Warning: this article contains sensitive images, including blood.
Michael Mansell stands barefoot in a rocking dinghy, rocked quite violently by waves in the Bass Strait, though he seems untroubled.
“Is taking part in cultural practices optional or compulsory?” he asks.
He’s a man that has always asked the hard questions, never shying from the difficult conversations, even as we land back on Flinders Island after a 15 minute boat ride that left me cold, shaken and soaked with sea water.
But after spending just a few days on tiny, remote Babel Island with him and his family, it was an important question to pose.
The picturesque Babel Island off the coast of Tasmania Source: NITV / Keira Jenkins
The APG was established in 1990, on the principle that Aboriginal people are sovereign; they issue Aboriginal passports and birth certificates.
Mr Mansell travelled to Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya on one of these passports in the 1980s.
Sitting on a makeshift stool in a shed, his hands deftly cutting open a mutton bird, Michael Mansell was somehow different from the man we’re used to seeing on the news.
No less staunch, no less respected, just different.
“He’s a legend to the Blackfellas and the community," his grandson Steele told me.
"But out here it’s just another day in the office.”
Michael Mansell and Scott Jones deftly cut open the birds once they've been plucked and cleaned. Source: NITV / Keira Jenkins
'We just need people to listen'
On Babel Island politics fades away - it’s a bubble, so far removed from Canberra that it’s easy to forget about the debate happening on the mainland.
But Mr Mansell’s distaste for the voice is clear.
“We don’t want to run white people, we want to run ourselves, and what is wrong with that, “ he said.
“That’s what democracy is all about. Why don’t we have six seats in the senate -one from each state- rather than mucking around with advising from outside the parliament.
“That’s the debate we never really hear about … We don’t need another (advisory) body, we just need people to listen to what we’re saying.”
And what the mutton birders on Babel Island are saying is that it’s getting harder and harder to get enough crew each season.
Every person and all the supplies, including materials for the sheds, generators, and food, have to either brave the 15-minute dinghy ride across to Babel or be helicoptered onto the island.
It’s a costly exercise, and Mr Mansell said the birders need support to keep the practice alive.
“When I came out to Babel, which is on the east coast of Flinders, the Aboriginal people who were out here gave it up as too costly, it’s hard to get stuff out here,” he said.
“Without government support Aboriginal cultural birding will eventually lose because you have to have these expensive buildings and machinery that goes with it.
“We’ve found it very hard to get state or federal government interested.”
'It's in my blood'
When I asked Michael Mansell about why he keeps returning to Babel each mutton bird season, his answer was simple.
“I remember when I was a kid about three years old, I came to this island, but I didn’t do any mutton birding. I’d come because all the community would come,” he said.
“It was a different era then. I’m talking about the 50s and 60s but three quarters of the Aboriginal population would go mutton birding, shut down schools and just migrate to the mutton bird islands.”
“The thing about it was you had no choice, you had to go and now I’m saying to my kids and grandkids you have to come.”
This is what is echoed among all the mutton birders on Babel. There’s a crew of 14 here and there’s a sense of cultural obligation that keeps them coming back.
“I help my grandfather run the shed and I’ve stepped into that role.
"So it’s not that I want to [keep returning] ,it’s that I have to,” Steele Mansell said, sitting out in the rookery, with about 20 mutton birds he’s caught lying at his feet.
Mutton birder numbers are dwindling, with a crew of only 14 on Babel this year. Source: NITV / Keira Jenkins
'Practise culture or be assimilated'
Mutton birding is hard, dirty work, and living on an island as remote as Babel - even if it’s just for a few weeks - would be a challenge for most people.
But Michael believes continuing the practice is a matter of survival for Aboriginal people in Tasmania.
“If it’s an option to practise culture or be assimilated you’re going to be assimilated,” he said.
“It’s only if Aboriginal people feel obligated to continue that cultural practice that it will survive, it’s the only way.”
But it’s more than the obligation that keeps people coming back.
Listening to the banter in the shed and out on the rookery, the birders are not just here because they have to be - there’s an element of joy.
For Tamika Burgess this joy comes from getting to come back to Babel after raising her children.
“I haven’t been birding for 35 years so this is my first time back on the islands,” she said.
The birders take a quick break out in the rookeries for breakfast Source: NITV / Keira Jenkins
One of those young women is Kitana Mansell, who runs a traditional food business in Hobart.
She has served mutton bird through her business including for the annual arts festival Dark Mofo.
Taking part in the mutton bird season is significant for her as a food business manager, and culturally as a palawa woman.
“I think it’s really important that we as young people are still keen to do the practice that our ancestors did and our older family members are still continuing to do today,” she said.
“I believe the reason we are here is because we’re passionate about who we are and where we come from.
“To be able to carry on the oldest living culture in the world is just amazing.”
Michael Mansell hopes the tradition lives on through his grandchildren.
“Over the last 10 years us old ones have been sitting around like the muppet show saying ‘oh the young ones are not interested’,” he said.
“I remind myself and others that I was watching an interview with Eric and Ruth Maynard all the way back in the 70s and old Eric was saying ‘the young ones aren’t interested’.
“It was exactly the same thing and we’re still doing it 50 years later so who knows.”
