When a group of women joined forces to create change in their community, their mission was simple. To create better living conditions for future generations.
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One of these women, Aunty Wilma Mundy, died tragically earlier this week at the age of 76, leaving behind 23 grandchildren and a legacy that will never be forgotten.
This year, NAIDOC Week acknowledges the work of female leaders, activists and advocates for social change.
We have all the Closing The Gap stuff, but there’s no self determination.
- The late Aunty Wilma Mundy
In the 1970s, Ms Mundy joined other women, including Margaret Dixon, Leila Avery and Wreck Bay’s Jean Carter, in taking centre stage in the fight for equality, becoming a strong voice for their community.
The group, known as The Advancement Society and funded by ATSIC, met in a room beside the Commercial Hotel in Bega, and lobbied up and down the coastline for the betterment of education, health and housing. One of their projects, the Murrays Flat Housing Corporation, involved moving houses from the Snowy Mountains Scheme to Bega.
Margaret’s daughter Colleen became secretary of the group as a teenager, and said Ms Mundy was a “very talented, clever and artistic” woman, “always in the thick of things” while looking immaculate.
“Still to today she kept her culture strong, teaching her grandchildren everything she knew,” she said.
Ms Mundy and her late husband Claude, a Djiringanj and Ngarigo man, were the second family to move into Bega 50 years ago, after spending much of their lives having their movements controlled by government.
“We were all living out there at the tip because we weren’t allowed to live in town,” Ms Mundy said during an interview last year.
She said decades after their group started, housing is still a big issue, along with health, and employment.
After her family were forced off Wurundjeri land at Coranderrk, near modern day Healesville, to make room for European settlement, Ms Mundy was born on the Lake Tyers Mission, where residents were “not allowed to leave” and were segregated from the wider community.
Her daughter Ellen said after moving to the Bega Valley for seasonal work, Ms Mundy saw local residents treated as immigrants on their own land, and forced to live in “terrible conditions”.
“We were struggling, we were very poor, there were no jobs and with segregation; it was hard,” Ellen said.
Colleen’s younger sister and Bega elder Glenda Dixon said female leaders stepped in at a time when men could be jailed for speaking out.
“At the time it was very important we had a say, and if the men couldn’t the women stood up,” she said.
During her interview with the Bega District News last year, Ms Mundy said housing issues in the region are in turn creating social issues within the community.
She said many families are still being treated in the same ways she witnessed at the Lake Tyers Mission near Lakes Entrance by mission managers in the 1940s.
“We have all the Closing The Gap stuff, but there’s no self determination,” Ms Mundy said.
“We always get treated differently because of our race.”
