The Wardan Cultural Centre began in 1991. Bill Webb, Wardandi Nyungar and custodian of Wardandi knowledge tells us the story of Wardan:

"When we were gifted the land, which I saw as a kind of gesture towards reconciliation from a local American fellow living here in Wardandi country, we first offered it to other Nyungar Corporations but they said they were too busy.

So we had to put together our own Corporation, do the land transaction, get the land transferred because the land was given to us and this asset was worth about $1.2 million. We could have used this as an equity basis and go to the bank and have the business up and running straight away but when we went to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission because we believed that whatever equity we had, then ATSIC was supposed to equal it, we thought that was their policy but that turned out to be untrue and that started the long struggle.

In the early stages, ten years before 1991, the aspirations of my father and mother and few members of the family was “how do we house this stuff, how do we keep the content of our culture alive, you know the history and the knowledge that my father and mother knew. I came out of the bush when I was 13 years old and lived in a humpy and I used to listen to these stories from me grandfather’s and that as well. But with the ever moving, changing world of mechanisms, the kids don’t really sit around and listen to the stories. They are more inclined about these Nintendo’s or doing other stuff, so it takes the kids away from the real things, of them absorbing the stories about Nyungar culture.

My mother (Mrs Gillespie) and father said “we need some place, the Nyungar culture needs some place for the Wardandi Nyungar culture to survive and I think that through our Dreaming and that we knew something was going to happen sooner or later and this gift, this gift of land set us on the path to make sure that our history and knowledge is preserved. Hopefully through a Centre like this it will be preserved forever, or until white man comes along and changes all this things and chucks us off the land again. But over the 13 years I know that it was set on a three (3) year plan until we had our doors open and then I realised we needed to put our plans into a three to five year plan. Then somebody came along and said “a new industry, business like this it will take you seven (7) years to start functioning”.

We had some of the heartaches and problems, like “dealing with some of the ATSIC’s and the Department for Aboriginal Affairs throughout Australia. We know, and I’ll be fairly blunt because these things are suppressed. The budgets that go out towards Aboriginal people for products (businesses) like ours, probably only about 5% of the whole federal budget get out to these sorts of places. So you see what I mean about a struggle, it’s a real struggle until we get to this certain stage.”

CONTACT:
Mr Jim Matan, Centre Manager
Wardan Aboriginal Cultural Centre
Injidup Springs Road
PO Box 30
YALLINGUP WA 6282
Tel/Fax: +618 9756 6566
Email: wardan@westnet.com.au
Web: http://www.margaret-river-online.com.au/wardan/