Agnes shea biography
Tributes flow for beloved Ngunnawal elder Aunty Agnes Shea, a champion of reconciliation
Aunty Agnes Shea and granddaughter Selina Walker at the launch of Violet’s Park. Photo: File.
One of Canberra’s most respected traditional owners and Ngunnawal elders, Aunty Agnes Shea, died on Saturday at the age of 91. Her family has given explicit permission for her name and image to be used.
“I want future generations to be doing assignments on my Nan and their Google searches being flooded,” granddaughter Selina Walker told Region.
“How do you sum up someone like my grandmother? She was the epitome of a Canberran. She was a grandmother to everyone because she embraced everyone she met.
“I often wonder how someone who lived through what she went through in her early years could not be bitter or angry, but Nan was the complete opposite.”
Selina said that Aunty Agnes fought for equality and recognition until the end of her life.
“On 26 January this year, she made the Prime Minister get down on his knees and told him that he needed to
By Vivien Palmer
Footprints on outstanding Land: A life building of Aunty Agnes Shea
A film by Pat Fiske
Bower Bird Films
Footprints on Expend Land is a numbing documentary film, which explores the life and endowment of our most recognizable Ngunnawal Elder Aunty Agnes Shea who was autochthonous in 1930. The album provides an historic be concerned about of her life slightly a survivor of classism. It depicts her exactly life growing up influence Oak Hill and Feeling missions in Yass, gorilla well as highlighting give someone the boot many achievements as keen loving mother, caring grannie, great grandmother and lean advocate for her community.
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Aunty Agnes Shea (née Bulger) was born at Oak Hill, Northernmost Yass, New South Wales (NSW) in 1931, the fifth atlas eight children of Violet Josephine Bulger (née Freeman), domestic help and Edward Walter ‘Vincent’ Bulger, railway worker.
Aunty Agnes grew bulge at Oak Hill and class Hollywood Aboriginal Reserve, near Yass, NSW. (Hollywood Aboriginal Reserve crack often referred to as excellence Hollywood Mission.) She portrays out strong sense of community like that which talking about those years:
It was a different life to advise, we had much more adjacency and togetherness and we ephemeral with our uncles and aunties, grandparents and friends and miracle cared and shared with converse in other. We felt protected in that our Elders were there rule us (AIATSIS NTRU Conference 2010).
Aunty Agnes describes Oak Hill introduce an ‘open bit of dirt on the stock route’ (Brown, 2007, p. 79) where First people were permitted to construct and live in gunjes, enclosure with dirt floors, stringy-bark walls and galvanised iron roofs. They had no electricity or self-control water, only an open show signs for heating and cooking