Finding his voice: Jack Buckskin’s turbulent journey to bring Kaurna back from the brink

From a childhood of violence and drugs, to a devastating loss in his teens, Jack Buckskin has travelled a hard road to revive his langauge. Now he’s spreading the word in SA classrooms.

More Indigenous school students are connecting with their culture thanks to new Kaurna language classes being rolled out this term.

It comes as the first Kaurna dictionary is set to be released later this year for a language that, only a few years ago, was close to extinction.

Kaurna language classes began at Warriappendi School, which teaches Aboriginal students, earlier this month. They will run fortnightly until the end of the school year.

Jack Buckskin, a Kaurna and Narungga man who started learning Kaurna when he was 19, is teaching the classes at the Marleston school. The 35-year-old said learning language was important for students to “realise the value in learning their own culture”.

Jack Buckskin with Warriappendi School students (l-r) Shania Wilson-Karpany, Albert McMasters and Delvian Reid. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Tricia Watkinson

“They might go back in their own lives and realise what they don’t know and want to learn more so it might get them asking questions to their elders,” he said.

“It might just bring them back on a journey to reconnect and learn and ask questions with their own elders, whether it’s Kaurna or not.

“It’s just trying to create them a foundation so they know their place and their belonging so they can continue their own journeys.”

Mr Buckskin has played a vital role in reviving the Kaurna language, which died out as an everyday dialect in the 1860s, and has become a recognisable face of Aboriginal culture in SA.

Warriappendi principal Craig Bailey said having someone as prominent as Mr Buckskin teach was a huge win for the school.

“It’s great to see (the students) settled, great to see them engaged and great to see them engaged with an Aborginal man,” he said.

“We’re on Kaurna land and we feel that Kaurna should be taught here.”

He said about 15 students attended the first Kaurna session earlier this month. “I think they really like the fact that Jack was actually delivering the course,” he said. Year 9 student Shania Wilson-Karpany, 14, said the classes were helping her understand her Indigenous heritage. “I don’t know much about my Aboriginal culture,” she said.

As well as teaching Kaurna, Mr Buckskin has contributed to building the language, which will have its first official dictionary published this year by Wakefield Press.

University of Adelaide Associate Professor Dr Rob Amery, who taught Mr Buckskin Kaurna, said the language had regrown to about 3000 words. “I didn’t expect it to get this far,” he said.

JACK’S STORY

Jack Buckskin has played a leading role in helping to save and revitalise the Kaurna language, which died out as an everyday dialect in the 1860s. The 35-year-old’s commitment to the cause has taken him into schools, where he now teaches the language he started learning at age 19 and later this year, Wakefield Press will published the very first Kaurna dictionary. This is Jack’s story.

It’s 2006 and a young Jack Buckskin is still reeling from the suicide of his older sister Mary.

She was his best friend, his closest confidante, his everything. Her death knocked him flat.

The loss of Mary came out of the blue for Buckskin. He was derailed in an instant.

“It hit me really hard,” Buckskin remembers.

“Questions about culture or anything, she had all the answers.”
When she died by suicide, Buckskin says, “I didn’t have that person, so I got really sick for a while. I stopped playing footy, stopped everything I was doing and really gave up on life. I probably had depression but back then no one knew what depression was.”

He dropped out of his university studies, quit his job as a pizza delivery driver and struggled to bring himself to even go out for a run – a lifelong love for the touted junior footballer who had stints in SANFL underage ranks.

After struggling with the loss for months, an Uncle insisted he start learning about Aboriginal culture to help get his life back on track.
Buckskin pushed back, then relented, making the two-hour round trip from his home in Adelaide’s northern suburbs to the Living Kaurna Cultural Centre at Marion.

He walked into the Kaurna language class where linguist Rob Amery was teaching a group of people, some Aboriginal, some not.

A 19-year-old, baby-faced Buckskin didn’t understand a word. But something deep inside him was ignited. He was hooked.

“I walked into the class and heard this non-Aboriginal guy rattle off Kaurna like I’d never heard before … and I thought, ‘I want to be able to do that’,” Buckskin, now 35, recalls.

Unbeknown to him at the time, his life would be changed forever.

Jack Buckskin has become one of the most recognisable faces of Aboriginal culture in South Australia. Picture: Matt Turner

Before that night Buckskin’s exposure to Kaurna language was pretty limited.

His family had a “word list” at home but, as he soon found out, it was small and hard to learn because the words were translated from Kaurna to English.

Like an adolescent discovering a foreign tongue, Buckskin searched first for the inappropriate words. “You’d look for the naughty words,” he laughs over a coffee at a Grenfell St cafe recently opened by a friend.

However, from that first night, Amery, former head of linguistics at the University of Adelaide, who has spent years himself learning, teaching and reviving Kaurna, saw something in the teenage Buckskin.

The two quickly built a rapport. “He was pretty switched on and he picked up the language pretty quickly,” Amery recalls.

Fast forward 16 years and Buckskin is the most fluent Kaurna speaker of only a handful of people in South Australia. His teacher puts it down to pure dedication and hard work.

“He’s done a really remarkable job in learning the language himself,” Amery says.

“There’s only so much you can learn through a language class. You’ve got to put in the hard yards yourself to learn a language and, well, he’s done that.”

And they were hard yards indeed.

Amery recalls how Buckskin spoke Kaurna at every opportunity but, given the lack of fellow Kaurna speakers, his options were limited. He would talk to his young children and to himself while he was driving around. He would even speak to his dog. But he was a natural and, within 18 months, was teaching alongside Amery. Within two years he was in front of the class on his own.

Buckskin admits his initial motivations may have been selfish. “I got thrown under the bus,” Buckskin says tongue-in-cheek.

“I didn’t want to be a language teacher, I just learned it for myself.”

That soon changed, and today Buckskin is the face of the revitalisation of the Kaurna language and, more broadly, one of the more recognisable representatives of Aboriginal culture in South Australia.

It’s a status that may not sit entirely comfortably with him but one he admits he can’t escape. His work in culture and language has become his life and thrust him into the public eye.

Aside from the 2013 documentary, Buckskin, about his early years teaching Kaurna, he has shied away from media attention – as much as his profile allows, at least.

Pinning him down for an interview is a challenge in itself. But when you see him scrolling through the calendar on his phone, it’s easy to understand why he is hard to get hold of.

Jack Buckskin has been sharing Kaurna culture for more than 15 years.

In 2011, Buckskin was named the SA Young Australian of the Year for his contribution to reviving Kaurna language and culture.

Despite his pride at receiving the prize, it came as a surprise and raised questions within himself about what it meant to be Australian.

“I didn’t realise people knew what I was doing,” Buckskin says.

“On one hand it was great people were acknowledging the work that I do, especially the long days and hours of volunteering all of this time and everything else, but at the same time I’m getting acknowledged for relearning my mother tongue language, which my grandfather got beaten for. It was that sort of catch 22 that I had mixed emotions over.”

The timing of the award presentation on January 26 also drew a range of reactions within Buckskin’s community. Some Uncles shunned the presenting of the award on such a painful day for the Indigenous population, while others urged Buckskin to use it as a platform to share his work and their culture.

“There were these mixed views getting put on to me … it was really hard to navigate. I was still only young back in 2011,” he says.

But one Uncle stood by him the whole way.

Stephen Goldsmith, a celebrated Kaurna and Narungga leader, began working with Amery to revive the Kaurna language decades ago.

Goldsmith took a young Buckskin under his wing, where he remained until the leader’s death in 2017. He was, and still is, the biggest influence in Buckskin’s quest of “lifelong learning”. His passing left a gaping hole in Buckskin’s inner circle as well as the local Aboriginal community where “Stevie” was a cultural pillar. “He was the most knowledgeable man that you could ever think of and he really set the tone for language and culture here in South Australia,” Buckskin says.

It was Goldsmith who invited Buckskin to that very first language class.

Growing up in a household often filled with as many as 20 family members,Buckskin was exposed to much as a youngster, which he now tries to protect his own children from.

Being part of a community rife with domestic violence and drug abuse, he saw first-hand the harshness of life for Aboriginal people, especially women. “I grew up with domestic violence happening nightly, daily, weekly,” Buckskin says. “It was difficult for me to grow up as a younger brother who’s told as a brother it’s your responsibility to protect your sisters … and their partner beats them up.

“I remember being on the receiving end a couple of times because I tried to stand in front of them and be that big brother and copping a whooping myself.”

Buckskin has worked hard to provide for his children but admits he finds it difficult to walk the fine line between providing for his kids and teaching them the value of hard work.

He tries to offer a bit of both.

Juggling his ever-growing profile and work commitments with being a father hasn’t come without its challenges for Buckskin, who separated from high school sweetheart Khe-Sanh for close to five years before the pair started working to repair their relationship recently.

However, Buckskin’s children, Mahleaha, 11, Vincent, 8, and Jackson, 5, will now be the first generationof his lineage in more than 150 years to be raised with Kaurna as their mother tongue thanks to the work of their father.

And although Buckskin is the language’s most fluent living speaker, he tries not to impose language on his young kids, but rather let them grow into their heritage.

Jack Buckskin in his early years teaching Kaurna.

The last decade and a half of his life has been dedicated to Kaurna language and culture but for a long time Buckskin belonged to a different “mob” altogether.

Born Vincent John, and nicknamed Jack, Buckskin grew up identifying as Narungga because of the lineage of his family on the Yorke Peninsula. “I didn’t even know my name was Vincent until I started school,” Buckskin laughs.

Then two years into his teaching of the Kaurna language Buckskin began tracing the ancestry of his mother’s side and discovered a link which brought his family from Victoria to Kaurna land in Adelaide.

The connection to the land he has lived on for his entire life gave his work all the more meaning. Despite his deep connection to Kaurna land, Buckskin still refers to the Narungga land of the Yorke Peninsula as “back home”. His connection to that Country is so profound he recently bought a block of land there so he and his young family have a place of their own to stay when they travel back to visit relatives who still live at Point Pearce.

An Uncle joked that he had bought his own land back. “If you don’t, you’re going to miss out,” Buckskin recalls saying. “I work hard to provide for my kids and provide a space for my kids to go back and keep connecting to culture. If I’m here or not, it gives them their space.”

Buckskin points out he chose to buy the block rather than a home in Adelaide’s northern suburbs where he still lives.

At 35, Buckskin is still much younger than Kaurna elders but is in the rare position of teaching language to the generation before him.

“It’s difficult,” Buckskin explains. “I’ve got elders in their 50s, 60s, 70s, and I’m teaching them language … culturally yes, they can teach, but linguistically they don’t understand it. It’s about unpacking it and making it easier for them to understand.”

Despite his hesitations, Buckskin is clearly highly regarded within the Kaurna community for his work. Dr Lewis O’Brien, an adjunct research fellow at the University of South Australia and a Kaurna elder, who has worked on Kaurna with Amery since the 1990s, says that without Buckskin’s work, the language would not be what it is today. “He’s done a marvellous job, Jack,” O’Brien says.

Feeling out of place has been all the more challenging for Amery, a non-Aboriginal man teaching Kaurna people their own language.

He is comfortable with his standing as the leading academic on the revival of the Kaurna language, but Amery has often struggled with his position as a “white fella” when approached to translate words and name places.

“I’m not a Kaurna person,” he recalls saying.

To combat this he founded Kaurna Warra Pintyanthi, a collaboration with Kaurna community members like O’Brien, whose praise of Amery is equally as glowing as that of Buckskin, which meant Kaurna people could have input into creating words.

“It’s incredible the work he’s done,” O’Brien says. “Without him we wouldn’t have done it …”

Rob Amery has played a vital role in the revitalisation of the Kaurna language. Picture Matt Turner.

Amery has revived, rebuilt and mastered Kaurna but his linguistic career has been as much about empowering Kaurna people to reclaim their language, and culture. In this, he and Buckskin share a common goal.

At last month’s historic, heavily-Aboriginal influenced Anzac Day Dawn Service Buckskin handed the reins over to Steven Warrior, a fellow Kaurna and Narungga man, to lead the smoking ceremony at the service.

But this didn’t diminish his own input as he performed the Welcome to Country and sang.

During this, Buckskin is at his typically powerful best, white body paint drawn over his lean frame and face, kangaroo skin draped over him as he performs. To hear him channel the voices of a forgotten language is nothing short of a spiritual experience, so much so it is one that is felt more than it is heard. However, he says he must now empower his brothers and sisters to learn the language and the culture. He must pass it on as it has been passed on to him. It is the only way Kaurna traditions have been revived, and will continue to be celebrated.

Buckskin has a serious mission but, away from the ceremoniesand events, the “kid from Salisbury” is never far away. Out of the public eye, he is as disarming as anyone. His grin is infectious, his voice gruff, his words genuine. He’s a bit of a larrikin and he tells a great yarn.

Before he began learning Kaurna language, Buckskin agreed to join an Aboriginal dance performance after Goldsmith insisted he “build his spirit back up” following Mary’s death.

He laughs at the memory of his first foray into Aboriginal dance being an extra in a scene of a Bollywood film being shot at the Festival Plaza in Adelaide.

“I had no intention of dancing – it was just a smile and wave sort of thing,” Buckskin grins. But he did enjoy the performance and a seed was planted.

After the Dawn Service his walls are down and he is not Kaurna leader Jack Buckskin or community representative Jack Buckskin; he is just Jack. He poses for photos with daughter Mahleaha and Warrior on the steps of the War Memorial still adorned in traditional attire.

“Tell me when and I’ll tense,” he laughs, motioning to his half-painted bare stomach. “Nah, but, for real.” And he is for real.

Jack Buckskin during filming of the documentary Buckskin. Picture: Supplied

“They know me as the fun Uncle … Uncle Jack always joking,” Buckskin says of his nieces and nephews later in the day. His face has been washed and his ceremonial attire packed away. In track pants and a hoodie with a cigarette in hand, he lingers well behind a gathering crowd at the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander War Memorial ahead of a separate Anzac Day service to honour Indigenous servicemen and women.

Buckskin is eventually beckoned over to perform his second Welcome to Country for the day as the ceremony begins and is unaffected by the presence of some of the state’s most notable political figures. “I’ve got my clothes on now,” he jokes with the crowd.

But when he is singing, a switch is flipped.

When he is performing a ceremony, he is “serious Jack”.

Buckskin has been able to forge a career through his lifelong pursuitof learning and love of language that has taken him across the world.

Not long after he began his studies under Amery, he began teaching Kaurna at schools across Adelaide including a six-year stint at Tauondi Aboriginal College in Port Adelaide.

That work was not necessarily lucrative, but Buckskin was just happy to be teaching his language and earning decent money.

As he taught Kaurna to the next generation, Buckskin’s rapidly growing reputation as the face of the language’s revitalisation opened many doors. He has since been commissioned to perform hundreds of Welcomes to Country, conduct ceremonies and make public appearances. He guesses he would have taught at least some Kaurna to more than 10,000 people over the years.

The requests for Buckskin’s representation of culture became so constant he established his company Kuma Kaaru, or “one blood”, which started as a dance group, but has become what Buckskin describes as a “one stop shop” for people to engage with Aboriginal culture.

It comes with a price tag but for too long, Buckskin says, he undervalued himself and his culture. He admits he has struggled with monetising his knowledge, but realises there are few people who can offer what he does.

A few years ago he was commissioned by the National Museum of Australia to create a traditional Kaurna shield and until he was asked what he would charge for the work, Buckskin was planning on donating it as he does with all traditional objects he creates for friends and family. “I didn’t see the value … I’ve learned from others over my working life how to value culture,” he says. There are times, though, when Buckskin is happy just to promote his culture. He is still astounded when reflecting on the fact a boomerang he handcrafted made it to outer space with American astronaut Shannon Walker, the wife of Australian astronaut Andy Thomas. He recalls joking with his niece, who was doing a school project on the boomerang, that the longest trip a returning boomerang had made was about 400km.

Dr Shannon Walker with the boomerang Buckskin hand crafted. Picture: YouTube

Buckskin is proud to champion his culture but a true success of his work would be being out of a job. “Make my business irrelevant,” he says. “I don’t want to be having to earn an income and work for something that should be the norm.” Now, more than 15 years after he first walked into Amery’s Kaurna class as a student, Buckskin stands at the front of his own class engaging eager students as his teacher engaged him all that time ago.

His life is unrecognisable compared to that first night, but one thing has remained: his desire to truly understand and share his culture.

“Where I’ve been now over the last number of years teaching language and culture and embedding it in society came out of a loss; it came out of the loss of my sister. Out of negative can come positive but it takes a bit of resistance and resilience to be able to keep pushing.”

Jack Buckskin says there is still work to be done to educate people about Aboriginal culture. Picture: Matt Turner

And despite his mounting commitments outside of teaching, he has no intention of stopping his work to spread the Kaurna word anytime soon. “Language is the gateway to culture,” he says. “From a revitalised language where nobody spoke it, to hopefully having many fluent speakers, and everybody speaking it, that’s the sort of legacy I want to leave behind.”
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