A Secret Country Page 8

  Police were used to find and steal the children. They had orders not to tell the children or their parents where they were being taken. This is a report from the Sydney Morning Herald of January 10, 1925:

  ABORIGINALS

  Children Removed from Parents’ Control Heartrending Scene

  Grafton, Thursday. The circumstances under which four aboriginal children, whose ages ranged from four to 13 years, were separated from their parents have aroused much indignation locally.

  The separation occurred just before Christmas . . . It appeared that the [police] officer’s instructions were to meet the parents at the ferry, and thither [the children] went accompanied by their parents, who did not know that their little ones were to be taken away from them.

  The scene at the parting was heartrending, but the children were taken, despite protests and tears, and conveyed to Kempsey. The children had been properly fed and clothed by the parents. It was a nice Christmas box to give to the parents of the children. The parents were in a terrible state about it . . . It is understood that the action originated with the Aborigines Board in Sydney.70

  The boys were taken to the Kinchella Home for Aboriginal Boys, where they were given rudimentary training as farm labourers. They were then sent to sheep and cattle stations where they were ‘indentured’ and paid in rations and pennies. The girls, who were the majority, were sent to the Cootamundra Training Home for Aboriginal Girls, where they were made into domestic servants, then ‘indentured’ to ‘masters’ in white middle-class homes.

  There is an historic parallel with the use of black slave girls as domestics in the American southern states before emancipation. While books, plays and laments were written about the dispossession and suffering of black Americans, there was no such outpouring in Australia. At best there was the belief that the children were being ‘saved’ from the horrors of a ‘primitive’ upbringing. Not until Alec Morgan’s searing documentary film, Lousy Little Sixpence, made in the early 1980s, was there the beginning of a popular understanding of the real meaning of ‘protection’.

  Indeed, where massacre and disease had failed to destroy Aboriginal life and culture, the Protection Board would provide a final, quieter solution. In 1988 the Aboriginal writer Roberta Sykes was given an official list from 1938 which, she wrote, ‘contained dozens of names and ages of children taken, and the age at which they died’.

  I felt faint as I read through and found I had in my hand perhaps the earliest list of black deaths in custody . . . Girl taken, aged 13, died three years later, aged 16; girl taken, aged 8, died four years later, aged 12; girl aged 13, died aged 14; taken 13, died 18; taken 13, died 17; taken aged 7, died aged 12 . . . and so on.71

  This was known, among imperial historians, as ‘smoothing the pillow on the black man’s death bed’. Once removed from their families, the children who survived would never be allowed to return home. The Aboriginal elders would die off. The reserves would be sold as farm land, and the Aboriginal race would be an anthropological memory, its pale-skinned ‘remnants’ secreted in the lower reaches of the white working class.

  Joy Williams is another woman of the renaissance. Joy never accepted the status of ‘remnant’ and has spent a lifetime searching for a childhood stolen from her. Joy was taken from her mother when she was a baby in the 1940s and sent to an Aboriginal children’s home near Nowra, New South Wales. There her real name, Eileen, was changed to Joy, because ‘there was already one Eileen at the home’. ‘I was one of the fortunate few’, she said, ‘allowed to keep my real birthday.’ At the age of five she was removed to a white children’s home near Sydney. The application form for her admission, submitted by the Aborigines Welfare Board, reads:

  Q: Why is admission sought?

  A: To take the child from association of Aborigines as she is a fair-skinned child.

  I met Joy in 1987 in Wollongong, the steel city south of Sydney. She is an attractive, wistful woman, with a humour as dry as dust and a slightly wicked laugh; and she is fragile. ‘My mother herself was stolen,’ she said. ‘My grandparents lived in Cowra, New South Wales, and they were told that if they went through a Christian wedding, their girls would not be taken away. So they did it, but the Board came and took them anyway and my mum was sent to the Cootamundra training home.

  ‘People would hide their kids. A truck would pull up outside and the officers would get out a bag of boiled lollies, give the kids one, then snatch them. It was kidnapping. I knew one woman who was waiting for her son to come back from the dentist. He’d be fifty-three years old now, and they snatched him when he was nine on the way back from the dentist; and he never saw his mother again.

  ‘Mum was sent straight from the institution to domestic service in Watson’s Bay, Sydney, looking after white kids, cleaning the house, that sort of thing. She was seventeen and got two shillings and sixpence a week. But she never saw the two shillings. That was put away for her, for new clothes. But the Board provided clothes from their stores. So it was practically slavery.

  ‘Not long afterwards I came along. As soon as she’d had me, she was given a hysterectomy at the age of eighteen, and it was involuntary. She didn’t know anything about it, and when I finally met Mum she told me she used to wonder why she didn’t have any more children.’

  ‘Was that unusual?’ I asked.

  ‘For Aboriginal women? No . . . for example, Western Australia was notorious for it.’

  ‘When did you begin to think about your mother?’

  ‘All the other kids in the institution used to get visitors every first Saturday of the month, and I didn’t get visitors. You know how kids fantasise . . . I just thought I was an orphan. When I was told, it was a hell of a shock.

  ‘I suppose I started looking for Mum when I was about eleven. That was after an episode when I ran away from the home and they caught me and rushed me to the hospital to see if I was still a virgin . . . God, which I was! . . . that was the same day I had to write out 500 times “God is love”. I should get eye strain compensation for all the Bible verses I had to write . . . and that’s when they told me I had mud in my veins, that I’d end up as bad as my mother. But hang on, what mother? And what did “bad” mean? When I asked, they said my mother didn’t want me.

  ‘Well, when I found her all those years later, she was living in what I thought was a dreadful little tin hut down on the south coast. It was a terrible moment, because the first thing she did was hit me. Afterwards I found out that she’d come to visit me at the home and they’d reassured her I would be coming back to her. But they were lying; it wasn’t true; and she blamed me for not coming back to her.’

  Joy had a daughter, Julie-Ann, who was adopted while she was in hospital. ‘I was sedated on that day,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t aware I was signing adoption papers. The baby was taken to a Catholic children’s home and, as far as I know, she went to an Italian hairdresser and his family, because she was the right colouring. I found out last year she was married. Not a day passes when I don’t think about her.’

  I asked if she had ever tried to get in touch with her daughter.

  ‘The law in New South Wales says you have to write to the adopting parents to get their permission to see the child, even if the “child” is an adult. I’ve written twice and I haven’t had any answers.’

  ‘Do you think she knows she is Aboriginal?’

  ‘I don’t think so. In the white world it’s a stigma, it’s not normal.’

  In 1989 Joy completed a BA degree in English and History at the University of Wollongong. ‘I never thought I would go to university as I didn’t think someone with my background could do it,’ she said. ‘In the first year I did Europe in the twentieth century . . . needless to say, I failed miserably. I mean, who cares about Ataturk, Mussolini and Hitler when one’s own country has a rich “history” of invasion, dictatorship, genocide and inhumanity? . . . I felt it was a cop-out by the History Faculty and a whitewash of what had happened in Australia.’


  Joy now advises in schools and colleges about the Aboriginal experience, anxious that young whites understand that the Australian past is welded to the present. She identifies racist and stereotypical books in school libraries and advises white teachers on their methods. ‘I am finding’, she said, ‘that perhaps ignorance is one of the bases for racism. However, I refuse to whitewash racism with that knowledge. After all, the white man says that “ignorance is no excuse for breaking the law”: their law, that is.’72

  Joy’s energy and achievements, both as an Aboriginal woman and in the white world, are typical of a growing number of teachers, historians, broadcasters, writers, artists and playwrights from similar backgrounds. Their work is often precise and unsentimental. For example: Ruth Waller’s 1988 oil painting ‘Death in Custody’, with its great black swan of Western Australia and its hanging black human; and Kevin Gilbert’s book, Because a White Man’ll Never Do It, in which the author courageously presents the degradation of Aboriginal Man: ‘He bowed to the fact of his women having to prostitute themselves for the food that would allow the children to survive, or for the alcohol that would yield the oblivion that was so much more desirable than the daily reality.’73

  In 1989 the Aboriginal National Theatre Trust staged its second conference of Aboriginal playwrights, actors, writers, dancers, technicians and directors. The playwright Justine Saunders said, ‘It’s about telling our stories our way, without white interpretations.’ The actress Rhoda Roberts said, ‘The beauty of it is that most black writers don’t write with bitterness.’74 One of Australia’s most commercially successful record albums in 1989 is Building Bridges, which proclaims on its cover, ‘Australia has a black history,’ and includes black and white acts calling passionately for a just settlement between all Australians.

  In 1985 an all-Aboriginal radio station, 8KIN, began broadcasting in stereo from a former convent, the Little Sisters of Jesus, at the foot of the Macdonnell Ranges near Alice Springs. Freda Glynn, the manager, told me of the reaction of the old people the first day on the air. ‘I showed them how to find the station on the dial,’ she said. ‘They began to cry. They were overwhelmed to hear their language on the radio.’ Within four years Freda and her colleagues had extended radio to television, winning the licence for the first direct satellite service to central Australia. Her company, Imparja Television, is wholly owned by Aboriginal organisations such as the land councils and, although established with Federal Government money, has to operate almost entirely on advertising revenue.

  When the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal announced that Imparja had won the licence, an editorial in the Darwin newspaper, the Sunday Territorian, attacked the decision as ‘a cynical exercise’ and said that it was ‘of such simple-minded imbecility that it almost defies description or understanding’.75 The Northern Territory Government appealed against the decision all the way to the Federal Court, and lost. Only a week before Imparja was due to go on the air, the Northern Territory administration reneged on a guarantee to buy $A2 million worth of services from the new licence holder. With only three days to go, the opposing Northern Territory television station in Darwin, owned by the billionaire Kerry Packer and the lawyer Malcolm Turnbull, asked the Broadcasting Tribunal to review Imparja’s licence and to enquire into its resources.

  In spite of this, they went on the air on schedule. In less than eight months they hired and trained staff, equipped studios, assembled the technology, bought programmes, decided schedules and found advertisers. With the help of white technicians and administrators, an Aboriginal television service now broadcast to a third of the Australian continent, an area the size of Europe. The audience is about 85,000 and it is growing. Imparja’s charter – to nurture the Aboriginal culture and provide material appropriate for a majority white audience – is undoubtedly an historic advance in race relations. But its major achievement is its very existence as a source of Aboriginal images of pride and self respect. The first Aboriginal current affairs programme, Urrepeye – the messenger – is broadcast in six languages with ten interpreters providing English subtitles.

  But there is a price. Aboriginal linguist Eve Fesl has described the effects of television as ‘like cultural nerve gas’. ‘You sit and watch it, you feel good while you watch it and all the while it’s destroying your culture and you don’t realise it,’ she said. ‘It’s especially devastating if Aboriginal children have no input but English programmes all day.’76 With only enough resources to make a few programmes of its own, and the need to survive on advertising revenue alone, Imparja has little choice but to show re-runs of Dallas, Dynasty and Sale of the Century. Like white parents, black parents are concerned about the influence of commercial television on their young. Some Aboriginal communities have rejected it; Maryvale, a community of 250 which has never known broadcast television, has installed a satellite dish on the understanding that the only sets will be kept in the school. Other communities have set up their own production units, making videos for local viewing. Freda Glynn is understandably angry that the Federal Government has forced Imparja into commercial competition, while underwriting a television network that promotes the language and culture of Australia’s immigrant communities.

  In its search for funds Imparja, after much agonising, accepted alcohol commercials, while at the same time running a campaign called ‘Beat the Grog’, aimed at the most virulent disease among Aboriginal people. When the expected revenue did not materialise, a commercial decision was taken to drop the alcohol advertisements.

  Still, what Freda Glynn remembers as ‘a foolish racial ideal’ has brought entertainment and information to thousands of isolated people. 8KIN’s Radio Bushfire series, aimed at schoolchildren, has delivered full school attendances on the one day of the week it is on the air.77 In Alice Springs there is a three-year training scheme to put black people into television jobs, and where local programmes are made 70 per cent of the people are Aboriginals. They include men in big hats and big boots and women who laugh easily with each other. There are no grey suits, not yet. For those of us who remember Jay Creek and the Palms, their achievement is a marvel.

  On January 26, 1988 white Australia celebrated the 200th anniversary of the British invasion. It was midsummer. From on board a yacht in Sydney Harbour the wine and food correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald sent this report of the ‘ultimate party’:

  Nothing I’ve seen, not Churchill’s funeral, not Aida at Luxor, nothing, no sight in 52 years can match this. A thousand masts, kilometres of rigging disposed. across the junction of sky and sea like a giant’s set of fiddlesticks . . . There are polite luncheon parties, dainty teas in some of the posher silvertail residences. But the real people are assembled in euphoric proximity . . . cheering each passing vessel, exulting in the spectacle . . .

  To hell with the knockers. If they don’t understand that any nation needs its rituals, its ceremonials, its opportunities to show how well-behaved it can be when given the chance and the stimulus . . . then there is no hope for it.78

  The ‘knockers’, most of whom were the original people of Australia, had not assembled in ‘euphoric proximity’ to the ‘real people’. They were well used to being told to go to hell. They were pleased, of course, that the ‘real people’ were ‘well behaved’, as this had not always been the case.

  They came from Pilbara in the north-west, Alice Springs in the centre and Tasmania in the far south, from Perth on the Indian Ocean and Townsville on the Pacific. They travelled in convoys of ‘freedom buses’ painted red, black and gold, and in cattle trucks and old Toyotas. At Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory, John Christopherson, the deputy chairman of the Northern Lands Council, addressed a roadside meeting of his people. ‘This is serious business,’ he said. ‘People from all over Australia will be watching us. You mob are taking stories, and if you’re going to take a story, it should be a sober one. If you take a drunken one, you might as well leave it at home.’79

  The temperature reached 110ºF.
Radiators blocked, head gaskets cracked. Eight buses stopped, but only one was abandoned. The hum of the didgeridoo and the resonance of clapping sticks generated energy; but the old people, who had insisted upon going, were tested severely. One of them died on the road to Adelaide, and the convoy faltered, consumed with grief. Normally Aboriginal people go back home to mourn; but Frank Chulung, Chairman of the Kimberley Land Council, said they would go on to Sydney ‘because this trip means so much to us and to all Aboriginal people in this country’.80

  The old men coming from Menindee, New South Wales, remembered well the previous anniversary of white conquest, known as the ‘sesqui-centenary’. This was ‘celebrated’ on January 26, 1938 with a re-enactment of Captain Arthur Phillip’s landing at Sydney. A commentator of the Australian newsreel company, Cinesound, described the scene:

  History flames into life as the dramatic scenes of the first landing at Circular Quay are re-enacted at Farm Cove . . . We see the natives gathering . . . to ward off the invaders just as they then did. Before Captain Phillip lands, Lieutenant Ball takes a boat-load of marines ashore to keep the natives in check.

  In the face of menacing savages, the white men advance up the shore of a new land . . .

  (Voices) ‘Is there any likelihood of an ambush?’

  ‘See that none of them remain skulking about.’

  Now Phillip himself lands. So a handful of Englishmen took possession of a continent! A vast unknown primeval land.