'I don't want my culture to be lost': Patricia Ellis is changing attitudes through education

She could talk about the history of the land, or the Dreamtime stories of her Brinja-Yuin people.

When Ms Ellis was growing up, her grandmother would ask her to fetch ingredients for the medicines she was brewing, and Ms Ellis would scamper off to collect plants which she had to spot quickly. Now she identifies them as easily as if they were labelled in the pantry. The land is her pantry, her medicine-cabinet and storeroom.

Ms Ellis teaches others through her business Minga Aboriginal Cultural Services, taking groups - most often holidayers - on walks and teaching indigenous culture.

She took the Narooma News on a short walk around the largely manicured Moruya Riverside Park, and even there Ms Ellis was identifying plants to eat, balms for wounds and resources for survival, greeting each plant by name, like a long-lost friend.

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She has been teaching bush food and medicine for more than 40 years, and is employed by local schools to run cultural awareness classes. When the weather isn't raining, she takes mobs of people out on walks in the Deua, Eurobodalla or Murramarang National Parks and teaches them.

"When people do a bush medicine walk, they say 'oh my god, there's just so much that I did not know' and they look at the bush very differently after that...they recognise that so many things are connected and if we do damage to one part, it ultimately will affect the whole," Ms Ellis said.

She teaches cultural skills - how to make possum skin cloaks, rope out of string bark or grass, baskets out of reeds, how to whistle snakes, make natural shelters on the beach or cook up delicious fish in salt-soaked paperbark - and she shares Dreamtime stories and cultural history.

"Dreamtime stories actually pass on information to help you survive, but people don't know that," she said.

She sees her role as to reeducate, to teach, to help people understand. She hopes it has a widespread impact.

"As a young Aboriginal woman, I used to hear people having negative attitudes about Aboriginal people all the time," she said. "I realised that it was just a gap in communication - people didn't really understand. The only way to change that is to educate people. So that's what I do, but in a way that's fun."

"When people learn it has a domino effect. I want to change the way that people think about things but I can't do it on my own. So I rely on the domino effect."

She has had "hundreds" of stories of positive feedback, where people leave with more inquiring minds, or a greater appreciation for the land and indigenous culture.

"A lot of people after the fires were saying how wonderful it was that that Aboriginal people knew how to do the culture burns, without doing any damage to the environment...But Aboriginal knowledge doesn't just stop a culture burns. Aboriginal knowledge is about absolutely everything. If people opened up their mind and listened to what Aboriginal people said and gained a better understanding of how we view the world, then we can't help but have a better place."

In the middle of the interview, a butcher bird with a bright green grasshopper in it's hooked beak lands on the table.

"Hello," Ms Ellis said. "These guys do a distinct whistle." As if on queue, the butcher birds lets out a unique shrill.

"It doesn't feel anything like work," Ms Ellis said of her cultural walk tours. "It feeds my soul."

"In indigenous culture, we don't inherit off our ancestors we borrow off our children's future. That's why I do it. For a better future.

"I just don't want [my culture] to be lost, and I don't trust that if I don't talk about it that won't be."