Koori coast
< Many stories

Noel Lonesborough

 

I’m the youngest of seven, and my mother passed away when I was about eighteen months of age.  I was sort of adopted to my uncle and auntie up in Wollongong, so as a child I was brought up in the white world – went and done the school thing, I was virtually a white kid in education.  Didn’t know nothing about me culture, just all separated. And when I was about seventeen I went back down, went back down home and lived there for a few years. I had the old walkabout in me, the old itchy feet. Took off all over the place. I had lost my identity, I had no culture, so I was just running around everywhere looking for something – who I was I suppose. In the last ten years I’ve been going to TAFE and that’s when I started getting into my culture.  Because we started doing Aboriginal arts, making jewellery, stuff like that, paintings. I didn’t know nothing, I didn’t think I could paint. That’s where I started learning my culture. A lot of white people, they’ve got their stereotypical things of us, that we’re all drunks, that we lay around in parks drinking, a lot of us do, a lot of us don’t. Plus, being educated too, we’ve got more of a chance. Me old man and that didn’t have a chance in the old days. You had to get a permit to go into town, we’re lucky we don’t have that these days. My brother, he had to go into town and he was in paint (?), I think he was the only blackfella in paint(?), he had to get permission. I didn’t have that, I was up here, with the white man.