PHOTO: Barbara Jackson now lives in Melbourne where she spent the long pandemic lockdown piecing together her book: ‘Crossing Cultures’.
IT’S NOT every day that your town appears in a book but hot off the press is a 266 page book that is both a personal memoir and a social commentary including a close look at a two year period in Coonamble’s relatively recent history.
‘Crossing Cultures’ by Barbara Jackson is freshly published with an official launch to be held on Saturday 5 August at a bookshop in a “bushy outer suburb” of Melbourne where Barbara now lives.
After working in the remote Indigenous community of Papunya (Western Australia), she arrived in Coonamble in 1989 and spent two years as the first co-ordinator of the Ellimatta Community Development Employment Program (CDEP). She then moved to another remote community of Yarralin (Northern Territory) in 1995.
Barbara says she never set out to write a book.
“About eight years ago I joined a ‘writing your life’ group,” she told the Coonamble Times.
“You had to write one story a week about your life.
“I realised the only way I could write was reports, not in my own voice,” she said. “I had to really concentrate on turning that into something that was real.”
She says she had never really spoken about her time living and working in the three Indigenous communities because most Australians “have no experience or understanding to be able to relate, they don’t have any background context in which to place it, and I didn’t want to say anything that reinforced a negative stereotype.”
“It wasn’t until I started writing about my experiences in Papunya, Coonamble and Yarralin, and my writing colleagues were fascinated. They said ‘ you should write a book’.
“And then came the pandemic and I thought, maybe I could.
“So I had to work out how to knit all these stories together and make sense of them for people to read. That’s when I realised I didn’t have any context and had to start researching.”
During her research, Barbara says she was astounded to find how very little information was readily available on the places she wanted to write about.
“Academic articles on the internet are locked behind paywalls or there are books in university libraries that I couldn’t access because I wasn’t at university,” she said.
“It thought if I don’t write this down and put it out there then it’s gone.”
“The Coonamble Shire had the most information, and when I found books like Joan McKenzie’s ‘The Vision Splendid’ and Heather Goodall’s ‘Invasion to Embassy’ it started to shape up with all the background story.”
From there, it was time to delve into her own memories, which Barbara says are “based on emotion, not on facts”.
“I didn’t have diaries or anything written down,” she said.
“You just start pulling on one thread of memory at a time and you follow the feelings around that and find that more memories come out, like the feeling of being an outsider in a new town.”
The book is divided into three sections cataloguing her time in each of the three communities.
“The Coonamble story was the most delightful to write,” said Barbara. “It wasn’t really a remote community and I wasn’t one of a minority. There were shops and pubs where you could go to socialise and then my dad Bill came to live there too. I actually had a great time in Coonamble.”
“And the CDEP was such a howling success and was such a happy place because they all loved to be on CDEP.”
Barbara says she made many friends working alongside the Aboriginal community, in particular with Gail Turnbull who took up the reins of managing the CDEP.
“I always thought how lucky I was to have her,” said Barbara. “She was so talented and competent, and so much fun – she stays in my heart.”
While the motivation was to fill a gap in available information through the lens of her own personal experience, Barbara is also driven to leave something for researchers foraging for information in the future.
“It’s a bit of social history,” Barbara says. “It’s written for white people. Aboriginal people know their own history, they know everything that’s happened. White people know very little so it’s from the perspective of what we don’t know.”
‘Crossing Cultures’ is full of stories featuring local organisations and local characters.
“Now the book is out there I’m delighted with it, I love the look and the feel of it.
“It’s an achievement and it’s a bit hard to believe what I have done,” she said.
“This is my only book, so I wanted to do it properly.”
“I have the website too so I’m making sure there’s something out there for future generations of Australians to find.”