Cabbage Tree’s Untold Stories

The road to Cabbage Tree Island snakes up through cane fields hidden amongst the floodplain of the Richmond River, a few kilometres inland from Wardell and Ballina on the NSW North Coast.

There are no road signs or obvious markers on the way in.  Yet, in the past few months, I have learned that this place, its people and their Untold stories are deeply connected to the big histories, good and bad, of the NSW North Coast community.

Driving over the narrow one lane bridge that connects it to the mainland, there are few landmarks to give clues to its fascinating history or the stories we were about to share with the nation.

Cabbage Tree Island was a former Aboriginal station, a self-sufficient farming community which is still home to many of the original families who have lived there for generations.

The Cabbage Tree Island community were collaborating with ABC North Coast to celebrate the people and their achievements and tell the very hard stories of this fascinating community.

Untold was a first for us – a vision of event radio where ABC NSW North Coast takes the whole radio station out to places and communities we don’t often get to and records the important untold stories across the region.

As the North Coast ABC Open Producer, it was my role to make some initial connections and gather stories from the community in the months leading up to our special Untold event.

It was the beginning of several months of inspiring work and story gathering that would culminate in a breakfast and a live broadcast from the school in late October 2014. It started with a day at Cabbage Tree Island Public School.

The students had written beautiful stories about important members of their family who they consider Unsung Heroes. Together, we recorded and published their stories as part of the ABC Open Unsung project.

This ABC Open workshop was one of several with members of the Cabbage Tree and the broader Ballina Indigenous community.

In a collaboration between Byron Bay Community Centre, Yarrabee Aboriginal Community Aged Care and ABC Open, we recorded some powerful and thought-provoking interviews with elders speaking about Reconciliation and their early life growing up on Cabbage Tree island. From this experience, I had the opportunity to mentor the elders in how to make a photo slideshow of their journey to Moree.

At the Ballina NAIDOC day celebrations, the ABC Open stall became a place to explore and celebrate the Bundjalung language with Rick Cook, a keeper and teacher of the local language.

The audio slideshows we created are showcased in ABC Open’s Mother Tongue Project.

Marcus Ferguson and the boys from the Jali Land Council Indigenous Protected Area, situated close to Cabbage Tree Island, also shared their stories. They showed me the incredible regeneration and cultural work they are doing to preserve the land and their cultural history and I was able to show them how to set up a camera and sound to conduct a simple interview for our Life’s Big Questions project.

On the day of our Untold event, I recorded Indigenous artist Digby Moran speaking about his childhood on the island and his donation of a painting to the Cabbage Tree Island school.

The experiences and the stories that have come from these workshops have shone a new light on a diverse, challenged and culturally rich place.

Meanwhile, my ABC Open colleague Catherine Marciniak was integral in making the Untold project work. As well as her behind the scenes efforts, Catherine worked with Lois Cook and family in a special collaboration to create a very moving story called Babe in the reeds: a story of massacres and resilience.

The ABC North Coast’s cross-media reporter Margaret Burin made a video that tells one of the biggest Untold stories about Cabbage tree island.

As far back as the 1880s, it was a self sufficient farming community. Margaret’s story documents the current community’s response to a1963 Four Corners report about how the Cabbage Tree Island community tried to repeat this dream of self- sufficiency in the 1960s.  It is a fascinating story.

Finally, on a clear windy Tuesday, with the help of the indefatigable Cabbage Tree Principal Dyonne Anderson, the ABC North Coast programs team of Justine Frazier, Joanne Shoebridge, Margaret Burin, Elloise Farrow-Smith and Graeme Stuart all came together on the front steps of the Primary School on Cabbage Tree Island.

Weeks of organising paid off as the whole North Coast Community were treated to an array of interviews, music and stories about the people and history of the island.

Children, community members and elders were there, with some special guests returning to the island for the first time in many years.

The feeling in the crowd and the feedback from the community in sharing these Untold stories has been incredibly positive and it was a real privilege to be part of it all. I’m very grateful to the many wonderful people from the Ballina and Cabbage Tree Indigenous communities who were so open and sharing with their time, generosity, honesty and stories.

One of the highlights of the day for me was when the school choir, made up of about 18 Indigenous children sang a song they had written in Bundjalung language.

There weren’t many dry eyes left in the schoolyard after they had finished.

The beauty of all of this is that these stories are preserved in digital form on the ABC Open and ABC North Coast websites for all to listen, see and share.

So please feel free to Woolar. That’s Bundjalung for Share.