The Aboriginal community collective in which I live is made up of individuals and groups of Aboriginal people from many parts of Australia. Thus, many of today’s families (immediate and extended) who live in different towns nearby originated from those distant regions. Individuals have married partners from within their own towns and from surrounding towns, thus creating super extended family networks. Consequently, many members of the community collective know personally the numerous families who live within the cluster of different discreet towns and surrounding areas.

Between July 2006 and July 2007, this Aboriginal community I refer to above is comprised of an Indigenous population of approximately 2,500 people. Within that 1-year time frame, a total of 27 funerals of identified Aboriginal individuals occurred. On average, there was one such funeral every other week. While every community member might not have known every deceased individual, he or she would have known someone who was related to or was a friend or acquaintance of the deceased, or the person may have heard about the funeral on the “Aboriginal Grapevine.” Basically, the individual in the community collective would know of the funeral and know what families were involved. Aboriginal community organizations such as medical centers and/or cultural and resource centers often serve as hubs of the Aboriginal community; they are places where funeral information is always present: people talk about recent funerals, funerals coming up, and funerals in far-off places, particularly if they are funerals of people who are extended family members of the community (Bresland, personal communication, 28 August 2008). Notices are posted on walls about funerals; Aboriginal flags are constantly flying at half mast, acknowledging that a someone in the community has died.

Funerals in the Aboriginal context are a major subject of initial contact in conversations. In a conversation with another Aboriginal person recently, one of the first topics of the conversation was “What funeral are you going to tomorrow?” Many Aboriginal people make the death notices section in newspaper compulsory reading every day to be kept informed about which Aboriginal people have died—where, when, and their funeral details.

Thus, a sense of grief is always present among individuals of our community, lying just below the surface of our consciousness, only to resurface as a full-blown grief when someone close to us dies. A funeral every other week in the space of 1 year does not give an individual much time to recover from grief. The closeness of our extended family and community connections makes the sense of grief a constant that affects our mental well-being as individuals and as a community.

Literature on the subject of grief mostly focuses on an individual’s experience (Parkes, 2001; Stroebe, Hansson, Stroebe, & Schut, 2001). There appears to be a common agreement about grief and what it means for a person, although different writers may refer to a different number of stages of grief. Kubler-Ross (1969) details the five stages of an individual’s grief with the death of a close loved one. I have attempted to correlate these different stages of individual grief with what I have witnessed and experienced as community grief. It is like a cloud hanging over the community. Depending on the closeness of the relationship between a community member and the individual who has died, the feelings of grief differ from person to person, of course. The broader community grief (boodja or earth) is more about respect and acknowledgement of the individual.

Constant turbulence (marr or wind) is a concept that I believe has been present in our community since the early days of colonization. Turbulence in this instance is the lack of stability in our community that affects us as individuals, families (immediate and extended), and communities. It is not only the turbulence that concepts such as community grief bring but also the political “footballization” of us as a people and cultural group in modern-day Australia. Political footballization is a term used to describe how issues affecting us are used by politicians of various persuasions to chop and change Aboriginal policy, legislation, and funding. The goalposts are forever changing. How do we as a community move things forward with a positive energy and perspective when there is no stability and no extended periods of calmness or serenity?

Violent cultural conflict (karl or fire): In recent years, there has been renewed debate as to the extent of conflict between the original inhabitants of Australia and those who came to stay post-1788. Reynolds (2000) highlights that previous generations of Australians kept the violent frontier history secret, or as Pilger (1986) states “The true history is never read, for the black man keeps it in his head.” Elder (1992) acquaints us with a number of different violent conflict events between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people, one of which is commonly known as the Battle of Pinjarra. The use or misuse of terminology, the word “battle” is entirely consistent with the “passive and secret history” approach to the conflict between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal groups. This passive view is reflected in the word “settlement” of Australia, which seems to describe a sort of passive, settled takeover of the Australian continent, when the opposite seems to have been true.

One of the significant aspects the Battle of Pinjarra was its having been led by the governor, an English government representative of the Swan River Colony. Governor Stirling received no reprimand for his actions from the government he represented in this violent event, and from that lack of action, it can only be assumed that the events in Pinjarra were condoned.

Such incidents (Connor, 2002; Elder, 1992; Reynolds, 1981; Schulunke, 2005) were seen as a strategic, government-sanctioned practice of subjugation to oppress and force the Aboriginal inhabitants to conform, to beat them into submission to be beholding to understand that white man was now the leader and all pervading force…, and to do as they were told. The violence and carnage achieved its objectives. Stirling’s military training and strategy in his assault on the Binjareb was to attack the most “ferocious group of natives” (as indeed they were regarded by other Nyungars), and if successful, the weaker groups would fall into line. It did indeed prove to be a successful strategy not only because he had violently punished the strong group of Binjareb so vehemently, but then as leader of the colony, he was not punished for his actions; thus, the rest of the colony could only assume that violence against the natives was a government-sanctioned strategy.