Bindjareb Elder Harry Nannup has continued his talking circuit around Peel schools, this time stopping at Mandurah Baptist college to talk about his childhood in Pinjarra before the area of his birth is commemorated in a few week’s time.
Mr Nannup visited the school to talk about his childhood growing up in Pinjarra, the obstacles he had to face as a young black man in the area, and his perspective of democracy in Australia.
“I'm the existing elder from this region here. I work mostly with Mandurah City Council. I love the work I do around town, I never get sick of it,” he began.
“I especially like coming to the schools. I've been to every school in Mandurah now, and I always get something out of coming down here and telling you kids about my life, and how I grew up in the bush. Because it's different from how you’ve grown up, very different. We didn't have power, we didn't have whitefella's tucker.
“We didn't always live in a house, because we loved living by the river. They called our people the ‘lakes and river people’, and we liked that title, because it suited us. We felt free out there.”
Mr Nannup’s talk covered the good and the bad of his upbringing, from the passion he has for the Serpentine River to how the Stolen Generation affected his life.
“That was before we had pressure on us to live the whitefella way. There was too much pressure there. If you lived in a house, you've gotta pay your rent, you've gotta make sure your children go to school,” he said.
“There were all these things you were supposed to do to make sire everyone was happy. Most of all, we were expected to keep everyone else happy, and not ourselves."
While Mr Nannup frequently states the importance of schooling - his school visits are more and more frequent, despite his advancing age - he admits to not receiving much when he was younger, due to the situation local Noongar children found themselves in.
Mr Nannup talked passionately about his time growing up next to the river – the spot where he was born is now the Sir Ross McLarty Oval – and how having that freedom taken away from him affected him, up until now.
"I didn’t have much schooling when I was younger," he said.
"I went to school in Mandurah when I was small. But then there was a small school on the back roads out in Serpentine they had for us, called Hopeland School. I don't know why they called it that, maybe because they had some hope for our people, I don't know, but there wasn't much there.
"But I got out. I've been made a freeman of the City. And I thought I'd never get that, because I didn't have that schooling. But I made my own way, I showed what this land is to the people that came here."
Part of Mr Nannup's insistence on visiting schools stems from that idea: convincing students of the importance of their own education.
"This room is about 100 times as big as that one classroom we had," he said.
"That’s important. You've got all these opportunities now, and all this freedom to do what you want. Don't waste it."
The students were also passionate about learning how they could embrace Aboriginal culture, something Mr Nannup has strived to do for many years.
"The kids, they're more open-minded, they don't have all these ideas of how things are or how they should be," Mr Nannup said.
"So it's easier to talk to them and say, 'Hey, you can do these things, they're small things but they make a difference.' That's why I like coming out here, because the kids always want to stop and listen."
The Shire of Murray is set to commemorate Mr Nannup’s ancestors when the Nannup Walk Trail is commemorated in Pinjarra in coming weeks.