Lady of the Lake is the story of Gunditjmara Elder Aunty Iris Lovett-Gardiner and her life at Lake Condah in the western districts of Victoria. "Brotherhood" is an excerpt.

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TRANSCRIPT

The old fellas, they used to…like my dad and Uncle Chrissie, they went to the First World War, an’ I seen them walk around all day with each other an’ not say a word…not say a word. That’s the way their brotherly love was with them, because they knew what they’d been through together an’ I think it was just…they wanted to be in companionship with each other an’ there with each other. So we just let ‘em sit around in the sun and gave them biscuits an’ tea and things like that, an’ they’d walk about, shoulder to shoulder, they’d walk about. You’d never hear them talkin’ about anything but you knew what they was thinkin’ an’ too you never heard them say much about what they went through, the horrors that they went through, in the war, an’ I think it’s a great pity that things like that were lost to us….like their families an’ that missed them, an’ when they didn’t come home that was a greater misery, you know, an’ it seemed to all be for nothing because people never got… our people never got anything out of that, not even a thank you, you know… for the soldiers that really served and really knew what it was to leave their homeland to go somewhere else to fight. When they came home they were shell shocked an’ things like that…there were things like that with ‘em…an’ ah…my mother was telling me that her an’ dad were walking along the road to Heyworth and a bullock roared…sung out…an’ soon as it did, he ran and hid behind a stump. He sort of wasn’t over the war …the effects of the war still, you know. He used to get terrible headaches from gas, mustard gas an’ things like that. They all suffered in their own way but they never let anybody know…you know.