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May 14, 2023

‘Hey, spunky, come over here!’: how Audrey Napanangka grew a life

Napanangka and her Sicilian-born partner have ‘grown up’ more than 30 foster

Napanangka and her Sicilian-born partner have ‘grown up’ more than 30 foster kids in the Northern Territory. A new documentary tells the pair's remarkable story

When they shop together, Santo Giardina places a jar of olives in the supermarket trolley and Audrey Napanangka adds a kangaroo tail.

Sometimes, the couple's big, extended family eats pizza in the Italian restaurant in Mparntwe/Alice Springs, where Giardina has worked. At other times, on Napanangka's Warlpiri country, her family will pull a goanna from a hole to cook on an open fire. Her ancestors would eat goanna to "stop them getting sick", says Napanangka; seated on the red desert earth, she shares her goanna Dreaming story about a dancing man, as Sicilian-born Giardina wanders nearby, playing harmonica.

The scenes are from a new documentary, Audrey Napanangka, which follows the couple's lives for a decade. Together for 37 years, the pair have "grown up" more than 30 foster children, including young relatives of Napanangka and other Indigenous children seeking a safe haven for weeks, months or years.

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"Family is important to everyone, and there are many forms of family," says director Penelope McDonald, a friend of Napanangka's. "This is quite a unique blended family that has made quite a contribution."

The couple met in 1986, when Giardina, who migrated to Australia from Italy as a child, happened to walk past her.

"He was dressed up with white trousers and a hat," recalls the now white-haired Napanangka, in a video call with Guardian Australia.

"And a white suit," adds Giardina – now bespectacled with a long, grey beard. "I was going to town on business, and all of a sudden, I hear, ‘Hey, spunky, come over here!’"

Napanangka smiles and shields her eyes with her hand, protesting this version of events – but, she admits, their foster children tease him often by repeating her pickup line.

"I loved the way she used to talk and calm [people], you know? Very nice," he says. "She wasn't like a rough woman. That's why we’re still together." Napanangka adds in halting English: "And we don't drink."

With small parts in the films Samson and Delilah and Rabbit-Proof Fence, Napanangka – who also paints goanna Dreaming and bush food stories – wasn't bothered by the cameras that followed them for 10 years.

In the film, we meet Napanangka's niece Miriam, who is serving jail time for violent offences connected to alcohol abuse; upon her release, Napanangka reconnects her to Warlpiri country at Mount Theo. During Miriam's years of incarceration, Napanangka and Giardina raised her daughter, Leanorah.

Around the same time, the couple struggled with another foster child, a boy called Tyrese, who was returned to them with behavioural challenges after two years with white foster carers. We watch as Napanangka flies to Canberra with a group of Indigenous grandmothers to protest "a new stolen generation"; the message is that family and cultural roots are essential to survival.

Napanangka's heart is so open to these children partly because she cannot have her own.

In 1965, her first baby, Robin, took ill. She carried him to hospital in a coolamon – a traditional hardwood vessel – and never saw him again: "They told me he died."

In 1967, she gave birth to another boy, Kingsley Jagamara, but he too was taken from her after three days together in a hospital bed in Alice Springs.

Driving back to Yuendumu from that hospital stay, her then husband was killed when their car rolled. Napanangka thought she would die too; instead, she sustained injuries that prevented her having more children. She was 17.

"After that [road] accident I was thinking, ‘I want to get my baby back,’" she says now. "[I thought,] ‘You mob been hiding my baby.’"

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Napanangka only recently received death certificates for her babies, with no indication where the infants might have been laid to rest. She is unconvinced Kingsley died, given the child was so healthy when she last saw him.

"She's still unresolved about it, really," adds director McDonald, who has known Napanangka for 40 years. "There was a huge infant mortality rate in Alice Springs at the time, but also a lot of [Aboriginal] children were taken from the hospital, so there's a lot of history … where kids were taken but then came back when they were middle-aged.

"That's what [Napanangka] was always hoping would happen [with baby Kingsley], but we don't know."

Today's generations face their own crises in and around Alice Springs, with increased rates of assault, domestic violence, property damage and theft sparking "crime wave" headlines. What does the couple believe can be done to help young people in the town?

One key to the complex problems, they say, is community intervention programs run by Aboriginal people.

They point to cultural programs for young people for treatment and diversion from substance abuse, such as those run at Mount Theo outstation, where Napanangka has worked; and the Central Australian Youth Link-Up Service, which runs programs within communities. Napanangka, who was born in bushland near Yuendumu in 1950, says her elders there taught her country was a healing place. "We are connected to everything," she says in the documentary.

In the film, we see teenage foster daughter Leanorah painted while preparing to undergo a joyful women's ceremony on country; the couple are clearly proud that she is now doing well at boarding school in Victoria.

Giardina knew he was going to have a big family when he met Napanangka. He reflects on sitting around the restaurant table eating pizza with many of the Indigenous children he has helped raise; bush tucker-wise, he doesn't venture much beyond sugar extracted from gum leaves.

The couple's hope is their documentary will offer a glimpse into lives seen less often on screen.

The film should "go around the world", says Napanangka emphatically, raising her index finger. "That’d be right."

Audrey Napanangka is playing in selected cinemas around Australia