03 | Remember Me | Jim Everett

Jim Everett puralia meenamatta - born on Flinder's Island in 1942 - is a man of many selves – philosopher, fisherman, scholar, activist, poet, soldier, filmmaker. When he was sixteen years old, he discovered a hidden part of himself.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hello, Hilary Harper with you. And in ABC Rewind, we bring you a selection of episodes from the documentary show Earshot, showcasing intimate storytelling at its best.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  Sometimes important things are hidden from us. There can be a good reason for it.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  Hi, Takun Budzhi here, with another episode in Earshot season, The Other Me. We're about to spend time with a man of many parts, of many others.

• 0:34Speaker 02

  Right, let's go.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  Jim Everett, philosopher, fisherman, 81-year-old master's candidate, activist, poet, soldier, filmmaker. But at 16, Jim discovered a hidden part of himself.

• 0:50Speaker 02

  It was the first time I'd come into the port to stay long enough to meet anybody. And I met one of my cousins. They took me down to Yellow Beach. All the Aboriginal community mobbed down there, camped in under the tea tree with the fires going and everything. And as soon as I saw them, I realised that we were Aboriginal. Of course, what else?

• 1:17Speaker 01

  Instead of walking away from that discovery, with all its potential pain and struggle, Jim embraced it. He's learnt a lot since then and spends his life trying to share it with young Indigenous Tasmanians.

• 1:32Speaker 01

  Producer Nicole Steinke travelled to Lutruwita, Tasmania, to spend time with Jim. Many people told her, "You don't come away from him unchanged."

• 1:41Speaker 02

  I just mostly go through the tree there, bro.

• 1:46Speaker 02

  God, we do break laws.

• 1:51Speaker 02

  We're coming along here, and when we get to the end of this road here, we're basically at Kudalena. I can be charged for even being here. When I was bowled out, I was told not to be back on this land again, not that it stops me.

• 2:10Speaker 03

  There are some people who make you want to live more fully, accept challenges and ignore society's limits. Jim Everett, or Purulina Minamata, is one of them. At 81, he's lived longer than anyone ever has in his family, and he's done it as a risk-taker and a poet.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  ...in the deeper waters where Rio Warawa will taste its blood of life, to know only too well a memory of creation in its bloodlines, and the arteries of water where the spirit cannot journey, yet knows its bloodline has touched all life in the many strong places of country away in quiet places.

• 3:01Speaker 03

  What is this land?

• 3:03Speaker 02

  This is on the Jordan River, just on the northern suburbs area of Hobart. And the Brighton Bypass was a big project the state government put into gear, and we protested.

• 3:17Speaker 03

  It was 2011, and the Aboriginal community was protesting because there'd been occupation of Kootalina for more than 40,000 years. Archaeologists employed by the state government agreed, but still, the bulldozers came.

• 3:34Speaker 02

  So this is Kootalina here.

• 3:38Speaker 02

  Right in front of us. A paddock, and this is where the archaeological digs were undertaken, and my son stopped the bulldozers here, and held the camp here for two years. It was costly for him. He lost his partner, and as well as never being employed as an Aboriginal heritage officer again, because he's the only ever Aboriginal heritage officer in Tasmania who stopped the bulldozers. No one will employ a heritage officer who stops the bulldozers, will they? I was arrested four times, Aaron was arrested five times, many others got arrested about the same. And eventually, we were kicked off the site and not allowed back on.

• 4:16Speaker 03

  After two years of resistance, the protesters were slowly being defeated. Jim's home is on Aboriginal-owned Cape Baron Island, or Trewana. It sits in Bass Strait, between the northeastern tip of Lutuittah, Tasmania, and Trewana's larger cousin, Flinders Island.

• 4:37Speaker 03

  Banned from the protest site, Jim had gone back to the islands. He was on the remote tip of Flinders when he got the call to return to Kutilina. The protesters had lost. The road would go ahead.

• 4:52Speaker 02

  So they'd keep busy and they got me off Flinders Island and down here in time for the next morning so I could hold the healing ceremony.

• 5:02Speaker 04

  That's despite bail conditions which ordered them to stay away. Fellow protesters formed a mob around them as police looked on.

• 5:11Speaker 02

  And I explained to everybody that the healing ceremony was for this land here, for our Aboriginal community, and for all the non-Aboriginal community people in this area, even the ones that were against us and spat at us and called us racist names because they needed healing. And I said, "If we don't heal them, then the whole place is not properly healed." I've got a photo of my son Aaron, and the pain in his face is just terrible.

• 5:46Speaker 03

  So, okay, there's a lock gate, Jim?

• 5:48Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah, they locked it. So we'd have to climb over the fence if you want to climb over the fence. When we was doing our healing ceremony, the fire was somewhere over here. Let's just go and have a look and see if we can see. This was here for rocks.

• 6:06Speaker 03

  Jim's activism goes back a long way.

• 6:09Speaker 02

  Kick a rock and break your big toe.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  I'm not quite sure what the year was, but one of the most impactful memories of Uncle Jim was the year that the Dalai Lama came to Tasmania, Lutwada.

• 6:29Speaker 03

  Jim's niece in culture, Ruth Langford.

• 6:33Speaker 05

  And this was a time where, in Tasmania, the systemic racism was rife.

• 6:39Speaker 03

  Ruth is a Yorta Yorta woman born in Lutrueta. She has cultural responsibilities here and has known Jim all her life.

• 6:48Speaker 05

  And so the Dalai Lama was coming to town. He was being hosted at the Big Flash Hotel. And Uncle Jimmy, in all of his glory, walked into the foyer, opened his arms and said, "Ya tuacha", which was an Aboriginal welcome. And he claimed that space, not only for himself, his family, his boys that were with him, but for all of us. He was an Aboriginal man meeting a spiritual leader, global leader. And Uncle Jimmy met him as a sense of equality.

• 7:34Speaker 05

  We are all related and I am here opening my arms to you.

• 7:42Speaker 05

  And that's what Uncle Jimmy has laid the tracks for our reality, where previously our reality was very constricted to what the colonizing construct was saying who we are. At that time, we were half-caste. We were primitive. We were set for extinction. We were the deficit. And all of our problems were because of who we were. And he showed us that not only is that not true, but this is the pathway to re-empowering ourself.

• 8:25Speaker 05

  It's about the way that we act and relate to other people.

• 8:41Speaker 03

  On the move again, Jim and I are taking the small plane from the Lutruwata mainland to the Aboriginal community of Trewana, or Cape Baron Island, where he's had a home for 20 years.

• 8:54Speaker 02

  So yeah, a bit of a run through my living room. So this table here with the television on, that's the table out of the Molly, my sailboat. When my boat went up on the rocks, I got what I could out of her. And that's...

• 9:06Speaker 03

  It's a comfortable place. His one-time partner Denise, who runs the island, calls it a museum.

• 9:13Speaker 02

  So there's my cray boat up there. That's when I was a fisherman. This is my mum. I look more like my mum. She's an old mutton birder, that's for sure. Mum and dad were both birders.

• 9:26Speaker 03

  So what are they doing here, your parents?

• 9:28Speaker 02

  Having a beer, that's what they're doing.

• 9:31Speaker 03

  These days, Jim opens up ways of being for other people, holding healing ceremonies and spreading his arms in welcome to the Dalai Lama. But he was once a little boy in Gippsland, whose mother told him to "tell them you're Maori".

• 9:46Speaker 02

  Mum wouldn't let us out without her shoes on because running around barefoot, that's what Aboriginal kids do. And we don't want them to see that we're Aboriginal or anything like that. "Tell them you're Maori" out. Because we have Maori bloodline was an excuse. And we knew it was an excuse, that's the thing. When she'd say, "Oh, tell them you're Maori", we knew that she wasn't telling us that we're Maori. She was telling us, "That's an excuse you could give these white people when they start sort of having a go at us about being coloured kids", or whatever it is they termed us.

• 10:15Speaker 03

  But Jim and his brother and sister didn't know that they were Tasmanian Aboriginal. To keep the family safe, it wasn't spoken of, nor the reason why the family had moved away from the islands.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  Well, dad couldn't accept that he was Aboriginal because he'd been conditioned so much. And he'd grown up looking like a white person, that he could get away with it. So he couldn't accept it, even though his bloodline, through his father, James Everett, to his grandmother, Betsy Maitai, she married the Maori fella. And Betsy's mum was Manalagena's daughter, Wapiti.

• 10:53Speaker 03

  If you start reading the colonial records of the forced removal and killing of the Aboriginal people of Lutruwata, you soon come across Manalagena's name. He was a clan leader, a warrior and a clever man, who through his four daughters and two sons is a direct ancestor of the majority of Aboriginal people in Tasmania today, including Jim.

• 11:17Speaker 02

  Miss Manalagena up there, of course. So this is a picture of the old Cape Baran Island Football Club. My father was 16 and he was part of this football team. This would have been taken in 1929. That's my father there.

• 11:32Speaker 03

  Can you imagine a life without family?

• 11:35Speaker 02

  No, good. No, no, I couldn't imagine it. Even though we were sort of a cuddly family, I'm talking about the whole extended family. When I was in the army and I came home to Flinders Islands on leave, went on leave and to go back to the army. Like, oh man, I could see he was really emotional and like, shake hands. Shake hands.

• 12:01Speaker 02

  See you, son.

• 12:05Speaker 03

  After raising their children in Gippsland and later St Kilda, his parents had returned to the islands. Meanwhile, Jim had been living an adventurous life, trying all sorts of things, including the army. And overall, the world had treated him well. But now, he was back in the place where he was born, Flinders Island.

• 12:28Speaker 02

  That's where I sort of got to know racism a little bit more. But I had a girlfriend who was Danish, who lived in Melbourne. And she came home when I came home from my first leave.

• 12:44Speaker 02

  So we went to a dance in Whitemark on Flinders Island, the main town. And when it came to the barn dance,

• 12:55Speaker 02

  as each partner's changed, the women was to come to be my next dance partner. They just walked off the floor. Yeah.

• 13:09Speaker 02

  This is in White Mark on Flinders Island, yeah.

• 13:13Speaker 03

  The place where you were born?

• 13:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. As they came to dance with me, they'd just walk off the floor.

• 13:20Speaker 03

  So you'd never had anything like this happen before?

• 13:22Speaker 02

  Nah, nah, not like that. So I walked off the floor then because I could see, well, this is just not gonna work like this, is it? So I just walked off the floor and sat there.

• 13:34Speaker 03

  How did you make sense of it?

• 13:37Speaker 02

  Well, I just understood that they didn't like us because we're blackfellas. So you just understood that, so... You can't do anything about it, like, not then, you know? I wasn't very into politics or anything. And you can't sort of hit out. So, you know, I just sat there because I was a bit selfless. All right.

• 14:01Speaker 03

  Just thinking about when you were a little kid and your parents had moved away from Flinders Island because of the racism.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:10Speaker 03

  And you were living in Gippsland and... I remember reading in your thesis, I think it was, about you earwiggling, listening in to the adults talking.

• 14:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, this is what they wouldn't talk about in front of us and that was sort of like... Who was quarter-caste and who was half-caste and who was related to who and... Sometimes they'd be talking about Truganini or Billany or people that were killed in the past in the colonial system. But they wouldn't talk about that in front of the kids. It wasn't like they talked about that often either, but sometimes they'd sort of be in there together with the door closed and having a few beers and... Start opening up a bit, yeah.

• 14:54Speaker 03

  And you'd listen?

• 14:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which, I mean, it just confused me anyway. You didn't work it out really. It was just a little like, oh, all right, so... Anyway, we're not whitefellas. Okay, got that bit.

• 15:13Speaker 03

  Trewana or Cape Baron Island is small. It's isolated and austerely beautiful with wild, empty beaches and windswept stunted trees under immense skies. It's often blowing a gale.

• 15:28Speaker 02

  You've got to be prepared for it. Right, let's go.

• 15:32Speaker 03

  We're going on a tour of the island in Jim's old jalopy.

• 15:37Speaker 02

  It's a jump start.

• 15:44Speaker 03

  There's no handle on this door, Jim.

• 15:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, all the handles are broken when you just go. None work from here. The outside.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  Motor's alright though.

• 16:07Speaker 03

  I was just thinking about how you performed the healing ceremony. How did you learn what it is to perform a healing ceremony? Because it's such a long way from what you were taught when you were a kid.

• 16:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I've been to lots of different parts of Australia, seen different ceremonies carried out, learned a bit of the old recorded language. And then, you just don't learn ceremony, you've got to understand who you are with country. And then you can put those things together. And it's really just a matter of stepping up to the plate and say, right, I'm going to do this ceremony and these are the things I need to say. From the time that I was a kid, joined the army when I was 20, and didn't know much about being Aboriginal, come out of the army, get a $25,000 loan from the Australian Government's Aboriginal Loans Commission, buy me fishing boat and go fishing, and then from there get

• 17:05Speaker 02

  involved in politics, and then learn all this other stuff that I never did know. It puts everything together so that when it came to doing a ceremony, well, basically it's all there.

• 17:21Speaker 03

  Most people have different selves. Jim's just seemed more radically different than most. Poet, soldier, fisherman, mentor to young creatives. He says his years as a scallop fisherman were the most satisfying of his life, but he gave it up when he realized the damage it was doing to the environment. Instead, he took a desk job as Tasmania's first state liaison officer in Aboriginal affairs. Then he moved to Sydney to help set up the ABC's Aboriginal TV unit and traveled the nation, visiting Aboriginal communities. From there, he kept moving.

• 18:01Speaker 03

  He sat on country and protested with First Nations people around the world, sucking in knowledge all the way.

• 18:11Speaker 02

  I didn't even need gum boots.

• 18:14Speaker 03

  But he still has a strong relationship with the sea.

• 18:18Speaker 02

  Oh, well, I mean, I sort of basically grew up on the sea. You've got to learn to respect the sea, and you've got to know your own limits. Let's get out of here, I'm starting to go in, it's like sinking into bloody quicksand.

• 18:37Speaker 03

  The first official handover of Crown land to an Aboriginal community in Tasmania occurred on Trewana in 2005. The community runs the place: power, water, roads, housing, school, cemetery, the lot.

• 19:06Speaker 02

  Stuart Mansell.

• 19:09Speaker 02

  His wife, Rosely, died earlier this year. We had a lot of deaths. Elliot Maynard, so he's only young.

• 19:23Speaker 02

  About the same age as Jamie.

• 19:25Speaker 03

  Your son?

• 19:26Speaker 02

  Yep, Jamie. Then Sharon, one of me cousins. She died after Jamie. They're taking a while to settle down these. Elliot's been here for a few years now. But they're all about the same age. The early 50s.

• 19:46Speaker 02

  All alcohol-related problems.

• 19:51Speaker 02

  But yeah, this is Jamie's grave here. So what I want to do with that is put a big rock here. A really big rock that'll go down in the ground. And then cover this with stones around that area. And then shells and small stones in the interior of it. But that'll still settle a lot more yet.

• 20:13Speaker 02

  Graves everywhere.

• 20:30Speaker 02

  This painting up here looks awful, doesn't it? It's sort of scary.

• 20:34Speaker 03

  We're back in Jim's home, where the walls are covered by photos and artwork by friends, extended family, and this one.

• 20:43Speaker 02

  My son painted that, Jamie, he painted that when he was in jail. That's how their heads would go, I suppose, when they're in jail. He was a really good son. But I suppose his mind's sort of conjured up this image of fire and demons and stuff.

• 20:58Speaker 03

  What was he jailed for?

• 20:59Speaker 02

  Oh, in jail for burglary. You know, he used to burglar shops and stuff. He never burgled private homes. He said, "No, we don't steal from private people, but we go and pinch from the rich."

• 21:09Speaker 03

  Your son Jamie that you lost sounds like a really interesting person.

• 21:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was. He was free. He lived just a free life. Work wasn't his idea of how you live. He's held some jobs and he used to go fishing. He was really good on fishing boats. But I'm talking about his later years. He sort of got out of work because his health wasn't the best anyway. But he'd show up when people had their problems. Somebody died. He'd be there with the dead at the funeral services and stuff like this. And he'd visit those people all the time. He's always kept in touch personally.

• 21:49Speaker 02

  Well, he lived with me the last seven months of his life, but prior to that, he was living in shared rooms, and then sometimes he was homeless.

• 21:58Speaker 03

  I think you told me before that sometimes he'd live in a cave, or...

• 22:02Speaker 02

  Oh, when he was about thirteen, fourteen, he had this dog, Toby, he was a big German shepherd. He and Toby would go up and live in the caves up in Canungi, Mount Wellington. That's how he lived, that was him.

• 22:18Speaker 02

  He didn't have much in life, really, because he never had much need for it. Yeah, he'd just go and do his own thing.

• 22:27Speaker 02

  He could pop up anywhere.

• 22:31Speaker 03

  Jamie was the third of Jim's sons to die. The other two weren't his blood children, but the sons of women he had long relationships with.

• 22:43Speaker 03

  The first returned from being a soldier in Afghanistan. He hung himself. The second died from emphysema and alcohol.

• 22:54Speaker 03

  Jim's son Jamie from alcohol, a bit of emphysema, and heart disease.

• 23:01Speaker 03

  But Jim says those are only the physical causes.

• 23:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, the Aboriginal community, right across the country, really has these problems. Generational trauma and stuff like that, it exists. I still feel that I have some of that trauma at times. And I get really frustrated and do or say silly things. If you're still colonized, and you've got a history that you know, and you know your family back into those times when the colonials were out openly shooting Aboriginal people, you feel that pretty hard sometimes, and it hurts. It's a sadness, it's a very, very sad feeling. And then you get angry. You get angry at times, or write some stuff that's pretty angry, then I'm going to go back

• 23:51Speaker 02

  and sort of edit it later on when I'm feeling a bit better mind. But yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, it's there.

• 24:01Speaker 03

  Some of the hardest times in my life has been

• 24:04Speaker 05

  Around my own question of identity and how I am in the world.

• 24:09Speaker 02

  Nice shark cooking up there.

• 24:14Speaker 05

  And those times where I've been able to walk on the beach with Uncle Jim, listening to his stories.

• 24:22Speaker 02

  Actually, flake or shark is a really good meat. And it's good curry too, it's a really good one to curry.

• 24:29Speaker 05

  Or sitting by a fire, or you know, even the best is when you're in his kitchen and he's just baked bread.

• 24:36Speaker 05

  Or he pulls it out from underneath his cupboard, his black sauce, his Worcestershire sauce. If you've got one of those, you know that that's pure gold. He is completely generous, but he is one of those wisdom keepers that

• 24:56Speaker 05

  shapes the world.

• 25:00Speaker 05

  What did you used to eat when you were a kid?

• 25:02Speaker 02

  Oh, well, I mean, like at Sasa Fresh Creek down these Gibbsland, we we used to go and get freshwater clams or freshwater mussels down there, including freshwater crayfish.

• 25:16Speaker 02

  That'll do that.

• 25:23Speaker 05

  There are a lot of people whose lives and stories interweave with Jim's, like Buck Brown. He's part of the extended family that Jim gives his Worcestershire sauce to. Yeah.

• 25:35Speaker 05

  Tell me about this fellow over here.

• 25:37Speaker 06

  About this fellow here. Bet. Linger longa langer. Well, I've known Jim most of my life.

• 25:45Speaker 05

  Are you related?

• 25:46Speaker 06

  I certainly am, we're related. I watched Jimbo as a fisherman around the islands here. Been a lot of travelling around Tasmania with Jimbo. And of course, I worked in cultural heritage for years and Aboriginal Land Council, Jim was the manager there. So I managed to work in the bush with both Jimmy's sons, Jamie and Aaron. Known Jim most of my life, he's one of my best mates, so he's a great bloke, yeah.

• 26:12Speaker 05

  And this island, what sort of a place is it?

• 26:15Speaker 06

  Oh, it's paradise. It is, really is. I grew up here.

• 26:25Speaker 02

  Political poems. This is, I reckon, one of the best I've ever written. Righto. So, On the Road with Buck. One day I was driving with Buck Brown along the coast, and we was talking about white coes on our land, till the talk got real intense and I wouldn't want to boast. But we worked it all out from the start, right to the end. Now, it's easy enough to see, well, it is to you and me, why white fellas do their thing the wrong way around. Their old men made a structure with God being He, so that the men had all the power on the ground. Then they made their peoples mine. It's just that this is what my life was. It's just another story. Everybody's got all these stories.

• 27:10Speaker 02

  And I sometimes think to myself, why doesn't it think that my story's any more interesting and special than anyone else's story? It's amazing. So what were you saying a moment ago? I forget. So do I. So, "Take heed, all coe, that we do our thing in a strong and pure way, and we always live with the way she has made for us to grow; and hold no sorrow, and shed no tears for the way they end their day, because we told them for two hundred years, but they didn't want to know."

• 27:50Speaker 01

  Jim Everett. And Jim's willingness to get arrested for a righteous cause hasn't slowed.

• 27:59Speaker 01

  This episode was produced by Nicole Steinke with sound engineer John Jacobs.