostly mothers, mostly indigenous, and I wanted to create a decolonial workspace where hours were flexible for both mothers and mob because so much of the care economy is done on unpaid labor and the backs of women, you know, whether that's us raising our families, looking after the elderly, or just like looking after our entire community always. And I wanted to reframe business in a way that we're able to actually pay those women for what they do and create programs that are centered around women-centered societies and re-bringing people back to the idea of like how how much more beautiful it is when we raise our kids together. Yeah, I wanted to reintroduce this women-centered societies and and give women this embodied experience of what it's like to be out on country and have all your kids play together. And what we found is like, you know, the same as when I was little. When you get a whole bunch of little jar jams together, they they're gonna be looking after themselves. You know, you're not gonna see them for a whole day. They're playing at the river and they're climbing trees, and the big ones are carrying the babies, and that's how they grow, and that's how they learn so much, and then it gives mothers and aunties and and nans that break and that rest to just like gather and speak. And so I guess like that's the seed of where the charity came from. Um, but now we're running anything from cultural camps that include language camps that we run just for mob and also cross-cultural exchange programs with the Pacific Island Brothers and Sisters. We have youth programs for teenage girls to reconnect with ancestral plant food and medicine. We've got an arts and culture residency that runs for one year, writers residency partnered with the Byron Bay Riders Festival, a postpartum program that's supporting our First Nations mums with six weeks worth of home cooked meals. It's all got native ingredients in it, an elders healing program that takes 12 indigenous matriarchs post the age of 60 through our one-year healing space, which includes four retreats and one-on-one neutropathy care, all through that. We do community days in Lismore and Ballinar, and it's just kind of taken on a life. And I don't know how it's gotten like this, but you know, we we're just listening to what our community wants and we're trying to provide a service. I don't know if it's super sustainable to run this many programs with such a small team. You know, we're five Indigenous women who make up the team and two non-Indigenous women who make up our um uh uh accounts and and grant writer, but somehow we're managing to get the work done and we're working with so much of our beautiful community on a needs base. And, you know, we're just doing this for this time until uh our other people can step in and take over and run the programs too, you know. I've got no desire to monopolize, to grow, to get bigger than Bunjalung. Like uh even if we end up in a couple of years just stripping back and only running a few programs, that's better for me. But I don't want to grow and expand and move into other people's country, but I do want to inspire other people to, you know, potentially take on these models of care to support our women to actually do that work and look at how we can support other mob and different nations to bring about similar models as us, you know. And now's the time, you know, the not-for-profit space can be complex and weird, and like I said, like I'm not an academic person or a businesswoman. I don't know how I ended up running this charity, but the ancestor blessed me with a whole bunch of good relations that are supporting here on Bunjalung and beyond. And so I just want to continue to be the bridge and redistribute the distribution of wealth. Last year we employed over 80 cultural workers, and that for me is a redefining of what the colony says the value system is because it's really placing the money back in the hands of our people who know country, who know the lay of the land, who know language, who know art, sustainable art, who know our ways of being, and to redefine that as like that is an appropriate and beautiful job for you to do. And I hope it inspires the next generation to know that they don't have to go and get a degree to be a well-paid person under this economic system that always tells us that our culture is not valued.

SPEAKER_00 40:57

I mean, like, gee, that just sounds so deadly to hear that. Yeah, from this vision of the the women-centered society to the returning to now these nine very beautiful holistic programs. I'm like, oh, I wish we had some stuff like that here in on our country. You know, I feel like we still have such a long ways to go in or recaping back to some of these cultural practices. But yeah, I can definitely see why it's grown because of the the grit and the love. And I think when you're moving with the spirit and ethos of community at your center and you're listening and you're adapting and you're providing, yeah, it's kind of easy for things to sort of like evolve and grow based off community's needs. So yeah, wow. I mean, what are you seeing from some of the people, like some of the mob that come through some of these programs? Like any sort of sentiments or or things that are shared for how they experience these incredible programs?

SPEAKER_01 41:55

Yeah, I mean, we just finished our last retreat for the elders program, which is one of my favorites. It's like so beautiful to take these 12 matriarchs on this journey of giving some of them the first facial they've ever had, giving them some of them the first massage they've even had. We introduced them to craniosacral therapies as well. They had one-on-one neuropathy, which apparently, through our data that we collected, magnesium seems to be the thing that can get heaps of our elders off numerous amounts of pharmaceuticals. So one of our elders was on 12 pharmaceuticals when she started the healing program. We put her on magnesium every night to help with a pain that she was feeling. So she got rid of her painkillers, which then indirectly got rid of her heart medicine because the painkillers were helping that. She's down to four pharmaceuticals, that's all she's taking. Another elder started the program on a walker. She's now finished the program without a walker. And our oldest participant, who's almost 80, you know, her reflection piece, she's still living out on the mission at Malabugama, which is really close to where I grew up. Auntie Carol, she also taught me in primary school, you know, and she was saying to like the best thing is coming actually together. So much of the healing was all these matriarchs from Tweed all the way down to near the border of Yegel Gambangi country and all the way out to past Grafton, that all these women know each other's families and family lines, but some of them had never met, and they got to sit and repatriate all of these stories that they knew about each other's families and everything that they had experienced, or the stories that were given to them. And even in that, those meetings of just sitting around and having a yarn, so much can be healed, so much can be repatriated. Having like us younger, younger women, you know, just show up in service to those beautiful old women who have carried the backs of so many of our people and still continue to, who raised our jajams, who still care for their granny. And everyone else, it's such a privilege. It really is such an honor. Like brings tears to my eyes because this is what our culture is about, you know? It's about looking after the most disadvantaged and the most undervalued in society. And I think this society is like disgusting to the elder women, you know. And I've heard a lot of elder women, not even indigenous, if you're indigenous, it's like a whole other situation. But you know, how invisibilized they become in the patriarchy once they go through their initiation into menopause and beyond, where in our culture that is the wisest woman, that is the most respected woman, you know, and it is for us to take that back and look after those ladies with such great care, and that gives them so much worth. And if we're able to just fill them with one year of like loving them up, connecting them in and supporting them. My hope is that a lot of those elder women who I was in deep relationship with prior to, because a lot of them come from, you know, bungelung, so I know them or their families. But my hope is that we we somehow can help um embed them into our programs and provide spaces where elders can just be paid to come and be in the program. They don't actually have to show up and do anything anymore. They've done it. And this is how we change business from inside the colonial capital system, is like we build elders' fees into our grants and we make them valuable and we make sure that they can come and they can be paid to just rest. I'm a big believer in rest as the revolution, but all types of rest, you know, environmental rest, community rest, rest around culture, just allows us the time and space to really find our way home. I think that program's probably my favorite, but you know, I'm a bit biased, I guess. But all of the programs are amazing. I mean, the post-parton program runs all year round, servicing Indigenous women all over Bunjalang Country. We drive the meals out there. Kirley Dawn, who was also, you know, a big support during the floods and right by my side at Quiry Mail, alongside all the other deadly mob naming Mimiran and Wayne King and Ani Jackie Laurie, you know, she runs that program and she's a deadly indigenous thula who's been a birth broker for a long time. And she's really passionate about educating our women and our nans and our aunties so that we can be in the birth base advocating for our women and not just letting these Western institutions coerce us into doing things that may not be best for us, you know. And just also providing things like kangaroo tail stew, uh curried sausages, but with all organic ingredients. And we worked with Mindy Woods, who's an amazing Widgetable Wireable chef from Banjalang She was a master chef, and she's come out with you'll love this, she came up with the Keynes curry, but it's using all our native spices, and it tastes exactly the same. And it's so deadly, like this kind of stuff is like crazy. You know what Nan used to make you, and when you're in your postpartum, you you have to be eating these kind of rich, dense protein foods. I mean, you can eat other foods if you're vegetarian or vegan, but you know, this way, but having that kind of curried sausage for so many people is so nostalgic, they just said, like, can't believe this food is like getting delivered to our door, and it's just like Nan's cooking.

SPEAKER_00 47:25

Oh my god. Well, this is the power of indigenity and indigenizing what we do, right? Like you're feeling and experiencing that every day. And yeah. And I mean, I think there's no, there's really no like English word to like summarize what you said, but there's one thing that I think that I want to highlight, which is that programme you were yarning about with our elders, you know, because they were such in enslaved and servitude, to give back to them in that way, for them to have that sense of community at the the stages of their life when they where they are, you know, because so much of their lives is around care responsibilities, unpaid labor, how special, and native food for postpartum. These are all things that I'm constantly thinking about as I start my birth journey and you know, really wanting to think about how I can protect my indigenity through that process in a hospital system, which is really violent. So, wow, you're doing amazing, powerful work. You should be so proud of what you've been able to co-create with the mob down there. I guess my my kind of last question, and I could speak to you all day, obviously, but I mean, what are you, you know, if we were to sit here in 10 years, you know, time and have this yarn about the work you're doing and the work that other communities are doing around this conversation around um indigenizing our practices and returning back to, you know, what do you hope that we'd be celebrating? What sort of changes would you like to see over that time?

SPEAKER_01 49:00

Um, I mean a massive return to women-centered societies, which means like the eradication of these nine to five confinements, I think, that not only steal our sunlight or our time and relationship with the sunlight, but allowing mothers and women to have more flexible hours to be able to get paid on their bleed days, to see the return of younger women or men being paid to look after their elders. I think food systems are critical in this time. Like in 10 years, I'd love to see community gardens and gardens kind of like in the urban space, especially, but take over that place because I think capitalism's co-co-opted our food systems. And in 10 years' time, if we can do real rack reclamation, not only with our food, but you know, our medicines here on country too, and see First Nations people leading those businesses, not being left behind, which does happen in the native food um industry a lot. You know, I think it's like 97% non-Indigenous owned in the native foods, is that like if we want to see real change, it requires us to see women and indigenous people lead. And I really believe that because for too long it's it's not been the way. We've been behind, we haven't been leading, and we haven't been given the respect that we deserve. And everybody suffers. Everybody suffers if a woman or a mother is not at her greatest health. If our vision is to raise the next generation strong and healthy, then we need to be looking after our women. We need to ensure that they um have very good access to food and uh it's it's dire in this country, and I I know that the food systems is a it's a place of privilege, and it's disgusting that people got to pay what they pay in some rural communities for even just three or four grocery items. And I think all of us should be championing and campaigning that we bring our food back and and we're able to do what we do best because it's what we consume the most of, you know. Um, so I mean I guess that's my vision. In ten years, I hope like the rivers are restored to good health. We got five river major river systems. The the difference it would make in some of these small community towns like Lismore and Mawallumbar if they had rivers that were swimmable and people and our young people could like return back to the rivers and play, damn that would be my greatest dream, and I would happily go if I could see that again.

SPEAKER_00 51:34

It's kind of nice to think about what that might look like. And I think it's these conversations are are going to be prolific and guided by people like you and our next generation, guided um by our elders who've opened these doors, but it absolutely requires solidarity in these movements and collectivism right now, and for you know, Migalus and um non-Indigenous folk to really listen and and learn and reckon with their own stories, their own histories to really help us because indigenous knowledge does have the power to to help us all, and you've got to sort of hold on to hope that we can get there. Um hope and a lot of fight, um that's for sure. Oh my sis, thank you so much. I'm gonna put all of Ella's details in our show notes, her Instagram, the returning, the programs, where you can back and support issues uh and causes and get behind the work that you're doing on Bungalung Country. From the bottom of my heart, I just want to say thank you so much for being here today and sharing your your wisdom. And you've certainly given me a lot to think about, but you probably reaffirmed so much of what many blackfellas are grappling with right now in a much eloquent term. But yeah, thank you so, so much for being here and sharing your time and your and your knowledges and your labour given what you're doing in building women-centred society. So thank you, my sis. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening, you mob. If you are vibing this season of Yarning Up, then please head over to Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast from to show us some rate and review. Alternatively, you can get in contact and give us some feedback by visiting www.