Guboo Ted Thomas
Encyclopedia
Guboo Ted Thomas of the Yuin people was a prominent Aboriginal (koori
) elder (leader), He lived a full life including touring Australia
with a gumleaf orchestra during the Great Depression
of the 1930s, playing rugby league
and getting banned for fighting a referee
, yet growing to become an Elder campaigning for protection of sacred sites on the South Coast, who went to the United Nations
in New York
, who urged the World Council of Churches
to accept indigenous religions, and who met the Dalai Lama
. Guboo loved a "cuppa" (cup of tea), had a sense of mischief, enjoyed being doted on by women, and his favourite saying was: "Always remember, the best is yet to come!".
Guboo's work in developing mutual respect and understanding, and in the renewal of the Spirit and the Dreaming, was prolific and ongoing. In his own words:
The earth is our mother.
When I die I'm going down there.
When you die you're coming too!
And what are you doing for the earth-for the mother?
Guboo wanted Aboriginal spirituality
, the Dreaming
, to enrich the lives of all Australians, and devoted the rest of his life to being a catalyst for a worldwide return to selfless ancient values. He became a member of the Baha'i faith, emphasising the spiritual unity of humankind of all religion
s. In 1984 the then 75-year-old began travelling the world teaching the Dreamtime
, the heart of Aboriginal spirituality. For the remainder of his life Guboo held "Renewing the Dreaming" Camps around Australia and overseas, for which he was well respected. However among his own people he was not without his critics, some of whom felt that he had discovered the perks of being a new-age guru
to the white community. Unfortunately he also sometimes upset the actual traditional owners of the land where his ceremonies were held, by not always respecting their sacred sites, and by violating local Aboriginal laws.
Guboo's accomplishments speak volumes about his commitment to Australia, and his Aboriginal community:
in the Braidwood area of the South Coast of New South Wales. He was born into the Yuin people, which he always maintained was a Nation made up of many individual tribes. Ted is a contraction of his birth name Edwin; and Guboo, the name he was best known for, was his tribal name meaning "good friend". Guboo was son of William "Bill" Iberia Thomas, a tribal elder, and Mary Gwendoline "Linno" Ahoy. Although he was the third of 10 children he was recognised as a future spiritual leader by the elders of the Yuin before he was 10.
Guboo knew most about his father's family, and it was from his father's family that he drew his strong bonds with the Aboriginal community. His father William "Bill" Iberia Thomas (1888-?) and his grandfather Peter Thomas were both tribal elders. His grandmother Hannah (Nyaadi) McGrath was a [medicine woman] who took him along on her healing rounds, and told him Dreamtime stories. His father, grandfather and uncles instructed him in sacred rites, male ancestral laws and Yuin customs . He was eventually chosen by them to be given special knowledge and to become the future elder and spiritual leader of the Yuin Nation.
From his mother's family Guboo had a very eclectic background that he knew little about. His part-aboriginal mother Mary Gwendoline "Linno" Ahoy (1887-1959) had a Chinese father, and is most remembered for this by her children and grandchildren. Guboo also knew that she had French blood as her mother's surname had been de Mestre, his French great-great-grandfather Prosper de Mestre
(1789-1844) was a prominent businessman in Sydney from 1818 to 1844, and whose father Colonel Andre Charles de Mestre (c.1756-1794) had been a French soldier whose head had been removed by a canon-ball in Martinique
; his Australian-born great-grandfather Etienne de Mestre
(1832-1916) was the horse trainer who owned and trained Archer
the horse that won the first and second Melbourne Cup
s in 1861 and 1862; his Aboriginal great-grandmother Sarah Lamb, and his part-aboriginal grandmother Helen (Ellen) de Mestre (c.1850-1934) would have been proud to see the part that Guboo has played in Aboriginal affairs during his life-time; and his Chinese grandfather James Ahoy was a market gardener in the Braidwood area at the time of the gold-rush who moved back to China leaving his family behind. What would Gubbo have thought of his maternal forebears if he had known about them? Given his commitment to the aboriginal land rights struggle his feelings probably would have been ambivalent considering some of them owned large tracts of land in New South Wales that had been taken from his Aboriginal people.
Guboo grew up on the Wallaga Lake Aboriginal Reserve where he attended the tiny local school until he was eight. Guboo would say of this time: "All I was taught at school was to knit, sew, make little johnnycakes and tend a garden. In those days, no-one bothered to teach the Aboriginal children the three Rs." Withdrawn from school by his parents, his education in his "Dreamtime culture" then began. When he was nine, his father, uncle and other Yuin elders took him on their Dreamtime walkabout from Mallacoota on the Victoria
n border to the Hawkesbury River
and showed him all the sacred sites for which he would later be responsible. During his early years he also watched as his grandfather called in dolphins to help them catch fish
, and called in killer whales to help them catch whales, his grandfather even being called by the killer whales at night to join a hunt.
Always hardworking, As a teenager he had toured with a Hawaii
an performimg troupe. As a teenager and a young man he was a member of the Wallaga Lake Gumleaf Band that toured southern New South Wales
and Victoria
, and performed at the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge
in 1932. The Gumleaf Band played at football dances, and on the back of trucks at district shows, gymkhana
s, and sports picnics on the beach. He used these trips to visit Aboriginal missions from Victoria, up the New South Wales coast into Queensland
, and inland over the Great Dividing Range
. He would visit the old people to learn more about their customs and beliefs, tour their sacred sites and talk to them about protecting the land and the Great Spirit that sustained it.
The band included 7 of Gaboo’s family including his father and uncles and 3 of his brothers. It was an Aboriginal group that performed traditional dances with sticks and spears. It also included step dancing, tap dancing, hula
dancing, and Māori influences, burlesque
, clowning, and singing.
They were a dance band that made music with gum leaves, an accordion
, ukulele
s, guitar
s, fiddle
, and drum
s. Guboo played the guitar, so very different from the traditional instruments that Guboo played in his later years of the clapping sticks and didgeridoo
.
After his music career Guboo then took work on various jobs around New South Wales including jackaroo
ing, collecting shellac
, cutting railway sleepers, working in the timber industry, as leader of an Aboriginal work-crew at Warragamba Dam
, and as a union delegate at a Botany
foundry. Most of his working life, however, was spent as a commercial fisherman on the South Coast applying that special knowledge given to him by his elders, except that "the middleman made all the money".
58 year old Guboo, along with all other Aboriginal Australians, finally became an Australian citizen following the 1967 referendum. After the referendum, the no longer young Guboo Guboo sold his fishing-boat after 25 years to devote himself to the responsibilities handed to him by his beloved elders. He moved back to Wallaga Lake with his family. In the early 1970s Gaboo and his wife Ann and other tribal Elders joined Pastor Frank Roberts' New South Wales Aboriginal Lands and Rights Council. This experience strengthened Gaboo's commitment to Aboriginal land rights and culture. "Land rights, self-determination, and cultural identity" became his catch-cry. His activism began by hitchhiking to Canberra to urge the Government to make the Wallaga Lake Aboriginal Mission into a reserve and to seek protection of the sacred sites. Before long he began working with the Institute of Aboriginal Studies, recording all the Aboriginal sites in coastal New South Wales. His work with the Institute of Aboriginal Studies was groundbreaking and became the basis of all future land claims along the South Coast. He attended land rights marches in Wollongong, and land rights meetings in Sydney. In 1977 he played a significant role in the establishment of a New South Wales Aboriginal Land Council to co-ordinated the land rights campaign. In 1978 he helped prepared land claims which were presented to the New South Wales Government. After five years of demonstrations and lobbying, the Wallaga Lake community received its title deeds, and he proudly accepted them. If only Guboo had been alive to see the ownership of a much greater area, of the former Wallaga Lake National Park
and the rest of the Gulaga National Park, be restored to the area's original owners, the Yuin people, in May 2006.
In 1978 Guboo became alarmed about forestry operations on nearby Mumbulla Mountain threatening sacred sites. The New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service, with the help of Guboo Ted Thomas, commenced an Anthropological
and Archaeological
investigation of Mumbulla Mountain. This investigation supported the claims of the Yuin people, and determined that Mumbulla Mountain is significant to Aboriginal people. Yet several politicians still claimed there were no sacred sites and dismissed Guboo's claims as 'idle fantasies'. In 1979 the then seventy-year-old elder first came to public attention when, largely through his efforts, the New South Wales Premier Neville Wran
ordered a cease to logging
on the Mumbulla Mountain south of Bermagui. However the campaign for Mumbulla Mountain was not yet over. His pertinacity, saw him not give up. He knew when to fight, and when to negotiate. He believed that he would win the battle, and he did. After five long years the victory was a significant land rights settlement for the Aboriginal people.
Around this time, he began espousing a spiritual
message, believing that the noisy protests and marches only aggravated racism
. He wanted to build bridges, bringing people together through a mutual love and respect for Mother Earth. His work of restoring people's unity with the land had just begun. He wanted the Dreaming to enrich the lives of all Australians and devoted the rest of his life to being a catalyst for a worldwide return to selfless ancient values. He went to the United Nations, and he asked the World Council of Churches to accept indigenous
religions. His teachings took him around the world many times, with not a penny in his pocket, and made him friends among many cultures. He met spiritual and religious leaders, like the Dalai Lama
, who would later contact him when passing through Australia. For the next 20 years he held "Dreaming camps" around Australia and overseas to teach and pass on his knowledge, to renew the Dreaming of these places and restore sacredness to the landscape. He spent each January at Blue Gum Flats, in the Budawangs, behind Pigeon House Mountain (Bulgarn). Thousands of people from around the world came to meet him in the deep wilderness and to seek a spiritual relationship with nature.
Back in 1988, the year of the Australian Bicentenary
, the seventy-nine year old had re-enacted his own childhood 350-kilometre Dreamtime walk of seven decades earlier. The walk went from Mallacoota on the Victoria
n border to the Hawkesbury River
, and took six weeks. Guboo walked with a group of koori kids from broken homes who still recall the walk with awe.
Guboo envisioned a nation that has put internal conflict between white and black Australians behind it in the realisation of a truly unified Australian identity with a respect for Aboriginal culture and love of the land as its bedrock. Apart from those in his immediate family, it was a message that fell flat among his own people. While Guboo went on to work tirelessly to bring black and white together in love and unity, his own people mistrusted him for most of his remaining life.
He shared the Dreamtime stories from his childhood with all who would listen. His birthday present for his 90th birthday in 1999 was the performance of a puppet show "Dreamtime Stories of the Yuin Tribe" performing a Dreamtime story as told to Guboo by his grandmother "Granny Tungii" the medicine woman.
Ever the gentle activist, in February 2002 he was participated in a protest at Sandon Point near Wollongong demonstrating against a development threatening Aboriginal sites and the area's natural beauty. The ninety-three year old will be remembered for sitting in a wheelchair and clapping two sticks together. He also idnetified some "sacred stones" in Thomas Gibson Park at Thirroul but Wollongong Council took more almost two years before they arranged for him to come from Wallaga to the site and identify them in early 2002. Guboo was then too unwell to walk the site in order to re-locate and identify them and the site was later approved fro residential development
Active in what he saw as his life's work till the very end, in his last days he was participating in a study about Indigenous kinship with the Natural World in New South Wales.
He died at 93 years of age on 19 May 2002, just before that year's Reconciliation Week celebrated the rich culture and history of Australia's kouri
citizens.
Koori
The Koori are the indigenous Australians that traditionally occupied modern day New South Wales and Victoria....
) elder (leader), He lived a full life including touring Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
with a gumleaf orchestra during the Great Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
of the 1930s, playing rugby league
Rugby league
Rugby league football, usually called rugby league, is a full contact sport played by two teams of thirteen players on a rectangular grass field. One of the two codes of rugby football, it originated in England in 1895 by a split from Rugby Football Union over paying players...
and getting banned for fighting a referee
Rugby league match officials
Rugby league match officials are responsible for fairly enforcing the Laws of the Game during a match of rugby league football and imposing penalties for deliberate breaches of these Laws...
, yet growing to become an Elder campaigning for protection of sacred sites on the South Coast, who went to the United Nations
United Nations
The United Nations is an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace...
in New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
, who urged the World Council of Churches
World Council of Churches
The World Council of Churches is a worldwide fellowship of 349 global, regional and sub-regional, national and local churches seeking unity, a common witness and Christian service. It is a Christian ecumenical organization that is based in the Ecumenical Centre in Geneva, Switzerland...
to accept indigenous religions, and who met the Dalai Lama
Dalai Lama
The Dalai Lama is a high lama in the Gelug or "Yellow Hat" branch of Tibetan Buddhism. The name is a combination of the Mongolian word далай meaning "Ocean" and the Tibetan word bla-ma meaning "teacher"...
. Guboo loved a "cuppa" (cup of tea), had a sense of mischief, enjoyed being doted on by women, and his favourite saying was: "Always remember, the best is yet to come!".
Guboo's work in developing mutual respect and understanding, and in the renewal of the Spirit and the Dreaming, was prolific and ongoing. In his own words:
The earth is our mother.
When I die I'm going down there.
When you die you're coming too!
And what are you doing for the earth-for the mother?
Guboo wanted Aboriginal spirituality
Spirituality
Spirituality can refer to an ultimate or an alleged immaterial reality; an inner path enabling a person to discover the essence of his/her being; or the “deepest values and meanings by which people live.” Spiritual practices, including meditation, prayer and contemplation, are intended to develop...
, the Dreaming
Dreaming (spirituality)
The Dreaming is a common term within the animist creation narrative of indigenous Australians for a personal, or group, creation and for what may be understood as the "timeless time" of formative creation and perpetual creating....
, to enrich the lives of all Australians, and devoted the rest of his life to being a catalyst for a worldwide return to selfless ancient values. He became a member of the Baha'i faith, emphasising the spiritual unity of humankind of all religion
Religion
Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values. Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to...
s. In 1984 the then 75-year-old began travelling the world teaching the Dreamtime
Dreamtime
In the animist framework of Australian Aboriginal mythology, The Dreaming is a sacred era in which ancestral Totemic Spirit Beings formed The Creation.-The Dreaming of the Aboriginal times:...
, the heart of Aboriginal spirituality. For the remainder of his life Guboo held "Renewing the Dreaming" Camps around Australia and overseas, for which he was well respected. However among his own people he was not without his critics, some of whom felt that he had discovered the perks of being a new-age guru
Guru
A guru is one who is regarded as having great knowledge, wisdom, and authority in a certain area, and who uses it to guide others . Other forms of manifestation of this principle can include parents, school teachers, non-human objects and even one's own intellectual discipline, if the...
to the white community. Unfortunately he also sometimes upset the actual traditional owners of the land where his ceremonies were held, by not always respecting their sacred sites, and by violating local Aboriginal laws.
Guboo's accomplishments speak volumes about his commitment to Australia, and his Aboriginal community:
- Through his work with the Institute of Aboriginal Studies an invaluable record of sacred sites along the New South Wales coast was established.
- In 1979 the then seventy-year-old elder first came to public attention when, largely through his efforts, the New South WalesNew South WalesNew South Wales is a state of :Australia, located in the east of the country. It is bordered by Queensland, Victoria and South Australia to the north, south and west respectively. To the east, the state is bordered by the Tasman Sea, which forms part of the Pacific Ocean. New South Wales...
Premier Neville WranNeville WranNeville Kenneth Wran, AC, CNZM, QC was the Premier of New South Wales from 1976 until 1986. He was National President of the Australian Labor Party from 1980 to 1986 and Chairman of both the Lionel Murphy Foundation and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation from 1986...
ordered a cease to logging on the Mumbulla Mountain south of Bermagui. This led to a significant land rights settlement in New South Wales. - The seventy-nine year old's 1988 re-enactment for the Australian BicentenaryAustralian BicentenaryThe bicentenary of Australia was celebrated in 1970 on the 200th anniversary of Captain James Cook landing and claiming the land, and again in 1988 to celebrate 200 years of permanent European settlement.-1970:...
of his own childhood 350-kilometre Dreamtime walk of seven decades earlier, with a group of koori kids from broken homes, demonstrated a personal vision guided by hard work, spirituality, respect and love for the land. - Ever the gentle activist, the ninety-three year old will be last remembered for sitting in a wheelchair and clapping two sticks together. He was participated in a protest at Sandon Point near Wollongong demonstrating against a development threatening Aboriginal sites and the area's natural beauty.
Background
Guboo Ted Thomas was born in 1909 under a gum tree at JembaicumbeneJembaicumbene, New South Wales
Jembaicumbene is a town in the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales, Australia, located 5 miles out along the Braidwood - Majors Creek Road...
in the Braidwood area of the South Coast of New South Wales. He was born into the Yuin people, which he always maintained was a Nation made up of many individual tribes. Ted is a contraction of his birth name Edwin; and Guboo, the name he was best known for, was his tribal name meaning "good friend". Guboo was son of William "Bill" Iberia Thomas, a tribal elder, and Mary Gwendoline "Linno" Ahoy. Although he was the third of 10 children he was recognised as a future spiritual leader by the elders of the Yuin before he was 10.
Guboo knew most about his father's family, and it was from his father's family that he drew his strong bonds with the Aboriginal community. His father William "Bill" Iberia Thomas (1888-?) and his grandfather Peter Thomas were both tribal elders. His grandmother Hannah (Nyaadi) McGrath was a [medicine woman] who took him along on her healing rounds, and told him Dreamtime stories. His father, grandfather and uncles instructed him in sacred rites, male ancestral laws and Yuin customs . He was eventually chosen by them to be given special knowledge and to become the future elder and spiritual leader of the Yuin Nation.
From his mother's family Guboo had a very eclectic background that he knew little about. His part-aboriginal mother Mary Gwendoline "Linno" Ahoy (1887-1959) had a Chinese father, and is most remembered for this by her children and grandchildren. Guboo also knew that she had French blood as her mother's surname had been de Mestre, his French great-great-grandfather Prosper de Mestre
Prosper de Mestre
Prosper de Mestre was a prominent businessman in Sydney from 1818 until near his death in 1844. He was French born, but also a "citizen of the world", who played an important role in the development of commerce and banking in the English Colony of New South Wales. He became a successful merchant...
(1789-1844) was a prominent businessman in Sydney from 1818 to 1844, and whose father Colonel Andre Charles de Mestre (c.1756-1794) had been a French soldier whose head had been removed by a canon-ball in Martinique
Martinique
Martinique is an island in the eastern Caribbean Sea, with a land area of . Like Guadeloupe, it is an overseas region of France, consisting of a single overseas department. To the northwest lies Dominica, to the south St Lucia, and to the southeast Barbados...
; his Australian-born great-grandfather Etienne de Mestre
Etienne L. de Mestre
Etienne de Mestre , a 19th century trainer of Thoroughbred racehorses, was Australia's first outstanding racehorse trainer. In his 30 year career he experienced all the highs and the lows of the turf in a career which ended with him dependent on donations from racing friends.With the five wins de...
(1832-1916) was the horse trainer who owned and trained Archer
Archer (horse)
Archer was an Australian Thoroughbred racehorse who won the first and the second Melbourne Cups in 1861 and 1862. He won both Cups easily, and is one of only five horses to win the Melbourne Cup twice or more; he is one of only four horses to win two successive Cups.-Breeding:Archer was sired by...
the horse that won the first and second Melbourne Cup
Melbourne Cup
The Melbourne Cup is Australia's major Thoroughbred horse race. Marketed as "the race that stops a nation", it is a 3,200 metre race for three-year-olds and over. It is the richest "two-mile" handicap in the world, and one of the richest turf races...
s in 1861 and 1862; his Aboriginal great-grandmother Sarah Lamb, and his part-aboriginal grandmother Helen (Ellen) de Mestre (c.1850-1934) would have been proud to see the part that Guboo has played in Aboriginal affairs during his life-time; and his Chinese grandfather James Ahoy was a market gardener in the Braidwood area at the time of the gold-rush who moved back to China leaving his family behind. What would Gubbo have thought of his maternal forebears if he had known about them? Given his commitment to the aboriginal land rights struggle his feelings probably would have been ambivalent considering some of them owned large tracts of land in New South Wales that had been taken from his Aboriginal people.
Guboo grew up on the Wallaga Lake Aboriginal Reserve where he attended the tiny local school until he was eight. Guboo would say of this time: "All I was taught at school was to knit, sew, make little johnnycakes and tend a garden. In those days, no-one bothered to teach the Aboriginal children the three Rs." Withdrawn from school by his parents, his education in his "Dreamtime culture" then began. When he was nine, his father, uncle and other Yuin elders took him on their Dreamtime walkabout from Mallacoota on the Victoria
Victoria (Australia)
Victoria is the second most populous state in Australia. Geographically the smallest mainland state, Victoria is bordered by New South Wales, South Australia, and Tasmania on Boundary Islet to the north, west and south respectively....
n border to the Hawkesbury River
Hawkesbury River
The Hawkesbury River, also known as Deerubbun, is one of the major rivers of the coastal region of New South Wales, Australia. The Hawkesbury River and its tributaries virtually encircle the metropolitan region of Sydney.-Geography:-Course:...
and showed him all the sacred sites for which he would later be responsible. During his early years he also watched as his grandfather called in dolphins to help them catch fish
Fish
Fish are a paraphyletic group of organisms that consist of all gill-bearing aquatic vertebrate animals that lack limbs with digits. Included in this definition are the living hagfish, lampreys, and cartilaginous and bony fish, as well as various extinct related groups...
, and called in killer whales to help them catch whales, his grandfather even being called by the killer whales at night to join a hunt.
Always hardworking, As a teenager he had toured with a Hawaii
Hawaii
Hawaii is the newest of the 50 U.S. states , and is the only U.S. state made up entirely of islands. It is the northernmost island group in Polynesia, occupying most of an archipelago in the central Pacific Ocean, southwest of the continental United States, southeast of Japan, and northeast of...
an performimg troupe. As a teenager and a young man he was a member of the Wallaga Lake Gumleaf Band that toured southern New South Wales
New South Wales
New South Wales is a state of :Australia, located in the east of the country. It is bordered by Queensland, Victoria and South Australia to the north, south and west respectively. To the east, the state is bordered by the Tasman Sea, which forms part of the Pacific Ocean. New South Wales...
and Victoria
Victoria (Australia)
Victoria is the second most populous state in Australia. Geographically the smallest mainland state, Victoria is bordered by New South Wales, South Australia, and Tasmania on Boundary Islet to the north, west and south respectively....
, and performed at the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge
Sydney Harbour Bridge
The Sydney Harbour Bridge is a steel through arch bridge across Sydney Harbour that carries rail, vehicular, bicycle and pedestrian traffic between the Sydney central business district and the North Shore. The dramatic view of the bridge, the harbour, and the nearby Sydney Opera House is an iconic...
in 1932. The Gumleaf Band played at football dances, and on the back of trucks at district shows, gymkhana
Gymkhana
Gymkhana is a typical Anglo-Indian expression, which is derived from the Hindi-Urdu word for "racket court," is an Indian term which originally referred to a place where sporting events take place. The meaning then altered to denote a place where skill-based contests were held...
s, and sports picnics on the beach. He used these trips to visit Aboriginal missions from Victoria, up the New South Wales coast into Queensland
Queensland
Queensland is a state of Australia, occupying the north-eastern section of the mainland continent. It is bordered by the Northern Territory, South Australia and New South Wales to the west, south-west and south respectively. To the east, Queensland is bordered by the Coral Sea and Pacific Ocean...
, and inland over the Great Dividing Range
Great Dividing Range
The Great Dividing Range, or the Eastern Highlands, is Australia's most substantial mountain range and the third longest in the world. The range stretches more than 3,500 km from Dauan Island off the northeastern tip of Queensland, running the entire length of the eastern coastline through...
. He would visit the old people to learn more about their customs and beliefs, tour their sacred sites and talk to them about protecting the land and the Great Spirit that sustained it.
The band included 7 of Gaboo’s family including his father and uncles and 3 of his brothers. It was an Aboriginal group that performed traditional dances with sticks and spears. It also included step dancing, tap dancing, hula
Hula
Hula is a dance form accompanied by chant or song . It was developed in the Hawaiian Islands by the Polynesians who originally settled there. The hula dramatizes or portrays the words of the oli or mele in a visual dance form....
dancing, and Māori influences, burlesque
Burlesque
Burlesque is a literary, dramatic or musical work intended to cause laughter by caricaturing the manner or spirit of serious works, or by ludicrous treatment of their subjects...
, clowning, and singing.
They were a dance band that made music with gum leaves, an accordion
Accordion
The accordion is a box-shaped musical instrument of the bellows-driven free-reed aerophone family, sometimes referred to as a squeezebox. A person who plays the accordion is called an accordionist....
, ukulele
Ukulele
The ukulele, ; from ; it is a subset of the guitar family of instruments, generally with four nylon or gut strings or four courses of strings....
s, guitar
Guitar
The guitar is a plucked string instrument, usually played with fingers or a pick. The guitar consists of a body with a rigid neck to which the strings, generally six in number, are attached. Guitars are traditionally constructed of various woods and strung with animal gut or, more recently, with...
s, fiddle
Fiddle
The term fiddle may refer to any bowed string musical instrument, most often the violin. It is also a colloquial term for the instrument used by players in all genres, including classical music...
, and drum
Drum
The drum is a member of the percussion group of musical instruments, which is technically classified as the membranophones. Drums consist of at least one membrane, called a drumhead or drum skin, that is stretched over a shell and struck, either directly with the player's hands, or with a...
s. Guboo played the guitar, so very different from the traditional instruments that Guboo played in his later years of the clapping sticks and didgeridoo
Didgeridoo
The didgeridoo is a wind instrument developed by Indigenous Australians of northern Australia around 1,500 years ago and still in widespread usage today both in Australia and around the world. It is sometimes described as a natural wooden trumpet or "drone pipe"...
.
After his music career Guboo then took work on various jobs around New South Wales including jackaroo
Jackaroo (trainee)
A Jackaroo is a young man working on a sheep or cattle station, to gain practical experience in the skills needed to become an owner, overseer, manager, etc. The word originated in Queensland, Australia in the Nineteenth Century and is still in use in Australia and New Zealand in the twenty-first...
ing, collecting shellac
Shellac
Shellac is a resin secreted by the female lac bug, on trees in the forests of India and Thailand. It is processed and sold as dry flakes , which are dissolved in ethyl alcohol to make liquid shellac, which is used as a brush-on colorant, food glaze and wood finish...
, cutting railway sleepers, working in the timber industry, as leader of an Aboriginal work-crew at Warragamba Dam
Warragamba Dam
Warragamba Dam is the primary water source for the Australian city of Sydney. It is approximately to the west of Sydney on the Warragamba River, a tributary of the Hawkesbury River, and impounds Lake Burragorang.- Overview :...
, and as a union delegate at a Botany
Botany, New South Wales
Botany is a suburb in south-eastern Sydney, in the state of New South Wales, Australia. Botany is located 10 kilometres south of the Sydney central business district and is part of the City of Botany Bay....
foundry. Most of his working life, however, was spent as a commercial fisherman on the South Coast applying that special knowledge given to him by his elders, except that "the middleman made all the money".
58 year old Guboo, along with all other Aboriginal Australians, finally became an Australian citizen following the 1967 referendum. After the referendum, the no longer young Guboo Guboo sold his fishing-boat after 25 years to devote himself to the responsibilities handed to him by his beloved elders. He moved back to Wallaga Lake with his family. In the early 1970s Gaboo and his wife Ann and other tribal Elders joined Pastor Frank Roberts' New South Wales Aboriginal Lands and Rights Council. This experience strengthened Gaboo's commitment to Aboriginal land rights and culture. "Land rights, self-determination, and cultural identity" became his catch-cry. His activism began by hitchhiking to Canberra to urge the Government to make the Wallaga Lake Aboriginal Mission into a reserve and to seek protection of the sacred sites. Before long he began working with the Institute of Aboriginal Studies, recording all the Aboriginal sites in coastal New South Wales. His work with the Institute of Aboriginal Studies was groundbreaking and became the basis of all future land claims along the South Coast. He attended land rights marches in Wollongong, and land rights meetings in Sydney. In 1977 he played a significant role in the establishment of a New South Wales Aboriginal Land Council to co-ordinated the land rights campaign. In 1978 he helped prepared land claims which were presented to the New South Wales Government. After five years of demonstrations and lobbying, the Wallaga Lake community received its title deeds, and he proudly accepted them. If only Guboo had been alive to see the ownership of a much greater area, of the former Wallaga Lake National Park
Wallaga Lake National Park
Wallaga Lake National Park is a former national park in New South Wales, 296 km southwest of Sydney, Australia. It now forms part of a greater Gulaga National Park....
and the rest of the Gulaga National Park, be restored to the area's original owners, the Yuin people, in May 2006.
In 1978 Guboo became alarmed about forestry operations on nearby Mumbulla Mountain threatening sacred sites. The New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service, with the help of Guboo Ted Thomas, commenced an Anthropological
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
and Archaeological
Archaeology
Archaeology, or archeology , is the study of human society, primarily through the recovery and analysis of the material culture and environmental data that they have left behind, which includes artifacts, architecture, biofacts and cultural landscapes...
investigation of Mumbulla Mountain. This investigation supported the claims of the Yuin people, and determined that Mumbulla Mountain is significant to Aboriginal people. Yet several politicians still claimed there were no sacred sites and dismissed Guboo's claims as 'idle fantasies'. In 1979 the then seventy-year-old elder first came to public attention when, largely through his efforts, the New South Wales Premier Neville Wran
Neville Wran
Neville Kenneth Wran, AC, CNZM, QC was the Premier of New South Wales from 1976 until 1986. He was National President of the Australian Labor Party from 1980 to 1986 and Chairman of both the Lionel Murphy Foundation and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation from 1986...
ordered a cease to logging
Logging
Logging is the cutting, skidding, on-site processing, and loading of trees or logs onto trucks.In forestry, the term logging is sometimes used in a narrow sense concerning the logistics of moving wood from the stump to somewhere outside the forest, usually a sawmill or a lumber yard...
on the Mumbulla Mountain south of Bermagui. However the campaign for Mumbulla Mountain was not yet over. His pertinacity, saw him not give up. He knew when to fight, and when to negotiate. He believed that he would win the battle, and he did. After five long years the victory was a significant land rights settlement for the Aboriginal people.
Around this time, he began espousing a spiritual
Spirituality
Spirituality can refer to an ultimate or an alleged immaterial reality; an inner path enabling a person to discover the essence of his/her being; or the “deepest values and meanings by which people live.” Spiritual practices, including meditation, prayer and contemplation, are intended to develop...
message, believing that the noisy protests and marches only aggravated racism
Racism
Racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...
. He wanted to build bridges, bringing people together through a mutual love and respect for Mother Earth. His work of restoring people's unity with the land had just begun. He wanted the Dreaming to enrich the lives of all Australians and devoted the rest of his life to being a catalyst for a worldwide return to selfless ancient values. He went to the United Nations, and he asked the World Council of Churches to accept indigenous
Indigenous peoples
Indigenous peoples are ethnic groups that are defined as indigenous according to one of the various definitions of the term, there is no universally accepted definition but most of which carry connotations of being the "original inhabitants" of a territory....
religions. His teachings took him around the world many times, with not a penny in his pocket, and made him friends among many cultures. He met spiritual and religious leaders, like the Dalai Lama
Dalai Lama
The Dalai Lama is a high lama in the Gelug or "Yellow Hat" branch of Tibetan Buddhism. The name is a combination of the Mongolian word далай meaning "Ocean" and the Tibetan word bla-ma meaning "teacher"...
, who would later contact him when passing through Australia. For the next 20 years he held "Dreaming camps" around Australia and overseas to teach and pass on his knowledge, to renew the Dreaming of these places and restore sacredness to the landscape. He spent each January at Blue Gum Flats, in the Budawangs, behind Pigeon House Mountain (Bulgarn). Thousands of people from around the world came to meet him in the deep wilderness and to seek a spiritual relationship with nature.
Back in 1988, the year of the Australian Bicentenary
Australian Bicentenary
The bicentenary of Australia was celebrated in 1970 on the 200th anniversary of Captain James Cook landing and claiming the land, and again in 1988 to celebrate 200 years of permanent European settlement.-1970:...
, the seventy-nine year old had re-enacted his own childhood 350-kilometre Dreamtime walk of seven decades earlier. The walk went from Mallacoota on the Victoria
Victoria (Australia)
Victoria is the second most populous state in Australia. Geographically the smallest mainland state, Victoria is bordered by New South Wales, South Australia, and Tasmania on Boundary Islet to the north, west and south respectively....
n border to the Hawkesbury River
Hawkesbury River
The Hawkesbury River, also known as Deerubbun, is one of the major rivers of the coastal region of New South Wales, Australia. The Hawkesbury River and its tributaries virtually encircle the metropolitan region of Sydney.-Geography:-Course:...
, and took six weeks. Guboo walked with a group of koori kids from broken homes who still recall the walk with awe.
Guboo envisioned a nation that has put internal conflict between white and black Australians behind it in the realisation of a truly unified Australian identity with a respect for Aboriginal culture and love of the land as its bedrock. Apart from those in his immediate family, it was a message that fell flat among his own people. While Guboo went on to work tirelessly to bring black and white together in love and unity, his own people mistrusted him for most of his remaining life.
He shared the Dreamtime stories from his childhood with all who would listen. His birthday present for his 90th birthday in 1999 was the performance of a puppet show "Dreamtime Stories of the Yuin Tribe" performing a Dreamtime story as told to Guboo by his grandmother "Granny Tungii" the medicine woman.
Ever the gentle activist, in February 2002 he was participated in a protest at Sandon Point near Wollongong demonstrating against a development threatening Aboriginal sites and the area's natural beauty. The ninety-three year old will be remembered for sitting in a wheelchair and clapping two sticks together. He also idnetified some "sacred stones" in Thomas Gibson Park at Thirroul but Wollongong Council took more almost two years before they arranged for him to come from Wallaga to the site and identify them in early 2002. Guboo was then too unwell to walk the site in order to re-locate and identify them and the site was later approved fro residential development
Active in what he saw as his life's work till the very end, in his last days he was participating in a study about Indigenous kinship with the Natural World in New South Wales.
He died at 93 years of age on 19 May 2002, just before that year's Reconciliation Week celebrated the rich culture and history of Australia's kouri
Kouri
Kouri is a village in the Saponé Department of Bazèga Province in central Burkina Faso. The village has a population of 925.-External links:*...
citizens.