Ella Noah Bancroft is a force of nature - and incidentally, nature is where she sees the most healing for self, other, and country taking place. As a proud Bundjalung woman, she moves readily between two worlds. She also credits her shapeshifting abilities to being a Gemini.
We were fortunate enough to catch up with Ella at the 2024 Byron Writers Festival in Bangalow, where she graced the stages to showcase freshly written poetry, run a writing workshop to help participants connect to country, and talk all things mother-related and her new book Sun-and-Moon alongside fellow queer Indigenous author Cheryl Leavy.
In many ways, Ella is a reluctant entrepreneur, despite striking me as a prototypical female founder. Her life-affirming organisation The Returning runs extensive programs and workshops for predominantly Indigenous women to learn the full gamut of “women’s business” including health, wellness, earth-based skills, pregnancy, birth and menstruation.
The not-for-profit’s web is extensive - but a postpartum program where First Nations mothers can receive 4 to 6 weeks worth of home cooked meals, all organic meat and bush foods plus one-on-one doula work stands out as a shining example of her and her team’s creations.
Here’s Ella - a truly creative being.
Natasha Gillezeau: Hi Ella. Thank you so much for making the time to connect with us today. Can you please give me three words to describe the Byron Bay Writers Festival so far?
Ella Noah Bancroft: Three words is hard. Grey in audience, and also, environment [it rained during the festival].
I don’t know how to sum up in three words, because every time I come to the Byron Bay Writers Festival, and most of the mob will experience this too, we’re met with racism, so it’s really difficult.
It’s a much more difficult place to be as an Indigenous woman than to just be a regular author who is kind of walking through because we always have racists asking questions during the panels. So it’s feels like lots of work.
To do the work in addition to the multiple talks you’ve got on?
To do the emotional labour of having to support our community who are getting racist commentary who are planted in the audience. It happens every writer’s festival. I don’t know if it’s every Byron Writers Festival, or it’s just every Festival where they allow question time, but my involvement in the Writers Festival I’d never had a weekend without a person being racist, and they actually had to remove a punter who hurled racist abuse at Amy Maguire on Friday night and then yesterday in Jazz Money again, life of mob.
Sounds exhausting.
Yeah, it’s exhausting, and I just came off a big conversation about that, and it’s hard to to capture without giving a fuller context of the story I guess.
It makes sense, it’s hard to drop into that as opposed to offering a pithy three word summary. What were your intentions with the different sessions? You have a really varied contribution to this Festival from the Reverend Poetry Showcase, Writing Poetry, Kids Big Day Out, and this afternoon, Mothers. Did you have a different vision for each of the sessions?
No. I try not to give myself anxiety by trying to think about the future. Often with anything that I do, I just arrive and see what feels right in the moment to speak to. Even the poems that I did on Friday, I wrote them on Friday morning. I want to be sharing stuff that’s alive and relevant to not just the audience, but to the truth of where I’m at in my life. That’s why I don’t like pre-planning anything, I don’t really write speeches, I just kind of see and allow what comes through me. I feel very supported by my ancestors on country, so I often just say a prayer, and bring them with me, and say come on, just use me to send through any messages you need to send through me.
That’s cool. I loved something you said on Instagram about having a vision for society that is mother-centred, that values community care, that values love over hate, and sharing over hoarding. What does that mean in practice?
I think it’s good to preface that I was raised by a single Aboriginal mother, so I have both an embodied experience of what it’s like to be brought up in a family where I’ve witnessed a single mother be disenfranchised by an economic system. And then as I’ve grown up as a woman, I’ve witnessed friends around me and family, who have become mothers or single mothers, and how disenfranchised they’ve been in the face of the economic system. Also in my line of work, because I run a charity - The Returning - what we often see is that women are carrying the care economy, which basically means that they’re doing all the free labour to allow capitalism to actually “thrive” in the way that it does - although I wouldn’t say capitalism is “thriving” - although if you think that GDP is a measure of success, then I guess that is.
But what it looks like is basically returning to family and woman-centred societies is actually catering to the fact that it’s quite big work to be a caregiver and in this society, the caregivers, whether that be someone who is tending a land, or a nurse looking after a sick person, or people working in old peoples’ homes, or people looking after our children in preschools, are some of the most underpaid positions. And I think it’s because the colony sees success as productivity, driven by goals, and business, but we don’t value things like our elderly or care for our next generation.
So it looks like changing our value systems and beliefs so we actually start pouring money into the spaces and places where we see those people thriving. If we put more money into amazing childcare workers, we’d have a better community of people wanting to show up and care for our kids with much more enthusiasm. The same with our nurses, the same with the people looking after our elderly. We might even change our social structures, we might end up doing that in our family dynamics more so than be driven by a career. We applaud our children when they come home from school if they get an A-plus, but we don’t applaud them if they’re interested in wanting to learn the species of plants, or using their imagination or playing with other kids. It’s up to us as older people to really applaud the values in our children that we want to see in the future.
How have you experienced that “reward and recognition” culture as an artist and writer that in a lot of ways seeds the careerism or good students identity? Do you feel like you need to be a “good student” and get that "A" even now as an adult?
I was a horrible student, first and foremost, I don’t know how I got through high school. I dropped out of Sydney Uni, so that was basically an experiment for me to go to Uni at 17, which I don’t think any 17 year old should do. I’ve never been someone who has been academically driven - I think because I grew up in an Indigenous community, from a very young age, I was disenfranchised with my literacy and numeracy.
So when I returned back to Western education on Gadigal country, I had dyslexia, and was in “special ed” classes. It was never about getting A's for me. It was actually about leaving the Western schooling system and realising that I wanted to live a life where I could gather my embodied knowledge and through that, I would be able to speak my most honest truth, and that is what’s led me to be a storyteller. It’s not been that I studied creative writing, or was a “Dux”, or even “good” at English.
It’s that I chose to go on a completely different path - and this is from my old people - that “embodied knowledge” is sometimes more truthful than “expertise”. It’s the kind of knowledge that remains in the cells of your skin. It’s the knowledge that nobody can fight you on. Science can be fought - because you’re just testing theories and ideas.
But the story of my life for 36 years - you can’t fight me on that. We need to be doing more to encourage people to live more authentically so that they can bring forth the stories that are true to them, that nobody can challenge you on because we’re not all learning the same ideas at uni or we’re not just doing scientific tests together. We’re actually living out our purpose and remembering who we are in that process.
Something I’ve noticed about Missing Perspectives is that the women that are drawn in either as readers, or other people, are very multifaceted. It sounds like you have these liminal, multifaceted identities, you’re in this tent with me now, and then you’ll be somewhere totally different in 48 hours. How do you integrate all those parts and identities in a way that feels whole?
I’m really into accepting death in parts of myself too - and not trying to hold on to the way I once was or the way I once did something but allowing each day to shape me into a different formation into who I am. But I actually enjoy these ego deaths moment to moment, month to month, year to year, where I can reflect on is that actually serving me, if not, I can actually let that go.
It allows me to not actually hold on or fight to the death with belief systems, or believe that I’m better than anyone else, because I’m constantly changing, I’m constantly informed by my environment, my experiences, definitely conversations I have with people about their different perspectives and stories, and so I feel like, in order to move into many different spaces we have to allow ourselves to be malleable to that.
While I have a soul that I can deeply tap into, in my ego state, my beliefs and my values, they can shift in many ways. What I knew ten years ago is very different - I’m initiated in very different ways now than what I was when I was speaking about Indigenous or women’s issues, which is often what I speak about because it’s my embodied experience that I like to talk to. It also helps that I’m a Gemini - many masks in many spaces.
And I come from a beautiful, creative, inspiring creative mother who when I was growing up, this idea of work, it’s not work, I don’t clock off at 5 o’clock, my work is my purpose and my purpose is a part of me, and like every moment to moment, I’m working and doing the work I need to do for myself, my community, for country, for customs, for my obligations here.
Do you feel like your work and your personal life is quite interwoven? How do you demarcate, if you demarcate? There’s the industrial model as you said, the 9 to 5, but there are so many different paradigms that could be applied to how work manifests.
Writing is so fun, and it’s a creative pursuit for me. Activism I like to do because I’m rebellious, and I’ve always been taught to be a disrupter. But my actual work is running The Returning here in the Northern Rivers and a lot of that is based around working with my Indigenous community. It’s kind of hard when your bloodline is from your nation, because your Indigenous community is your family, and your friends, and people you’ve grown up with, and that you have these intergenerational relationships with. It’s hard to clock off.
At the end of the day, if an auntie calls me, or a young girl who I’ve been working with calls me, I’m going to answer that phone no matter what time it is, because I want to speak to them and see what’s going on.
Can you tell me a bit about The Returning?
The Returning started in 2018 with a deep desire for me to see Indigenous women return back to country to be able to access workshops to be able to access workshops around health, wellness, earth-based skills, pregnancy, birth, menstruation, all women’s business stuff in an accessible way and also to provide a place for single Mums to be able to do that. It’s now called The Gathering. From that seeded a big program list that now runs across the region - we now have seven programs.
We have a youth program, we have women’s gatherings, we have cultural camps, we have a post-partum program where First Nations mothers can get 4-6 weeks worth of home cooked meals, all organic meat and bush foods plus one-on-one doula work, we have an arts and culture residency, we have men’s programs… it’s extensive. We’re an all women team. I’m very strong on the fact that if you’re a mother and Indigenous you’re going to get hired before anyone else. Because in the capitalist colonialist workplace, you’re probably going to be the last to get hired. Our programs are based on both a cultural understanding of what’s needed, and also nature therapy. One of the biggest parts of healing is healing in community and on country. Actually, it’s not even so much what we do, it’s just bringing people together.
A lot of our programs are for Indigenous people, although the gathering and culture camp, we do invited non-Indigenous people to sit with us. We have very limited ticket spaces for those programs to give non-Indigenous people the experience of what it’s like to feel like not the majority. I think that it’s important to have those embodied experiences, because it generates empathy. It’s these experiences where we get to remember and return to a way of being, and a way of seeing that life can be more simple but we’ve actually made it so complex. Nuclear family dynamics, individuating, the need to be separated from everybody or community or family.
That just breeds somebody who is going to end up struggling their whole life to fulfil their needs. We have never, ever as human beings lived by ourselves. You wouldn’t live by yourself in nature, yet we’ve constructed this whole society in a way where it’s comfortable to live by yourself, and there are greater rates of depression and loneliness is only on the rise. It makes you wonder.
I agree it’s not human to push people to those limits and say that that’s what success is. How do you marry being an entrepreneur with what I sense as a resistance to certain forms of capitalism?
Yeah, it’s interesting. It’s been my biggest challenge, actually starting a not for profit, like a charity that is registered as a corporation. I chose a charity for the very reason that we can’t make a profit, which means that yes, we can ask people for money, and I’m quite good at asking non-Indigenous people for money to support Indigenous people because I feel like I’m being Robinhood. I also don’t mind going to the Australian government for grants either because our programs are not about assimilation policies, they’re about imbuing and embedding a great sense of pride in our culture, and hoping our young people see the cultural programs we run and they then went to step into cultural work, which I think is the greatest resistance to the Australian illegal occupation currently.
What do you mean by that?
Lots of Indigenous charities or Indigenous excellence is seen through the eyes of what Western success is. If you become an Indigenous writer for example, at a Festival, you’re put on pedestal and it’s like, oh wow, you’re such a "good Aborigine."
But still through a particular paradigm?
Yeah - in comparison to someone who is a cultural worker who stayed in their community their whole life. They could be living remote, or rurally, but they are doing what is the most important work I believe, keeping our lore and knowledge systems alive. Not to say that the Indigenous people out there storytelling aren’t, but there is a status difference. We always in this more dominant Australian culture see people who are rural or remote or live closer to nature as lesser than.
That’s a product of how the colony could set up this capitalist system where it ends up using country as its slave. With our youth program, we do a gardening program to show the girls to be a gardener is to be a woman of great magicianery. It’s to understand our plants, which are our family, they’re our kinship, they’ve grown with us since time immemorial, but they’ve also been the things that feed us, they’ve been our medicine, they’ve been our healing in many ways. To be able to have that knowledge is far more vast for me to say to these girls this is what you should hold your head high in, rather than them knowing algebra.
Are there any parts of the programs you find the most joyous?
I love them all - I’m so lucky to have created this corporation that allows me to spend so much time in nature. All of our programs fundamentally use country. Our biggest disadvantage is accessing country on Bundjalung. We don’t have land, so we often find in 2022, over $110,000 of our raised donation money and grant money has gone to accessing land from white land holders.
And does that look like paying rent, or hiring?
Just hiring land from landholders who have appropriate accommodation. We need facilities. We can’t run these programs or heal country in the way she needs to, unless we’re on country.
I don’t necessarily live inside my office, which is wonderful, but then I get a lot of reprieve by being with the girls in the garden for nine weeks, spending five days out on culture camp where our youngest is 6 and our oldest is 70, these are things I could have only wished for when I was younger. I can’t sit in an office doing a normal 9 to 5, it feels too unnatural.
Agreed that sitting in an office all the time is unnatural! Thank you for your time Ella - and good luck for your final talk.
Ella Noah Bancroft on... her 3 favourite places in nature
1. Water
“Water always draws me. Where my tribal lands are Bunjalung, that wash pool creek is one of the most magic river systems I’ve ever had the pleasure of sitting with and being in relationship with, not only for the fact that every time I’m in that water I’m in the same water systems as my ancestors, picking up rocks and building rock walls with my family, we think how many of ancestors may have touched the stones that we pick up or the axe heads that we find. It gives me shivers on my body to think about that place, and it’s one of my favourite places to be.”
2. The ocean
“I have a deep affiliation with both fresh and salt water. I get both saddened sitting by river ways in Bundjalung, and also inspired. I get saddened by how poisoned and dirty they are, but inspired when I chase my way back to the kind springs to see how water is this magical entity that gives us life. I can’t actually put into words through English what I could in language about how I feel about water."
3. Squiggly gum trees
“Sitting at a base of a squiggly gum tree, I’ve had some of my most profound internal conversations with country, while being at the base of some of those big ancient trees.”