Page 684 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 19 March 2019
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Uncle Carl came to Canberra at about age 17 after being born at Hollywood mission and growing up on another mission in Yass. He worked in construction for many years, as has been noted, before putting down the tools to begin working with archaeologists, in an effort to help them understand the deep connection to land that all Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders feel.
He played a significant role in the genealogy project that was initiated in 2010. This project helped us all to understand the complexities behind traditional ownership or custodianship of the land on which we live. The project also assisted Uncle Carl to better understand his own family history.
He was proudly Ngunnawal and learnt that his father’s grandfather, Tom Brown, had been a convict who coupled with an Aboriginal woman, Clara Woodhouse, in the generations before him. He learned that he was from the Wallabalul people, a Ngunnawal clan from the area of Yass who have a spiritual connection to land that extends over tens of thousands of years.
It was their unique and continuing connection to country, to the land and water that he worked to preserve and educate us about. He featured in the book telling the stories of the Ngunnawal in 2007, in which many elders recounted stories from their lives in an effort to help us understand their connections with each other, and their connection to land and water.
In that book, he says he was given the name Kingswell when he was born and that he knew some basic words in Ngunnawal that he had learnt from his parents. He described himself as a Ngunnawal warrior. He took a keen interest in walking around Ngunnawal country, getting to know it, understanding it and connecting with it.
He spent time walking and working out the back of Namadgi and traversing the Googong shores, identifying scar trees and significant archaeological artefacts, getting to know more about the ways of his ancestors as he went, and he was happy to share that knowledge. It was and is important knowledge that should inform how we live in this region.
He said his grandchildren will probably know more about country than he did, just as he had learned more about country than his father, and so the cycle of sharing of traditional knowledge continues. The Greens recognise that sovereignty was never ceded and that to become a truly reconciled nation we must act to empower, listen to and support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, their families and communities.
We must make deliberate efforts to listen to our local and regional Aboriginal people, whether they be Ngunnawal, Ngambri, Ngarigu, Wolgalu, Gungundurra or Wallabalul. These are the traditional peoples of our region and we have much to learn from them. Carl Brown’s significant contributions to our local Indigenous knowledge will be remembered at a time when he will be missed. My thoughts and condolences are with his family, his extended kin and his friends.
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