Spiritual awakening

Imagine a tour that tells you about the ancestral history of the place according to the area's First Nations people - while connecting your mind, body and soul in the ultimate immersive experience.

This is what Jarndu Ngaank tour operator and Indigenous Elder, Pat Torres, aims for when she takes clients to two locations north of Broome in Western Australia.

This is the first year in which she’s run tours, after receiving an Indigenous Tourism Fund grant from the National Indigenous Australians Agency (NIAA) in 2021. The Fund was developed in partnership with the Indigenous tourism sector and provides business support and grants for Indigenous-owned tourism businesses. With the grant, Pat was able to set up a website and build a social media presence.

Her latest venture adds to an already impressive career as an established author and educator with two university degrees. Pat has also hosted numerous horticultural and bush medicine courses and in 2006 she launched the bush foods company Mayiharvests.

“I wanted to be able to share our knowledge in an open way to get allies and collaborators working with us to improve the lives of Indigenous people,” Pat said.

The 66-year-old has connections to the Djugun, Yawuru, Karajarri, Ngumbarl, Jabirr Jabirr, Nyul Nyul and Bard peoples, from both north and south of Broome.

Her knowledge in addition to being the only female tour operator in the region meant that it made sense that tours were her next project.

“It's about trying to create that understanding so that humans can go forward and be a bit gentler with each other and the environment,” Pat said.

Three tours touch on ancestral women's stories. The tag-along to Quandong Beach and the town-based beach tour both operate twice a week, while the Reddell Beach female-only tour operates monthly.

All of the tours are place-based and clients are placed into skin groups.

“Throughout the whole experience they have to work within the group, they have to acknowledge the relationship with the other people and they've got to obey the cultural rules while they're getting a lived experience of how culture operates,” Pat explained.

Many of her clients live in urban environments, are afraid of fire and have never experienced life outside of the city, so they often benefit on a spiritual level.

“If they themselves are not feeling well, my tours give them a sense of being welcomed into a place,” Pat said.

“It's gentle, it's not abrasive, it's not aggressive, which is the way traditional people operate – they work with kindness and understanding and inclusion.”

Pat said it is satisfying to see how popular her tours have become.

“I think there's a growing respect of acknowledgement of the place and voice of First Nations people in this country so for me I get satisfaction because I'm sharing bush foods and fruits in a way that is really welcoming to them.”

Recently, Pat showed a group the mangroves and red cliffs of Town Beach near Roebuck Bay on the Kimberley coast.

“They came back to me later and said it was wonderful and they'd learned stuff they'd never known before,” she said.

The group took away a good Liyarn – or inner spiritual centre and moral compass – and a revived energy.

As one of her recent tour clients said: “The way Pat articulated the story line and knowledge is profound and, as an Aboriginal woman, I positively connected to her storytelling with the simple and gentle approach.

“She is a woman of great dignity and power. She's a woman of significance to the future of our children's identity and preservation of cultural knowledge and cultural integrity.”