Pam was born in 1944. Her mother was Joyce Carter and father Arthur Thomas. Joyce Carter’s father was Charlie Carter and Arthur Thomas’s father was William Thomas.

Pam remembers day trips in a wooden rowboat with her sister Harriett and mother and father across the Lake into Dignams Creek. The family would catch bream, flathead, mullet, black fish, oysters, bimbullas and black mussels. If their father intended on spearing fish, they would camp overnight to enable him to begin spearing at 4am. The bigger bream were always easier to catch at that time of the day.

Pam Flanders recalls fishing with lines and spears off Poole’s Point and prawning in the Tilba Lake. They camped in the sheltered heathland, near a fresh waterhole. Pam remembers her mother making a boiled date pudding from swan eggs, collected near the Wallaga Lake ‘Cricket ground’; one swan egg was equivalent to 6 chicken eggs. The family could eat swans eggs, because they were not the family’s totem species.

Pam continues to reside at Wallaga Lake.

 

Excerpt from Stories About the Eurobodalla by Aboriginal People, 2006. Story contributed by Martin Ind from Moruya High School.