Indigenous Australia

Mona Ngitji Ngitji Tur

Family photograph

Mona Ngitji Ngitji Tur (1936–2011), cultural educator, oral linguist, and interpreter, was born on 15 July 1936 at Hamilton Bore, Fifteen Mile station, north-western South Australia. She was the only child of Inawantji Mary, an Antikirinya-Yankunytjatjara woman with southern Aranda (Lower Arrernte) connections, and John Edward (Jack) Kennedy, a railway fettler of Irish and Scottish descent. Her Anangu name, Ngitji Ngitji, is the word for cicada.

Much of Mona’s early life was shaped by forces outside her parents’ control. During the 1930s—the era of assimilation—relationships between white men and Aboriginal women were prohibited, and Aboriginal children of ‘mixed descent’ were often forcibly removed and sent to institutions to learn to live like white people. As a child Mona lived with her mother in a bush camp in the sandhills near the station; her father stayed in the fettler’s huts at Pedirka railway siding, visiting on weekends. Unlike the white authorities, the Antikirinya accepted Inawantji and Jack’s relationship. Mona enjoyed the freedom of station life—collecting bush food, performing ceremonies on her own Country, and speaking her ngunytju’s (mother’s) language. However, due to her mixed heritage, she lived with the constant threat of being ‘taken away and … never, ever [seeing her family] again’ (Tur cited in Mattingley 1992, 161).

Mona’s uncle was a tracker with the walkatjara (police) and he would give advance warning of police raids whenever he could, enabling her mother to hide her in the bush. On one occasion, when Mona was five or six years old, the police came without warning, so Inawantji dug a hole in the ground inside their kanku (shelter) and buried Mona up to her neck. She covered her daughter’s head with a blanket and got the camp dogs to lie around her. From her hiding spot, Mona heard the police ask her ngunytju for her ‘half-caste’ child. Inawantji bravely responded: ‘Wiya, no, me got no half-caste kid’ (Tur 2010, 18).

When Jack was transferred to Alice Springs, Inawantji stayed behind with her family. She gave birth to Mona’s half-sister Gloria in 1941. In around 1943 food shortages forced the family to move south to Oodnadatta where there was a government ration depot. Mona, her mother, and sister were not allowed to stay in the township and so lived on the town’s fringe until offered a room at the home of Andrew Hele, a white man with an Aboriginal wife and son. Soon after, Mona began attending Oodnadatta School.

Inawantji and her new partner (later husband; m. 1954) Dick Carroll found work at Allandale station in 1947. Wanting Mona to continue her education, Inawantji placed her and Gloria at the Oodnadatta Children’s Home run by the United Aborigines Mission (UAM). Mona left school and the home in 1950, aged fourteen, travelling first to Todmorden station where Inawantji and Dick were working, and then to Adelaide, where the UAM arranged work for her as a domestic servant. She worked for the same family, the Bagshaws, for the next five years, helping to raise their three boys. During this time she continued to see her mother and sister and to speak her Antikirinya-Yankunytjatjara language, a skill that would prove valuable in the years to come.

In 1954 Mona returned to the Oodnadatta Children’s Home to work, moving the next year to Gerard Mission in the Riverland, and then to Colebrook Home in Adelaide, both UAM-run institutions, before attending the Aborigines Inland Mission’s Bible Training College at Singleton, New South Wales (1956–58). Next she worked as a cook at Campbell House Farm School, a home for Aboriginal boys near Meningie, South Australia, run by the Aborigines Protection Board. Later, hoping for employment as a children’s nurse at Seaforth Home, Somerton, she was disappointed to be offered a cleaning position instead. She eventually became the cook there. Transferred to the Stuart House Boys’ Hostel after it opened in North Adelaide in 1964, she remained in this role until 1968. Both institutions were run by the government.

Mona had married Jozef (Joe) Tur, a Polish immigrant, in 1965. She had two children prior to meeting him, and they would have two more, in 1968 and 1971. In 1973 Mona began teaching Pitjantjatjara at the University of Adelaide and working as an interpreter with the Aboriginal Legal Rights Movement. She then began a three-decades long career as an interpreter for Anangu people, first with the South Australian Multicultural and Ethnic Affairs Commission and then with the north-west court circuit. In 1982, at the age of forty-six, she was given Elder status by the Antikirinya-Yankunytjatjara community on the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands and entrusted to continue teaching and interpreting Pitjantjatjara in schools, universities, courts, prisons, hospitals, and for native title claims.

In the 1970s Mona started writing short stories and poems, many of which were published in anthologies and journals. She was the first Aboriginal artist in residence at Carclew Youth Performing Arts Centre, Adelaide, performing her work in schools and teaching children about Anangu culture, storytelling, song, and dance. In the late 1990s and early 2000s she was involved in supporting the Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta in the Irati Wanti (The Poison, Leave It) campaign to stop the building of a nuclear waste dump at Billa Kalina, south of Coober Pedy. In 2007 her poem ‘This My Land’ was placed on a plaque in the main street of Oodnadatta to honour community members from the Stolen Generations. Cicada Dreaming, her autobiography, was published in 2010. Having worked as a cultural educator across all three Adelaide universities, she was awarded an honorary doctorate (DLitt) by Flinders University in 2011.

A humble woman whose strong cultural beliefs existed alongside a deep Christian faith, Mona retired from language work in 2010. Survived by her husband and three daughters, she died on 28 May 2011 at the Philip Kennedy Centre, Largs Bay, Adelaide. Her work as a language teacher, interpreter, and cultural storyteller contributed to the maintenance of Anangu languages and cultures.

This entry was written by Simone Tur and Denise Noack with the permission of, and including information from, Aunty Mona’s family.