From the Aboriginal activists group Queensland 1970s, attributed to Gangulu woman Lila Watson:

‘If you’ve come to help me, you’re wasting your time. If you’ve come here to help me because your liberation is bound up with mine – then let us work together.’

In 2010 Melbourne-based Aboriginal activist Gary Foley advised settlers that if they really wanted to help Aboriginal people in their fight for social change, then they should start by educating themselves by looking for prejudice in their own homes. * 

George Criddle took this advice to heart. In 2023 they published a text-based work printed as a limited-edition book called Summaries of a Settler Artist’s Journal (Letters to Elizabeth Criddle et al).  In this text, part of a PhD thesis that included an exhibition of artwork, George draws from personal experience and academic research to wonder about their family’s involvement in frontier violence in the Midwest in the1850s.

I met George in 2020 when they turned up at the Greenough Museum on one of many journeys to Yamaji country looking into the lives of their ancestors, particularly Elizabeth Criddle.

At the Greenough Museum this involved staying in the tiny ‘maid’s’ room at the Museum where Elizabeth lived as a young woman and visiting the 1854 Massacre site at Pelican Springs on the Greenough River where Elizabeth’s husband was a member of the posse of settlers involved in the killing.

George and I bonded over our shared desire to – as George writes – ‘attempt to bridge the historical divide between the early days of invasion and (the artist’s) developing decolonial worldview’. Challenging family stories about early settler violence against Aboriginal people is difficult work. Throughout the thesis it is clear George is fearful that their family would turn away from them as she invited them to look at uncomfortable truths buried within generations of silence. 

George invited their parents, aunts and other rellies into the story of Yamaji lives through art works, writing, and an important day when they experienced the Naaguja Weeara Cultural Tour conducted by storyteller Derek Councillor. On 6 June 2024, her family was present at the ceremony of the 170^th anniversary of the massacre held at Pelican Springs.

George continues to nurture relationships within their family group and with the Indigenous people encountered over a three-year research period. They allowed information and understanding to percolate, giving space for ‘collective meaning making’ to develop. As George writes in the Preface: one thing I’ve learnt from turning towards my family and my history is that real change doesn’t happen by the efforts of individuals alone: it takes place within collectives such as families, slowly, over long periods of time.

On one of their journeys to the Midwest, George met Theona Councillor and learnt that she was writing an opera about the massacre at Pelican Springs in the Naaguja language. They joined forces and set out together to support the further development, staging and funding of Theona’s creative vision.

Dr George Criddle’s book is for sale at the Greenough Museum, or a copy can be viewed at the Geraldton-Greenough Library.

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iw8YVBbQgNg&t=107s