Our curator's guide to Killa

As you settle in for a delicious meal at The Rechabite and immerse yourself in cultural narratives and life experiences from the west Kimberley coast, we wanted to give you some more background to Killa: Pindan to Plate.

Read notes from curators Emilia Galatis and Chad Creighton for a greater insight into killa and the place of food in Kimberley life.

A note from Chad Creighton

Food. It’s the universal thread that brings people together. Growing up in Broome in the west Kimberley, we have a unique relationship with food. Located on the edge of the Great Sandy Desert on the Indian Ocean, Broome has attracted people from all over the world. It was this area that was visited by William Dampier in 1688, the first Englishman to visit Australia’s coast, hence the name Dampier Peninsula. In the 1800’s settlers arrived establishing cattle stations. Pearling then followed bringing with it an Asian workforce. Aboriginal people were displaced, forced into slavery, indentured labour and placed in Missions. All of this history, whilst horrific in many ways, has created a region with a diverse cultural identity. 

Aboriginal people from this area have an everlasting relationship with Country that continues to nourish them with bountiful food from the land and sea. This mixing of cultures and nations combined cuisines and ways of cooking. Goannas out on Roebuck Plains Station cooked in a ground oven, the smell of tea trees in the air and fresh rain landing on hot dry river clay. Mud crab cooked in a Singaporean-inspired sweet chili sauce on a bed of cooked rice smothered in belachan, a favourite of Broome Aboriginal people who have their own family recipes. Lunjard (turtles stomach plate) cooked fresh on the coals with salt, pepper and onions. A hunter’s favourite meal whilst the rest of the turtle is distributed amongst several families. Mango, boab nut and tamarind mixed with sugar, the wince made on a child’s face as the tartness of the tamarind settles on their taste buds eventually alleviated by the sweetness of sugar.

My grandfather, Paddy George, and his brother Bernard were taken when they were teenagers to work on the stations and in the Mission at Lombadina and Beagle Bay. They worked hard their whole lives and died poor men. My mum remembers life up the hill (Kennedy Hill in Broome) in the reserve. It was a hard and simple life. The sound of old Bardi men singing around a fire. Songs in Bardi and often in German, taught to them by the Missionaries at Beagle Bay. She remembers running down into China Town to old man Tang Wei’s shop with a pannikin to collect a serve of long soup. Waiting for the tide to go out so they could raid the fish traps set by Chinese and Malay men. I never knew my grandfather but was taught how to hunt and fish by many uncles and grandfathers. Trips to Hedland to hunt emu and kangaroo, fishing trips up on the Dampier Peninsula collecting oysters’ milky fat, stingrays their livers swollen pink the desire of everyone, diamond head mullet gizzards and yellow oil dripping from them as they’re taken from the coals, dugong – that distinct taste we crave above all others.

Twenty years ago – Wow it is hard to believe it was that long ago! – I presented an exhibition titled Oondoord Market, as part of my Fine Arts degree at UWA. Oondoord Market was a video installation that commented on the world I lived within. My life is similar to many other Kimberley mob. We often spend some time in the city for study and work. We live and walk in two worlds – well that’s how it’s described when we are growing up. In school we were taught to talk proper English at school and to leave kriol or our language at home. We still live by the seasons, we hunt and fish according to what is in season, what is fat. That is common for us mob in the Kimberley. From a young age we grow up hunting what we eat. Food from Country. Whether it’s the land or sea, we follow the seasons. Growing up in Broome and the west Kimberley, I ate pigeons, cockatoos, turkey, stingrays, goanna, fish, turtle, dugong, fruit bats, snake, kangaroo, emu, ducks, friar birds and the list goes on. I was taught to kill and prepare an animal along with a fire and ground oven to cook the animal.

So, what is Oondoord? For Bardi people this is turtle mating season, a prized time on the calendar when turtles are plentiful, fat and laden with eggs. To others however this seemed horrifying when I recounted my stories to friends and colleagues in Perth. So, I made an artwork about it. My intention was not to shock and horrify, but to educate and generate a different level of understanding within the audience. Yes, I was fueled somewhat by frustration. I was frustrated that people could not understand our way of life, that they would throw stones at it when they had never experienced it. So, I filmed a turtle hunt off the shores of Ardyaloon community and was chased through a shopping centre in Perth by security who didn’t want me filming the sterile packaged plastic wrapped meat and presented these films in a gallery.

Now 20 years later we are telling another story, Killa. Killa refers to bush cattle or fresh meat. In the Kimberley when someone says killa, we all know what that means. Why killa? Because it tastes better than shop meat, it’s cheaper, we buy it station direct and know where it comes from. We can feed several families and we can access cuts of meat that are not available at the shop. Again, the intention is not to generate feelings of shock and horror. But to educate and develop different levels of understanding. When I explained the project concept to my friends and family who came on this journey to create this work, Scotty Cox’s response was “Oh this is about what we do every other day, its just about life”.

Killa aims to give people a peek behind the veil. To experience the life and country of west Kimberley mob. For Bardi people like me, we have been fortunate to have an unsealed, corrugated dirt road deterring vehicles from making the trip to our country, protecting our country, culture and way of life. Our old people have kept language, culture and law strong. This remoteness also meant that meat was expensive to buy from the shop. Our way of life continued and we have always turned to country to sustain us. Most of the cattle stations are gone but remnants from that time remain with old rusting windmills and cattle yards still present. Employment is not easy to come by in remote communities but in the west Kimberley, tourism is providing jobs that allow us to stay home on country. Times have changed and now you can drive to our country on a sealed road. You can experience the Dampier Peninsula with Bardi people like my Uncle Bolo Angus. He runs a tour called Southern Cross Cultural Walk at a place known as Lullumb. He is very generous, sharing stories, fishing, food, song and dance with tourists.

I recommend everyone take the opportunity to visit the Dampier Peninsula and do a tour with a Bardi person. See the world through our eyes for a day, hunt, fish and eat delicious food. Hear the stories we have to share with you about this land. For those who can’t make it there, make a booking to see Killa. Share in a unique long table dinner whilst being immersed in a video installation that will transport you to the west Kimberley and give you some insight to our way of life.

A note from Emilia Galatis

Writing on a hot summer morning in Perth, I smell childhood, I can feel it in my nose; the evocation of memory in our prehistoric, olfaction memory. Food and a desire to communicate through food is in my blood; it has been part of my families identity for over three generations. Many of my ancestors were sea people from small Greek islands called Kastelorizo and Ithaca. Here they worked as merchant traders and fisherman across the seas of the Middle East and Europe.

After a brief stint pearl diving in Broome, my great grandfather started selling fish from a basket in Perth city, before taking over a fish and chip shop in 1926 on Barrack Street. My grandfather grew up cleaning potatoes in the morning and serving food at night. The first Australian fish and chip shop was opened by a Greek migrant in 1879 in Sydney. A now celebrated ‘Aussie’ meal is one of countless adopted food narratives of this country. My family, like many migrants in the food industry, were motivated by different principles of business and relied on the fact that ‘skippies’ just didn’t know the difference between snapper and salmon.

In 1972 my grandfather founded Red Rooster, opening his first store in Kelmscott, inventing the Hawaiian pack that quickly became a West Aussie summer classic: a quarter roast chicken, chips, a pineapple and banana fritter. Another Greek migrant classic that my Papu ate until his dying day, always exclaiming “bring back the banana”.

Reflecting on my own complicit relationship to the dominant food narrative, knowing that my migrant family was able to make something in this country out of potatoes and fish in a bucket, I’m aware that these opportunities were not offered or enabled to Indigenous people.

I always saw Killa as a celebration – a celebration of food narratives, food histories and food cultures that questioned what distinctly Australian food is. Killa is also a lense to view Australian food stories. The migrant food narrative has been canonised, whilst 60,000 years of indigenous food has been silenced. In our first meeting with artist collaborator Lloyd Pigram we discussed “the authorship of taste”; what the West deems palatable or in fashion is aligned with who writes history. But it’s also aligned with consumption, power and access, who has the power to industrialise, market and sell food manipulates the dialogue.

With infinite content in Indigenous food and a whole country to explore, we are just starting to scratch the surface. Dale Tilbrook, a Wardandi Bibbulmun woman, explained in a recent native foods tasting that big Australian business decided that 12 bush foods would be commercialised for mainstream consumption, including wattleseed. She explained that they chose just one wattleseed variety, out of 500, all with very different flavour profiles. So, even when we gain access to what might be called “bush food”, it’s still authored by globalised food giants. This is a growing industry and like many other Indigenous knowledge industries has less than 1% indigenous involvement (UN Food Systems Summit, 2021). Due to the economy of scale and the capital needed to compete with large companies, this is the grim reality of the sector currently.

After many years living in the Western Desert, Pilbara and West Kimberley, I have been lucky enough to eat and share freshly caught and prepared meat of many kinds with Traditional Owners on Country. I felt compelled to facilitate the sharing of these stories with a wider audience, bringing something beautiful yet challenging into world view.

Food for me is a way of life. I wake up in the morning and I think about what I am going to cook for dinner. The language of food – the way food connects us, the history on the plate, the soil it grows in, the style its cooked in. As Chad explained to me, even the kind of woods used in Indigenous cuisine differ from place to place. Flavour is specific to each place, despite the animal often being the same. The cows we ate in the Kimberley grazed on sandfire and saltbush, their taste was unique to that station between desert and sea.

Today we often see in upscale restaurants the inclusion of native ingredients as a point of difference, mostly used by non-Indigenous chefs. The 200-year omission of native foods before this is a colonial hangover. In 1697 English seafarer William Dampier wrote, “The earth affords [Aboriginals] no food at all. There is neither herb, root, pulse nor any sort of grain for them to eat that we saw”. Indigenous food sources have been ignored based off the settler world view. As our only and original food story, we should be invested in changing the language of Australian food culture and offering more support to Indigenous producers and businesses to access all levels of the sector.

I struggled with the notion that people might become vegetarian after watching Killa. Some of my friends mentioned that they might be inclined to stop eating meat seeing the insides of a cow. I see beauty in the lost art of wild butchery and I wince at the cold, silver, metal insides of a commercial abattoir. From my perspective, food consumption in the West is grotesque; we sanitise dairy, pump hormones and antibiotics into cows and box them into confined living conditions. Women in the UK are now becoming resistant to antibiotics due to globalised meat processes. Greed fuels our food industry, not a desire to make people well from the inside out.

Our mass consumption meat industries are also inherently wasteful. Speaking with our suppliers Dirty Clean Food I learnt that the average live weight of a cow is a bit over 500kg. From an animal this size, we can expect that only 40 - 45 kgs of steaks cut will then be found in a grocery stores. Which means that only 10% of the animal is consumed. But in killa, all parts of the animal are used and shared.

Being in reverence with all parts of a animal you eat is a beautiful and essential act, paying homage to its existence, the life it has given. Knowing what the animal eats, where it grazed, the micro biome of the soil that grew the grass – this is the way we should be living. From the soil up, I want to know what feeds my body. If we prioritised these principles, embedded in the act of killa, we would be moving towards a much better world.

Food goes in and out of fashion – rabbit, ox tail, lamb shanks, tongue, sheep brains, nose to tail dining. What is deemed palatable is marketed by the dominant culture. As Australian cuisine continues to evolve and find itself, I look towards our oldest living culture, their practices and principles to lead the way.