‘This is my country. But you are welcome to stay’

April 30, 2026 — 11:40am

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Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that this story contains an image of people who have died.

My grandfather as a boy in the late 1800s lived on a farm that sat on the bank of a river, the family homestead occupying a rise above a spread of the stream so wide it deserved to be called a lake.

It brimmed with fish. Yabbies dug into its banks and waterbirds of all manner were drawn to it.

When the season was right, a woman named Kitty Wallaby – always known in our family as Mrs Wallaby, though she undoubtedly had an Indigenous name – set up camp by the lagoon, building a fire and a lean-to from bark.

She was given to puffing on a clay pipe as she contemplated whatever it was that built an air of serenity around her.

My great-grandmother, a woman of country generosity, ordered my grandfather and his brothers to go down and offer Mrs Wallaby a meal from the homestead.

My grandfather, late into his life, told the story many times.

‘This is my country, you know.’Quote attributed to Kitty Wallaby

Mrs Wallaby, he said, announced she needed none of their food. She caught her own fish, thank you, and reached under the banks with her toes to fetch out freshwater crayfish.

“This is my country, you know,” my grandfather recalled her announcing.

The boy was offended. No it’s not, he argued. His father had bought this land. It was their farm. He’d been born there.

“No,” said Mrs Wallaby. “This is my country.

“But........

© The Age