Jinoor: Bruce Pascoe
Artwork by ENOKi
Featured music is ‘Arriving’ by Hanna Lindgren
About the Author
Bruce Pascoe is a Yuin, Bunurong and Tasmanian man born in the Melbourne suburb of Richmond. He’s the author of the best-selling Dark Emu, Young Dark Emu: A Truer History, Loving Country: A Guide to Sacred Australia and over thirty other books including the short story collections Night Animals and Nightjar, and academic texts including The Little Red Yellow Black Book with AIATSIS. Dark Emu (Magabala Books) won Book of the Year and the Indigenous Writer’s Prize at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards in 2016, and has now sold in excess of 200,000 copies. He is the author of Country: Future Fire, Future Farming with Bill Gammage in 2021.
Transcript
Jinoor—it means the foot. But much more than that. It’s my home town and has been called Jinoor forever, until around 1850 when one of the local squatters called his farm Genore, the English attempt at the Yuin word. Soon after it became Genoa.
Many Australian Aboriginal words have been Anglicised, but we have the distinction of being Italianised. The English couldn’t perform the linguistic miracle of saying Roma so converted it to the bald Rome. Paris became Paris but with the dull English pronunciation.
And so we are now Genoa, perhaps to deliberately distance us from its true meaning. All peoples of south-eastern Australia travelled to Nalangul in summer to gather and bake the bogong moth. It was a feast and a festival, but more importantly than both, it was a means of cultural perpetuity.
One hundred thousand years is as close to perpetuity as any humans can know, but the culture didn’t count on the imperial nature of the Christian religion and its sister, capitalism. Neither of the two should be condemned for their philosophy, but the application of their arrogance was fatal for whichever Indigenous peoples became its target.
Targets get full of holes, and it was no different here, our country, Australia. But holes in bodies is an unpleasant thought, so it was easier to say that Aboriginal people didn’t exist, or if they did, they didn’t rate as humans. Australia lived inside that miasmic myth for 230 years. It may be about to change its mind, but some still cannot abide the thought that the dispossessed were human.
It’s a problem Australia seems to want to solve. If they’re allowed.
But look, these are unhappy thoughts—so let’s go back to those early summer festivals and the reason Genoa was called Jinoor.
I farm land at the junction of the Jinoor and Wallagaraugh rivers. One of the brothers who farms that land with me is descended from families who walked the Jinoor valley trail to the mountain every year. Nalangul became Mount Kosciuszko—we lost the sacred name in favour of a Polish man who never went there. Just saying.
All the groups of people surrounding the mountain—Ngunawaal, Dhuduroa, Ganai, Bidwell, Yuin, Wiradjuri and others—approached using the valleys of the rivers as their path.
When the southern Yuin and Bidwell walked to the mountain they walked beside the Jinoor River, they followed the valley path, the footpath.
They would have walked through the gorge of the river where white and blue flowers glow like fairy lights in the high crevices of the shaded gorge. Can you imagine the children swimming and shrieking their delight in the deep pools of the river? Can you imagine the pleasure of their parents as they watched?
Of an evening there would be feasts of fresh water mussels and crayfish, murnong and munyang cooked in parcels of river grass in the ground oven. They might have had to give that oven a good tidy up because it probably only got used a few times a year.
The children would have learned that there were special songs which had to be sung at particular points in the journey, and by the time they reached the plateau around Delegate they would have been able to see the smoke from the fires of other travellers in neighbouring valleys. Excitement would be building; children would have been looking forward to playing with friends they only met on summer holidays. Perhaps young men might have dreamt of young women they hoped had made the journey. And this time…
Not only would they have seen the smoke but they probably heard the songs too. The sense of anticipation would have been palpable in the air. Then soon enough they would see their cousins walking the surrounding ridges as they made their way to the sacred mountain.
They would have been able to call out to each other, recognise a familiar gait, a profile. The nearness would have been tantalising, but those ridges would still keep them apart for a few more days.
Soon enough, however, they would be eating moth, sharing songs, playing, falling in love, remembering historic events. What wonderful talk, song and laughter there would have been.
The groups around Nalangul haven’t come together like this for some time. I wish all those people could cooperate today, because in today’s world they have the potential to wield great cultural power. Not power for its own sake, but power in order to care for country. To follow the legacy of the ancestors.
We might never be able to return to those days, but I hope Australia can learn that such happiness existed. If we’re allowed.
This initiative is supported by the Metro Tunnel Creative Program which harnesses the innovation, imagination, and expertise of the creative sector to help manage construction impacts.
