At Four Years Old, She Walked This Landscape. Decades Later, She Returned to Remember It

When Aunty Carol Pettersen was four years old, she travelled through the bushland of southern Western Australia with her family, helping to drive sheep along rivers and across country.

Decades later, she returned to one of the places from her childhood and stood on the same rocks where her family once crossed the Gairdner River.

For Carol, the landscape is more than a piece of land. It is a place filled with memories of childhood, family and a way of life that has largely disappeared.

Carol is a Menang Elder from the south of Western Australia. She remembers a time when the area around what is now Jerramungup looked very different from the farming landscape people see today.

There were few fences, no motor cars and long stretches of bushland. Carol said her family could walk for many kilometres while moving sheep through the country.

“I had a wonderful childhood,” she recalled.

Her family learned to read the landscape itself. Hills, rivers and distinctive trees helped them understand where they were and where they needed to go.

The area now known as Jerramungup was once called Yarramoup. Carol explained that the name was connected to the tall yate trees that grew on the hills in the area.

For people who knew the country, those natural landmarks were enough to navigate through the landscape.

Carol also remembers the food her family gathered from the bush. They knew where to find bush foods, salt and honey, and how to prepare food using the resources around them.

Those memories have remained with her throughout her life.

But the landscape itself has changed dramatically.

After the Second World War, large areas were cleared for farming and soldier settlement. The open bushland Carol remembers from childhood gradually became a productive agricultural region.

Today, she is among the people who can still describe what the area looked and felt like before much of that transformation occurred.

Returning to the old river crossing has therefore become a personal journey through memory.

Standing on the rocks where her family once crossed the river, Carol can still picture the landscape she knew as a child.

Her memories also carry a broader message about the relationship between people and Country. She describes the natural world as interconnected rather than separate pieces of land.

For Carol, remembering the past is not simply about looking backwards. She hopes sharing these memories can encourage younger generations to understand the country around them and the history contained within it.

More than seven decades after she first walked those paths as a young child, Carol can still recognise the places that guided her family.

The roads, farms and cleared fields may look different today, but the river crossing remains — and with it, a living memory of a landscape that existed before the transformation of the region.

Sources: ABC News Australia.