#elouera

Auntie Brown lived at Hill 60 until she and her family were forced off the land to make way for the battery. She spoke about how life was hard at Hill 60, but being forced off her people’s traditional land to work on farms was even harder, “Hill 60 is where my grandmother died. It was a hard place to live at. There was no electricity [or other such luxuries] but it is my people’s traditional land… [My family and I] were [eventually] put on farms to work, while our men were made to fight in the war”.

The 76 year old also talked about how her family was robbed of what little other freedom they had, “My father and cousins tried to set up a fish co-op up. My father use to bring in the boats and the nets. We’d get the smaller fish and the good ones would go to market. But once they put in for a fish co-op they took everything off of them. All their fishing gear and everything, given to two white fellas. An aboriginal person just couldn’t live”.

The view from Hill 60 Park

There were promises made to give the land back to the traditional owners, but when they were able to finally leave the farms there was no such luck.

When the Department of Defence tried to sell a portion of land to the Wollongong City Council in 2006, the community tried to use this as the opportunity to take back what they had been promised so long ago.

Auntie Brown credits a lack of unity between different Aboriginal clans, as well as a lack of funding, to the reasoning behind why the land was not returned, “[The Council] was entertaining [the Wadi Wadi people] mostly. But they’re not from around here originally, they’re from Victoria”. It was clear that Auntie Brown disagreed with the Wadi Wadi peoples claim to the land. She had previously talked about how traditionally, an Aboriginal person would need to ask permission if they intended on venturing into the territory of another Aboriginal clan. This made it easier to see why the claim from the Wadi Wadi people was not received so easily from her own people; it was an invasion.

She goes on to talk about funding, “We just couldn’t get the support we needed. This kind of thing takes a lot of money”. Auntie Brown said that if the land had been given back to the Aboriginal community, she would like to see it cleaned up, and have bush trails added. Hill 60 Park is said to have a lot of middens, and it was also used for burials, but these burial locations were not marked out.

Eventually the Department of Defence gave control of the land over to the Wollongong City Council, who in turn declared it a place of public recreation.

When asked if they would ever try again to reclaim the land, Auntie Brown said “[the fight for the land] caused a lot of heartache and caused a lot of stress. It put cousins against cousins. I have to get my spirit back and think about my family now”.