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children, the Education Department had established no schools for us. The Mission chose to provide schools to give us the opportunity to learn as the white children did. There were no qualified teachers at Mount Margaret but the Mission staff did what they could for us. It opened up a new world for me. Many Mission staff received Western Australian Correspondence School lessons for their own children. These were passed on to us, but because there were too many children for full-time lessons we were split into two groups. One group was taught in the morning, the other in the afternoon. Each group got two and a half hours schooling a day. It wasn’t much, but for us it was exciting and gave us grounding in all subjects, particularly English. In many schools speaking ‘native’ was a punishable offence. At Mount Margaret it was different. Teachers encouraged students to speak only English during school hours. They said it was the best way to learn a new language quickly and correctly. Outside school we were able to talk to each other in our own language.
    I have only happy memories of my time at Mount Margaret Mission and will always appreciate the background the Missionaries gave me.
    Abridged from
Badudu Stories,
teaching notes
May O’Brien and Alwyn Evans, 1994.

Jukuna Mona Chuguna
MY LIFE IN THE DESERT
    When I was a child I lived in the sand dune country of the Great Sandy Desert to the south of Fitzroy Crossing. My father’s birthplace is near the waterhole called Wirtuka. My father got his name, Kirikarrajarti, right there. It’s a name that came from the
ngarrangkarni.
In the ngarrangkarni, two men came to Wirtuka and found the place overrun with possums. They were all fighting and biting each other, some up in the trees and others down in holes in the ground. As they fought they were hissing, ‘Kkir! Kkir!’ so the two men called the place Kirikarrajarti, because of the hissing noise the possums made. My father’s
jarriny
is the possum, and he is called Kirikarrajarti after this place where the possums were fighting.
    My mother came from another group of people, who belonged to Japirnka waterhole. When my parents had been together for a while, I was conceived, and my jarrinycomes from near the
jila
Mantarta. Near Mantarta is a smooth sandhill called Lantimangu. It’s a place where spirit children live. When a husband and wife walk near there, one of the spirits thinks, ‘I’ll go to them. I’ll make them a mother and father.’ One time my parents got a lot of edible gum from desert nut trees that were growing all around there, on the flat down from Lantimangu. That night my father had a dream and saw a child standing behind him, but when he turned round it disappeared. Next day he said to his wife, ‘This gum might be the jarriny for our baby.’ He had a feeling about it. Then my mother knew she was expecting me, and so my spirit comes from that sandhill called Lantimangu.
    There was a really bad spirit child living at Lantimangu. He was my spirit brother. He threw a fighting stick at my grandmother and hit her on the back because she was digging up a root vegetable from his place. He snatched the roots from her and left her there on the ground, crippled.
    My mother’s father also came from the Japirnka waterhole, but his wife, my grandmother, was from Mayililiny waterhole, to the east, near the Canning Stock Route. My grandfather travelled over there and brought her back to be his wife. My father’s mother belonged to Tapu and Wayampajarti, two waterholes north of Japirnka.
    My mother had four children, three girls and a boy. My father had two other wives besides my mother. His second wife, who was my mother’s sister, had three boys and a girl.My father’s third wife had a girl and a boy. All ten of us had the same father.
    Our regular journeys for hunting and collecting food took us around the country to the north and to the south of