Keeping culture

Rick Potter

Transcript

Camera Interview with Rick Potter, Acting Executive Officer, Cooramah Aboriginal Cultural Centre.

Recorded at Cooramah Aboriginal Cultural Centre, Glen Innes, March 27, 2001
Interviewed by Cathie Payne & Peter White Australian Museum
Sound recorded by Joshua Raymond, Australian Museum

Q. Rick, could you introduce yourself?
My name is Rick Potter. I'm currently chairperson of Coomarah Housing which operates a cultural centre in Glen Innes. Also I'm currently the chairperson of the local Glen Innes Aboriginal Lands Council and acting executive officer of the Coomarah Housing and Enterprise .

Q. Why did you choose the site for the Cooramah Aboriginal Cultural Centre?
It's been a number of years that the elders and the community wanted to build a cultural centre. Originally it was planned to be out on our property out at W ill ows, but it wasn't feasible for us to do it out there. It was too far out of town. So we were looking around for a block where we could build a cultural centre and the corner of McKenzie Street and the highway was an ideal spot. The New England Highway is a very busy highway and we thought, yeah, that would be the spot to do it in because a lot of passers by drop into the cultural centre and that's why we built it here.

Q. Could you give us a bit of a run down on the actual Coomarah Corporation?
Coomarah was originally set up as a housing corporation. Then a couple of years later they had the prospect of adopting the CDP within Glen Innes. So they took that under their wing and it expanded dramatically in the last five years and a couple of different business enterprises, such as Ngurrabul Tourism and Koori Cuisine ... [have joined] the cultural centre at the present moment.

Q. How did you go about setting up your cultural centre?
The centre was starting to be built in early May 1998 and the completion was 12 months later in May 1999. The centre was built by mostly unsk ill ed labour from the CDP workforce that Coomarah Housing operates, and this is what you see today: our cultural centre built from unsk ill ed labour.

Q. What obstacles did you have to overcome in establishing the cultural centre?
There was quite a few obstacles with, with the DA which is a development application. It took quite a long time for it to go through. If I remember correctly it was about probably nine months before the council approved for the complex to be built on this site. The specifications were a bit overboard I think but we done what the council wanted with the specifications ... [interruption]. Another one of the obstacles were the wet weather. I think when we first started, [when] we put the first shovel in the ground, we had about three months wet weather to begin with and the foundations, just to do the foundations of the building took about five months... But we did get it done and this is what you see today.

Q. What is CDP and how important is it to your community?
The CDP is a community development kind of program which ATSIC funds to run in communities and a part of the funding guidelines is for the community or the organisation which has a CDP is to put them through training programs and try and get them permanent work at the end of the day. When we started to build the centre, we submitted for funding for wages for the CDP to help us build the cultural centre. And because the CDP had been running for a few years, a lot of our labour force had done courses in carpentry, brickworks, cementing, all the sort of sk ill s that are required to build a building like this, like the cultural centre. And I think that we got out of it quite good because we did use the CDP later of Coomarah which own the culture centre and we currently have 171 participants on our books. Five years ago we started with 50 participants so we are growing dramatically. And the CDP worked within the whole community in a number of activities like rural fencing, ranch-style fencing, building, sub-contracting to the wider community, working on our properties and I think the CDP program is a very good program for the federal government to have.

The CDP program that Coomarah runs currently works with all our Aboriginal community here in Glen Innes. We have 12,000 acres about 45 kilometres out of town and they work on the rural properties and I think the federal government ... had a good idea when they set up CDP programs.

Q. Was their something that happened when you were establishing the Centre that was really easy?
Yeah, there was a real easy part to do. The outer walls of the cultural centre [are] made out of aerated concrete and it was very easy to put and apply and finish off painting. It was a very easy job to do that.

Q. What do you consider as the major achievements that have resulted from establishing the Centre.
I think the biggest achievement is that the Glen Innes community have got their own cultural centre and grounds. And it has brought a lot of the Aboriginal community together - having functions and things like that up here at the centre. It's been a really big achievement just to bring the local Aboriginal people back together and they could sit down and, at their own cultural centre, have lunch, talk to each other and ... that is a big achievement on its own.

Q. What type of funding did you seek?
... back in 1996, Coomarah put a funding submission into ATSIC to run a catering service of Indigenous foods. In 1996, we did get granted $74,000 to set up this catering service, but it just didn't seem to be viable to set that catering service up on its own. So about I'd say 1997-mid 1997, a few people sat down and started to devise a submission, an application to ATSIC to build the cultural centre and it was quite a lengthy period to put this application together, but when we did submit it, ATSIC did grant the money to us.

Q. How much money was that?
It started off in '96 [at] $74,000 and when we finished our application it was 290,000 and ATSIC granted $290,000 to ... buy the land and build the complex.

Q. What are your current plans for funding?
Our current funding for 2000-2001 is to do all the gardens and that within the centre. Our plan is to do bush tucker gardens, native trees and shrub gardens, also to have a nursery where we can propagate seeds and sell to the public. ... native trees and shrubs, bush tucker [and] medicine plants ... we would plant in our nursery - one out the back and also one out on our properties. Also in that plan is to have a native fish pond built so people can see what the native fish look like in the wild.

Q. Are there any other funding avenues that you are looking into?
Yeah, there [are] a lot of other funding avenues that we can look into. There is Auroa* [sp*] which is an indigenous land corporation that you can apply ... to ... for commercial premises such as the cultural centre. There is also a lot of other funding avenues, like Easy Grant [sp*] which is on the internet. ... there [are] places like the Commonwealth Bank and ... many other different places that you can apply [to] for money. There is Aboriginal Cultural and Heritage that you can apply [to] for that funding. ATSIC is not the only place.

Other sources of funding is the Aboriginal Cultural and Heritage Trust that you can get funding for ... hav[ing] native trees and that planted on your land. That's the aim - to bring the Aboriginal culture back even though it is not a real big area but we like to have native trees and native bush and things like that and there [are] a lot of funding places that you can get this sort of funding.

The Aboriginal Cultural and Heritage Trust they have grants that you can apply for to plant native trees out on your lands and things like that, and that's our whole aim - to get all the native trees and foods and bush tuckers and plants, medicine plants and ... to show the Aboriginal culture again.

As you know, you have botanical gardens in all the major cities of Australia . Well, why not have a native botanical garden where ... people can walk through? I think within this community we want to dedicate our gardens ... to people that have passed on and done a lot of work for the organisation - have a memorial so that people can walk through and say, 'well, you know, who was this?' He was a foundation member of Coomarah, who ... had the idea of building a cultural centre. Well now the cultural centre is here, why not put something back to the people that had the original idea?

End of interview

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