Disclaimer: I know the people who read this will know what kind of person I am. My intention when writing this is only to inspire and encourage more people to realise the importance of stories and why they should tell theirs. Hopefully, I got a laugh or two out of you as well.
This story starts like any good story. At work.
Not a likely location to begin, but the reality is that people spend something like 90% of their lives at work (give or take) so chances are, the story will start at work - the true ones, at least.
I was finishing a graveyard shift at the bar where I worked in Perth. It was 2018.
I hated it there. I’ve worked in a few bars before, and I don’t know what you would call that place. ‘Two super rich old guys with too much money and not enough social skills’ is what I would have called that bar.
I was walking out the door at 3 a.m. with the rubbish and some leftover pizza in a pizza box, balancing awkwardly under my arm. At this point in my life, I was living in a hostel, which, while it sounds like I had fallen on some really hard times, I’m not seeking sympathy. Trust me, if you were there, you would have known there was nowhere else in the entire world any of us would rather have been other than living in that hostel at that moment in time.
Hostel life is never dull. PROTIP: Never fall asleep in shared spaces
But the catch was - there’s always a catch - we were all broke, so very broke. Hence, the leftover pizza getting taken from work.
So, I'm walking down one of the many perfectly manicured streets of downtown Perth, not a human being in sight. Some insect creature is chirping away in the distance, either attracting a mate or getting ready to attack me.
I made it to the bus stop and slumped down, exhausted.
I can’t remember the last time I wasn’t sweaty, I thought to myself.
Not 5 minutes later, a very large, statured aboriginal man walks up and sits on the bench beside me. He had indistinguishable tattoos all up his arms (mostly indistinguishable because I was trying not to stare).
He asked if I had any money for the bus.
“Genuinely, man, I don’t have any cash. I live in a hostel”.
He let out a wheezy laugh-sigh.
Anyone who has the audacity to openly laugh at another’s shitty situation (let alone a random stranger), I’ll happily share my pizza with and laugh too.
He accepted - I felt like he would.
From there, he started chatting away about how he had recently been released from prison (note to self: no matter how curious you are, Rachel, don’t ask what for!) and how he needed to get to his girlfriend's house because she was texting him going crazy.
(I rolled my eyes, too, ladies.)
Sometimes, my thoughts show on my face. He immediately pulled out his phone and showed me the text evidence. Unfortunately, it was all there in black and white. He currently had one girlfriend clearly locked and loaded into crazy mode. This man was stress-eating.
The bus showed up, and we both got on. I tapped on with my card, and the Aboriginal guy just strolled past the driver without paying. A huff and mumble from the driver, and that was it.
The point here is not that Aboriginals can travel on public transport free if they really wanted to, but rather that they are born storytellers, and the reality is that most of the time, their stories are being told to an audience who can’t read.
Storytelling is in their bones and their DNA.
If you stick with me just a little bit longer, I will explain this as I take you to the Kimberleys, the cowboy hat-wearing, red pindan, muggy, mosquito-infested north of Australia.
“We can’t stop here - it’s bat croc country!” I’d think to myself in my best Raoul Duke impression.
My job here was as a tour guide, showing people around the Pearl Farm and explaining how it came to be. In marketing, I guess you’d call that your brand story. But in order to tell the pearl farm story, I was tasked with learning about the local people who had inhabited these areas for thousands of years and the man that came to work alongside them to make some money off those deliciously shiny pearls.
By the way, those Australian South Sea pearls you pay thousands of dollars for? The Aboriginals gave them to their children to play with, like marbles.
I spent the day with Terry on one of his more informal tours. He’s a local Bardi Jawi man, and if you ever get the chance to meet Terry, get him to tell you his story about the time he killed a saltwater croc in the water with a spear (a fucking wooden SPEAR!) - you know how it ends (obviously), but even as he was telling it to me, I was still wondering if he was going to make it out alive. The man is a living legend.
He took us for a walk to a very old tree where generations of the Bardi Jawi people would gather to talk, probably passing on survival knowledge, gossiping, developing ideas, and sharing stories.
We learned about the songs of the local people to get from place to place (like spoken maps), in a place where every place looks exactly the same.
Think about that. Can you imagine the level of detail needed in a song to give someone directions in a landscape like Australia?
AND keep a good rhythm?
AND remember the whole damn song?!
You can’t forget half of the song because then you’d just be lost, humming away like ‘shit, I guess this is where I live now….”
So, we've come to the part of the story where I’ve hopefully come full circle, and I can relate everything back to that guy at the bus stop in some really neatly packaged and satisfying way.
The man himself, Terry. Showing us inside a bee hive.
The Australian story is the Aboriginal story because they're the original storytellers. Quite frankly, why so many Australians (not all) continue to ignore the most interesting thing about their history is well and truly beyond me.
As an outsider looking in, I ask the gatekeepers of aboriginal stories (or any stories for that matter) this:
Are you storytellers, or not?
Because real storytellers don’t care who listens.
They tell stories because they have to tell them. Not when, or where people are ready to hear them. Yes, even at 3 a.m at a bus stop.
In fact, it is when nobody is listening that we need to find ways to tell them the most.
We get them out of us because it will eat us from the inside out if we don’t. Instead of a flesh-eating disease, it is a soul-eating disease; slowly eroding away our worldview, identity, and what matters most to us.
(Image: Local Riji artist, Bruce, often came into the gallery to show me his latest art pieces)
We all know the feeling, too. When someone refuses to listen to our awesome story, and so you stop sharing them because, quite frankly, they don’t deserve this much awesomeness if they’re not going to appreciate it.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that storytelling only comes in written form, either: it comes in art, movies, poetry, music, comedy, tour guiding, social media (if you’re brave enough to put yourself in the arena of judgment).
But this thinking needs to change.
If the audience you’ve been handed refuses to listen, then speak to someone else. Someone who can see the value.
Just look… we’re all listening.
