The Two Wise Men and the Seven Sisters story explanation – Text version
told by Josie Boyle
This is my Mum, Mimbardda, from whom I get all my Dreaming stories. Stories that I go and tell inschools. They all come from my mother. Behind is the country that we come form. This is our country, the WONG-GU-THA country here, and over there is where Mary’s country is, way on the border of the NorthernTerritory. Docker River.
The skin groupings that these two are using at the moment is made up of how everybody married a long time ago. The six skin groupings of the desert. It was a clean way ofliving and it was to stop interbreeding and all those sort of things. So, today we refer to each other through the skin groupings of our areas.
In a minute we hope to go to where that lake is and we’regoing to draw the stories in the sand and tell the stories in the old-fashioned way, of the Aboriginal way, the real traditional way of telling the stories. How we used to do it a long time a go.
AsI look out over there I feel very sad inside, because in our Dreaming stories of the Seven Sisters, the stories tell us that this was the last cut-off point for the Seven Sisters when they had theirtime here on earth. In the Dreamtime.
Over there is a boundary line that tells us that that’s a cut-off point into someone else’s territory, so the Seven Sisters spent a lot of time here, as theirlast time on earth, before they went back up into the Milky Way. This place was once so beautiful that the Seven Sisters lived in these caves here. But now as we look over here, we can see that theplace has been completely desecrated.
Mining people have come in here and made big open mining pits here. All the caves are wrecked here today.
This is why we need these Dreaming stories so much,because we need to tell our children all about our creation-time stories and all our Elder Aboriginal people that live in the towns here; in Koolgardie, in Kalgoorlie, they know these dreaming stories out…