Professor Julie Andrews will lead a project to investigate the role Yorta Yorta people played in the seasonal fruit harvest.
Planning will soon start for a $1.4 million research project into the role of Indigenous fruit pickers in the Goulburn Valley.
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La Trobe University researchers have secured the grant through the Commonwealth-funded Australian Research Council Discovery Indigenous Scheme to investigate the role Yorta Yorta people played in the seasonal fruit harvest.
The project is jointly led by Professor Julie Andrews, a Yorta Yorta woman, who was born in Mooroopna.
Prof Andrews is director of La Trobe’s Gabra Biik, Wurruwila Wutja Indigenous Research Centre, and joint project leader, Professor Katherine Ellinghaus, is from the School of Archaeology and History.
Prof Andrews, an anthropologist, said references to Indigenous people working in horticulture are in scraps of history.
“We want to gather the information and put it in one place where people can see it and hear it and read it,” she said.
“We came from Shepparton and our families picked fruit and worked in SPC and Ardmona. We always wondered about what happened, and we wanted to document this.
“A lot of my aunties tell stories about picking fruit. We will work with family groups who worked on the orchards and we want to hear from the farmers too, because a lot of them had good relationships and worked in partnership with Aboriginal families.“
The team will be using a film crew to also document the research, which may take three years.
Fruit picking at Orrvale. Photo: State Library of Victoria.
Prof Andrews and Prof Ellinghaus will work in collaboration with Outback Academy Australia chair Leanne Miller.
The study will use family and clan-led research to explore how Yorta Yorta people engaged in fruit picking from the 1920s to the 1970s, and how their choices of labour and employer demonstrated acts of self-determination.
“We aim to advance understanding of the history of Australian capitalism by applying Aboriginal ways of thinking and doing,” Prof Andrews said.
“The project will provide significant social, cultural and commercial benefits by generating greater knowledge of Yorta Yorta fruit picking in the Goulburn Valley region and beyond.”
Ms Miller said the research was about economic truth-telling.
“Outback Academy Australia is proud to support a project that not only honours our Elders’ labour, but also reframes fruit picking as a powerful story of Aboriginal entrepreneurship and resilience,” she said.
“We want to highlight the significant contributions our people have had on the local economy over the decades, in particular a major impact in the agriculture industry for the region such as fruit picking.”
The project may produce a book or books which can document individual family groups.
Prof Andrews said Yorta Yorta man, Neville Atkinson, from Shepparton, would be assisting to help with his local knowledge.
She said the work would start in earnest next year, but planning was expected to start soon.
The research project will study the history of Indigenous fruit pickers in the Goulburn Valley.
Photo by
Megan Fisher
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