Your Story, Our Story: Noongar elder Walter McGuire on the invasion of Australia and the history of migration

“Without the first story, there is no story.” When British colonisers left the safety of their ship to explore WA’s coastline, Walter McGuire Junior’s ancestors were watching from the shoreline. They couldn’t have known those strangers would be the first of many waves of migrants who would arrive in Noongar Boodja seeking a new life. Walter’s feet are still firmly planted on land that has been home since “before time itself began,” his connection to country unbroken. “We’ve come from no other place, but from here. This is who we are,” he said. In this seven part series, Lily Hoffmann uncovers the untold origin stories of Western Australians, starting with one of its First Nations people. A LONG HISTORY Walter, known as Uncle Walter to most, gazes out across Elizabeth Quay from his perch atop a hill nestled in Kings Park. Now the backdrop for countless picnic selfies, the view has changed but the place is deeply familiar — just a stone’s throw from the site where his great grandparents came into the world. For Walter, a proud traditional owner, all of this was, is, and always will be, Noongar Boodja. His ancestors have roamed the vastness of the Whadjuk lands that envelope the botanic sanctuary for more than 40,000 years. And while it might be called Kings Park now, this place has another, much older name – Karrgatup, home of the trapdoor spider. “There was a society here, a society that had law and culture, housing, employment,” Walter explained. “Everybody worked in harmony with the land, Mother Nature.” Walter, now the proud owner of Go Cultural Aboriginal Tours, dedicates his life to telling the first stories of the places now known as Elizabeth Quay, Kings Park, Rottnest Island and Yagan Square. Guiding newcomers from around the world — and Australia — through his city. “When you think back to the time of colonisation, settlement, and invasion of our lands back in 1826, the Noongar people, we occupied pretty much — and still do today — the entire South West region of Western Australia,” Walter said. “From Geraldton to Southern Cross, to the great Australian Bight and all the coastline back to Esperance, Albany and Perth with 14 tribal clans.” STOLEN GENERATION; STOLEN WAGES For Aboriginal people, the story of Australia’s migrant history is a profoundly complicated one, characterised by displacement from their lands, massacres and disease, slavery, and the imposition of policies that affect their communities to this day. It is a tragic legacy of the mistakes made by colonisers and the migrants that came afterwards, Walter said. The Noongar elder believes that had the first migrants been more willing to live in harmony with the First Nations people, the clans would have welcomed colonisers as new community members and that “we’d all be Noongar people” today. It was not to be and while many migrants have come to Australia to escape conflict, deprivation, and discrimination — it has been the scene of all three for Walter and his family. Walter McGuire Junior was born on August 13, 1962 in the small country Wheatbelt town of Beverley, to May Stack and Walter Senior. The McGuires eventually moved further north, settling along the Great Eastern Highway in Kellerberrin before Walter’s brother was accepted to the prestigious, then all boys school, Guildford Grammar. It proved to be a pivotal moment for Walter and the understanding of his family history. “I remember my mother crying the very first time we dropped my brother off at Guildford,” Walter said. “She cried all the way (back to Kellerberrin), and that stuck in my mind. It wasn’t until about 1996 when I was doing my degree at Curtin University…that I found out she was Stolen Generation, and I connected that with her crying, because it was likening to my eldest brother being taken away. Forcibly removed.” May Stack, born in a little cottage at New Norcia Mission, was taken away from her parents by the government on at least two occasions — without cause. Meanwhile her future husband Walter Senior worked under slave-like conditions for local farmers. “My mum was Stolen Generation ... Dad had to leave school at grade four, he had to go and work for rations”, he adds. “Grandma, I suppose, didn’t have the means of feeding him, so he was paid rations and for the long time that he worked for that farmer, he was never paid a dollar. “No super, no holiday pay, didn’t even get holidays.” INHERITED TRAUMA May promised herself she wouldn’t watch another son walk out of her home, so she moved the entire family to Perth for Walter’s education at Mount Lawley Senior High School. But not even a mother’s love could protect Walter from his unwanted birthright — the inherited trauma of years of entrenched racism and disadvantage. “In my final year, I was elected as head boy by my peers, but the headmaster decided, in his wisdom, that it would affect my studies,” Walter recalled. “He didn’t want an Aboriginal person, the very first Aboriginal person, to be head boy of the school while he was principal. “There was a big outcry from the students because they are the ones who elect (the head boy) … That actually affected a lot of people, a lot of Aboriginal people, students, and old friends.” UNWAVERING COMMITMENT Remarkably, a lifetime of these experiences has only cemented Walter’s commitment to his country. It’s brought him closer to home and to his purpose. He refuses to let racism and missed opportunity deepen the gap. “We the First Nations people, the Aboriginal people of this land, we should want for nothing,” he said. “There should be nothing about closing the gap. There should never be a gap. A gap has been created by colonist invaders.”

Your Story, Our Story: Noongar elder Walter McGuire on the invasion of Australia and the history of migration

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