Yugarilya nyurni yadu (you good/beautiful).
This is the first time I’ve stepped on this place.
This is the first time I’ve seen this birna lake and beautiful
birinyi sandhills.
Or run my hand through this clear spring.
My ancestors were here long ago.
They drank from this spring.
They would have gathered food, hunted, and used the reeds for
weaving and other things.
It’s very feminine.
A yadu.
A place of peace.
My name is Susie Betts and I am on a journey to find out more
about the creation of my country.
I’m a Wirangu woman and this is Wirangu manda country.
We are coastal people.
In the 1800s there was conflict where the white settlers came to
settle and farm the land.
My people, the Wirangu and others, were driven off the
cliffs to their deaths in the ocean.
Elliston and Streaky Bay have long been avoided by our people.
But there has been reconciliation.
Healing.
Our totem is the eagle waldya.
We are reconnecting with our manda, our country, bringing
back the stories of old and of our people.
Waldya nyurni yadu (eagle you good/beautiful).
The eagle’s nest is a special place.
It was one of the places we were moved on from – Murphy’s
Haystack.
It is a place of ceremony, special to our men and women and
children.
It has a connection to the Seven Sisters Constellation, to the
Pleiades, linking us with the night sky above.
To the rest of nations in Australia and connects us to the
rest of the world.
Yugarilya (seven sisters) maldhi-wira-nga (night sky)
nyirnarn (sitting) Yugarilya , the Seven Sisters Songline, runs
right across central Australia.
Capillaries diverge out, forming and shaping the land.
For us Yugarilya, the Seven Sisters, are chased by the
Hunter, Orion, who fell in love with them.
The Seven Sisters were those beautiful, beautiful bright-eyed
stars.
They were very beautiful.
Wiyana-muga (women)– they’re chasing the snake, the dyunu,
they’re chasing the dyunu, down to earth and they made all these
hills, manda, right along, going along, chasing.
And old Hunter was watching, tgilbi, tgilbi, old tgilbi.
He’s chasing the stars, seven sisters, and they made the hills
these are the wiyana-muga.
The seven sisters took off and he chased them right up past
Port Lincoln there, everywhere and came back again and right
down again.
He kept chasing these beautiful girls and the snake, the dyunu,
come down and ripped up all the earth and he made these hills.
This is part of the snakes doing.
The hunter he got tired of chasing them because he couldn’t
catch them, they were too quick, and then he went back home, went
back chasing them even right up Sydney way to the Blue
Mountains.
He went right around and came back to Wangary to relax and the
Seven Sisters went back up to the sky – they went home, they
went back up to the sky.
And he got so tired and he had a rest and laid down there at
Wangary and it made me sometimes cry when I go past Wangary and
have a look at poor old fella, he did a hard job chasing them,
trying to catch them up.
It is a story linking people all over mother munda, all over the
earth.
Yugarilya has taken me to other nations and other peoples under
the stars.
I was lucky enough to be awarded a Winston Churchill Fellowship
to explore the Seven Sisters in Northern and South America.
The Lakota Sioux and other nations believe the Seven
Sisters were formed after a bear chased seven maidens up the
mountain at Mati Tipi.
To save them the creator made the mountain higher and then
turned the sisters into Pleiades.
In Arizona the Hopi have built villages on messes and they
mirror Orion constellation in the sky.
They believe we all came from the stars and have seven
ceremonies for each of the Seven star Sisters.
In Peru the Sharman tell the story of humanity’s connection
to the stars – we came from them and the Seven Sisters are
honoured in many temples.
The galga-muga, stars, light a path to show we are all
connected, not just to Wirangu country, but to everyone in all
nations under one sky.
The Seven Sisters Songline isn’t just for us.
Yugarilya is for everyone. It’s a story for humanity. And for
peace.