Remembered By Heart: An Anthology of Indigenous Writing Read online

  Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are respectfully advised that deceased people are referenced in this publication.

  Publisher’s note: Variations in spelling are consistent with the original publications.

  Every reasonable effort has been made to obtain permissions for all copyright work. Please forward enquiries to Fremantle Press.

  First published 2014 by FREMANTLE PRESS

  25 Quarry Street, Fremantle, Western Australia 6160

  www.fremantlepress.com.au

  Copyright foreword © Sally Morgan, 2014.

  Copyright individual stories © individual contributors, 2014.

  The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to Fremantle Press.

  Cover illustration by Sally Morgan.

  Cover design by Ally Crimp.

  Printed by Everbest Printing Company, China.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-publication data is available on request

  ISBN: 978-1-922089-77-9

  Fremantle Press is supported by the State Government through the Department of Culture and the Arts.

  CONTENTS

  Sally Morgan

  Foreword

  Stephen Kinnane

  Tracks

  Alice Nannup

  Life in Moore River

  Hazel Brown

  Growing Up Around Needilup

  Alice Bilari Smith

  In Those Days

  May O’Brien

  My Story

  Jukuna Mona Chuguna

  My Life in the Desert

  Joan Winch

  My Mother

  Lola Young

  Growing Up With Family

  David Simmons

  Hiding

  Eric Hedley Hayward

  Opportunity

  Rene Powell

  Mission Days

  Sally Morgan

  A Black Grandmother

  Tjalaminu Mia

  Boorn — Taproot

  Kim Scott

  Of Aboriginal Descent

  Bronwyn Bancroft

  Crossing the Line

  Biographical Notes

  FOREWORD

  The Native Welfare controlled every aspect of your life in those days. It was very hard for Aboriginal people then and I learned very young that I’d have to be determined if I wanted to get anywhere.

  Elder Joan Winch

  This moving collection of youthful memories touches on a broad sweep of history and includes people from many different Aboriginal countries. The stories have been shared in the hope they will make a difference to people’s understanding of the past, and in the belief that a just future can be created for all.

  These are powerful stories of survival that share pain, humour, grief, endurance, life experience and hope. Taken as a whole, they detail the devastating impact of many decades of repressive legislation on the lives of individuals and families. Legislation which, while aimed at ‘protecting’ Aboriginal people, obliterated any access to basic human rights.

  By 1911, each state and territory in Australia, except Tasmania, had passed legislation giving government officials absolute control over the lives of Aboriginal communities. The powers granted under the various Acts made it possible for officials to legally control people’s movements. To this end, areas of land were set aside as reserves, government settlements and missions. Aboriginal people were forced to live in such places. Segregation was further supported by the criminalisation of acts of resistance. In Western Australia, it was a criminal offence to resist internment on a reserve or settlement. Leaving a place of internment without first obtaining permission left an individual open to prosecution and arrest. Nationally, the far-reaching powers of the various Acts ensured segregation was a reality of life for Aboriginal people in Australia. Elder Hazel Brown recounts the experience of her mother:

  My mother was brought down from Carnarvon on a cattle boat. They kept them down in the bottom of the vessel and didn’t let ’em come up top. It was a rough trip and they all got sick. From Fremantle they took ’em to Balladonia Mission, and then a few weeks later took ’em all the way to Carrolup. The white people musta thought they were gunna try to run away back to where they come from.

  In Western Australia, it was the Aborigines Act 1905 that sanctioned the removal of Aboriginal children from their families, providing for their institutionalisation — often thousands of kilometres away — in missions, settlements and reserves. This process shattered families and communities, disconnecting people from their country and culture and leaving a legacy of confusion and despair that is still being dealt with today. Stephen Kinnane, whose grandmother was removed under such legislation from Miriwoong country in the Kimberley, writes:

  They did not see the hole they were tearing. They did not see they were taking someone’s daughter, someone’s grand-daughter, someone’s sister, and someone’s future mother. They studied my grandmother, but they did not see her and they did not see the chain of events they were setting in place.

  The rationale for removing children from their families was often based on the need for education or the provision of better living conditions. With few exceptions, the education was minimal. Girls were trained to be domestic servants, boys to be farm labourers or station hands. In addition, while the living conditions in places of internment varied, they were often worse than the situation from which the children had been removed, supposedly for ‘their own good’. Elder Alice Nannup was removed from her family at twelve years of age and sent to Moore River Settlement. Alice’s mother had been a wonderful cook, and Alice records her disgust at what she saw when asked to help out in the settlement kitchen.

  For the soup they’d cook up these awful sheep heads. First they’d skin them, but never take the eyes out, then they’d split them down the middle, give them a quick rinse and throw them in the copper. Sometimes those sheep heads had bott-fly in their noses but they wouldn’t worry about that. They’d just throw it in and we’d see that in our soup.

  The stories in this anthology reflect the changing times and policies over the decades. Historically there had been a view that Aboriginal people were a ‘dying race’ and it was only a matter of time before Australia’s Indigenous population would be extinct. When it became clear this was not the case, that rather than decreasing, the Aboriginal population was increasing, government administrators became fearful of what they termed ‘a social menace’. In 1937 the Conference of Commonwealth and State Aboriginal Authorities decided that ‘The destiny of the natives of aboriginal origin, but not of the full blood, lies in their ultimate absorption by the people of the Commonwealth …’ Consequently, in the late 1930s government policy moved in the direction of assimilation. The ultimate aim of assimilation was the extinguishment of all cultural ties between Aboriginal people and country, the end of the kinship system, the death of law, language and identity. In other words, cultural genocide. In practical terms, this meant the lives of Aboriginal people were even more tightly governed. The Bringing Them Home (1997) report notes:

  … assimilation was a highly intensive process necessitating constant surveillance of people’s lives, judged according to non-Indigenous standards.

  David Simmons, a Nyoongah person from the south-west of Western Australia, comments on his own consciousness of such surveillance.

  In 1951 the Native W
elfare Officers were still active. My younger school days were occasionally spent hiding from the Native Welfare. My mother insisted that I go to school, but there was always that dread that I would never come home from school because of Native Welfare.

  Tjalaminu Mia, also a Nyoongah person from the south-west of Western Australia, recalls the suffering she experienced under the assimilation process, while living at Sister Kate’s Children’s Home.

  Its aim was to turn lighter skinned Aboriginal kids into white citizens and I suppose it was part of what used to be called the White Australia Policy, because the politicians of the day wanted this land to be white. It was a very racist policy because they expected us to forget all about our families and our culture and take our place in white society instead.

  The deep thread running through this collection and linking each story with the next is one of pride. Pride in family, community and survival. Pride in being Aboriginal. Bronwyn Bancroft captures this in the final paragraph of her story:

  I am proud of who I am. I am proud of where I’ve come from. I’m proud of what I’ve done and I’m proud of where I’m going.

  Anyone reading these stories will come to understand there is a lot for each person in this collection to be proud of.

  Sally Morgan, 2014

  Stephen Kinnane

  TRACKS

  My grandmother’s skin was concealed when she was a small child. I am of my grandmother’s skin. Her skin leads to my mother’s skin, and my mother’s skin to mine. My skin is olive and supple. Cuts do not heal quickly but dissolve slowly into raised scars devoid of pigment. The scars last. They show. But this is not the skin I am talking of. I was reunited with my skin when I returned to my grandmother’s country, Miriwoong country. Jalyirri is my skin. It is how I am placed. It is my skin of reunion. My grandmother was placed by her skin, Nangarri, and then taken away to a place where her skin meant nothing more than colour.

  A dissecting black border was ruled north–south through the Kimberley, slicing my grandmother’s country in two. It cut its way along Empire-red maps dividing the northern frontier into federated Western Australia and the Northern Territory. White people had been in my grandmother’s country less than twenty years when she was born. The Europeans saw these countries simply — pastured or rocky, fertile or infertile, inhabited, but from where they stood, under utilised. They saw only two seasons in the East Kimberley, Wet and Dry. The Dry is seen as hot and dusty. The Wet is even hotter, but the heat is broken by the rains. The Miriwoong identify four seasons: Rain, Cold, Windy and Hot. Come the Rain season the country sings into life in rich greens, reds and purples. There is plenty of food and it is Law-time; time to catch up with the mob and rejuvenate the land. The ground is always damp, and can become one vast glass-like flood plain when the afternoon rains thunder down.

  Tracks are harder to follow come Rain time. In the Windy season it is cooler and there is no rain. Life swells around the larger water supplies where there’s food and business. Tracks last a long time in the dry red earth and the nights are clear and fresh. But the ruling guddia saw the world only as wet or dry, black or white. Within a world of ‘Empire’ they marvelled at their clinical brilliance. They had reduced the world into discrete, simple particles of matter. But it is not so simple. My grandmother’s skin had held the story of over two thousand generations of her people’s life in their country and then the generations of others. She was born of the crossing of this vertical black line. It cut through her country and into her life.

  My grandmother was broken down into ‘authentic’ parts, half white, half black, but never seen as wholly human. She was the product of the Colonial Frontier to be mapped, traced, labelled and categorised. They called her a ‘half-caste’. They thought they had her pegged. But then they didn’t know what to do with someone who didn’t fit within their neat lines of demarcation so they decided to remove her from their picture. When they took her away they thought they were solving a problem. They thought they were setting the picture straight, clean of their own sins, free of imperfections. They did not see the hole they were tearing. They did not see they were taking someone’s daughter, someone’s grand-daughter, someone’s sister, and someone’s future mother. They studied my grandmother, but they did not see her and they did not see the chain of events they were setting in place. They did not think she would remember what had happened to her, or that others would share in this story. They did not think we would one day be leafing through the personal files they created about our grandmother, watching back, as her life was tracked and controlled across those pages for almost half a century. Cuts leave scars. Scars leave tracks. Tracks can be followed.

  Lake Argyle stretches the walls of what was once the giant Ord River valley. Tourist brochures boast that it is the largest man-made lake in Australia, containing nine Sydney Harbours nestled neatly within paperbark-covered hills. It is classified as an inland sea, an unnatural version of the ancient sea that ‘explorers’ had coveted and mythologised as they searched in vain through an imagined landscape. In reality it is neither a lake nor a sea. A concrete and rock dam wall wedged in a gorge on the Ord River tenuously holds back this enormous body of water.

  Today, beneath the massive lake’s surface the land lies transfixed, cold and silent. Like the hull of a giant sunken ocean liner, my grandmother’s country lies trapped in time, holding the memories of thousands of lifetimes, and a moment of disaster when the waters flooded in. If you turn south at the ruins of the old homestead though, and search along the silty floor, you will pick up a trail. These are my grandmother’s tracks leading silently out of her country. Although it is dark beneath the silent waters and the tracks are very old, look carefully and you will see them leading all the way back to a place called Wild Dog.

  Friday 29 June 1906. Wild Dog Police Station. Before they took her away my grandmother’s name was Gypsy. She had been taken off a cattle station called Argyle. My grandmother’s older half-brother’s name was Toby. He had been brought into Wild Dog from the Ord River Cattle Station, which was further south. They waited together. Gypsy was recorded as being five years of age and Toby as being six. They could have been older. They could have been younger. Over the years their ages would fluctuate across the pages of the files that were created about them as figures of authority took wild guesses about their beginnings. For certain, they were too young to be away from their families. They were two small children being held over by the Kimberley police pending their removal. It was all matter-of-factly noted in the Police and Aborigines Department files. The lean sentences, tidy phrases and abbreviated words of bureaucracy were used to begin their story. A simplistic system was in place to decide their future. Although the sentences might be spare, reading these records is like deciphering a code. To be chained and dragged a hundred miles was described as being ‘escorted’. To live in a camp with your family was deemed to be ‘neglected’. To have fairer coloured skin than your mother meant ‘suitable for removal’.

  Government enquiries into the removal of children use dates in their calculations of the numbers of Aboriginal kids taken away from their families. The dates coincide with the passing of legislation when this practice was proclaimed legal. However, these official dates are arbitrary and misleading. From the time the guddia first entered this country Aboriginal children were taken. To really understand what happened, and how it impacted on the lives of Aboriginal communities, you have to listen to stories that have been handed down.

  I passed around my grandmother’s photograph in the park in Kununurra, the one of her soon after she entered the Mission. In the photo she was a chubby little five-year-old. When she smiled her eyes were all squinty in the sunlight. She was short for her age, fair skinned, big hipped and skinny legged. She had a big birthmark on her left thigh, and a head that was too big for her body. She was a funny-looking little kid, and she was a long way from her home. I wasn’t sure if it was permitted to show the photograph so widely, but Nangala said enough
time had passed for cheeky spirits not to be a worry. The photo was of great interest and all the women had cooed and sighed, and laughed too, at the sight of my grandmother dressed up in mission clothes.

  My grandmother and her brother Toby were some of the first children taken from the East Kimberley by government authorities, but not long after them the yearly toll started to rise. Many of the women sitting in the park had experienced the trauma of having their children taken away. Some of them were younger than my mother and had had their children taken from them as recently as the 1970s and 1980s, when they were sent as babies to Princess Margaret Hospital for treatment, and once there were adopted out without the women’s consent. I think this is one of the reasons why they were so welcoming; it was not just about my grandmother, but about every child that was taken away. I could come back and be placed because missing children and their stories are not forgotten. One aunty told me she is still waiting for her son to come back. It is the same in the south, where too many older women waited their entire lives without ever being reunited with their children. This is our community history and an unresolved daily reality for many Aboriginal families.

  The Swan Native and Half-caste Mission had been operating in the village of Middle Swan for at least seventeen years when my grandmother and her brother arrived. On the morning the SS Bullarra docked at Fremantle, the children were met at the wharf by the missionary Miss Jenny, who ran the Mission along with her sister, Effie Mackintosh.

  Perhaps given a coat or something warmer to wear, the children were taken by steam train on the long journey to Midland Junction. I can’t imagine what they made of the train, of its steam, its size and its thunderous noise.

  Built on a pastured ridge, in cleared bushland, the Swan Mission grounds sloped gently towards Jane Brook, which swelled with paperbarks and reeds. Beyond the brook, hidden by the paperbarks and accessible by a muddy track, were the much more substantial buildings of the Swan Boys Orphanage and St Mary’s Swan Parish Church. Although possibly the first establishment at the site, the Swan Native and Half-caste Mission would always be the poorer of the two institutions, hanging on at the fringes and beyond view.