My name is Margaret June Adams but I just like Margie. Born in Moree in the year 1942 on the
river camps or the hospital or somewhere and we was happy on the mission and the top camp and
the steel bridge over here. We had all these camps and everybody just made dumpies and
homes everywhere but that was all together, that's the main thing. I think we had to do that because
of the massacres that took place in our area. Kids was never allowed to walk alone but you had to go
in a group or something. They used to tell us a lot of ghost stories and things like that. I think it
was only to stop us going out at night but then I always said to my friend, 'Who were the boogeymen?'
Wasn't the spirits or anything. One thing I liked about the school was doing art. I used to win a
lot of little prizes in the art at the school, we had competitions and painting. Now, we
used to do the white man's history ... Used to paint a cat or a dog or a sheep or a cow or something
that was our animals. We were not introduced to do Aboriginal culture and history. We did
know we could see a little black kid in the, in a book or something that was a little [ __ ]. To us
that wasn't our people, we didn't know it was Aboriginals. 14 or 15 when you left school
you had to go out to work on white people's land, either minding kids or cleaning up. We like sort
of worked there for three months or something and go somewhere else and done this or that.
I used to work for some well-known identities ... So we come come back to our own towns
and stayed or when we got married or whatever, hooked up or jumped the broomstick's other side ... (laughs)
I didn't really take to art again until my daughter was 15 or 16 and left school. That's when
I come involved with the art world, the culture and the history, talking to old people. People that
surrounded me and I learned from them. A lot of things I won't talk about, but I supported
all the land right movements. I've been there, done that in the marching and Parliament House
... Parliament House too, out to La Perouse, so learning all the culture, history and Aboriginal
sites and knowing about them in my area, other towns and places I learned from the old people
and we have a remarkable history, traditional life, sacred sites and secrets, legends and everything.
Then I began to go into schools and that, talking and teaching history and art and at this very place
here, we formed the Aboriginal group called the Yurundialli. The Yurundialli was an Aboriginal
tribal name for our group. Its meaning 'goanna', so 30 of us joined up here. We were designers, artists and
and we also done all kinds of batik painting and, oh we done everything at the back of this gallery but
what they used to call us was 'the newer artists'. People only wanted to see the Northern Territory
art and we had to tell them there, tell the people, 'Hey, there's more than one lot of blacks in Australia!' I
said, 'See them people there? We got our own sacred sites and land and keeping places and all that.' I
said, 'We are Aboriginal people and this is our work, our artwork.' A lot of us don't paint dots but
we respect the Elders up there because that's their history, that's how they paint. What I say is I
painted paintings of the Dreamtime because what it is to me is my life as an Aboriginal person today
and I'm dreaming the dreams of my ancestors and seeing them as I see them in the Dreaming and
that's how I paint the Aboriginal culture and history and I'm trying to keep the dream time
going by letting people know that there is a culture in the history and the language, you know.