Don't Take Your Love to Town

by Ruby Langford Ginibi

In 'Don't Take Your Love To Town' Langford writes: 'we saw a big sign saying BUNDJALUNG NATIONAL PARK and I told him he was now in my territory'.

This is Ruby Langford's (Ginibi) first book and autobiography.

First published in 1988, Ruby worked for over 2 years with her editor Susan Hampton to write her story to share with the world.

'Don't Take Your Love To Town' paints a picture of what it was like growing up in Australia from the 1930s onwards, in a society divided between black and white, in both rural and urban areas.

Beginning life on a mission in NSW, Ruby grew up surrounded by the love of her father, sisters and extended family which helped her develop her deadly sense of humour in the face of the many hardships and heartbreaks she experienced in her life.

She has observed and lived the changes wrought on Aboriginal communities, the poverty and tragedies that found their way to her doorstep and yet she managed to find a way to keep smiling while bringing up her 9 children mostly on her own.

Ruby Langford has lived a life rich in both sadness and joy; she has a very easy style of writing for the reader to find themselves drawn into the pages within minutes and, peppered with her wit, her story captures and holds the reader within its grasp until the end.

Genres: Nonfiction, Australia, Memoir, Biography, Womens, Biography Memoir, Indigenous

269 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Ruby Langford, a Bunjalung aborigine, was born at the Box Ridge Mission, Coraki on the NSW north coast, grew up at Bonalbo and went to high school in Casino.

Reviews

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fascinating account of a life which is both ordinary and utterly remarkable. I was struck by the stoicism with which the author faced raising nine children in spite of often living rough and being abused and abandoned by many men. It is clear in the early chapters that her intelligence and potential were recognised by her teachers, but the need to contribute to supporting her family and later to raise her children meant that for many years her potential was unrealised. Only occasionally does her frustration at missed opportunities emerge in the narrative, but when it does it is particularly poignant, contrasting with the matter-of-fact recounting of repeated hardships.

The writing style is unconventional, stringing together anecdotes and recollections, but I found it very readable. I did struggle to keep some of the names straight, due to the author's many children, large extended family, and other people she met as she and her family moved from place to place.

While there is a great deal of tragedy in the author's life, ultimately the book is uplifting. This book is an impressive achievement, all the more so given the struggles the author has experienced.

[Monique · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book resists interiority, resists the reader's desire for a conventional autobiography that is easy to consume. Ruby Langford gives us her life in a relentless stream of details, collated and strung together. It gives the impression of oral storytelling, adopting a fluid and flexible structure that reads like a good long yarn, like infinite gossip, or an interview with the questions removed.

In sharing her incredible tale, Ruby gives voice to the experience of the indigenous people in White Australia--their stories of incredible hardship, separation, mistreatment, and homelessness. Ruby shows a people displaced and forced to migrate up and down the country, living hand to mouth just to survive; a people caught between the dreaming of their own culture and the enforced aspirations of White Australia; a people who, as she says, keep running into glass walls.

It shows the shameful and unnecessary mistreatment of indigenous people by White Australian police, cataloguing the horrible injustices of Aboriginal deaths in custody. But at the same time Ruby shows the incredible resilience, strength and power of these people--herself, her family, her friends--to overcome unimaginable obstacles with an easy humour, all the while maintaining a strong sense of family loyalty, of connection to the land, and an unquestioned relationship to the spirits.

The life detailed is one that we should all take a lesson from. It's not an easy read but I'd recommend it to anyone.

[Ali · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's been a few decades since I read this the first time, but it really holds up. Ginibi's humour, matter-a-factedness and willingness to provide a candid window into an extra/ordinary life make this easy to pick up and be immersed in. Her large family, many moves, and fight to maintain connection and survival are still a reality for many today, even if technology and housing costs have changed.

[R · Rating 5 out of 5]

Almost a year because I read it chapter by chapter and never wanted to finish because I knew I’d miss Aunty Ruby.

Will write proper review later but rest assured I loved this book

[Bettie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gifted from Splozza, who kindly sent me both book and audio tape, thankee.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ruby Langford Ginibi (1934 – 2011) was a Bundjalung woman born on Box Ridge Mission, Coraki on the North Coast of NSW. As you can see from the my original 1988 Penguin Paperback of her first book, Don’t Take Your Love to Town, she did not have the name Ginibi when it was published: Ginibi is a Bundjalung honorific, one of many honours which she subsequently received for her work as an author, historian and lecturer.

According to Wikipedia , Don’t Take Your Love to Town won the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s Human Rights Award for Literature. It’s still in print today. It is studied in schools and universities as a record of rural and urban indigenous life in an era of significant change but it is read and enjoyed as a great story: wise, funny, poignant and frank about the difficulties of indigenous life as well as Langford’s own mistakes. (The title of the book refers to a popular song by Kenny Rogers and her own assessment that it took her too long to realise that she was better off without unreliable men who drank and beat her up.)

I had my first three kids with Sam Griffin (Koori), but I didn’t change my name. Bill, Pearl and Diane are Andersons, named after me. The next three I had with Gordon Campbell (gubb)*, Nobby, David and Aileen. They’re registered in his name. Then I married Peter Langford (gubb), and Ellen and Pauline were born. Now I’m Mrs Langford. My only legal name change. Later, I had Jeff, my youngest, with Lance Marriot (Koori), who took on all my kids and loved them all. But I stayed Langford, by now things were complicated enough.
You can think of me as Ruby Wagtail Big Noise Anderson Rangi Ando Heifer Andy Langford. How I got to be Ruby Langford. Originally from the Bundjalung people.

*gubb – urban Aboriginal word for white person. (p. 2)

She had nine children altogether, three of whom had predeceased her at the time of writing this book, and another died later. Her family also included ten adopted children who [she] collected along the way as well as a large extended family scattered around New South Wales. The book is dedicated to every black woman who has battled to raise a family and kept her sense of humour.

Wikipedia also tells me that:

[Langford] received an inaugural History Fellowship from the NSW Ministry for the Arts in 1994, an inaugural honorary fellowship from the National Museum of Australia, Canberra, in 1995, and an inaugural doctorate of letters (Honors Causia) from La Trobe University, Victoria in 1998.

In 2005 she was awarded the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards Special Award. Her works are studied in Australian high schools and universities. In 2006, she won the Australia Council for the Arts Writers’ Emeritus Award.

Langford’s achievements were all the more extraordinary because she left school after just two years of high school, and much of that was disrupted.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/07/02/d...

[Megan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm so glad I read this - as it filled in all the gaps from reading My Bundjalung people (should have read that one second). It was a fantastic book and reminded me of the Glass Castle by Jeannette Wells. Both were books of a thousand stories, one right after another. The trauma and devastation and sadness was hard to believe, let alone read through. But both Ruby and Jeannette told their stories in the way they experienced them - simply as a part of life that you just had to deal with and move on. As a reader, many times I had to set down the book, take a breath and try to absorb the significance and meaning of her stories. It's a powerful book, that covers a huge breath of time, of lives and of intense complexity in Aboriginal and Australia's history.

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

A very important and informative read that offers an insight into the harsh reality of Aboriginal people in Australia. Although I‘d recommend everyone read it, it wasn’t an easy read since the author sometimes mentioned so many people that it was hard to keep on track

[Meg · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a wonderful Australian book. I was thoroughly enthralled with all Ruby had to tell about her struggles as an Aboriginal woman in this country but also enjoyed the many happy and idyllic recounts of her childhood antics and tender family moments. I was touched and saddened at the abhorrent treatment of Aborigines that I know still goes on today . I gained a lot of strength from Ruby's story. Her ability to get on with things and her bare bones existence raising her very young family. RIP bundjalung woman.

[Ray Gates · Rating 5 out of 5]

For me, this was a glimpse into part of my family, (the author being a cousin) so my rating reflects my being able to make this connection. However I think anyone with an interest in gaining a glimpse into life of Aboriginal people - and life in general - in Australia during the second half of the last century will enjoy it.

[Emma Ruth]

If I hadn't written it down, I never would have known I'd read this book. Bits and pieces are now coming back to me however, I believe we read it aloud in my Literature class, which would explain why I blocked it from my memory (it's hard to get into a book when your fellow classmates stumble over and mispronounce the words).

[Kate Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this initially as a required reading at uni, and hated it. But reading it years later, with knew knowledge and experiences of indigenous culture (especially Koori) made this so much more enjoyable.

[sheena d! · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book taught me how prepare porcupines. And more.

[Ali Atkinson-Phillips · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didnt always enjoy the writing style but a great story.

[Samantha · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5

[Ellen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Matter-of-fact reflections on growing up in an Aboriginal community during a time when that lifestyle is denigrated and denied. An important read.

[Diane · Rating 3 out of 5]

A Maori memoir. I really enjoyed the first part of the book when Ruby is living with her dad and family. She is an excellent student and musician and her teachers want her to go to teacher’s college. It seems certain that the Aborigine’s Protection Board would put her through college, but her dad wants nothing to do with the Board –“ all the protection they’ve done so far is to take people from their land and split up families. (p. 38). He later points out that Aborigine’s Protection Board supported Aborigines fighting for their country but also created what he calls the Dog License which meant that blacks could not buy or drink liquor at white bars.(p 48).

Ruby has children at a young age and begins to live a tough but active life often in the bush and often living in tents and growing her own or hunting for food. This is really impressive and interesting. After a few years, her relationship with her partner Sam deteriorates – from his heavy drinking, many affairs, and beating her. I was impressed when she essentially left him, and yet continued to live relatively independently in the bush. Then she meets other men and begins living in towns, moving constantly (she must have moved 100 times. I learned that the sense of family among the Koori is very strong and includes a much more extended definition of family than is common among western Europeans. There is also a strong requirement that when family need a place to live, you have to provide it – even if means 14 or even 20 people living in a two room apartment!) She began drinking heavily (especially after her eldest daughter dies in an accident) and is beaten up regularly. She supports her sons who are constantly fighting – often for no particularly reason - and then in gaol (I do like the British spelling). I began to have the same sense I did with Once Were Warriors – here is another story of native peoples everywhere or Black Americans with no sense of their past or hope for future. This part of her life continued a long time, and I almost stopped reading the book.

Finally near the end of the book, Ruby begins to find her Aboriginal history on a trip to Alice Springs and to Uluru [Ayer’s Rock]: “…I wished at that moment I’d been born fullblood instead of the degree of caste that I was. I had a longing for the relaxed tribal sense of time and of looking after the earth, but I knew that I enjoyed the luxuries like not having to boil the billy for a cup of tea…the hot shower and watching TV. I’d become soft in the modern world…:” AND “City blacks couldn’t survive there [in the bush] and they couldn’t survive in our half black half white world.” (p. 235 and 236) This is only about 30 pages from the end of the book.

I found it a tough book to read. Not sure if it is a book I would recommend.
A nice bibliography

[Caren · Rating 3 out of 5]

First published in 1988, the memoir has been republished in 2023 as part of the UQP First Nations Classics series. In her introduction to this edition. Nardi Simpson commends the author for having the courage to share the details “of the hardships endured…not the version of the story we naturally like to share.” It is an honest, unembellished account of the impact of poverty and discrimination that impacted on Ruby Langford’s family and the love and resilience that characterised her through those most chaotic and difficult years.

Langford’s story encapsulates the struggle to survive, to feed and provide shelter for her growing family of nine children amid alcoholism, violence, racism, and domestic abuse. In opening herself up to the scrutiny of her readers, Langford detailed the challenges she faced from childhood on a mission, through to her life in the bush, working wherever she could get work, through to her later life in the city. We read the “black wom{a}n’s truth” against the backdrop of Australian culture with a perspective that many of us have never experienced. We have an inside account of the relationship between the police and black youth, between the legal system and the young Aboriginal boys and men who have met its cruelty and the law’s tunnel vision.

What rises above the poverty, the relentless search for food and money to live, is the deep love shared by this family. It sustained Ruby through the grief and heartache she suffered, as well as gave her the strength to write her story in the hope it could “better the relationship between the Aboriginal and white people.” It is not a polished literary manuscript, but nonetheless one that is essential reading to gain an understanding of how difficult it is to “live between two cultures.”

[Rhonda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Couldn't put this down. It's a warm, open-hearted, engaging and mesmerising autobiography by Ruby Langford, proud elder of the Bundjalung people and is set from the 1940s up to early 2000. Reading it gave me more glimpses into the importance of family and kinship ties in First Nation society, and also how those ties play out in everyday life in times of hardship and in happiness. She speaks of the difference between city and country aboriginal life and peoples and of the deeper connections that endure. The book is also crammed with daily life interactions between white and herself, her family and significant others, white, half cast and full blood. There were white people she spoke of with affection but her words 'Some white people you couldn't knock, but you had to find out who, and where they were' within the context of her families interaction with the police and the legal system were remarkably generous given the repeated experiences of bias her family endured specifically, and generally re the deaths in custody and bashings we know are still happening, despite much of popular media reluctance to give it much airspace. This book is neither self pitying nor without humour. It is full of a life lived to the hilt, incredible hardships but also laughter at both herself and those she knew. Of huge value to all of us who need to know more about how life is for First Nation people in Australia rather than what we have been, and contine to be fed.

[Mandy Partridge · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book should be read in our schools, to show young people how recently Australian apartheid occurred. Ruby Langford Ginibi only died in 2011, but her autobiographical story tells of her youth living in dirt-floor sheds made of flattened kerosine tins, in country towns in NSW. Her family split between Aboriginal reserves and missions, and Redfern in inner Sydney, Ruby traveled to where-ever she could find work, or shelter for her and her nine children. Government policy controlling Aboriginal people's lives often dictated her circumstances, and the lives of her family and friends. Ruby and her editor, Susan Hampton, created a narrative which strings the fractured lives of Ruby and her partners around the employment they could find, cutting wood, sewing garments, cleaning and working the railways, while trying to maintain the connection with family and special places. Ruby's intelligence and self-expression lead her to become a vocal activist for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. She traveled widely and saw Australia's wonders, meeting and inspiring people across the country and beyond. She lived to see Aboriginal people win citizenship, the vote, and Land Rights, slowly, place by place.

[Michael Lever · Rating 3 out of 5]

This isn't a book anyone can rate. It isn't well written - but it is an apparently painfully honest account of a life lived on a different world. A world that coexists in time and place with mine, but which is so utterly foreign that it leaves me lost. As an archaeologist I have enough anthropological training to understand that judgement needs to be suspended when observing a foreign culture. But the difficulty here is that the authors life weaves in and out of the dominant colonising culture, almost inevitably failing by its standards at every turn. And the familiarity of the dominant cultural yardsticks makes it all the more difficult not to measure the authors life against them. I read this work primarily to gain insight to a well known local Aboriginal activist. But the work ends before any such activism seems to start. Perhaps that's a lesson to me in itself - not to pick as important those aspects of the authors life in which they engaged forcefully with the colonisers, but rather to accept that what and who they are is a product of their self definition.

[Evelyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ruby Langford is probably the most resilient person you will ever meet or read about. She left school at 15, had her first child at 17, and eventually had nine children. She worked in the outback building fences and living in temporary camps and later in Sydney where she began to read about Koori people who were well-known and had written books and made films. At the same time she learnt more about the deaths in custody and was able to draw from the experience of some of her sons who had been in gaol and on the wrong side of police violence. Writing a book was something she had thought about for a long time and once her remaining children had reached adulthood she realised now was the time. This is a book which showcases the strength of many First Nations people whose lives were affected by ignorance or direct racism from many of the white people with whom they came into contact.

[Joan Garvan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I believe this book was on the school curriculum at one point. Definitely good for any non-indigenous person to read works by people such as Ruby Langford, there is much to learn on the experience of Aboriginal people in Australia. Ruby talks about being sent up the country to live with relations, as were others, so they wouldn't be taken away from their families. She talks about many years later being taken back to her Bundjalung country and the emotions she felt meeting again with long lost relatives. Ruby describe the difficulties in raising her family and from time to time going with her husband to work in the country building fences, living in a tent and eating a sheep brought to them from a local farmer; putting in the stumps was particularly difficult while she was pregnant.

[K Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great that it’s a memoir from a first people of Australia woman. And I understand it’s from a time and place. But that didn’t make me like it any more than I did. Or didn’t. I got about 3/4 of the way through and couldn’t take any more. It felt like each chapter was a description of either a violent man, a sexist man, a stupid man, a childish man, a combination of any of those, or all of the above.

[Stephen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Cant say I really enjoyed reading this, Ruby is clearly an incredibly resilient person who has survived hurdle after hurdle , I began to question the way she survived one violent relationship after another and then often bragged about beating her children and family members.

[Henry · Rating 4 out of 5]

God, just devastating. What a hard life she had. What an incredible force she was! So much suffering and such a hard life. So so tough! Important reading - a Bundjalung woman who lived between Bonalbo (west of Casino), Sydney and northern NSW.

[Clive Parkin]

Would have read for Aust Lit at Uni. Recall enjoying it a great deal.

[Brionee Noonan · Rating 5 out of 5]

We are here and will always be here.

[Ruby · Rating 5 out of 5]

what an incredible life

[Aj · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me two tries and quite a while to get into this book. It is not well written, and the structure is very simple.

Despite all this, I mostly enjoyed it. The most remarkable thing about this book is how common the life recounted in it is. Langford was an incredibly strong woman to have lived through all the hardship and tragedy she did. The material conditions she and her family lived in were, at times, appalling. The ingenuity needed to survive them while raising nine of her own children as well as a few other unofficially adopted ones, would have been immense.