Vernice Gillies: welcome to country is an important way of showing respect for boundaries

Someone asked me a question at a recent session: did Noongar neighbours visit and meet?

Of course they did, for a range of reasons.

It depended on whether it was ceremony time or time for celebration.

And why so many fish traps if it wasn’t to feed a lot of people?

To feed a family group, or just the Menang mob, there might be just three or four, because you would use them often, over and over.

But if you have nine traps, it means at certain times of the year, there would be people coming from all over the place.

There would be corroboree and then the men would do the business of the tribe.

They also would have arranged marriages, because marriage was forbidden between two people, one from here and another from close by.

Two people getting married would have to be separated by at least three or four different groups between them — one from here and one from over the other side of the hills.

That was to keep the blood lines pure.

One mob would have invited another mob to come for a week. It would normally be a week, and a week of celebration.

People would come to Kinjarling from the other side of the hills, and even further out.

A big celebration would include corroboree, fish, shellfish, a big fire, kangaroos, and more.

Then the men would do the business.

Sometimes people complain about the welcome to country, but it has always been so.

Our stance is that if you come from off-country, and you’re going onto another country, you need to be welcomed.

You do not, for example, go to your neighbour’s house, and knock on the door and enter without them saying come on in.

Can you imagine what that’d be like? I think the word for it is trespass.

At certain times of the year, our boundaries were very elastic. And other times of the year, they were very rigid.

Vernice Gillies is a Menang-Noongar elder. This is the final instalment of a four-part series for the Albany Advertiser.