Charles Pakana (Victorian ABoriginal News)

Welcome back to the VAN Talks podcast and thanks for tuning in. We are now back at Coranderrk with Uncle Dave Wandin. We had so much positive responses from our last podcast and thanks to all those people that got back to us. A lot of the questions we will be including in this particular podcast. So thank you very much.

Uncle Dave, welcome back, very short time in between, but welcome back to the podcast.

Uncle Dave Wandin (Wurundjeri Woi wurrung Elder)

Thanks very much Uncle Charles. Believe me, if you wait too long, it’s very hard to reconnect the story. So…

Charles:

Absolutely. Couldn’t agree more than that.

Uncle Dave

We want some continuity in the story.

Charles

Well, talking about continuity, we started off previously at 1863, finished off pretty well at 1924, and this was with the closure of Coranderrk. So what I want to do is, because I’m really keen today to yarn about what happened from 1998 onwards, but let’s hear what happened between 1924, the closure, and 1998. How did the Wandin family and the Nevin family get back onto this country?

Uncle Dave

Yeah. So it’s a very interesting story, I think anyway, because it showed even back then in 1998, well, from about ’95 I think it was that there were people who were working very hard towards reconciliation. Yeah. So although this place was closed down and all evidence of the village and the infrastructure that comprised current Dirk Mission station was demolished.

Charles

They’d picked it over, hadn’t they? All the people from around the area.

Uncle Dave

Yeah. They took away all the building materials. They dug it out of the ground and yeah, removed all evidence that we’ve been here. But, and from 1924, it was a dirty….before that, but the land pretty much got carved up and sold to private enterprise.

Charles

Now this was meant to be for soldier settlement post World War One, wasn’t it? But no soldiers actually ended up settling here..

Uncle Dave

No, that’s right, yeah. No one ended up being given a parcel of Coranderrk land under the soldier settlement scheme. 

Charles

So where did all the mob go to?

Uncle Dave

90% of them were encouraged to go to Lake Tyers mission, which at the time, yeah, they’re closing down all the mission stations and sending everybody to Lake Tyers pretty much. But my family, the Wandoon’s and other families too, actually stayed on the outskirts of town.

Charles

You mentioned that last time. Yeah, you got jobs and bakers and everything like that.

Uncle Dave

I believe. Yeah. All the men were working in sawmills. There was lots and lots of sawmills around in those days. Yeah, right up to the 1960-70s. It may be even longer. Yeah. Basically if you didn’t like where you’re working at one sawmill, you just said stick it up your mum and go on to the next one. You know, they are everywhere. And there was people working for the Border Works and a whole range of, yeah, everybody had jobs, sure there was. And there were plenty of farms, you know, whether it be cattle or sheep. We didn’t have all the bloody wineries around that we got today, so roughly.

Charles

How many of the Wandin family would have hung around here? I know we’re talking about 100 years ago, but roughly how many?

Uncle Dave

Yeah, so my grandmother stayed here. In actual fact, my my oldest uncle was the last child born here at Coranderrk in 19/22/23, something like that. And yeah, they stayed here in Healesville. So the generation above me, all my uncles and aunties, they all stayed here and grew up. How many other Wurundjeri people? There were some Nevins, but there were others. There was Wurundjeri people. There’s quite a few Taungurung people that also lived on the outskirts. There was, yeah, Wiradjuri? I’m not too sure about any Gunai Kurnai people, but there was quite a large contingent of Aboriginal fringe dwellers, if you like.

Charles

Well, we’d mentioned in the last episode that Coranderrk was actually a mishmash of mob that there’s been brought in together, regardless of their clan, kinship and everything.

Uncle Dave

Well, that was the same with every mission station

Charles

Yeah, of course

Uncle Dave

Of course, white people didn’t just, it’s the wrong word. Didn’t discriminate about how black you were. You know you were all Aboriginal, didn’t absolutely. Our tribal moieties and our cultural protocols and things like that.

Charles

So how did the family survive? Stay together, maintain its culture during that, what, 70 years up until 1998 ?

Uncle Dave

Well, basically we lived white. We did everything that we could to mold into society, which was what the government wanted when they shut down the mission stations. But we were lucky that we had five brothers and two sisters in the generation above me, and they stayed strong together. All the men worked to actually help the girls go to school because they said, yeah, we need to change the world.

And so if anybody’s heard of Aunty Joy Murphy and she went on to university and that was supported by the men of that generation actually putting a part of their pay to make sure that she had that tuition. It’s the story that as I know, because I can’t imagine how someone can become, well, we know now, but how could someone become that smart without going to a university? And she is, you know, the matriarch of that generation today.

Charles

Very highly respected.

Uncle Dave

And yeah, if any of us have got issues, we still go to Aunty Joy and ask advice and she can normally point us in the right direction. My eldest boy talks to her all the time with the work that he does at Melbourne University. Yeah, so very close connection, you know, it’s very hard. You can’t break that family connection.

Charles

And that’s a great.

Uncle Dave

Even I was taken away for, you know, 30 odd years. But yeah, coming back was just like coming home, so..

Charles

Talk to me about coming back. So it was about 1996-1998.

Uncle Dave

Yeah, 96 when I came back to Healesville.

Charles

All right, so when did Coranderrk all be in a much smaller form, come back into the hands of the Mob ’98 And what happened then? Well, it wasn’t just handed back.

Uncle Dave

No, no. It was a very, very long fight actually. But the previous owner that lived here, a woman called Barbara Tane. So one thing that they did discover here in the building just behind you, there actually was actually a whole heap of paperwork from the mission days.

Charles

And what was of particular prominence in that paperwork?

Uncle Dave

Well, basically she started to read through it and she realised the importance of this place and she actually helped our families apply to the government, she said. I don’t belong here. This belongs to you, and I will fight on your behalf.

Charles

So was the story of Coranderrk as a mission actually being lost up until that point?

Uncle Dave

No. We knew about it, of course, but no one was listening a bit. No one was listening.

Charles

But in the broader community, obviously this is something that people didn’t want to hear about.

Uncle Dave

No one, no one remembered or didn’t want to remember right, got wiped off the land and and wiped out of people’s minds.

Charles

Which is of course what the government wanted back in 1924. So with the discovery of that paperwork and the desire of the person who found that to share the message, what was the follow on from that?

Uncle Dave

Well, basically the women of the Wurundjeri tribe, to my knowledge did most of the work and all the petitioning. Yeah, like William Barak did to keep Coranderrk. They took on the role of doing all that petitioning to get land.

Charles

Given back and this was back to the state government.

Uncle Dave

Ah yes, to the state government. Yeah, even though it was funded, it was, it eventually did have to go to the federal government at the time. We know it as the ISLC now, but it was ILC back in those days. And eventually, yes, they won and we got the 200 acres back and we had a massive celebration here. We got some land back, but we didn’t actually share it with anybody.

We kept it very much within our own little family groups. But we had a wonderful time. Now we set up a little camping spot down at the bottom edge of the corner of the property here, which is the Yarra and the next door neighbour’s fence. And there’s a nice beautiful little sandy beach, you know. So yeah, we all went back to the old days being told the stories of fishing from our granny Jemima taught Uncle.. and my dad and other people when it was the mission. Sorry, not when it was the mission …

Charles

When it was a gathering place because you mentioned that last time prior to the mission days.

Uncle Dave

That’s right. Yeah, yeah. And we, yeah, we sat around lots of campfires and told stories, and I guess it’s where our, my generation now has kind of picked up the cudgel, if you like, to continue to preserve the story.

Charles

But was that the goal back in 1998? Or was it just, wow, we’ve got the land. There must have been a moment where? What the hell do we do with this?

Uncle Dave

Exactly right. And that took quite a few years, I can imagine. We celebrated. We celebrated and we had an agister here. That was because there was always cattle, yeah, even when it was the mission station. But the, yeah, all the subsequent owners also ran cattle on here. So we had someone managing the cattle, pretty much not.

We went, oh, we got firewood for all the rest of the family in town and you know, lots of fallen down trees, so lots of chainsaw parties if you like trailer loads and trailer loads. And we were doing, we felt we were doing pretty good. But there came a time where, that when you started talking to other people that nobody knew the story. Jackie and Brooke Wandin were sitting here one day and says we can’t keep this just for ourselves, we need to raise the profile a bit.

Charles

So when would this have been roughly so early 2000s?

Uncle Dave

I’d have to go back and check the poster, but 2010s?

Charles

Right, OK. So quite recent.

Uncle Dave

Yeah. So yeah, we had it for roughly about 12 years before we thought this can’t be all there is to this land.

Charles

More than chainsaw parties and the beach down there, yeah.

Uncle Dave

Way more. I mean, yes, lots of people learn to test out their four wheel drives and their motorbikes across the land and kids learn how to swim, those kind of things. But yeah, we thought we need to do more and this was Jackie and Brooke’s idea more than anyone else. And so they said let’s have a concert and how are we going to do it? Doesn’t matter, let’s just do it.

Charles

Sounds like the start of Woodstock.

Uncle Dave

Well, it could have become that. The reality is that the concert was an absolute success. I won’t go into the details of all the background work that they had to do to get the funding and whatever

Charles

Can imagine..

Uncle Dave

…but it was a success. Yeah, I think there was going to be 300 tickets and there’s like 700 people turned up.

Charles

Goodness me

Uncle Dave

But It’s a lot of work to run a concert. Yeah, and the concert itself didn’t benefit the land.

Charles

So what was the first..

Uncle Dave

But it raised awareness.

Charles

Right. So that was the main goal. It was to raise awareness of Coranderrk. Yeah OK

Uncle Dave

So they did three concerts three years in a row. But if anybody’s ever been a concert organiser, it’s a special type of person. Yeah, it’s absolutely exhausting work. We thought, well, they thought we’d need to do more. We’d need to look at the whole of the land, not just a place where we can hold a concert.

Charles

All right. But you were living here at that stage. You and the family were living here, is that right?

Uncle Dave

Living here in Healesville.

Charles

In Healesville, so the land was just…

Uncle Dave

We would all come and visit, right? On the hot days and yeah, the birthdays and the weddings and the 21sts and all those kind of things. This was a place to hold them

Charles

But it wasn’t being used for anything else apart from that and the concerts for three years.

Uncle Dave

That’s right. The only income was the the cattle.

Charles

Right, which is agistment

Uncle Dave

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is even today, it’s still only enough to cover the rates and the insurance and some minor maintenance things. And yes, did make a lot of money out of the concerts. So little think tank got put together and one of them was my youngest boy, Darren, alongside Jackie and Brooke.

And they said, let’s look at the rest of the land, Let’s think about what William Barak and Simon Wonga, what their dream was for Coranderrk or what their goals were for Coranderrk. And they said, how can we continue the legacy, particularly of Barack, of what his intentions were?

Charles

Because if we just remind the audience right now, it was the recognition of this land not just being as a culturally important, as a gathering place for all the different nations, but also as a rich source of food and resources.

And this is what the three of them decided. That’s what we need to live up to again. 

Uncle Dave

That’s right.

Charles

Right. 

Uncle Dave

So how do we go about it…

Charles

So how do you go about that?

Uncle Dave

Well, First off, you have to look at the land and pretty much I would say that more than 60% of this land, maybe six, maybe even 70% was BlackBerry.

Charles

Oh crikey.

Uncle Dave

But like everyone else of our generation and younger generation, I think the blackberry belongs here. And of course it doesn’t. I mean, yeah, we still had people would come and pick blackberries, but you could never, you could never pick them all. There was so many of them. It was actually degrading the land. You know, we were overstocked on cattle, the cattle we’re only drinking out of the little dam that we’ve got up the top here.

But most of them, the cattle were drinking out of the river and we started to think more holistically about what we were doing with the land. And yeah, basically we were seeing that we were letting the land destroy itself. So they said, OK, what do we do? So we applied to the government. We’ve got some funding to do a farm management plan

Charles

OK. 

Uncle Dave

So still keeping in the thinking economically, we weren’t quite deep enough into the culture at that stage. When we got some experts out who looked at the land and said, well, this area here is no good for cattle and that area is no good for cattle. And because it doesn’t grow the right grasses and it wouldn’t grow the right grasses because it is on a flood plain, you know, 80% of the property is on a flood plain.

He said what I would recommend is you actually fence those off and you put in vegetation, as in trees, shrubs, which fitted into what my son was doing, which was conservation land management. So it fitted right into his his ethos and you know what he was planning to do, which is when I got called in because I’d actually finished off his training for him. He started his training at Zoos Victoria and he come and work with me with the Narrap team to finish off his conservation land management.

Charles

And for those listeners who might not be aware, the Narrap team is essentially a branch of the Wurundjeri Woi wurrung that Uncle Dave founded back when…

Uncle Dave

2012.

Charles

2012, which is really well known across Melbourne, if not Victoria, as one of the premier Land Management Services out there. It’s very steeped in culture and seeking to bring back the old ways of bush management

Uncle Dave

..of Land Management, caring after Country while combining the modern methods that are available to us. Because remember the old ways of managing country? We didn’t have the weeds that the Narrap team has to deal with today.

Charles

Didn’t have blackberries either, aye.

Uncle Dave

Didn’t have blackberries. I’m trying to think someone said something to me about blackberries. Oh, that’s right. It was a government person. I can’t remember what department it was, but they were in conservation, right? And seriously, they walked up to me and said so how did your ancestors deal with the blackberries?

Charles

[laughs] and your response was?

Uncle Dave

I said, well, they didn’t. And she said, oh, is that why it’s so bad today? I said no, they didn’t deal with it because they didn’t exist before the white man came here. Anyway, it was the sort of a light bulb moment that people have got this concept that everywhere that they go and they see blackberry and they see willows and they see all these plants that have been brought in from, you know, the northern hemisphere that they’ve always been here. Some people can’t comprehend that  they’ve only been here for a short time and they’re not doing good things for the land. That’s a little sidebar.

Charles

So, so you were brought back in, this is where…

Uncle Dave

I got brought back in as the Narrap team as a contractor to help with all the fencing and the blackberry control, installing 6 kilometers of electric fencing controlled by solar and then dealing with the blackberry in the paddocks.

It’s still an ongoing thing that we’re still doing today is looking after the conservation areas, the actual river frontage of dealing with the blackberries there, and immediately the land started to recover once we’d fenced off the wetter areas and excluded the cattle. Out of that, we are seeing native foods come back. And this is where I came into the ideas this hey, if this is what the land is telling us that it can support.

So we’re thinking about the future of Coranderrk, right? So we’ve got the farm management up and running. Yeah, everybody’s happy about it, but it’s still not actually going to bring us a lot of money.

Charles

So let’s look..

Uncle Dave

Let’s look at how we can diversify that.

Charles

And that’s what I’d like us to talk about now. So you and I have talked previously on a couple of occasions of your plans and the plans of the family here to bring in native foods. But there’s still that very real loss of knowledge and culture. A lot of these native foods have got to be managed in a specific way. They’ve got to be prepared in a specific way. How much of that is lost? Let’s be real.

Uncle Dave

85% of it.

Charles

How do you get it back?

Uncle Dave

Look, there was a lot of recording done of native Bush foods. There were some really good professors and one that I referred to as the woman who wrote the Bible on Bush foods is Doctor Beth Gott, the first woman ethnobotanist in Australia who worked very closely with all the mobs up and down the East Coast of Australia and Tasmania very respectfully and gathered a hell of a lot of information, but it’s not conclusive.

So as much as I getting into conservation and management trying to bring back culture, it was all about getting native plants back. Most people think about native plants, they think about putting trees in. I started to think about foods, and not just our seeds and plums and fruits, but actually our foods that grew under the ground. And then, you know, starting to investigate what we knew about our underground food, if you like.

Charles

So yams.

Uncle Dave

Yeah, yams, lilies, orchids, native geraniums and pelargoniums, things like that. And then starting to work out, yeah, finding the conditions that they will grow in, did they grow here before? And that evidence is a bit scattered, and it became almost a bit too much to be able to do.

Charles

What do you mean a bit too much?

Uncle Dave

Well, it it was a lot of hard work and it was going to take more time than we thought. But the land was still telling us there were new grasses popping up. So there are seagrasses that are popping up.

Charles

And were those the tell signs, the new or the new species that were popping up?

Uncle Dave

Well, they weren’t new. They were old species that were recovering.

Because we controlled the invasive European stuff that we’ve got here. So we’re still telling the story and so we’re continuing it. We knew it was going to be a struggle, but AG Victoria heard about what we’re trying to do as well as other Aboriginal mobs across Victoria and it just so happened that they put up some funding to help everybody get kick started, if you like, here in Victoria.

And of course once you do that you’ve got funding that’s there on government websites and people can look it up. And Melbourne University came across it and they said this is a very, very interesting space, particularly with climate change.

Charles

Melbourne Uni’s done a lot of good work in this area, haven’t they?

Uncle Dave

Well, in this area, this is new for them because one of the big things, of course, is where you’re getting the politics of intellectual property.

Charles

ICIP.

Uncle Dave

Yeah, yeah. So we spent, we spent more than a year talking to Melbourne University and writing an agreement, so they offered a standard agreement and we said no, that does not suit what we want.

Charles

But what was this agreement for? What was it going to deliver?

Uncle Dave

Well, it was about that they would, you know, record everything that we did and they would then own that knowledge. Oh, that’s kind of a standard thing that universities do. But no, we spent time flipping that on its head, right. So we’re approached by food sciences, Melbourne University, because then started to realize, although I kind of knew it, because food scientists around the world and agricultural scientists already reporting, you know, substantial losses of what we call modern cropping, you know, because of climate change.

They basically convinced us we will help you do whatever you need to do because they actually believe that our native foods are the answer to Australia’s food bowl, particularly Melbourne’s food bowl. We don’t grow very many vegetables here in Victoria anymore. Pakenham is now all houses, which is sort of our food bowl for Melbourne. We don’t have that.

We rely on Queensland now and we’ve already seen breaks in that supply chain through floods and fires and just climate change in general and the various pests and diseases that are coming into the country. Yeah. So they’re very future looking and that’s becoming our goal now is OK, let’s re-learn what we can. So you asked to talk to Brooke today. Brooke is actually in the archives in Melbourne University. That was a whole protocol to go through that about having access to the archives.

Charles

So what are the big challenges they’ve got, though?

Uncle Dave

Well, the big challenges, I don’t think we’re going to have enough land to grow what we need to grow even on the 200 acres considering that the 80% of it is a floodplain. So we’ve only got the high ground up here. So it’s still very experimental. We now know we’re probably not going to make any money out of it so..

Charles

You’ve really of those 200 acres, you’ve got what 40 acres in this case?

Uncle Dave

Yeah, if you’re working on 80%, but it’s probably not even that. We do need to keep the high ground for when the ground floods so that we can bring the cattle up on the high ground if we have to.

Charles

OK, so let’s have that again at least.

Uncle Dave

Yeah, Yeah. I I reckon we’re probably only looking at the moment probably, yeah, pushing it around 5 acres that we can suitably use for growing.

Charles

All right. So let me push you then. What can realistically be achieved in only 5 acres?

Uncle Dave

A hell of a lot. Because even if we don’t make money out of it, we can teach. What we learn from this land by experimenting with different varieties, by being able to use the labs of Melbourne University. So that as we grow these foods, one of the things that needs to we know, needs to be identified is a lot of our foods, if they weren’t prepared properly, can actually make you sick. And everybody goes, oh, we don’t want to grow them, but I’ve got to remind people, But hang on, you grow rhubarb, you know you can’t eat the leaves.

You grow a lot of foods that need processing, no different to us. We all need to eat and we learnt to live with what the land actually has provided for thousands and thousands of years. But the big thing is, because of the climate change, is that people are looking at it. The answer because we know through Beth Gott’s work that these plants were actually very super nutritious compared to modern crops today. We know that native plants don’t need anywhere near as much water as modern crops today.

Charles

Which is critical in Australia.

Uncle Dave

And they do not need as much fertilizer. Yeah, actually a less fertilizer the better. But we still need to work out what those all those balances are.

Charles

So what are the crops you’re experimenting with right now?

Uncle Dave

Well, our focus is on tuberous crops.

Charles

OK.

Uncle Dave

So the Yam Daisy, the Aboriginal potato as it’s sometimes referred to all of our lilies. But we have some water plants as well, Plant called Bulbucinus. I don’t know the Aboriginal name. We have a plant called water ribbons. That’s a big hit. It’s one of those things like everybody who eats a foreign meat. No, it tastes like chicken, but the water ribbon if you give people it.

Charles

Doesn’t taste like chicken, does it? 

Uncle Dave

No, no it doesn’t taste like chicken, but they actually get three different versions. Yeah, it’s got an apple taste. A really crisp apple taste. It can taste like a sour, but it can also taste like a cucumber. It depends on whose mouth is actually eating it. Yep. But all I can tell you is that everybody loves it.

Charles

So how much of that are you growing or experimenting?

Uncle Dave

We’re not growing, it’s still growing near wild in the fenced off wet areas where we’ve excluded the cattle and it’s just come up by itself.

Charles

So what crops have you actually introduced here? Or reintroduced here

Uncle Dave

Well, we’re still experimenting in raised garden beds to see what’s going to work here first. So we do have the the Myrnong, the M Daisy. We do have the bulbar and Lily power vanilla Lily. We have the native geranium. And with that going around the corner, we’ve got a few more. There’s 35 plants that we’re experimenting with.

Charles

Have you tried them all?

Uncle Dave

No, no we haven’t. We haven’t actually been able to get a large enough cropped in taste because so many people want to understand about the plant and quite often we’re pulling them up to show what they look like.

Charles

So you’re starting right from scratch. You’re understanding the basic botany of all this stuff.

Uncle Dave

Absolutely, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I could grow it. I could get a plow in here and do rows and I could grow the stuff. Yeah, I can’t sell it. We could grow out and eat it for our own community. But because there are too many unknowns in the makeup of that food, you know what are its basic chemical makeup? Do they have poisons in them?

Charles

So this is, this is a major long term project? 

Uncle Dave

Oh, absolutely.

Yeah.

Charles

When do you see a point in time where you can sit back and think, right, we’ve got a couple of crops that we understand now. We know what their botanical breakdown is or where their makeup is, how to deal with them, how to prepare them. What are we looking at?

Uncle Dave

that’s right, yeah, we need. That’s why we have engaged with Melbourne University. So we can use their food scientists. You know, they they can cook it, half cook it, they can steam it, they can roast it and they can pull it apart and put it under their microscopes and computer things and whatever, and tell us what the reactions are and then we can then start to market that.

But that’s again about looking at in today’s modern world, how do we store this stuff? We’ve got a leaf that grows here. It’s a native pepper leaf, but as soon as you pick it, it starts to wilt. So you need to be picking it and using it in your food straight away. But so they are the things we need to do. We have got a commercial kitchen here to do our own experimentation as well, so we’re using as many avenues as what we’ve got. But in the meantime we don’t know if it’s going to be a success or not.

But even if it’s not, this place has already become an education centre. So we can teach people about animal husbandry, we can teach people fencing methods, we can teach people conservation land management, because we’ve got 25% of the land is now dedicated to conservation. We can teach what we do know about Bush Foods, and I’m hoping that some of those younger people that we’re inviting in will want to go off to university and become scientists. It’s OK to, you know, rely on what we orally know. But we believe if we do want to preserve our knowledge, we do need to write it down. There need to be records kept somewhere.

Charles

How many people are working here now, Dave?

Uncle Dave

With our volunteers on our volunteer list, we have about 45 people.

Charles

But how many people would be here sort of over the course of a week?

Uncle Dave

Oh 3 of us, if we’re lucky. There’s myself, there’s the farmer who’s who helped us do the Land Management plan and and he’s cattle and Jackie’s partner. We’re kind of the active daily type people but that’s still not daily. We’re all working, actually, other jobs.

Charles

So who’s funding all this?

Uncle Dave

Some of it we raise by having a visitor program and we charge people to come in, you know, and we give them cultural education, take them on walks and talks and things like that. But yeah, we’re still heavily relying on on government funding.

Charles

Does the government recognize the importance of what this place is and the potential that has to solve the supply chain of the food bowl problems?

Uncle Dave

No, no. That’s one of the things. So through the Agriculture Victoria funding, which is focusing on the Bush foods, yeah, there we are still working through that on the supply network chain because there are 8 mobs across Victoria doing it and we’re all in different areas and we’re all growing different things, which we believe are more suitable to their particular country.

Charles

And what’s the relationship between those eight different mobs? Are you exchanging information?

Uncle Dave

Oh yes, yeah. Yeah. So we regularly get together once a month as a general catch up and every three months there’s not so much a conference, but we get down to sort of more nitty gritty detail about what the next steps are. And one of those big things was intellectual property. And then the other one was, you know, how do we increase the capacity and bring people in Because eventually and some are already doing it. Yeah, we’ll need nurseries to actually collect the seed and start propagating it. We are building a nursery here, Barengi Gadjin. I think it’s got a we’re lucky to actually acquire an abandoned nursery.

Charles

Barengi Gadjin Nursery is incredible. Been up there before and it’s amazing

Uncle Dave

From what I understand they’re producing 1,000,000 seedlings a year or it’s got the capacity to produce a million seedlings a year. Yeah, we’re not looking at anything on that scale here.

Charles

Not yet, not yet. But I mean, is that something that could be conceivable in the future, whether in your lifetime or your sons?

Uncle Dave

I like what Walt Disney’s quote If you can dream it, you can do it. Many people have told me, oh, you’ll never get that done and I just go watch me.

Charles

So what are your biggest challenges, your three biggest challenges right now to to achieving that dream?

Uncle Dave

Wow, to put it down into 3 recurrent funding.

Charles

And it’s got to be government funding, hasn’t it really.

Uncle Dave

Well, eventually we would like to look at private enterprise investing on the broader Victorian scale through Agvik. But yes, we are looking for philanthropists. But at the moment, yes, we rely tightly on on government funding and what revenue we can bring in by running our basic education programs that we do have here.

But yeah, we do want to expand this into a training centre where Aboriginal, young Aboriginal people, old Aboriginal people too, if they want a change in career, can come and learn about things that they may have thought were lost.

Charles

Uncle Dave, by the way, was looking at me when he mentioned older people looking at a change of career…not gonna happen.

Uncle Dave

Yeah, I took on this challenge. I’m 63 now and I took on this food challenge, if you like. I only started doing that in 2018-19. I’ve only been doing it for five years.

Charles

Hope for us old fellas yet then,

Uncle Dave

 there’s no chance I’m going to retire.

Charles

So recurrent funding is one challenge. What’s another challenge?

Uncle Dave

It’s enticing our young people to come in to give them opportunities. At the moment it’s all done with volunteers. No one’s getting paid.

Charles

So when you say young people, or specifically young Aboriginal people, or is young people. You don’t really.

Uncle Dave

Well, yeah, we are looking primarily for young Aboriginal people to help them connect back to their culture and give them opportunities to actually have a trade if they want it, you know, So with our commercial kitchen, they if they want to go into a food service industry, we can make that available.

We already have a partnership with the Yarra Valley Winery Association, and their chefs have been out here and we’ve given tastes of some of our foods and they’re heavily interested, but they’re waiting before they make an investment. But the chefs are already saying pretty much whatever you can grow we’ll buy.

Charles

So how do you get young people interested in this?

Uncle Dave

It’s a good question. We haven’t got around to how do we do it. I mean we can advertise and yeah, we are basically using word of mouth. We’ve got some young people that are coming out here where but.

Charles

They’d be volunteers, wouldn’t they?

Uncle Dave

In the beginning, and that’s the hard part.

Charles

That’s your catch 22. That’s just that recurrent funding. But you need to get young people out here and young people need money, so..

Uncle Dave

Therefore, you got to have sales and without the sales you’re not going to get employees, you know, but I think I think as we build it and we start to make money, you know, currently we only have actually one paid employee and she’s only paid one day a week because that’s all we can afford. You always start off with one from little things.

Big things grow. We all know that. So she was only employed just last year and we’re hoping that we’ll employ a second person this year and the year after we’ll employ a third person depending on once we get our nursery up. So we don’t actually just have to grow plants that we’re going to plant in the ground here. We can actually farm gate, sell plants out of the nursery. So it’s another revenue stream.

Now we’re looking at sustainability. So some current funding we’re available for is increasing our solar capacity by installing more water tanks. So we’re not relying on metered water from Yarra Valley Water. So it becomes a self-sufficient farm.

Charles

So it sounds like the third challenge is infrastructure.

Uncle Dave

Yeah, but we’re getting there. The two buildings that we’re sitting in between now were derelict buildings. Five years ago, no one believed that we could do it. So yeah, again.

Charles

This is your Jack of all trades coming into. It is.

Uncle Dave

Absolutely. I I see potential in everything and I think I spoke on the last one, you know, nothing is ever a disaster and nothing is irreparable. And yeah, I just keep looking and say, OK, there’s a little bit of damage over that land, what am I going to do there?

And we don’t take this blanket approach over across the whole land. It’s about looking at the damaged parts and saying, well, that’s a problem. Where are my good parts where I can make them actually take over looking after the land themselves. Sometimes you don’t have to go and do anything if you’ve got your good parts and they’re allowed to spread across the land.

Charles

Last question, Unk What benefit will this have to Victoria, not to the Wurundjeri but Victoria?

Uncle Dave

Well this is one of another one of our long term goals that as we increase our capacity to have more visitor programs, one of the things that we will do is educate anybody. They don’t have to be Aboriginal, they educate what they can grow in their backyard. Just like going down to Bunnings and buying tomatoes and cherries and christ  knows what here is another option.

Here is food that is good with you. Here is its, and again, work with Melbourne University. Here is its nutritional value. Here’s the way it needs to be stored. Here’s the way it needs to be prepared and here’s the way you eat it. And here are the medical and the health benefits and the nutritional benefits of each individual plant. And so do they have an interest and say, hey, this stuff is really good for me and hopefully they can harvest stuff here, cook it here, they can taste it and go, oh, I like that.

Can I grow that in my backyard? And eventually you’ll have Murnong growing in everyone’s backyard, which will replace the potato. Just a little background. Yeah. So I’m following food crops around the world now. And the most recent one I’ve seen is Indonesia. It was actually lost more than 30% of their potato crop due to climate change already. Jeez. Yeah, 30%. It doesn’t sound like much, 30%. But when you look at the figures of how many potatoes they produce and it’s in the millions and millions of tons, Yeah, of course. And he’s losing 30% of it.

They’re losing hundreds of thousands of tons of product. Yeah, that’s just one, that’s just one crop that was all they were focusing on. So, but yeah, do you always see these things on ABC, iview, SBS that talk about these things and it is happening all across the world?

Charles

But we come back to native foods which are better suited to these.

Uncle Dave

Which have been through climate change exactly. You know, they’ve survived droughts in ice ages and yet they’re still, despite all the pressures put on, I mean, particularly in the last 200 years, still actually exist.

Charles

How can people find out more about Koranderk, the work that’s happening now? And more importantly, how can people put their names forward to volunteer?

Uncle Dave

Yep. So we do have a website just type in Coranderrk or Wandoon Estate and again we need you know when we talk about infrastructure that’s one thing we are behind on is our IT technology. So it’s not always updated.

Charles

So it might be a bit of a clunky website…

Uncle Dave

It is a clunky website. But it’ll tell you the dates that we do have our volunteer days. I’m usually here. I try to be here every Tuesday regardless because I need to program my work life rather than, you know, being opportunistic. I said OK, my other jobs that I do, I’ve wiped out Tuesdays, you know, that’s that’s preserved for here. So it’s having this chat may have been a visitor group, or if there’s no one here then there’s always farm duties to do, yeah?

Charles

Uncle Dave Wandin, once again, thanks so much indeed for coming on to VAN Talks.

Uncle Dave

No worries. Thank you Uncle Charles.