In case you’ve been living under your doona or stuck in your beanbag without internet, this week is NAIDOC Week – our annual, national celebration of the history and achievements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

Held every year at the start of July, this year’s theme is For Our Elders, a chance to acknowledge the vital role our elders play in our lives.

In honour of this theme, the Lismore App reached out to local teacher and Banjalang elder, Elliot Knight, to find out about his work with children and teens over the last few decades in numerous Northern Rivers schools and to offer our readers a chance to add some local language to their vocab.

Uncle Elliot is Ngarakbal Githabal. Many of us will have noted bal as a suffix at the end of Bundjalung words but may not have known the meaning. Bal means trees, and trees come with boundaries like along the riverbanks, and therefore define areas where different clans are from.

“I’ve been teaching for 28 years in the education department. I was about 25 when I started. I started at Goonellabah Public School. I was a teacher’s aide supporter and a tutor. Me and Uncle Micky and Ricky Cook went to Sydney to meet with the big heads from Canberra to get the language program started in all schools. We got it up and running, we were the founders,” Uncle Elliot explained.

Uncle Elliot displaying pictures of his mother Mariah Williams nee Knight and his grandfather Stanley Williams

Thanks to his mum Mariah Williams, who had the insight to teach him much of her language and culture, Elliot has gathered years of experience and knowledge to share with local kids, along with his training.

“My mum even said it, she wanted it spoken in schools, she wanted the education department to take it on board when she was alive. But it didn’t take off until we met in Sydney and they put it in place. We said “this is how it’s got to be run and it’s got to be run by an elder that’s employed by the DOE (Department of Education) and then the AECG takes over. They provide the funding through the government to pay the tutors, the Aboriginal Education Consultant Group,” Elliot explained.

“I work at five different schools – Richmond River High School, Lismore Heights Public, Tregeagle, Goonellabah Preschool and Wyrallah Road Public.”

“If I need to use the board, I do, but sometimes I really don’t need it. I tell them stories or give a presentation of animals, for example, there’s a reason why this bird is here - jingrrd jingrrd – willy wagtail, why is he here? They’re storytellers. They tell us stories of what’s going to happen or something that did happen. We can read the land. We can read birds, animals, the trees,” Uncle Elliot said.

With many different story examples citing nature as a resource of information, Uncle Elliot said the kids often ask lots of questions, all part of the process of teaching new words and expanding their thinking.

“I tell them, we’ll move to this spot with the seasons so we don’t take too much out of there, then we’ll move to that spot, so it regenerates, it’s a circle, so we come back to the same one again at the start.“

“I might talk about the joobrrd – witchety grub in the tree – but you can only get it from one tree and that’s from the gum tree. You can’t get it from any other trees. Or about the little black grubs, when they’re walking towards the sea – the east coast – that tells us the mullet are on at the beach. If they’re walking this way, inland, they tell us the mullet are in freshwater.”

“Willow trees tell us when the perch are running down in the Wilson and Richmond Rivers. When they lean down and touch the water, that tells us the perch are on the run. I learnt all this from going out with dad and uncles, they teach you."

"They’d say this tree represents this animal or what ripples in the water mean...reading the land is so significant to aboriginal people. It tells us what’s in season. And we never take water when we go to the east coast because there’s fresh water down at the beach. Once you get to the brown sand all you do is dig down and there’s freshwater.”

Elliot Knight sharing family images of his elders Euston Williams and Charlotte Williams nee Brown

Uncle Elliot also imparts to his students the importance of cultural traditions to be respected when learning language.

“The words need to be spoken by an elder to them, they can’t just go pick it up and talk it. That’s what I tell the kids, they have to learn the right way. Your pronunciation might be different to how I pronounce it, and that’s a big no no in our culture. You have to go through certain rules in our culture to learn to speak it. I was lucky, I had an elder mother from the Boothram lore, she taught me,” Elliot explained.

“I grew up speaking English and my language at home. I come from Banjalang which is Coraki and Evans Head area. Banjalang is part of the Bundjalung nation. There are different tribes in the local area all under the one roof but we all know the same thing. The spelling might be a little bit different but the meaning is the same. Every tribe has a word bank. “

“I tell the kids there’s no books, it’s oral, spoken, passed down through generations. All this has been passed down through my mum, her dad, his mother and father, their mother and father. I pass it on to my son but only one because he’s not the moogle one.”

To find out about national and local NAIDOC events, visit https://www.naidoc.org.au/.

moogle – naughty, mischievous

joobrrd – witchety grub

jingrrd jingrrd – willy wagtail

buribi – koala

budgegan – cat

gwong – rain

wadding – cold

ngoolarrd – flood

yulgun – sun