Anne Devenish
- Chief Librarian in Kununurra


Ted Carlton playing the didgeridoo

Three years ago Anne Devenish had a sudden inspiration.

As chief librarian in Kununurra, in the Kimberley, in Western Australia’s far north, she realised she was living in the middle of a resource almost as valuable as the massive Argyle Diamonds mine nearby.

All around her, like scattered diamonds, were hundreds of Indigenous people’s traditional and personal stories.

And Anne, trained as both a librarian and a teacher, was perfectly placed to mine them. Which is how ‘Sharing our Stories’ was born.

Approximately every month for the past two and a half years Jenny Hunter, the programme coordinator, has invited a local Indigenous person to the library to regale a class of wide-eyed primary school children with their personal story.

Classes from every local primary school come along to hear someone like Peter Brandy, a local Indigenous musician, talk about his life and to play his guitar.

Or to listen to Arnie Birch who grew up on Lissadell Station and became a police liaison officer before turning to fishing and becoming known throughout the Kimberley as ‘Mr. Barramundi’.

Then there’s Rowena Lupton, who was a radio announcer and is now the Sponsorship and Communications Project Officer for Argyle Diamonds. After recounting her story Rowena told the children, “Never give up on your goals. Stay positive always.”

“‘Sharing our Stories’ achieves many things,” enthuses Anne. “Firstly, it creates in the Indigenous kids a pride in their own culture while changing the attitudes of the new generation of non-Indigenous children through meeting and interacting with the storytellers.”

“Also, it induces a real love of stories as the kids begin to see the connection with books. Many of them, after a story session, take a book from the library shelves and begin to engage with it.”

It’s easy to see how a love of stories could be created in the warm, friendly environment of the book filled library.

Especially when they are as dramatic as Ted Carlton’s who was a jackeroo and stockman on the Carlton Hill Station breaking horses, catching bulls, shooting wild donkeys and droving.

“We used to walk cattle from Carlton Hill to Wyndham Town meatworks,” Ted tells the enthralled children. “It took two weeks.”

Inside the mind of every child present grows an image of swirling dust and cattle slowing moving across the vast Kimberley bush.

And that’s the magic of stories.