To Be A Queer Noongar

Kurtis Makuru

I come from ngany Minang Boodja. Born on Kinjarling, the rain my constant companion. On my Dad’s side I’m Noongar, a history of stolen children before me; war, trauma, abuse, colonisation. Further, deeper in my cells are stars so bright, culture too strong to be doused by rain. A campfire within me always keeping me warm. On my mother’s side I’m less sure. Wadjelas. Coming from somewhere. On boats carrying death, they appeared as ghosts. Their Indigeneity long forgotten. Sick. A weirder religion than the stuff stuffed down my Pop’s throat on Walkaway Mission. It poisons the blood and makes you do strange things. 

My story starts long before I was born from Kinjarling rain. Ancestors with me every step of the way on my long winding walk, whether I knew it or not. My spirit is strong today, I can feel it glowing brighter fanned by the breath of the communities I find myself in. I did not think it possible. White skinned. Black inside. Lost. A gnawing sensation that I am something other than my mother told me. That I have no need to marry a man. Or sit like a lady. My spirit is older than that and my body a reflection of my Country. Nature is queer. It knows things you can only hear when you accept yourself as part of it all. A tree's roots sprawling through Boodja. Touching everything. When I speak into the wind, birds gather to hear my story. They know who I am. Before I knew myself.

It is a hard thing, when Blakfullas are homophobic or transphobic. Because I understand why. I hope to meet them with grace. Barter and sympathise with lies in a stupid book. Colonised spirituality, when our bodies are built of stories. It hurts, like the cuts I made into my own skin when I was young. See me. Know me. Understand I cannot change what is an inseparable part of myself. No amount of cutting will dispose of it. I shouldn’t want to. I am not just a Blakfulla. I am Noongar. Of the Wagyl Kaip. I am not just Noongar. I am queer. I am not just queer.

I am not queer in the same way a Wadjela is queer. A non-Indigenous person. I exist outside of non-Indigenous languages and the categories and hard lines they create. It is ironic I am writing in English, but Noongar is not something my father or his mother was allowed to learn and further and further. I know some. But not enough yet. Colonisation is an all-consuming thing. My people turned to mince. To disappear and be shat out. They do not know that when we die, we go back into everything to be born again. If our Country is still here, so are we. If we are still here, so is Country. If I can learn my language again. If I can be a queer Noongar. 

I know boola queer Noongar. They are magic before it was demonised. A buzzing electricity. A cultural strength vast and fluid like the waters of my home. The rainbows of land Country. Bringing colour, expression, softness. A good mediator is a queer Noongar. Between past and present. A front-line fighter. A healer. Truth telling through their very existence. 

I have memories of boola queer Noongar. 

I have an Aunty Elisha who brings me to the beaches of Malimup. Surrounded by other queer young Blakfullas learning culture, language and history. It's one thing to be told, you exist, your ancestors know who you are and love you, and another thing to experience it and feel the sensations of them around you. Malimup is on my ancestral Country Minang and Pibblemun Boodja. It’s healing to be home and surrounded by people who see me for the whole of who I am. 

I didn't grow up with very many Blak role models around me. I wasn't allowed to see my Dad and so was stuck in a house with only white adults who were practiced in the art of pushing shame. I had learnt as a survival mechanism to become very small. Strange. A frightened thing. Imperceptible to the people and the world around me. I escaped from there when I was 17 and came to Boorloo. I was homeless and home sick, in and out of mental health wards trying to end my life. It was only when I started learning my culture and my language, started opening myself up to community, that I started to feel that small fire within me again. In the city, you find your own trauma bumping into everyone else’s, all these voices saying all these things, time and colonialism pressing down on you it's hard to breathe at all. But on Country, where the only sounds are your own breath and the beating of the ocean, and your surrounded by people who are on a similar path to you, healing is inevitable. It's all medicine for me down there.

The world I’ve found is old, an illusion of some newness, a false sheen given to me. Work until your bones are brittle and white and continue to move the same rock from left to right and back again. So focused on such minute details with unfocused eyes. Horses in fences running a race to win just to die. Never to live. Exist. 

Being alive. A Yorta Yorta word taught to me I cannot remember.

I've prayed for white man’s time to stop. Just a second. To breathe, to think, to be. Unwatched. The same feeling I find in the bush. Standing as trees stand, tilting my head as birds do. I want to go home to this. Run far from city and bigot pretend Elders and Wadjelas and mining companies and politicians. Blak babies killed, community needs, too much to do for just me. I'm not just me. It's asking too much when I have responsibility. To Country, to home, to family, to culture, to my boola queer Noongar. To the father ocean of home and the bilyas under my skin. Polluted. The smoke of the city is not like the smoke of wonnil. Laws that are wrong, a system that cannibalizes. Turning Country to dust. Money. My cold clammy skin heated from the inside. Bursting, the dying of an old star. Do I even want to be born again? 

If I cannot be me.

Tell me.

Listen not just with eyes or ears.

It is as unchangeable as ancient soul in the clumsy hands of western mentalities.

Turning Eden to toothpicks.

Limiting. I can only understand through myself. Sifting input through the rocks in the rivers of my flesh. I need more than just me to create a complete picture. A community. A culture. Country. Feedback a reflection, everyone a mirror.

Indigenous peoples are scientists.

Do you think we rose to the surface first?

Always fire first.

Under the crushing weight of people and systems that think they are above the earth. Somehow separate from it. You could climb infinitely into space, and you would still be a part of it all. A long way from the waters of your birth. But still connected.

Most days all I want to do is scream and cry. It is not that I do not feel Blak enough. I know who I am and where I come from. Before I was born. Before I could understand words and listen to the stories of my old people and touch with my hands kerbin and create rope. That is not it. It is Wadjelas assuming to strip off my skin and declare my spirit without any recollection of their own. Cutting the umbilical cord of my roots that connect me to the waters of home. They speak such racism so casually, systems presumed pure and my people and land expected barren. I could theoretically let people assume I am white and try to live according to their cultural values and norms. It is my insides they cannot see. I do not think I could. It is not our colour they hate. It is our insides and the Country we are inside. It is truth, it is expression. I refuse to calcify. I have white within me. Ancestors who have lived and died by white superiority. But further. Further they were Indigenous and that disease that brought them to today makes me sick. I have survived a lot of trauma in my life, the effects of which visits me every day. That I try to heal from whenever I have a spare moment.

Ask any Blakfulla. If it’s one thing we know it’s trauma. My shadow for the entirety of the time I have been alive and before then, resting in my DNA. 

But strength. 

A lot of Blakfullas hate the word resilient. It is used so poorly to describe us. To placate us. To pat us meekly on the back and say well done you didn’t kill yourself when we destroyed everything and are still kicking you while you are down. We attacked your entire souls, the very spirits you are and exist within. 

You didn’t kill yourself today, so resilient. 

Not like we have the highest suicide rates, and we continue to be murdered by the police state that is Australia directly or indirectly. It is all the same. We end up dead or labelled resilient. It’s bastardised. Says a bastard of black and white.

Resilience is wonderful. It is a learnt skill that requires time to heal and the relearning of your brain. Your body. Your spirit. We are so flexible, adaptive, and you can heal once you have experienced something terrible. It is true. That requires time to heal, support, love, community, family, culture, Country. 

Time.

We are allowed none of that, actively prohibited from accessing and yet we continue. That is not resilience. That is survival. I want my people to thrive. I want to thrive. I want to breathe again as all our Indigenous ancestors did. I am choking on poisoned smoke. 

Wadjelas have become blind to the buzzing of life force around them, they go around gouging out people's eyes and replacing them with bibles. I feel sad for them. For myself. An anger I cannot help. Gifted to me with convenience, progress. Silence of the soul, a long way from home. 

Everything is alive, not just you or me, the chair you sit on, the plastic you throw away that goes on to pollute the waterways of our bodies. Sitting in dumps. Discarded, abused, neglected, disrespected. 

Maybe how I am feeling is how Country is feeling.

They must go back. 

Reflect on the harm of yesterday and the harming today. 

Right now. 

It is not enough to act and find out later. 

Misinformed, mismanaged, clumsy, newborn manic.

They want to colonise the world. 

To control it all. 

To suck all of the life force into the prick of a needle.

Because they wish to, they can.

Cancer eating its own flesh.

It evolved, some chain of events.

Magic become electricity you charge for. 

Go home.

To be a queer Noongar again. 

Glossary

Ngany – My, Me, Myself, I

Minang – Who I am and where I come from

Boodja – Country, Mirror 

Kinjarling – Place of Rain (Colonised name is Albany Western Australia) 

Noongar – The name of my nation and its peoples

Wadjelas – The name we gave white ghosts on boats 

Wagyl Kaip – Southern Noongar and lands including my Minang people, Goreng and Ganeang peoples

Boola – Many 

Yorta Yorta – People of the land and waters of the Murray Goulburn region

Bilya – River, Umbilical cord 

Wonnil – Peppermint Tree

Kerbin – River reeds 

Pibblemun – Shares some Country with Minang 

Boorloo – Perth Western Australia