Level 4

Henry James Rankine was a Ngarrindjeri Elder born at Point McLeay (Raukkan) in 1940, to Hendle Rankine and Annie Rankine (née Long), both also born at Point McLeay. Henry was the eldest of nine siblings, three of whom died very young. Growing up at the mission, Henry’s first paid job was on the dairy, milking cows all day from age fourteen. He also did farm labouring and butchering growing up, and worked for St Johns Ambulance Service for four years.

Henry was married to Jean Rankine (née Gollan) in the early-1960s, and they had six children together, born 1962-73. Henry was a deeply spiritual man, who took pride in his own knowledge of, and role in the continuance of, his culture and Country. He would frequently tell stories of spiritual and mystical events – reinforcing the strength of Ngarrindjeri culture grounded in family, community and Country, and demonstrating the wisdom of the Old People.

Henry served as a member of the Point McLeay, then Raukkan, Community Council from 1962, succeeded his mother as Chairperson of the Council in 1970. He had a long career of 46 years serving his people and was presented with a watch for 20 years of unbroken service to the Raukkan Community Council in 1982. His mother too had served her community for a remarkable 45 years, elected founding Chairperson of the Point McLeay Community Council in 1968, and appointed a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE) in 1970.

Henry’s role on the Raukkan Council brought him many responsibilities including membership of the Southern Chairmen and Advisors’ Committee, with Colin Cook of Gerard and Neil Milera of Point Pearce during the 1980s. He was additionally active on the Coorong Consultative Committee, the Southern Regional Aboriginal Heritage Committee, and with the Tandanya Aboriginal Cultural Institute.

Henry was also a Justice of the Peace; a member of the Aboriginal Lands Trust (ALT) for the Coorong, and later Ministerial Representative to the Board of the ALT (2007-8); Commissioner for Native Title; and the Chairman of the ATSIC Murrundi Regional Council from the early-1990s. He was awarded an Achievement Award from Advance Australia in 1989, and an Order of Australia Medal “for service to the Aboriginal Community” in 1992.

A highlight as Council Chairperson and Community Co-ordinator, Henry was involved in organising the Ngarrindjeri Ngrilkulun 1999, the first Corroboree held at Raukkan since 1899, which brought together the Ngarrindjeri diaspora, Elders, and broader South Australian Aboriginal Community for a joyous celebration during the International Year of Older Persons.

Henry Rankine passed away in 2008 at age 65. Henry’s wife Jean passed away in 2020.

Yvonne Koolmatrie was born in 1944 at Wudinna, near the far west coast of South Australia, to Joseph Roberts, a Kokatha man from that region – born at Fowlers Bay, with family at Yalata and Ooldea; and  Margaret ‘Connie’ Roberts – a Ngarrindjeri/Ramindjeri woman from Rabbit Island in the Coorong. The family moved around a lot when Yvonne was young, following work seasonally across the country – bag sewing, fruit picking, wool classing, shearing, or road grading – all the way between Joseph’s traditional Country in the west, and the Riverland and Meningie in the South; the kids working with their parents, or attending school occasionally when they were in town. After the family settled in their first permanent home at Cooltong (near Renmark) in the early 1960s, Yvonne was soon to have her own children, and moved down to the Coorong in 1967, then Meningie. It was here, in 1982, that she was first introduced to the traditional Ngarrindjeri weaving technique, taught to a small group by Auntie Dorothy Kartinyeri at a one time workshop that would change her life:

“That’s how it all began for me and that’s what I come back to whenever I start weaving. I will always acknowledge Auntie Dorrie for teaching me; she was the person who set me on this path. When I attended that workshop, it gave me a different outlook on life.”

Here the women and men learned how to prepare and stitch the material, as well as visiting the sandhills around Raukkan where the bilbili and kayi (spiny-headed sedge)* grows, as it does along the Murray and through the Riverland and Coorong. Yvonne is also very interested in the ecology of the region, emphasising sustainability in reed collection through her workshops, and understanding her practice as custodial as well as material culture.

By 1986 Yvonne was living in Berri with her late husband and children, and teaching weaving at the Jerry Mason Senior Memorial Centre in nearby Glossop. She began exhibiting more, including at Tandanya and as part of a group show at CACSA in 1993 with Ian Abdulla and Kerry Giles entitled ‘Murrundi: three River Murray stories’, assisted at this time by a fellowship that allowed Yvonne to spend a year weaving, and researching the South Australian Museum collections. Following several shows across Australia over the next few years, Yvonne was invited to represent Australia at the 1997 Venice Biennale with her work ‘Eel Trap’, alongside Emily Kame Kngwarreye and Judy Watson, and curators Hetti Perkins and Brenda L Croft. Since then, Yvonne has been represented by Gabriella Roy in Sydney.

Yvonne cites Duncan Daniels as the biggest inspiration in her life, assisting her in travelling and collecting reeds up and down the river, fishing and finding material. She sees weaving as a practice that brings people together and connects to culture, history and land – teaching the practice to other women in her family including her mother, and sister Lucy, and leading weaving workshops across the country: “teaching people and helping them to rediscover their culture.” The historical context of her work is especially significant to Yvonne, understanding her weaving as the critical continuation of a traditional practice that was at risk, until a revival by a small group of women including Auntie Dorrie in the 1980s, and is now the responsibility of a new generation: taking on renewed significance as a proud marker of cultural identity, and resisting hegemonic attempts to eradicate or commodify Aboriginal culture.

The Art Gallery of South Australia hosted a major retrospective exhibition of Yvonne’s work, ‘Riverland’ in 2015, within the inaugural ‘Tarnanthi’ Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art. Here the incredible range and scale of her oeuvre is most apparent, bringing together works from galleries and collections across Australia, and showcasing weavings that reflect the traditional Ngarrindjeri forms of her forebears, as well as modernist objects – of another lineage in the spirit of Janet Watson’s ‘Model of Aeroplane’ (1930s) – all united by her commitment to the traditional stitch and material, beginning with the arduous process of gathering. As Hetti Perkins observes in her essay for ‘Riverland’, Yvonne’s forms (in this case her story mats) “perform a mnemonic function – they not only revive memories of the lived experience of times past, but serve as a technical guide for those who will follow in her footsteps as cultural custodians.”

Yvonne has works in major galleries across Australia including the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Art Gallery of Western Australia, the South Australian Museum, and internationally, at the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka, Japan. She has also exhibited in the 1991 ‘Aboriginal Women’s Exhibition’ at the Art Gallery of NSW, ‘Beyond the Pale’ Adelaide Biennale in 2000, and in the ‘Festival of the Dreaming’ as part of the Sydney Olympic Games celebrations, also in 2000.

In 2016, Yvonne was awarded ‘Artist of the Year’ in the SA NAIDOC Awards, and the prestigious Red Ochre Prize at the Australia Council’s 2016 National Indigenous Arts Awards, acknowledging her “outstanding contribution to a lifetime of achievement in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts at a national and international level.”

*Bilbili (Ngarrindjeri): rushes used for baskets and mats

Kayi (Ngarrindjeri): grass to weave with

Agnes Rigney was born in 1939, the eldest of twelve children to Jimmy Abdulla and Jemima Abdulla (née Hunter). Jemima was born at Raukkan, but was living at Swan Reach Mission and recently married to Jimmy when Agnes was born. Jimmy was strident in his objections to the restrictions placed on Aboriginal people at this time, and was denied rations by the ‘Protector’ after he and Jemima were married without first seeking permission from the missionaries. After moving to Point Pearce briefly, Agnes and her parents returned to Swan Reach where they lived until 1956, alongside other families that had refused to leave after the mission was officially closed and residents were pressured to move to Gerard Mission or elsewhere.

Despite the hardships endured on the mission, combined with the degree of paternalistic control exercised by the missionaries and the state, Agnes recalls that period as a happy time, with vivid memories of playing in the river, her Elders catching fish and swans to eat, and attending Sunday School each week where they could sing choruses in their own language. Agnes was also aware as a child of the pervasive inequality experienced by her people, and her father sought to enculturate her in non-Aboriginal society, taking her with him when he lived and worked with white people, and insisting that she go to high school to learn the tools she would need to help her people in the future. Agnes was later involved in archaeological and oral history research into life at Swan Reach from that era, from which her recollections here are sourced.

Agnes settled in Barmera in 1970. She was widowed young and brought up all her children as a sole parent. True to her father’s ambitions for her, Agnes continued the fight for greater equality and equal opportunity for Aboriginal people, and was always involved in community life. She was a founding member of the Riverland Aboriginal Social Club, alongside Cathy Chishold and David Rathman, which grew until the group decided to work towards opening a community centre – holding public meetings and exploring options to secure their own building and funding, and ultimately opening the Jerry Mason Senior Memorial Centre at Glossop in 1984, where Agnes worked as the Co-ordinator. The Centre started running popular courses in Aboriginal crafts, teaching wood carving, basket making and feather flower making, as well as running fitness and boxing classes in the evening. Renowned Ngarrindjeri weaver Yvonne Koolmatrie worked at the Centre teaching weaving from 1986. Over the following years they expanded to include vocational education courses funded by the Education Department, then screen printing classes from 1988 – attended by Agnes’ brother Ian Abdulla, who then launched his art career a year later at age 41 and went on to national and international success.

By 1990 Agnes had been joined at the Centre by two other full-time staff, and had attendance of an average thirty students every day. They were involved in organising various community sports teams, running a childcare service, and teaching Aboriginal culture at almost every school in the Riverland. Other community involvement included organising NAIDOC week activities, providing a counselling service and an Aboriginal Health Worker, and teaching secondary studies to adult learners. Interested in empowering Aboriginal people toward financial independence and self-management, Agnes was also running business training courses, and sought to create an Arts and Craft Aboriginal Enterprise Centre with a global outlook. In 1990 the University of North Arizona funded Agnes to travel to the United States, to talk about Aboriginal culture and explore markets for the sale of Aboriginal art and crafts, which resulted in several business links and a series of outlets in the USA.

The following year, in 1991, Agnes was elected Councillor to the District Council of Barmera, becoming the first Aboriginal woman elected to local government in South Australia. For Agnes, this represented an opportunity to “change social attitudes and gain acceptance of Aboriginal people,” and to bring awareness of the role of local government and what it could offer to the community, as well as striving to make the Council more relevant to the lives of local Aboriginal people. In an interview for the Council and Community journal in 1992, Agnes was described as “a very capable administrator and achiever,” and “the kind of person who can bring Council and their Aboriginal communities together for local economic and cultural development.”

Throughout her life Agnes was a champion of the Murray River and her traditional Country, necessarily including campaigning for environmental protections and changes to the way the Murray Darling River system is managed. She was a Murray Lower Darling Rivers Indigenous Nations (MLDRIN) delegate for Ngarrindjeri, forming an alliance of Aboriginal peoples across the Southern Part of the Murray Darling Basin, to assert the interests of the traditional owners in relation to water law, policy and management across NSW, Victoria and SA, and working with and funded through the Murray Darling Basin Commission. For Agnes, the river symbolised the connections between Aboriginal Nations in the region, stating to Jessica Weir in 2004 that “it doesn’t matter what group or what language group you belong to, there is a common cause, there is a common thread along the river, the river people,” and that the ecological threats to the river represented a threat to ‘cultural living’ - the continuance and transmission of cultural knowledge and practice:

“I remember as a kid growing up in Loxton how clear the river was, the water was, and my father actually making us spears from bamboo. And we used to walk down to the river and we used to spear the fish. And it is just sad what’s happened to it now. That was a part of cultural living, connected to the river, that we can’t really practice anymore.”

Agnes was Chairperson of the Riverland Aboriginal Heritage Committee in Barmera from 2008, a member of the State Aboriginal Heritage Committee, and an applicant in the successful Native Title Claim for the ‘First Peoples of the River Murray and Mallee Region,’ along with eleven others including Henry Rankine OAM, which began in 1998 and was determined in 2011. From 1990, the year of its inception, Agnes was also an elected Regional Councillor to the national Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC).

She was an important contributor to educational and historical knowledge of Aboriginal culture and mission life, contributing significantly to ‘The Ngarrindjeri People’ course book for secondary students in 1990, and always maintaining her connection to the river:

“I don’t think I can be far away from the river because the river I believe is in my blood. It is a part of me. I was born on the river. I have lived on the river all of my life and I am an Elder now. I wouldn’t be happy too far away from the river … We are all part of the food chain, and that’s why I feel a part of it – well I am … The river gave us life, the river fed us.”

As a senior Ngarrindjeri Elder, Agnes was also one of a few Elders to produce the Ngarrindjeri wordlists, designed to assist Aboriginal Education Workers in language and culture education, which formed the basis for the later Ngarrindjeri Dictionary project in which she is acknowledged. She was Chairperson of the Aboriginal Languages Centre in Adelaide, at the time co-ordinating nine language programs throughout regional South Australia aimed at reviving, recording, and translating languages and stories in schools and within the community, and ultimately to institute Aboriginal languages as a permanent and compulsory part of the education curriculum. Agnes is quoted in the Koori Mail in 2002 speaking to this project:

"Language is the core of our culture, our identity, and it's very important for us to keep that alive and to make sure that it's passed onto our kids, and that they pass it on to their kids so that it's kept alive.”

Sharon Gollan is a descendent of the Ngarrindjeri nation of South Australia, with family and cultural connections to many communities within and beyond South Australia. She is an active member of the broader Aboriginal community in South Australia, and is recognised as a leader both within her nation and the wider Aboriginal community.

Sharon has worked professionally and academically in a range of human services fields in Australia. She began her professional career with a strong focus on Aboriginal children, youth and families, working in an interdisciplinary team to address the social-emotional wellbeing and support needs of young Aboriginal children and families and communities. Sharon has over thirty years of experience in the health, youth, children and community services sector with a primary focus on creating better services for Aboriginal people. Through her leadership positions within the public and non-government sectors she has gained extensive experience in the development, implementation and review of government programs, policies and initiatives.

From 2001-2009 Sharon was a Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in the David Unaipon College of Indigenous Education and Research, University of South Australia. She contributed to the education of graduate and post-graduate social work, nursing, teaching and psychology students by supporting them to develop culturally accountable practice when working with Aboriginal people and communities.

Sharon practices as a Cultural Advisor, Trainer and Consultant. This work has taken her into both urban and rural regions, operating within and across government, non-government, university and private sectors. As a consultant she has designed and managed evaluation, research or planning projects at local, regional, state and national levels. She has also been a Board and/or Advisory member of Aboriginal community controlled health services as well as mainstream community health and human services, including as a member of the SA Aboriginal Advisory Council, providing advice directly to SA Government Ministers. This has given her unique insight into management, governance and service delivery issues for Aboriginal people, and she has developed both a keen interest and exceptional skills in leadership in Aboriginal contexts. In 2009, Sharon’s contributions to Aboriginal communities across the state over many years were recognised through her winning the Premier’s NAIDOC Person of the Year Award. She was also one of the NAIDOC Ambassadors for South Australia for two years.

Sharon has been regularly invited to contribute to the evaluation of community-based projects, strategic planning, policy development, community consultation, curriculum development, education/training, and social-emotional wellbeing projects in the Aboriginal health and community services sector. These include projects focused on children, young people and families, health, juvenile justice and community leadership. She receives frequent requests from government agencies to provide specific advice on matters relating to culturally competent practice for working with Aboriginal families, whether related to a particular family situation, employment and recruitment, policy development or governance and decision-making.

Sharon was instrumental in the establishment of Camp Coorong in 1985. Through her youth work activities, she had been inspired to model a South Australian camp on the successful Camp Jungai in Victoria, and saw an opportunity when a parcel of land became available for sale in Meningie. After visiting the real estate agent and discovering the owner of the land, she made a connection through a local football club and persuaded the then owner of the property to remove the ‘For Sale’ sign while Sharon and her Senior Youth Worker worked on raising funds to buy the land.

Sharon has made a profound impact in the lives of many, particularly in her work and conversations about partnership accountability work, and especially in the concept of ‘black-white’ partnership work. In this capacity she has developed strong partnerships with non-Aboriginal people in addressing issues that non-Aboriginal people need to consider when engaging with Aboriginal people as consultants, researchers and/or practitioners. She is well known for, and under constant demand to facilitate ‘Cultural Respect and Safety’ training workshops that assist non-Aboriginal health and human services workers to understand the dimensions of racism, their cultural identity, and how to address racism in order to develop respectful service responses in working with Aboriginal people, agencies and communities, including for DIT.

In her own words: “We must be Courageous to keep our Vision of Change, of Truth, of Love and of Justice.”