I can say I’m lucky, me, Essie Shillingworth Jibbah, my tribal name. Because me and my two sisters and my five brothers and my mother and father, we lived with the bush and lived in the bush and I was born free. What I mean by that, we was born free, is that we wasn’t brought up in a mission, we never lived in a mission, we don’t know what it’s like to be under the white man’s thumb – we had our own ways and own life and we lived with the bush, my sisters and brothers and myself. So also with us we was taught our culture and tradition. That’s why I say, I’m one of the lucky people, who can stand up on their own two feet and know what they’re fighting about.
I just finished releasing my first cassette with Bush Queen on it, Number One, that’s the name of the cassette, I recorded it in Adelaide. That was yesterday, the 12th of March, 1980. So, from that cassette it’s going to go to a bigger one, an LP or a small one. And that’s not going to stop me – I want to keep on writing songs and doing documentary films till probably the day I die, and that’s going to be a long time yet, I’ve got no hope of dying yet because it’s so much and I’ve got the opportunity to fight for what I want. So the next film is going to be called Aboriginal Awakening, and I can’t wait to get started on that quick enough, because it’s the only way I’m going to communicate to the world, to let them know that there’s Aboriginals still alive and that we are an independent race, an Aboriginal race, that wants to be recognised, that’s all we want. We want to be recognised as human beings, not as blacks, we want to be a race, because we are human beings also – colours only run skin deep – and this is what we try to make the world see and in Australia too, that the Europeans see that the Aboriginal people are only just a human person, not just a black.
