“What they’ve done for me in the past seven years, I cannot forget for seven lives,” says an emotional Gurpreet Singh Mediratta, a resident of Darwin in Australia’s Northern Territory.
He has been living with his partner, Barbara Berryman, for the past seven years. Due to such close proximity to the indigenous community of Australia, he says he feels hurt when people don’t see the real goodness of these people.
Mr Mediratta says he is very well-integrated into the Yolngu tribe of NT – one of the oldest communities on earth, to which his partner belongs – and he was adopted into the tribe by an elder.
He says Australia Day is a reminder of pain and suffering for his adopted family, that the country's first people endured after the arrival of white settlers at the end of the eighteenth century.
"It is Invasion Day for them, the day when their land was snatched from them. The pain lives in their hearts," he says adding that his partner's grandfather often recalls the atrocities committed with several generations of his tribe by the White people.
He also speaks of the many similarities between Indian culture and the Aboriginal culture.
“I feel so hurt when I see negative stereotypes of the Indigenous Australian people,” he says. “The large-heartedness and forgiving nature of these people is rare in today’s day and age.”
A former Deputy's Sherrif of the Northern Territory Supreme Court, his life went from crisis to crisis after his wife passed away, leaving behind a young son. And he developed a very serious illness.
He says that the only support he has received during the crisis he landed into after his wife’s death, was from the Indigenous Australian family that he now calls his own.
“I first met my partner, Barbara, in the court where she came in her official capacity as an Aboriginal Interpreter. We met for drinks later and hit it off, and here we are. We’ve been living together for seven years now,” says Mr Mediratta.
He says he now can understand and speak many words of the Yolngu language.
His partner, he says, belongs to the very well-known family that runs the Gumatj Corporation in NT, a business that has interests in food production, manufacturing, retails and construction amongst other areas.
“Despite having such a family, my mother-in-law, who recently passed away, depended upon me a lot. She told me I was her favourite son-in-law, even though I’m not married to Barbara. In this community, it’s against the norm for a son-in-law to address his wife’s mother as ‘mum,’ but I called her so,” recalls Mr Mediratta.
“I was so emotional to think these people have broken away with tradition just for me,” he says adding that during times of need, he has never been turned down by the family, especially Barbara’s grandfather, who everyone addresses as ‘Babaji’, identical to the Punjabi word for a family elder.
Click on the player in the picture above to listen to this interview in Punjabi.
