Description
"When we first came the farmer told us there was good water up there. We found a big gnamma, it is still there, it is about eleven feet deep and always full of water. Dad built us a shack out of hessian and tin. There’s a big stone Mum where mum used to boil the water for washing our clothes. I was the fourth of seventeen children. I had the best childhood. My Mum was beautiful, she had love equally for all of us, no favourites. Dad was away a lot shearing, he was very strict but there was no doubt of his love for us. There was just our family there, now and again other people would come and stay but not for long. As an older boy I used to help catch our food. If you went up to the top of the hill there’s the best view, you can see for miles across the salt lakes. About three or four times in my life I have seen them in flood, it’s a wonderful sight. Islands form and rabbits and other animals are trapped. We went down to the lakes for food; it was our pantry! We caught ducks to eat, there were eggs, duck eggs all year around swans eggs in Makaru when the rains come. There were kangaroos, emus, snakes and goannas. There was kwardiny, which are like carrots but taste hot like chilli. There was a special way of digging them out and cutting them so that they will keep growing, there are tubers under certain trees that taste like potatoes. I reckon that we got about seventy per cent of our food from the land, the rest we got from rations of flour, sugar and tobacco. Then there was Dad’s wages and Mum worked as a cleaner, she cleaned the butcher’s and the baker’s shop." (Kevan Davis in Wyalkatchem, The Nyoongar Story, Davis, Davis and Robertson, 2017, Printed at Edith Cowan University.)
