Victorian Aboriginal elder Joy Wandin Murphy got so fed up with being called a "dirty black" at primary school that one day she ran home, grabbed a pumice stone and rubbed her elbows until blood poured out.

"As I bled, I thought, 'What is wrong with these people? My blood is the same as theirs'," said Ms Murphy, who is known as Aunty Joy. She ran back to school and told her headmaster "to tell those kids that my blood is the same as theirs".

Aunty Joy Wandin Murphy reading her second children's book, Wilam: A Birrarung Story, to her grandson, Tate Murphy. Credit:Justin McManus

"I was proud to be black, but I was never dirty," said Ms Murphy, a Wurundjeri elder and an adjunct professor from Swinburne University, who recalled her mother boiling the copper and "washing her heart out".

This year she published her second bilingual children's picture book, Wilam, A Birrarung Story, in English and in Woiwurrung, the language of the Wurundjeri people. Home is wilam and birrarung is the Yarra in Woiwurrung.