 Now to our final speaker, please welcome Gail Cormby Thank you dear friends for welcoming me and I've had a lot to do with all of you and thank you uncle Max and Everybody here for having me. Hmm. I've got to childhood treasures in here Anyway It was it was a hundred years ago that my father's life changed and in itself it changed My life Incredibly, I was so grateful to hear everybody's story here and the the one word that triggered with me was resilience My dad was in the French First World War in the trenches there and and he was left for three days in a pile of of his dead mates and they were feeding him into a mass grave to To be gone forever when they realized that he was just a little bit alive not very just a little bit and so Dad eventually got back to Australia in I think it was about 1920 when he finally came here and When he had left he was a very fit country farm boy Raised person who just assumed that he would go back to farming but he was Suggested to him that maybe he go to the city that terrible thought and just operate a Lift in the city and that that would be like sending him to a Horrible outcome. So of course he went out into the desert on camels as you do I Love the smell just smell It's not beautiful. Beautiful. Anyway, I'll get there So my father went out into the central Australia To find himself of course and in that journey He found a whole group of friends that then Supported him and he supported them for the rest of his life You all look too young to me What I can see to have heard of a man called Albert Namajira the painter No, okay Anyway, yes, you've heard of him. Oh, okay, Western are and a man who had struggled to find enough food from working for his family in the late 1920s there'd been the most horrendous drought in central Australia and 80% of the children died during that time and so can you imagine losing 80% of your children? But Albert was an amazing man, and I remember him very well He was tall Western are and a very quiet very serene person who was very much part of his land and He looked at father's watercolours paintings. He was my dad was a painter Of course, and he said this man sees my country better than anybody else Sees it and so he said how much does this fellow get for these paintings and when he was told 20 quid That was like a million dollars to Albert, so he went to dad and said You fellow you teach me this Painting business and I teach you my culture and show you places And so the agreement was made in the west the rest is history so the dilemma that my father had in the 1930s was that bush-born First Nations people were unable to leave their Mission stations or reserves they were put on they were not allowed to access the city or media or Anything like that so they really couldn't get the story out of of their skill base or their talents And so when dad tried to take these little watercolour paintings that absolutely Sparkled of the hot breeze of the outback and the and the incredible color in the landscape When he took those to the city people wanted them They wanted them desperately because the main people in the cities wanted to connect with First Nations people And so one really interesting story about Melbourne was that dad wrote to that Gilded manager of the fine art society and said oh look I've got this young friend of mine who paints Really well and and we should have a one-man show of his work And it was really really important that that we did this and And I've got the letter at home to actually go right back and said oh, I'm sorry that'd be not Aboriginal people will get a You know warmer or something from the museum And have it on show as an icon and and then you take his clothes off and take a photo of him with a spear or something But people won't be interested in that Because to that time there was no Aboriginal art represented in any art galleries that was only ever seen as Artisan object for museums well father was the might upset and He wrote back and said that Unless he accepted his friend's work on his say so he would get all of his peer artists So boycott the gallery. So anyway, it all happened. It was all fine Albert didn't have to take his clothes off So I was a child in the 1950s in Central Australia and I was so fortunate To have grown up around the Western are under community So when dad and Albert were there painting under the tree and there was so many other artists followed in that art movement So at one time there was 20 people painting with father in that whole movement. I was that little feral kid running along the dry riverbeds Eating bush tucker. I'm just so amazed at how blessed I was and So along those dry riverbeds and for people in other countries, they think of rivers as having water Not in the center Maybe it's a week in a whole year when you actually have water in a riverbed And it's very quick and very violent and it just goes away as quick as it comes But what you're left for the rest of the year is a wonderful resource For the native food plants to be surviving really well So the edge of that riverbed was always this wonderful red hard packed clay side and So the women with their digging sticks would just chip away where they recognized a Particular spot It's Cyprus Bulbosa. I have in here Western are under call it Langua. Yeah, darling. You help me. So this tiny little bowl Was what we would dig out of that dry riverbed bank and this is a very significant little plant I Dug these on Saturday and at home I have a wood fire stove and I then roasted them So what you can see here is a tiny little yam Cyprus Bulbosa as I said But it has like a skin like an onion skin to it And when you carefully once it's roasted you can squash it like that and it comes off and then you eat one and It's it's kind of a kind of a rich Goodness kind of taste it smells nutty When you roast it and this is such an important resource of protein and Renewable resource within the landscape of my childhood As I said, this is a treasure that I hold very dearly because the buffalo grass that came in Feral grasses feral weeds and feral animals have Dispossessed a lot of our arid zone native foods. Oh There's a story there isn't there? It's a funny little paradigm. Yeah, anyway These little yelka Which are really important have been Choked to the verge of extinction and so I kindly ask you all To help in any way that you can To preserve this fine little thread of happiness To my childhood. Thank you