Ysola Best

A childhood on the river

Ysola Best was born in 1940, the youngest of the six children of Edith Graham and Stanley Yuke (Hill, 2007). Her father was a Rat of Tobruk and owned and skippered the fishing boat MV Ivy May, and the family lived on the banks of the Nerang River at Brighton Parade, Southport (Hill, 2007). She remembered: "I loved the river. I swam, fished, rowed boats, explored, searched for mud-crabs" (Hill, 2007).

Her grandmother was Jenny Graham, an Elder of the Yugambeh language group, and her ancestors were the Kombumerri families of the Yugambeh speakers (Hill, 2007).

Researching her people

From the 1970s Ysola was one of the first generation of Aboriginal people to research their own family history, collecting written records and photographs (Aird et al., 2021). In the 1980s she recorded her father's surviving brothers, and in 1987 she helped organise a family reunion at Beaudesert that brought together more than 300 people (Aird et al., 2021). Her nephew and his co-authors describe her as "a tenacious researcher" and "a strong believer in oral history" (Aird et al., 2021).

She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Aboriginal Studies from the University of Adelaide in 1990, and later a Graduate Diploma in Community Museum Management from James Cook University (Aird et al., 2021). In the early 1990s the State Library of Queensland employed her to index the Queensland sections of Norman Tindale's genealogies, work that let her help many other families trace their own (Aird et al., 2021). In all, she spent twenty years researching Kombumerri culture "so that it could be passed on to future generations" (Hill, 2007).

Language and the Yugambeh Museum

In the mid-1980s Ysola and her sister Patricia O'Connor asked the University of Queensland for help to bring back the Yugambeh language, and were told it had been dead for three decades (Garcia, 2020). They did not accept that. They went on to help build Queensland's first working research facility for reviving languages (Garcia, 2020).

That work became the Yugambeh Museum, Language and Heritage Research Centre at Beenleigh, which opened in 1995 (Aird et al., 2021; Queensland Government, n.d.). The Beaudesert Times called her "one of the founders of the Museum" (Todd, n.d.).

Bringing the Ancestors home

Ysola was one of four local Traditional Owners, with Mibrie Heath, Patricia O'Connor and Teako Thomson, who negotiated with the University of Queensland for the return of the Ancestors taken from the Broadbeach burial ground (Larkins & Young, 2015). In 1988 they were laid to rest again, close to where they had been taken, in what is now Kombumerri Park (Larkins & Young, 2015).

In 1991 she and Patricia created what the Queensland Government describes as Australia's first war memorial to Indigenous servicemen and women (Queensland Government, n.d.).

Writing

Her writing includes the articles "Bilin Bilin: King or eagle?" (1993), "An uneasy coexistence" in Aboriginal History (1994) and an Aboriginal view of early settler relations on the Logan and Albert rivers (1995) (Aird et al., 2021). Her books are Kombumerri, Saltwater People (1997, with Alex Barlow), the children's book Borobi and His Friends (1998, with Gillian Aird) and Yugambeh Talga: Music Traditions of the Yugambeh People (2005, with Candace Kruger and Patricia O'Connor) (National Library of Australia, n.d.).

Country and legacy

For about twenty years she worked with the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service, bringing Yugambeh language back to places through stories and dual naming, including on the Gold Coast Hinterland Great Walk (Nelson-Carr, 2007). After her death in 2007 the Minister called her "an ambassador for the Yugambeh people" who "helped non-indigenous people see the landscape through different eyes" (Nelson-Carr, 2007).

In 2011 the Yugambeh Museum dedicated its new Kungala (knowing) exhibition and training space to her (Todd, n.d.).