Nola Turner-Jensen
Managing Director
Wiradjuri
5 Bats is the result of a lifelong search of Wiradjuri Linguist and historian, Nola Turner-Jensen to re-establish, learn and share the teachings, philosophy and values laid down by our Sky World father and mother. Nola is a direct descendant from her Aboriginal GG Grandmother Sarah (nee Gibson) and Henry Naden through her mother’s family and grew up in Narromine, NSW.
Supported by amazing four fellow Aboriginal brothers and sisters (Dale Chapman, Will Carter, Mark Champley and Shannon Jackson) and several important allies who generously shared their expertise to get 5 Bats off the ground, Nola strives to frame the company on the original standards set down by our old people.
Nola is currently a Linguistic Research fellow with Melbourne University, undertaking a study (3 Sisters/3 Brothers) to identify the language patterns that reveal sacred sites within clan places to hand over to Elders within all language groups.
In line with Aboriginal protocols, Nola focuses specifically on women’s sacred ceremonial practice, gender language and sacred site locations.
“I spend most of my days locating, tracking and positioning the written and recorded history of my Wiradjuri people that is currently being held in the institutions throughout the world and then searching for those precious Wiradjuri and other Aboriginal people who hold the oral knowledge to confirm for me where to place this taken information I am finding within our universal kinship of all things.
It is easy to focus on what has been lost as a colonised people. So much fodder to gather from that thinking. I am deeply and forever wounded by the loss of my people’s systems and the continued displacement of them still today. That rabbit hole is a dark place. I cannot sit in this dark place and still be able to help my people. Sometimes I cannot help going there, I prefer to focus on the positive and find gratitude in this time. I am grateful for all the earliest maps of my people’s country, that were written and drawn by the Colonial explorers, surveyors and ethnographers. I am grateful that many of the early settlers named their farms after the language name for that place and I am grateful for the written witness accounts of our early ceremonial and ritual practices by these others.
To do this task of Aboriginal linguistic Repatriation relating to place. The thing that takes the longest time is not the finding or reading of the information, tedious as that is. It is the translation and repositioning of that found knowledge within our vast oral and very ancient system. When I talk of positioning, I mean where it fits into our universal kinship and who should know it. In our Aboriginal systems, everything has a Kinship that it belongs within. There is nothing that is individual. Even every Aboriginal language word has kinship that it sits within. I am not a fan of Alphabetising language, as it takes each word away from its family that help it make sense.”
~ Nola Turner-Jensen