Assessable e-Portfolio Work
For Dr Zoe Pearce’s PYB007: Interpersonal Processes and Skills
Personal REFLECTIONS of each week’s lecture and tutorial material
By Rebekah Copas

Week 10 lecture:

Communication in intimate relationships

The question about why we chose particular friends, and how we tend to chose whom to become intimate friends with, and whom remain only acquaintances, is of general interest to me.

I remember being told as a teenager, by another teenager, some statistics about the ages at which people are statistically likely to be increasing and decreasing their total quantity of friends. Perhaps a reason this interests me, is because of having noticed about myself, that most of my friends have been, first of all, from among the friendship group my first boyfriend introduced me to, and second of all, among the friendship group my second boyfriend, and father of my three sons, introduced me to. Both of those men have substantially engaged in attempts to harm my social relationship after breaking up, and in both instances breaking up was by my own assertion. So I have feelings of loss around belonging in a social group.

Subsequent to those two longer term relationships, my relationships with men have been entirely within the Aboriginal community, and also I have been at an older age, and because of cultural difference, and socialisation differences, it has been difficult to engage in the friendships which could sustain those relationships. Furthermore, within the Aboriginal community, in every location I have been socially involved within, it is socially normal for women to have close female friendships which are forged quite independently of a male companion, and men will tend to assume that women can manage and maintain such relationships without male participation, and that women will rely on those friendships automatically whenever he is not available for emotional support. It is unusual for me to meet indigenous women whom I feel I have enough common outlook in life with, to be able to engage in forging close interpersonal relationships, and so often these days, I find myself needing to emotionally rely on the fact of having been included into a desert Kinship unit as a blood relation. The desert culture I am in takes these relationships very serious, and within an assumption of close, or intimate, exchanges being necessary to maintain the friendship. For example, when I arrived in Alice last year, although my Warlbiri sister had no knowledge I would be arriving, she happened by coincidence to be the first traditional person I met after arriving, and within her cultural outlook, that coincidence is merely evidence of the strength of the blood bond between us. Even though it had been almost five years since I had last seen her, and another five before that when the bond between us was first made, (or rather within her culture, it would be thought of as the bond having been first noticed then, since blood bonds are defined by what sorts of dreaming patterns are shared between individuals, in combination with shared situations and obligations), she immediately engaged me in activities which reasserted a close bond, including helping her prepare her clothing and hair, and taking me to the grave of her grandson, whom I share the obligation of mourning the death of with her.

Other indigenous women I have made close friends with, are within similar sorts of bonds, in which the emotional intensity of the friendship is very real, despite seldom being able to be in one another’s company, however these are the relationships which sustain me, and so I very often feel much out of place within the social context of modern white Australia. I have to think about this within the context of how some of these women have engaged with me in a way that is healing for me around some insecurity that developed in me through my relationship with my mother, while I was in infancy.

Clearly that insecurity is a source of why my friendships with men have dominated, and I have lost many formerly close female friends, through separating from boyfriends. I have not felt comfortable or capable of building close emotional bonds with women whose culture is the mainstream Australian cultural paradigm. It could be in part, that within Aboriginal culture there is a social category for a person like me, which is similar to social categories in the mainstream culture, which I have not ever found my feet in, although often oriented myself towards. For example, many of my friends and acquaintances over the years have worked in the Arts or Music industries. Within many Aboriginal social settings, the poetry I write enables me to be regarded as a person whom is individually emotionally driven in the way that Artists can be, that in itself, requires a person to maintain an isolating frame of mind often, and in the Aboriginal cultural paradigms I have friends among, it is being able to sustain the required frame of mind to make Art or Music, which enables a person to have the necessary social status, rather than having already earned money from such work, or having the necessary qualifications. Also I feel that my motherhood and skills in relating intimately with a man, are also more respected within Aboriginal cultural paradigms.

Other factors effecting how I engage in close friendships, are that I had children much younger than my peers at the time, and that I have travelled quite a bit, and moved town often in my early childhood, and also am now away from Canberra where I know people I went to high school with, have worked with, and engaged in activities like Yoga with, and within a housing co-operative I lived in there. Since arriving here in Brisbane six years ago, I have been under more stress, but also was within an unusual context in my reason for having to come here, within which I felt it was not normal to be forging new friendships until recently. That context was a family court case, and I have not begun to settle into being here in Brisbane, until my oldest son came back to live with me, and I have proved in court that my children are sustaining secure stable bonds with me, despite allegations to the contrary. I feel very sad most days about the circumstances of the court case that arose through me having had a relationship with an Aboriginal man, but I do not want to put any of that into this context, beyond saying that the stress of my children’s father having been engaging in negative racial discrimination, and preventing the children learning Aboriginal culture, has caused me to feel like a social burden often, and so I have been reticent to form friendships with anybody whom is not also under the same level of extreme stress. I have noticed that the friendships I have formed with others whom have similar levels of stress, are the sort of friendships with are too emotionally intense to be engaged with very regularly, unless within an arrangement of living together. Within the Aboriginal community, most females, (unless themselves engaged in illicit drug use, which I tend to avoid as often as possible), are very much protected from needing to be involved in overly stressful events such as have surrounded my life since my children’s father refused to return my children to me, and because it is not normal for different sex friendships to happen within Aboriginal culture, unless the people concerned grew up together, or have had some developmental period of life, such as attending university, within a shared environment, or unless there is the possibility of sexual relations being entered into, I have not made many new friends here in Brisbane among that Aboriginal community, except with men whom really wanted a more intimate relationship than I wanted to sustain. So this fact causes me to be in a very unusual category within indigenous contexts, except for among a few individuals living in other places, whom know me better. Nevertheless, I have had a few significant, close, engaging, and mutually beneficial friendships with Aboriginal men over the past few years, but the nature of the Aboriginal community and how it regulates social status, means that I normally ought not disclose that I have been involved in those friendships.

However, now I am avoiding the topic of the insecurity in my relationship with my mother. I suspect, but do not know, that my mother had some post-natal depression when I was a baby. She did not in any way abuse me, and never neglected my physical needs, however was always distant from me, and I always felt closer to my father. The only way I have learned to adequately analyse the family dynamic which was that basis of the poor relationship between myself and my mother, is again from within an indigenous cultural paradigm. There are two distinct patterns within which my birth family are not adherent to traditional Aboriginal Kinship, and it is through understanding how human relationships work best within those patterns, that I have been able to relate to the failures in my relationship with my mother.

It is difficult to define my understanding here without providing scientific information to back up my understanding, and orient it into the mainstream culture. One aspect of how indigenous culture defines my relationship with both my parents as odd, is within the knowledge that my blood group is a B+, but both my parents have the blood group A+, which is in itself an unusual fact within either culture, but within Aboriginal culture, it defines that my own Dreaming will not often be likely to be able to be in the family of my birth, but that I will be more likely to dream together with others whom I share the same blood group with. The other aspect of how I have been taught about what has been going wrong with my intimate relationships, through problems in the relationships in my family, is that my parents, if within indigenous culture, would not be themselves aligned in the ideal marriage relationship, but are, depending on the locality, and definitely at the locality of my birth, in the sort of relationship which is defined as an avoidance relationship in most parts of Australia. That is, of a mother-in-law/son-in-law way of interacting. It is difficult to provide scientific verification of why that is true in both cultures, given that my parents do not actually orient their own identities into Aboriginal Kinship.

However, there is some scientific evidence to suggest that the matrilineal moieties of Aboriginal skin groups, are based in biological fact. There is the possibility that it can be traced through the DNA which passes only from mothers, through the mitochondrial DNA, but that has not been researched as yet. However, what has been discovered, is that rats at least, can be divided into two groups, with two discrete sets of what is called “Major Histo-compatibility Complex” (MHC) molecules on the surface of the skin, and mammals tend to want to make babies with another individual with the opposite set of MHC molecules than their own body has. Furthermore, when babies are made between rats with the same set of MHC molecules, the babies and parents have a decreased life span, while when babies are made within what relates to matrilineal moieties, the immunity of both parents is increased, and babies and parents live longer.

However what is going on in relationships between a mother-in-law and a son-in-law, is not yet scientifically verified, except perhaps through those anthropologists, like Mircea Eliade, whom edited the Encyclopaedia of World’s Religions, and writes about Archetypes of human stories.

In respect of creating and managing relationships more generally, I have had to wonder about how it happens that I manage to fit myself into indigenous behavioural expectations, since I was not raised within indigenous traditions and culture. What is clear to me, is that the traditional people I know in the Northern Territory, are respectful of me because of my communication skills, and in particular, my skills at communication through body language. When in Alice last year, the women started immediately to teach me some of the women’s sign language, through their observations of my normal level of attenuation to their ordinary body language, and also because of my being old enough. In part also because some of the information they wanted to engage in communication with me about, (eg my friendships with men), is not normally spoken at all by women, and it could be regarded within many Aboriginal cultural contexts, to be as rude as to be inviting more of the same, if a woman discloses any of her history of intimate/close/and sexual relationships with men. In fact, I am already so conditioned by the indigenous context, that I feel disoriented from being able to communicate this in the mainstream cultural context, and as though I could be in serious trouble for having written as much as I have here, in the open form of written English words. In general, it is very difficult to define how I am able to engage in communication within Aboriginal contexts, because at times it is a bit mysterious even to myself, that I am able to adequately communicate, while other white Australians are not. Therefore, I expect that a large part of what enables me, is that the patterns of child raising my mother engaged in, where already sufficiently alike to those within Aboriginal cultural paradigms.

In fact, by analysing my mother’s child raising style by comparing it to a family whom is not able to engage readily in communication with Aboriginal communities, she certainly correlates with all the categories defined by Westerman and Wettinger, in their Psychologically Speaking documents, in table 5.1, at http://www.gtp.com.au/ips/inewsfiles/Psychological%20Assessment%20of%20Aboriginal%20People.pdf as being more alike to indigenous mothers than alike to non-indigenous mothers. The same is true of myself when compared with all my non-indigenous peers whom I made friends when while my children were infants. Clearly, if we are compared with a traditionally oriented Aboriginal mother, we would seem to belong on the other side of that table of differences, yet the internal experience of the children, within our family, is of being raised within a different model of communication to that being used within the families around us. This is one of the reasons why there is substantial credibility able to be given to the possibility which a number of indigenous men have alerted me to, and which corresponds with very small, but significant factors in our family oral history, of us having indigenous ancestry, despite it not being able to be certified because of having no paper evidence of intermarriages during the period of first contact in NSW. The traditional people whom know me regard the fact of how I relate to them, as a fact of the victory of indigenous cultural belief patterns, and proof of cultural survival. However within city contexts, it is difficult to assert that, for a number of varied reasons, yet I am often accepted to be another indigenous person, with or without needing to assert that.

The lecture mentions how we tend to be attracted to one another by smells, and senses of taste and touch, and touch is certainly known to be the basis on which people respond to the MHC molecules. Interestingly, Aboriginal society is known to be very tactile in human relationships, for example, when in the company of my Warlbiri blood sister, it is normal for us to hold hands. Also, very often, indigenous Australians will totally reserve judgment about someone they are speaking with, as to the total meaning of what is being said, until after some skin to skin contact has taken place. Also factors such as sitting and standing positions come into consideration, and whom is higher or lower physically in how people have arranged themselves in relation to one another so as to have a conversation. Clearly also, the tightest bonds, outside of those of marriage and birth, are indicated by how food sharing is engaged in. The general set of ordinary verbal communications is always moderated by knowledge of whom provided what food and whom ate what and when.

I am reflecting here also, about how much of the focus of my attention has been on asserting the circumstances of my existing within an Aboriginal cultural paradigm, and I want to assert also, that many of my former friends find this fact about me, of wanting to assert Aboriginal cultural competence, as being an untoward obsession with indigenous beliefs. They feel alienated by me at times, and so I feel then less included within the social contexts I had once shared with them. However, one of them has noticed that how I tend to be dominating in my assertions of Aboriginal cultural belief, is compatible with what is normal for a portion of the Aboriginal population. It is as though there is a social place within Aboriginal society, for anybody whom is feeling a loss of social identity, to be enabled to be continually openly defining and re-defining belief in self and in relationships, in a pattern which is very similar to how Narrative Therapy is conducted.

This lecture has also engaged my mind very actively in thinking about how I have altered my patterns of what social taboos I respond to, and which I will ignore. Normally I find myself needing to abide by a far larger set of social taboos than most people are, because I am living within the taboos of two cultures at once. However I believe that because my family already had very strong inter-cultural contexts, this has not been too difficult for me. For example, I always knew that how I needed to behave at each of my grandparents houses was very different, and that my Dutch Aunt by marriage, had a different set of standards, as did my mother’s Greek cousins, as did my father’s Indian work mates, Japanese work mate, etc, etc, etc. I have endeavoured throughout my motherhood to provide my own children with an equivalent degree of lessons in how to be sensitive to different sets of social expectations within different cultural contexts, and more subtly within different family environments within the one culture.

I am going to put a poem here too, since I was writing it just before listening to the lecture, and its social context is at the forefront of my mind while writing this also. I think I want to put the poem here, because I have strong vivid dreams of being instructed by my father in needing to use poetry to communicate certain ideas, which are not readily able to be communicated in prose or in conversation. This one is a poem in process now. I can’t really make any other words about what it is about.


Make It Love Her (she {who} deserves you)

For when no other will do
What she can for you
Best let life continue
By netting her shoes
For what she’s been into
Was already married unto
The best and the worst of
What is it have you
For what she loves through
Be what you already did do


It is often a matter of more being less and less being more when we need communication through words, as I am sure many Australians will relate to in the new film Samson and Delilah. I have to say in summing this up, that I have never had a relationship with a white Australian man, but one with an Englishman and one with an Irishman, others more briefly with two other Englishmen, a black man from the West Indies, and another from Papua New Guinea; and that all of my intimate relationships with Australian men have been totally within the paradigm of indigenous cultural contexts. I have noticed of myself a total inability to engage in normal social relations between men and women within the mainstream cultural paradigm also, and have recently had to notice of myself, that the social contexts of intimate relationships with men from other countries, are social contexts within which I had already decided before commencing the relationship, that those men were of lesser social status than me, (even when having more money), and were not behaving properly towards me, such that I had an excuse to not behave terribly properly towards them either, according to the standards which my parents, and grandparents, set for me in infancy, as to what is properly the way to conduct relations between men and women.

There is another poem I made in early 2007, about my relationships with indigenous men. I feel a bit shy to put it here though, because it was written for a different context, in which I had been trying to communicate to some non-Aboriginal men I know, how behaviour among Aboriginal men, which would be thought of as untoward outside of indigenous contexts, is actually just being normally respectful within indigenous culture. However, how I communicated myself was by attempting to translate into more English words than Aboriginal men ever use, what it is that is being communicated by Aboriginal men, to a women, when they are setting out to consummate an intimate relationship, or bring intimacy into a relationship.

The Best Pick Up Line

Not out of the blue
Unless you never sensitive to
Yet seldom recognised
In open until love is known
And the matter manifests as
Need for the pick up best
Let me translate sublime
Why Aboriginal men define
What to me means consent but
You yourself may need yet
Beware of the rut
The rent has over charging excuses
That knowledge of thus
This pattern disabuses
Might the words of specifics show up
Excuse me but
Will the man be unlikely to say
But ever so politely
Well mannered not fey
Communicate that today
He can’t help from noticing
You seem to have been causing
Upon his own dreaming
That
And as the man will
He might then just
Directly expose of
The part of his anatomy
Politely posing in question
Never without his full dignity
Always fully steady composure
And belief in his own responsibilities
Almost apologetically
Yet without any shame
In what he thus names
Without even saying
The name of the game
And as he exposes
What his body has noticed
He may remark that to cure himself
He’ll have to reconcile its story
And if not with you yourself
In accepting your own part in
The situation’s causes
He’ll just gently remind that
Thereby perhaps
There is another woman obliging
To feign being you to find of
What might he have lost count upon
While engaging in communication
Between you and him
That best just accept
Him making his offer
Your own story too
More or less immediately will do
And he’ll have gently thus asked you
By caressing your mind with
His own witness of his
Own culpability in time thus
Make you realise
Yes females are culpable too
That his real ploy
Has been all the time
Implanting within her the bind
Of a grand bout of shame for her kind
Of feigning innocence of mind
And us girls on our part
Will bow down our head
Maybe embarrassed to realise
What we’ve caused upon that
Real love provides
Yet thus with pride
Belong to the man who
Will our shame hide
By his own game
No women need have
Too much mess in the brain

To put this poem within its total social context, among most of the Aboriginal men whom I have had any intimacy with, it is normal to presume that a female needs to be held accountable by men, for any moment in which her mind associates with finding pleasure in sexual activity while she is in male company; and often enough how men translate that need to hold women accountable, is by asking her to follow through with what was in her mind more or less immediately, and so long as without breaking Kinship. (In certain Kinship relationships, where sexual activity is not appropriate, if a female is giving any indication of thinking about sexual activity, she will be admonished and instructed to leave the man’s company immediately.) The other way of describing the same, is to say that men will regard a woman as having been inviting sexual activity if she make any reference at all to anything sexual in his company. However that extent of social expectations is not applied to women whom are outside of Aboriginal cultural contexts, but therefore, women whom are outside of Aboriginal cultural contexts, are thought of as easy women and are little respected. So in part, my own abidance to Aboriginal cultural competencies, could be interpreted from the outset of commencing a relationship with an indigenous man, as having been something I entered into so as to prove that I am equitably capable as any indigenous woman, of sustaining normal feminine propriety within the Aboriginal/Indigenous cultural context. My capacity to be fluid with this kind of cultural competence, was itself noted while in Alice, in respect of whom I became betrothed to, as a way of the men in Alice making sure that I was not going without a husband while there, in that his social status is significant.

However, it is readily possible for me to notice that my capacity to communicate within the normal standards that the local Murri community, are socialised into, is a different matter, and in communicating with local Murris, I often need to assume just as much disparity of life experience, as I would normally while communicating with desert communities whom sustain tribal hunter gatherer skills. It is just that the kinds of differences are different, and that of course influences all communication. For example, how an Aboriginal person from among those I am in Kinship with in Alice, or at Yuendumu, might regard this exposition of my interpretations of some Aboriginal cultural patterns of communication, could be quite different to how a local Murri would regard the same writing, and where I might be taken to have communicated myself out of turn, or outside of Aboriginal culture, is regulated very differently in each context. A part of what this writing might communicate to somebody whom knows me well, is that, in how I am accounting for the consequences of what I am writing, I am aligning my story with what is more likely to be beneficial for traditionally oriented communities, than for the local Murri community, in what aspects of my knowledge I am exposing; and so in that, I am also communicating to anybody with an Aboriginal cultural outlook, that the traditionally oriented man I have an intimate relationship with, is, within my sensibilities to culture, readily able to dominate over any local Murri man with whom I have been connected.

It is safe to say here, that I am presenting a portion of the discourse that can be engaged in among the Aboriginal community, about the cultural outlook of persons allocated the social position of the label of being among the “lost generations”, (as opposed to stolen generations, but often also within the overall category of belonging to the stolen generations and their descendents), which is used to refer to anybody among all white Australians, whose family has “passed-as-white”, for so long as that they have lost their conscious recollections, and oral histories, of being of Aboriginal ancestry. My own family is certainly often regarded as fitting into that social category, through how it is often defined, however it is also somewhat contentiously defined at times, as a social category of persons whom have sold out their culture, and thus are in debt to all those Aboriginal persons whom could not have passed-as-white, because of skin colour. Different families and sets of social conditions within the Aboriginal community, tend to enable different status to be allocated to anybody whom is considered to be among the “lost generations”. It is normally regarded here in Brisbane, that anybody with Aboriginal ancestry ought to be able to find a paper record of it, and thereby, through engaging with the community enough to sustain recognition, obtain certification of their Aboriginality for the purposes of obtaining Abstudy etc. However, this is not the case in my own situation, since my ancestors all came from parts of Australia where the intermarriages happened at first contact, and in regions where first contact pre-dated that in other regions. How various portions of various indigenous communities delineate an analysis of whom among white Australians may or may not be able to be found to have indigenous/Aboriginal ancestry, is yet another part of the whole story, however, there is a commonly held association with one specific racial feature, that is not normally defined outside of Aboriginal cultural contexts. That is of there being an involuntary contraction of one of the muscles of the inner leg, (the one that goes the whole length of the leg), that is normal in persons of indigenous ancestry, to happen in conjunction with sexual climax. It is very obvious perhaps then why it is a racial feature seldom expressed or evidence of it exposed to non-indigenous people, yet in many portions of the indigenous community (perhaps not all though), it is held to be a stronger racial feature than, for example, skin colour, or broad nostrils. Many Aboriginal people I know, are adept at observing among white Australians, whom shows signs of having the racial feature I have defined, by just watching the way people walk if wearing shorts, and often the Aboriginal community is more likely to associate with supporting famous sports people whom show it, for example, it is observable in Darren Lockyear. The fact that such a racial feature is observable in famous sports people, whom are not oriented with their Aboriginal ancestry, is a strong part of the total picture about why the indigenous community do not tend to make this knowledge open in most non-indigenous contexts, since it is often still regarded that white Australians need be given a personal choice about whether or not to identify socially within the total group of persons whom have Aboriginal ancestry. (I would like to be able to provide evidence of academic integrity here for my assertions about racial type, but since the information is not given any other academic context that I know of, I am at a loss as to how to regulate how non-Aboriginal academics might regard the assertions I have made, short of recommending that one ought to be careful about whom one asks of what information within Aboriginal society, but that anybody engaged in any Kinship group from the Northern Territory, will be more likely to regard this information as "open", than as it is more normally now regulated in the eastern states, as "closed" or secret information, but which has the potential to become "opened".)

In my home town, of Armidale NSW, the original language group is now held in doubt, (does not appear in the more recent maps, where it had in the older ones), but was once thought to be Aniwan, but having no surviving inheritors, since the local black population all come from other tribes and areas further east, south, west, and north. However, it is a region in which there was a significant level of violence, (Armidale is close to where the Myall Creek massacre happened, for example), and the AIATSIS does hold records of the Aniwan language having existed, and of the local area being of ritual significance. The sacred sites connected with large gatherings which are close to Armidale, had already become favourite picnic locations for the white population, by the time of Federation, and one point of view commonly held is that if anybody survived the onslaught of first contact, it was only through engaging in intermarriages and by inevitably passing-as-white to survive. Clearly mothers whom knew themselves to have indigenous ancestry, had every motivation to attempt to pass as white so as to raise their children in relative safety, and that sensibility of intense fear of being found out to have indigenous ancestry, is certainly the response I have consistently found among my birth family to myself having any involvement at all with anybody whom can be perceived to be Aboriginal. This set of facts often places a barrier in the way of effective communication, and ensures that it is often only from intimate relationships that I am able to communicate myself adequately within modern urban Aboriginal communities.

One other aspect of how I related to what is possible in communication, and how intimate communication is regulated differently within indigenous cultural contexts, is by having learned a significant story from the indigenous tradition, and having been accepted by enough indigenous men, in my way of relating the same story within the modern western paradigm of science. The story is the one of the Seven Sisters, and I will not tell it out here, but instead will tell how it can be related to modern science. The human genome project has discovered that the entire human species is descended from one or more of seven matrilineal clans, and that throughout the whole world, persons of specific ethnicity, tend to have specific patterns of which of seven markers of ancestry are present. While isolated examples exist elsewhere also, and modern intermarriage has enabled more variance in patterns of the seven markers, it is known that Australian Aborigines are the only entire race to sustain having always had all seven genetic markers present, and are thus evidenced to have already significantly been intermarried with every of the original matrilineal clans. From an indigenous cultural outlook, that science is very obviously just telling about evidence that the story of the Seven Sisters is real. What many Aboriginal traditional Aboriginal persons find, is that all persons whom have all seven genetic markers, (so could potentially be of indigenous Australian ancestry, particularly if their ancestors were already in Australia by Federation), can be pushed into becoming more fully attenuated to indigenous Australian culture, than can, for example, even the Africans who live in Alice. So once we begin to assess what it is which enables us to communicate with one another, we need to evaluate also, what the interplay is between culture and racial origin, and what ethnicity is, how it is defined, and whether ethnicity can temper our communication possibilities, when existing in a culturally displaced context. The academic discourse what causes cultural traditions to exist, has never yet considered what influence the genetic markers may have, however, within indigenous Australian culture, there are certain categories of persons whom are quite enabled to regulate how everybody else socially interacts, through belief in needing to observe how each of us interact with each of the seven sisters in our ancestry of antiquity. If we can display behaviour that is being accountable to every of those sisters, then we have a higher social status, and are regarded as inheritors of every blood line, with or without the scientists having found genetic markers.

I have noticed how my language moves into using the pronoun “we” as soon as I introduced the context of the story of the seven sisters, and that is instructive as to how deeply ingrained in my subconscious I am, in respect of my sensibility to belonging within indigenous culture. The seven sisters story is believed to be one which its teller cannot communicate without exposing their own real nature. However, being able to tell the story OK, is not able to obtain a paper record of having indigenous ancestry. Yet many indigenous people I know, would prefer for me to be formally identified, simply because I am able to tell the story, and being able to tell it, is how traditional culture often regulates affirming sovereignty. Yet what can be communicated within indigenous contexts, by story telling, need not become able to be communicated within the social mainstream of Australia, although often enough, it already is.

It is also generally instructive that I have felt able to engage in divulging certain less often communicated information, within the context of communication about communication. So while this reflection is often seeming to veer away from the original context, what is observable about it, is the way in which I am asserting what is my own context for communication in intimate relationships, and that I am engaging in communicating this context, within an assumption that readers of this reflection, are not already attuned with such contexts. Because of my socio-cultural and socio-economic background being different from with the social backgrounds of the majority of men (if not all), whom I have had intimate relationships with, I find myself very often, within the context of communication in intimate relationships, needing to assert a lot of background data. It is worth considering the extent to which the paucity of my bond with my own mother, may have contributed to the fact that I have not had an intimate relationship with any white Australian man, and neither with any indigenous white man, as might have been a more obvious solution for my life story at one point. I have certainly avoided the social contexts, and social constructs, in which my parents raised me to consider to what is normal for intimate relationships, throughout my life since leaving their home, however, I still find that there are significant correlations between my own patterns of intimate conduct, and those of, for example, my grandmothers.