The Magnet's coverage in June of the unearthing of ancestral remains on a beachfront at the Sapphire Sun Eco Village (formerly Shadracks) south of Eden stirred up unprecedented local interest, conjecture and memory. Among it was a surprise email from faraway Ireland, sent by Jan Alexander. She commended the coverage, and shared with us her own family history with the bones’ resting place as well as her personal reverence for Aboriginal culture and lore re-evoked by the discovery. This is her story:
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In August 2012, we gathered at Shadracks Creek for a family get-together.
As children we’d meet there when our families traveled home to spend Christmas with our grandparents.
I knew that being with my cousins again would be wonderful, and it really was.
But I hadn’t anticipated the impact that being on Country would have to me after being so long away.
At the time I was standing right above the grave of the Aboriginal man whose skeletal remains were unearthed on that same spot three years later.
I couldn’t have known that then, but I felt the spirit of his people as strongly that morning as I did when I was a child growing up there.
My mother’s parents, Michael (Mick) Fourter and Edna Fourter (nee Legge) moved to Shadracks Creek in the late 1920’s with their five young children.
They built a house, milking sheds and a small dairy, where my grandfather separated the cream from the milk.
It still stands above what is now the Sapphire Sun Eco Village, and it pulls out all our memories each time any of us 'kids' drive by along the road.
The story of how the Legge’s acquired the land at Shadracks Creek didn’t get passed down, but I can easily imagine that for thousands of years it was a treasured place for the local people.
Now we know that it makes up part of the Bundian Way, so it’s easy to imagine the thousands of pairs of feet that traveled over this part of the country, and all the family gatherings that took place there from time out of mind.
I can only guess that in taking over the land, my ancestors must have caused deep sadness to the local people, by then forbidden to protect the land in their time-proven ways.
Perhaps by the time my ancestors came they had already been carted off the land, forbidden to even visit.
That part of the story I have yet to find out.
My mother, Mary, would have been 15 years old and her sister Freda a year older (when they moved to Melbourne for work).
I picture two young girls waiting with their mother down at the farm gate for the milk to be collected, each girl with a suitcase beside her on the ground.
I know my mother was very homesick during those early months in Melbourne.
I still have a letter her father wrote to her then, that I found among her most treasured keepsakes, after she died.
My mother had met my father, Les Alexander, before he went to fight in the second World War in 1942.
When he returned from the war my father and mother became engaged and they married in 1944.
My parents traveled to Eden at every opportunity.
My father would finish work at the printing factory when the school holidays came around.
My mother would have the car packed and we’d set off the next morning for Eden.
Very soon after the fires of 1952, Mick and Edna (my grandparents) built a humble dwelling on the flat land down near the shore.
Their children had all left home by then and their needs were simple.
It was only a short time later when the idea to open the farm as a camping ground must have occurred to them.
They dug pit toilets and put up water tanks off a makeshift shower block.
They named their new venture ‘Shadracks Creek Caravan Park and Camping Ground’.
There was great life around the farm at that time and my grandparents enjoyed seeing the campers come in each year.
Mick Fourter died suddenly in September 1981 in a traffic accident not a hundred yards from the farm gate.
His wife Edna passed away four years later.
Shadracks Creek Camping Ground was put up for sale, and so it passed out of my family’s hands.
In 2013, the year after our family gathering, I traveled out to Australia again.
I wanted to spend some quiet time alone on Country around Shadracks Creek.
And I wanted to meet up with Uncle Max Dulamunmun Harrison, and initiated Yuin man.
Being with Uncle Max provided the opportunity to ask previously impossible questions about our country and specifically the sacred land at Shadracks Creek.
His insights I carry with me in my daily life.
The unearthing of Aboriginal skeletal remains at Shadracks Creek in June this year had a profound effect on me.
To quote (Eden Magnet) journalist Toni Houston, ‘one of the great cultural stories of our nation’ is because of the outstanding co-operation, care and respect with which the entire event of finding these human skeletal remains has been handled by the many people and agencies involved, from the excavator driver all the way through to the Eden Local Aboriginal Land Council.
I now know that my childhood was played out above the remains of the local people who were there first, before our family came.
The discovery of this man’s remains are, for me, physical proof of what I’ve always known - that the land was, is, and always will be Aboriginal land.
