"Being able to sit through others not understanding": Rosie's story

Geraldton Language Party storytellers Godfrey Simpson (Wajarri), Maringi Querino (Māori), Peter Salmon (Warriyangga), Jacqui Cook (Gàidhlig) and Rosie Sitorus (Toba Batak) who tells her story in this blog.

Geraldton’s first Language Party was held in September 2019. Rosie Sitorus made the show come to life, wearing many hats as co-producer, emcee, and storyteller. Here, Rosie shares with us her experience of participating in a Language Party, and how it offered healing to a grieving community.

“I work as a language worker for Bundiyarra Irra Wangga, an Aboriginal language centre in Geraldton. We work primarily with Indigenous language speakers of between 7 and 9 languages from the midwest region of Western Australia. It’s a big area, with lots of languages, lots of people and lots of cultures. Geraldton really is multicultural, but most people just don't see it. We held the 2019 Geraldton Language Party at Bundiyarra with a really diverse audience. We had about 40 or 50 people come along, some of whom I had never seen at my workplace.

Geraldton town beach. Image by Theo Vervoort

“Geraldton really is multicultural, but most people just don’t see it.”

A lot of what we do is at Bundiyarra is helping to reconnect people with their language; giving them a place to feel proud of their language and to recognise the common experiences between people who speak an Indigenous, endangered or a minority language with the rest of the population. There are so many more common links than there are differences. 

The Language Party fitted in well with our ethos. It gave us a place to celebrate local languages and to create connection with other speakers of other languages that are in a similar position. We came to celebrate the strengths, the connections, the persistence, and the resilience of the people who carry these languages now, and into the future.

Bundiyarra Aboriginal Community Aboriginal Corporation offers programs and resources to support the social, cultural, economic and community engagement of Aboriginal people in the Midwest, Murchison and Gascoyne regions of WA. 

At the Language Party, I shared a story and song in my Father’s language. My Father is an Indigenous Indonesian man and he speaks a language called Batak which is from around Lake Toba in Indonesia in Sumatra. The storytelling opened up so many rich experiences for me and for the audience and the people in the community that participated.

There was some real unrest in the community in the days before the show. A young woman in the community was shot and killed in this town. I don't want to say that she died or that she ‘passed away’, because it wasn't peaceful. She was killed not far from Bundiyarra, which is called "bundiyarra" for being a good place.

We thought long and hard about cancelling or postponing the evening. We talked at length with our storytellers, with our community, with our leaders, and we sought their guidance. We would never disrespect a family, or a community, in grief. And our community told us that it was okay for it to go ahead.

Community is never separate no matter what kind of work you do. You can never separate the community’s experience from what you’re doing with the community. It was not a party any more, but an acknowledgement, and a resilient persistence through celebration, of languages that can carry hope forward.

When we talked about it afterwards and reflected, we realised that going ahead with the Language Party was the right thing to do. At the time it was scary to have a public event that was positive and a bit light hearted and a bit fun when a very serious situation had happened. It gave a whole other dimension to the event and ended up sewing strong bonds between the different people in the audience and the storytellers.

Rosie with colleague and friend, Peter Salmon.

It was a bit different telling my story at The Language Party. It was an interesting journey, not feeling understood, but I knew that in a couple of minutes people would understand.

I was aware of the feeling of being able to sit, or to live, through others not understanding. I knew that people were not understanding what I was saying. And that is not unique. There are people around the world for whom that is their whole life. They are constantly misunderstood, or not understood. The Indigenous community is misunderstood or not understood so often. I'm used to being articulate, and I generally don't feel misunderstood unless I'm talking to someone who doesn’t speak English, or maybe to someone who is not on my wavelength. It was good to feel misunderstood or not understood. It didn’t feel comfortable, but it was a remedial thing.

It's kind of like the reason you go to the gym. Most people don't go to the gym because they like feeling sore. They go because if they do that more and more they’ll get stronger and fitter and healthier. And it’s the same thing with this, to understand that being uncomfortable, and not being understood, for a short period of time is good for your other skills. It helps you gesture more. It helps you empathise with other people's experiences more. It improves your own communication skills. You’ve got to go through uncomfortable not-so-enjoyable things in order to really appreciate what you’ve got, and to get better at it.

“I was aware of the feeling of being able to sit, or to live, through others not understanding.”

Prestige means something. I’m very interested in mainstream popular culture and influencers and thinking about how we create a buzz around someone or something. How can we build up prestige around ideas and people and movements? What resonates with people and what doesn't? I’m always interested in giving language speakers prestige because in my mind, language speakers are more important than celebrities. For me, Language Parties are ways to create prestige about language speakers in other people’s minds.

Going to a Language Party is a very gentle way of being in an Indigenous space. A lot of the people who were at the Language Party would have never been to Bundiyarra before, and so people were taking a step into the space of the Aboriginal community in Geraldton, a physical step. It seems not just symbolic, but physically important to do that. At a Language Party you can strike a balance between creating a place of high culture on land that belongs to the community.

These languages were shared in a place that put them in a position of high culture; put them in a position of prestige and a place of respect that some people in the audience had never seen before. They were just these little languages that are spoken in schools, or just these little languages that people learnt from their grandparents that have no position or utility in everyday life. This event showed the audience, and the people telling those stories, that that’s exactly where their languages belong. In fact, it is their most natural habitat to belong in a place of importance for everybody.”

Rosie and the storytellers lifted our spirits. We experienced a new possibility for Language Parties to bring a grieving community together in solidarity and truth-telling, remembering the cornerstone of our common life: our stories.

—Nicole Curtin