‘We’re still here’: Indigenous performers send a message down millennia

When Gomeroi songwoman Auntie Bronwyn Spearim-Hoy was growing up in Moree in the 1960s and early 70s, officials would go to brutal lengths to try to crush Indigenous culture.

“We were living on mission camps,” she says. “Language was forbidden. If you spoke language, they took your children away. So our mother and father spoke language behind closed doors when it came nighttime. And I had elder siblings who spoke language and we’d listen.”

Later, following the death of her father in 1976, Spearim-Hoy moved with her family to Mount Druitt.

Auntie Bronwyn Spearim-Hoy, second left, with members of Ngambaa Dhalaay.Credit: Janie Barrett

“My mother was still afraid that they were going to come and take us from Mount Druitt,” she says. “I said, Sydney is all new. Totally different. We can walk the same as everybody else here. It took her about a couple of months before she ended up having the courage to continue to teach us.”

Spearim-Hoy has since devoted much of her life to sharing culture with her own mob and beyond. Her all-female organisation is called Ngambaa Dhalaay, or Mother’s Tongue, recalling the lessons learned at her mother’s knee.

Fifteen dancers and singers from Ngambaa Dhalaay will showcase their culture this weekend on Tubowgule (Sydney Opera House forecourt) during DanceRites, the national Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander dance competition that began in 2015.

They will join nearly 300 performers and 18 dance groups from more than 40 nations and clans. This year will also feature a performance by Native Pride, a Native American cultural group from Jacksonville, Florida, who are visiting Australia for the first time.

“These dances are passed down from generation to generation,” says Spearim-Hoy. “My mother is taught by her father, her mother, her mother’s father, her mother’s father’s mother. And it goes on. [Our ancestors] hear us and we’re sending a message to say we’re still here, we’re keeping it alive. We’re promoting and making people understand that our culture still exists and it’ll always exist from generation to generation.”

A performer from Cape York’s ALLKUMO Malpa Paman group at last year’s DanceRites festival.Credit: Wayne Quilliam

Eighteen-year-old Mietta Spearim, one of the younger Ngambaa Dhalaay dancers, is passionate about preserving and sharing her culture.

“It means everything to us as individuals and as a nation together we take pride in what we do,” she says. “Without it we’re lost. If you don’t know who you are you can’t know where you’re going. Our culture and all that is very, very important.”

And while DanceRites is technically a competition in which winners are named and prizes are distributed, for Spearim, there is a much deeper significance to the event.

“I see it as a deadly thing for all mobs to come together and showcase where they’re from,” she says. “We’ve always grown up knowing culture isn’t a competition and that we don’t do song and dance and stories and painting and gatherings to compete against each other, or for money. We do it for the love of culture.”

DanceRites, October 19 and 20. Sydney Opera House forecourt. Free.