No one has counted and written down our first 100 years in Australia yet. Don’t migrant communities count and commemorate their settler years in a place? In my family, generations of our Ancestors have lived here off-and-on, yet we are the first generation who were born here and remained here life-long. Our earliest was in 1896, enacting Modern Tonga and our new constitutional Monarchy. One of five boys chosen by Dr. Rev. James E. Moulton (et al.) to move to Australia, to attend boarding school and bring back new knowledge to the Kingdom.
Now we are Australian settlers from the South Pacific Islands. I am from the Kingdom of Tonga, local to Sydney’s Inner West area of Marrickville, renamed by council: Bulanaming in the local Cadigal language. Modern Australia is embracing Aboriginal languages, a sign-post of a colony maturing. Specifically, my familial places are Nukunuku, Hihifo, Tongatapu and Kotu, Ha’apai (although our father’s family have resided in and occupied Kolomotu’a, Tongatapu in the shadow of the Sovereign for more than six generations now).
So, back home in the Kingdom, we know something about being diaspora settlers as well as being local Indigenous people, under settlement. Considering the former, we have been settling in places throughout the Pacific region for about 120 generations. Historically, when contested we ‘got out’, after a few hundred years of settling by occupying lands and their peoples. I say ‘we’ because in our genealogical accounting, my own Ancestors were there in one capacity or another.
Our women also came here to study, train and work in nursing.
Can you imagine so-called Australia ever doing that? After 500 years of settlement, packing up and leaving these lands for the local Indigenous people and ‘going home to where we came from’? That’s what we have done, previously in our Pacific region when ours was the Empire.
Being ‘the Aussies’ of our now worldwide Kainga (close kin), we centred ourselves here because our grandpa: Mum’s dad, Mum’s brother and Mum’s grandpa were all Newington College ‘old boys’ alumni. Our women also came here to study, train and work in nursing: Mum’s aunt, Mum’s cousins. Mum chose her own path though - Radio and Media communications - ABC and SBS.
As a boy, Grandpa came and studied alongside the late-late King of Tonga – colloquially called . They came for mission school education connected to the formation of Modern Tonga aided by Sydney missionaries: retaining land sovereignty, development and trading indigenous spirituality for Christian religion. Like with local Australian Indigenous communities, that included the education and training of new generations. That’s how my family come to be here now, part of a colonial process. Sydney, our new Mecca.
Those 60-plus years of being here, backtracking further to 1896 in Baramattagal, Dharug country, is what makes this area of Cadigal Lands – Eora our urbane-village home away from home.
Fast-forward down my Ancestral line to my parents:
The 1960’s through to the 2010’s they lived in many different places in the Inner West. Those 60-plus years of being here, backtracking further to 1896 in Baramattagal, Dharug country, is what makes this area of Cadigal Lands – Eora our urbane-village home away from home. Counting ourselves lucky to be embraced by the local Cadigal now, then the common-denominator was the colonial.
Mum was a modern mid-century Pacific renaissance woman. ‘Mod-Oz’ in persona and style, Modern Australian fused in refined regional harmony, elevated and tasty. Ingredients mattered to Mum, always pretty fancy, growing up privileged, it was what she was accustomed to.
As a young couple, fancy fresh food ingredients were readily available locally in the 1980’s. Mum was white-collar media worker, Daddy was our at-home parent, a Mature-aged Uni student on the rugby team, part-time white-collar ABC worker with a dream of building our Tongan plantations into an Agricultural business and Food market store chain, like the Fiji Market in Newtown.
Mum had quaint ‘Aussie’ Christmas Day traditions: called ‘White-lady-Women’s-Weekly-New-Idea’ cuisine by my Greek-Australian-artsy mate.
By 1985 my pre-Boomer Mum was a widow, apt at cooking Cantonese recipes that she had learned boarding with Grandpa’s friends in Canberra while trainee as a Clerk. Mum had quaint ‘Aussie’ Christmas Day traditions: called ‘White-lady-Women’s-Weekly-New-Idea’ cuisine by my Greek-Australian-artsy mate, a great way to describe the post-war cooking tips my mum shared socially connecting with Anglo-wives of Grandpa’s friends who she’d boarded with as a teenager, her ‘Australian family’. Some married into our relations, even more Kainga.
Post-war cuisine recipes discovered in Australian media from canned goods and processed foods, was always a novel idea and a point of hilarity amongst my Pacific Island community or my school mates from Asian or Arab and Mediterranean families. In my Home Economics class, mandatory for female high school students, we learned to cook Euro-centric Post-War dishes with; canned apricots, French onion soup, cream cheese, tinned mackerel, canned corned beef, bread, processed cold meats, white flour, white sugar, pancakes, biscuits, mince, sausages.
Being from urban agricultural farm-to-table or market cultures, my schoolmates and I were from people who had mostly grown, caught or traded our food fresh. We ate from kitchen herb gardens, plantations, picked fruit, nuts and leaves from trees and most of our households ate meals harvested and cooked from raw ingredients.
My schoolmates and I were from people who had mostly grown, caught or traded our food fresh.
In 1950 Mum had travelled here, a young child with her parents and her close kin, staying with Grandpa’s friends. A later trip at eight years of age, she performed with her Kainga the first-ever Tongan traditional ensemble performance, with members of our close kin from the Kingdom and a collection of the Tongans already residing in Sydney – brought together by Grandpa for a Newington College fundraiser held at Sydney Town Hall. What I would give to hear their music.
Performing alongside her father, her pregnant mother and a touring string band of Mum’s Fa’e Tangata (her mother’s brothers) amongst the performance troupe, the Sydney Morning Herald, depicted Mum in an article, photographed the way celebrities are, visiting patients in the children’s hospital wards, in an updated youthful ‘Pacific-Island’ costume, more akin to classic black & white movies of the day: pretty dress, grass skirt with a Ukulele in her hands and a pleasant smile on her eight-year-old lips.
I’m not sure if it was at that moment or when my eldest sister had her first birthday in our Great-grandpa’s home in Nuku’alofa, or when my other older sister performed Tau’olunga at five years old in our Nukunuku village; that our Arts and Contemporary performance careers began - all public cultural events, photographed, historical - perhaps all three, it’s difficult to count.
When our ‘Mod Oz’ Mum died in 2019, we hosted her putu (funeral) in the Newington College chapel - a massive and elegant event, though intimately Kainga-centred, refined in its revival of ancient practices fused with modern-restrained urbane-Australian methods informed by Grandma’s glory in refinement and Grandpa’s coached curatorial. Mum’s farewell on Ancestral informed space was meaningful to us.
Against the backdrop of stained glass, organ pipes, ngatu and fala wall hangings; the Chapel filled with our mournful hymns sung among the echo of the song, dance and stories of our own Ancestors who are invested in generations of us, here.
Sēini ‘SistaNative’ Taumoepeau (She/Her) Orator and Songwoman. Sēini is Indigenous to the Kingdom of Tonga & an Australian veteran of Pacific Arts and Culture, with a career spanning more than 30 years as a Performance Artist
This article is part of SBS Voices' Straight Up Islander series, showcasing the work of writers with ancestral ties across Oceania. It has been edited by Winnie Dunn, in partnership with Sweatshop Literacy Movement Inc.
