When Australians talk about having the oldest surviving culture on Earth, Susan Moylan-Coombs wants you to really think about what that means. Indigenous Australians prospered on this continent for what we now estimate to be roughly 80,000 years before the colonial project arrived and, in her words, “took just over 230 years to fuck it up”.
Last year she delivered the keynote speech to the Australian Leadership Retreat (ALR) at the Australian Davos Connection Forum — an invitation-only event packed with CEOs, politicians, and media. She spoke of the coming climate catastrophe and the folly of attempting to solve it using the same logic that got us here in the first place. The speech was titled “Australia’s blind spot”.
“I’m trying to help them decolonise their thinking, but it’s like I’m speaking a foreign language. People hear it, but they don’t… get it,” she told Crikey while sitting on the banks of Manly Dam, a body of water shaped like a little reef shark in the centre of Warringah’s north. After her ALR speech, she decided she wanted to shift the conversation in Australian politics. Late last year, declared she would run as an independent in Warringah.
“I strongly believe that building the philosophies of Indigenous economics and science into the mainstream of the Australian conversation is absolutely key to moving us forward, and when you try to do that, the system wants to reinforce itself. It wants to ‘other’ you.”
Therein lies her challenge. While the other candidates talk about congestion and public transport, Moylan-Coombs is trying to fundamentally reset the Australian mindset. I suggest that might be difficult in a seat as conservative as Warringah.
“Actually, no. Of course there is a section of population who think that away and that’s understandable. But what’s been great to see is the young ones and the younger sets of parents, who were educated more about Indigenous history. They’re really wanting to understand and are actively saying ‘we need to ask First Nations people about this climate emergency’.”
Still, it is tough. Candidate forums with one- or two-minute time limits on answers favour a candidate with a party platform to work from, and limits the ability to advocate for a total re-think of, say, our approach to the environment.
“We’ve been here 80,000 years, we probably know a bit about protecting the environment and climate,” she says. “And we’re still surviving, despite an attempted genocide. So wouldn’t it be amazing if we did embrace Indigenous knowledge into a modern context, dovetail it with the modern science and work out a new way forward? Indigenous people all over the world have this approach — we’ve personified the Earth, it’s family. We are part of it and we belong to it. So why would we damage it?”
As she says this, she gestures towards the shore and for a moment we silently watch a statuesque black swan — its crimson beak glows like an ember at the end of a charred branch.
On the morning we meet, details are starting to emerge of Australia’s “watergate”. It’s hard to look at this elaborate shell game being played with Australia’s natural resources — the government paying well above the odds for water it can’t use, siphoned off from where it would naturally go, with the profits sent overseas — and not see her point.
Molyan-Coombs is a Woolwonga and Gurindji woman. The Woolwonga people barely survived an attempted extermination in 1884, while the Gurindji people were pioneers in Indigenous land rights.
She was born Susan Calma, then became Coombs after being taken from her biological family and adopted by the high-profile Coombs family when she was three. Her adoptive grandfather was “Nugget” Coombs, the first governor of the Reserve Bank. She has lived in the Northern Beaches area for the best part of 50 years. During this time she became the first Indigenous school captain in Australia, the first female Indigenous surf life saver, and embarked on a long career in broadcasting.
The fact that she walks in two worlds is a recurring theme of conversation. She makes no attempt to hide the trauma of forced removal, but talks with great affection of her adopted family and the values she inherited from them — HC Coombs is “Grandpa” and more than once, she explains a position with “because, you know, I’m a Coombs girl”.
Another theme is her disappointment with the limits of the conversation: in Warringah, in Australia, in politics. Whether it’s individual issues — say, the seismic testing going on off the Sydney coast “from Newcastle to Manly and no one’s talking about it” — or overarching assumptions. The press coverage has adopted the view that Warringah is a two-horse race between Tony Abbott and Zali Steggall and she worries that this belief is bleeding into the electorate.
“In the local press, it’s like I’m invisible.”
She’s not convinced by the “anyone but Tony Abbott” position.
“And then what?” she says. “It’s bad taste, the “dinosaur” stuff. I came out very early, and said ‘play the ball, not the man’. They’re playing the man.”
Incidentally, she doesn’t love their adoption of the word “tribe”.
In 1788, five days before the raising of the British flag at Sydney cover gave us the “bruise” of our national day, Captain Arthur Phillips met the men of the Kai’ymay region 12kms to the north; Manly Cove was so named because of how much Phillip admired their masculine qualities.
“So Manly, in the narrative of modern Australia, is really important,” she said. “Professor Dennis Foley is the elder for this area, and when he was traveling in the Kimberley, he met an old man who said ‘you need to heal your country, because that’s where our people first faced destruction. If you heal your country, it will travel out through the songlines and the storylines and the nation can heal.'”
This is what Susan Moylan-Coombs wants you to think about when we talk about the oldest surviving culture on Earth.
Charlie Lewis is reporting from our special Warringah bureau for the length of the election campaign. Follow his coverage here.
‘Indigenous Australians prospered on this continent for what we now estimate to be roughly 80,000 years before the colonial project arrived and, in her words, “took just over 230 years to fuck it up”.’
If we must have a debate about Indigenous Australians vs the rest of us, let’s start with the facts. After 80,000 years there were probably about 500,000 indigenous inhabitants on the continent. Do the maths. They were not prospering. And although we have problems I don’t feel that I’m in a place that’s more fucked up than 230 years ago.
It’s pretty hard to establish the facts in this issue. A common figure I have seen is that there were over 750,000 indigenous Australians before the white settlement with some even suggesting over a million was possible. What we can be sure of is that the introduction of European culture into Australia, as into other continents like the Americas, had a devastating, probably decimating effect, on the indigenous cultures of those lands. The high suicide rate among indigenous Australians suggests that from their point of view, the place is definitely ‘more fucked up than 230 years ago’.
I agree with you, old grey beard..
The half million guestimate was based on the depleted population due to the catastrophic effects of diseases picked up from Cook’s brief visits and the continuing failure to understand the true bounty of the landscape – already turning wild & unkempt by the time the whites returned in 1788.
As late as the mid 20thC it was still assumed (despite copious early evidence to the contrary) that the coastal fringe was the most easily survivable for the primitives without cool iron axes who might find the odd dead whale to stave off famine.
None so blind as they who will not see.
As a white fella, I am a committed supporter black fella rights to a much better deal in Australia. But like the other comments, I challenge 2 key facts reported here. The Archaeological and anthropological evidence is, according to Yuval Harrari, that indigenous Australians arrived in Australia ‘only; about 45,000 years ago and with less than 100 years all Australian megafauna was extinct. So black fellas completely changed the Australian ecology immediately they arrived (it seems by the use of fire). But they then maintained that changed environment from then on. So they do know the Australia that existed before the British invasion and the subsequent social and economic oppression they suffered since.
I definitely agree with Susan that there will be great benefits for Australia if started listening to Blackfellas more.
We need to understand & with the ongoing decimation of our wildlife, it wont be long before the environment here will be untenable..
The indigenous people cared & did a lot of land maintenance, though they were largely nomadic tribes, though they had a relatively low population, they still managed to survive on a continent, that has very little natural water reserves & is the driest continent in the world..
We also need to remember that in those times, there was high risk of death among the colonists & prisoners..
The increase in population has only really happened in the last 100 years maybe, so really those that have the idea that we were doing the indigenous a favour need to go & do some research as the myths that abound are many & problematic.
I would imagine this discourse that the indigenous people have to put up with is frustrating & actually distorts the truth to such a degree that they often aren’t heard because of the mainstream media’s refusal to change the record & hear the truth just for once…
The word ‘nomadic’ suggests wide ranging wandering – it would be more accurate to use ‘transhumant’ which describes movement with ones own territory for seasonal purposes.
The big corroboree were social events for ritual purposes, bonding widely disparate mobs, geographically & culturally.
Really mega ones took place in places of Dreamtime significance, sometimes places no mobs lived on purpose, just custodian elders.
A good start to better understanding would be having schools study Bruce Pascoe’s “Dark Emu” & Bill Gammage’s “Biggest Estate on Earth” as set texts.
A well written and really interesting article .
How far ahead of his time was Nugget Coombs? Good luck to Susan, anyone steeped in his philosophy, with indigenous heritage, has to be a star candidate. Too good for the likes of us.
Seismic testing around Sydney? I didn’t hear of that, will have to Google it. Buggers will do crazy things if we aren’t told.