A Rape of the Soul So Profound

The return of the Stolen Generation

Peter Read

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000319507
• Print ISBN:
  9780367717346
• Subtopic: Sociology

A Rape of the Soul So Profound began when a young researcher accidentally came upon restricted files in an archives collection. What he read overturned all his assumptions about an important part of Aboriginal experience and Australia's past. The book ends in the present, 20 years later, in the aftermath of the Royal Commission on the Stolen Generations. Along the way Peter Read investigates how good intentions masked policies with inhuman results. He tells the poignant stories of many individuals, some of whom were forever broken and some who went on to achieve great things. This is a book about much sorrow and occasional madness, about governments who pretended things didn't happen, and about the opportunities offered to right a great wrong.

1
The oral evidence

The first interview¹ I published with an Aboriginal person separated as a child was made with Veronica Cameron in 1976. Veronica Cameron lived near me in Katherine, Northern Territory and we often discussed her time as an institutionalised child at the Catholic children’s home at Snake Bay, Melville Island. Veronica’s account of the institution, like other narratives of the time, was ambiguous-neither resentful nor forgiving, accepting institutionalisation without blame, neither hating nor loving the nuns.

The parents of Topsy Nelson Napurrula were allowed to see their daughter a little more frequently, but the missionaries’ equating traditional ways with ‘rubbish’ was little different from church teaching at Roper River 30 years before. She described her life at Phillip Creek, an Anglican institution near Tennant Creek, in the 1950s.

Topsy Nelson Napurrula related her escape from Phillip Creek with so much zest and hilarity that neither I, nor perhaps at this time Topsy Napurrula herself, understood how forced assimilation had collectively affected a whole people as well as thousands of individuals.

Two years later, in 1979, I was recording personal histories at Erambie Station, near Cowra, New South Wales, where, although I did not realise this at the time, some of the managers had used child removal to threaten and punish the station residents defying their arbitrary authority.

Aileen Wedge’s life history, recorded at Erambie, is now recognisable to me as the first of the horror stories of institutionalisation and its consequences revealed in ‘Bringing Them Home’ eighteen years later. Yet at the time I spoke with her I still was not able to understand the tragedy of Aileen’s life in anything but individual terms. Even her refusal to see her mother who had come to visit her at the Cootamundra Girls Home because she was ‘too black’ did not alert me to the catastrophically negative presentation of Aboriginality which she, and all the girls in the Cootamundra Home, were subjected to.

Joy Williams’ story as well as any exemplifies the terrible long-term destruction which begins at the moment the children are apprehended by the state. There is Joy as bright as a button in the early photographs. At the age of twelve or thirteen she begins cutting her arms to find out what colour her blood is, and she grows up, she says, thinking she is stupid. Whatever else the state took from her, it could not extract her sharp natural intelligence. My friend Joy Williams, the accomplished poet, now holds a Master of Arts in Creative Writing.

All through the 1970s, I now realise, stories like those of Veronica, Topsy, Joy and Aileen had been accumulating, but we still saw only the individual tragedies, not the apocalypse.

’Oh what’s this, cocky tucker?’

(Veronica Cameron)

Every morning (if you were on the cooking roster) you had to go and serve it out … Sometimes the older girls [i.e. those working, not at school] used to have tinned meat. After breakfast there were dishes to wash, or scrub the refectory …

Then we’d go and do the washing, and hanging out the clothes. Then when that’s finished Sister always had some other odd jobs to do, you couldn’t sit down till about ten, that was smoko.

Then we’d go upstairs to do sewing, and if it was washing day for the nuns, we had to wash their big habits, and the brothers’ trousers, and darn the socks, and the other girls did the ironing. And then one of the sisters used to show us how to starch—we didn’t like that.

After lunch the Sisters used to have a bit of a rest, and then we’d do a job that needed doing, like over at the boys the pillow slips needed changing. We had no sheets, only blankets, so we only had to do the pillow slips. It depended on how the morning jobs went. The boys, up till 13, went to school, but later on there wasn’t enough girls and boys for work, so they had to pull us out of school. I was about 13.

Meals were about 5. We had to hurry up because we had to go to the Rosary whether we liked to or not. The meals weren’t very good, maybe a stew sometimes or open some tinned meat. sometimes for dessert there was just bread and milk in a big pot. ‘Oh what’s this-cocky tucker?’ Sometimes there were big tins of fruit.

Recreation hour was from 7 till 8. There was a film sometimes or we did dances like the waltz, or the Dashing White Sergeant, or the girls did the twist.

’Don’t go to that rubbish place’

(Topsy Nelson Napurrula)

Sometimes parents was come sometime, come and see us, and we was bit, bit, you know, we didn’t sometimes, kids, we didn’t much worry about mother and father now. We used to play one place, and stay one place because we was bit used to it.

• [Q]: You’d forget about your father and mother?
• Yeah
• [Q]: So, if there’s a ceremony, or business on, you couldn’t go?
• No.
• [Q]: What about during the day, Topsy? Did the mothers, the women, ever sing then so you sit with them?
• No, not in this place.

Because … because the missionary didn’t allow much, can’t see them business. The missionary was keep telling us:

’Ah, don’t go that rubbish place [i.e. the ceremonial ground] and don’t follow your mother and father. Gotta learn something. Gotta learn this way. Follow this one.’

• [Q]: You mean, follow Christian way?
• Yeah. Christian way. Whitefeller way. Whitefeller way …
• [Q]: Some kids run away from the mission?
• Yeah.
• [Q]: Where did they run to?

Once I ask my mother and father they went away you know. And I went to camp and I ask one of them ladies, old ladies,

• ’Where’s my mum and dad?’
• And they said to me,
• ‘They’re gone’.

I came back, to dormitory. Afternoon time I was thin-kin’, and I couldn’t stop cry. Just thinking for my mum, and cryin’.

Next day I got away.

• [Q]: Run away?
• Yuwayi [yes]
• [Q]: Which way’d you go?
• To Tennant Creek.
• [Q]: Did you walk?
• Yeah.
• [Q]: Your father and mother there? Did you find them?
• Yeah, yeah.
• [Q]: Which one did you go with?
• Nobody.
• [Q]: In the daytime, when you ran away?
• In night.
• [Q]: Night time! By yourself!

And they was looking for me. And some other kids was telling them:

’Topsy’s not here. She’s gone. And she went, to be with his [her] mother and father!’

Because my father took that other thing down to that place, to that old Station, that old Telegraph Station, he took goat there. And that’s why I couldn’t stay ‘ere. So I was keep thinking. And missionary was go down, and tryin’ to come and bring me back.

And I was run away again …

• [Q]: Some places, they lock those dormitories at night so the kids can’t get out?
• Yes, they used to do [that] here.
• [Q]: Did you get out through the window maybe?
• No, I was hiding. They was telling.
• ‘Come on you kids, ready for bed!’
• And I was creeping along.

I ended up at North Ryde

(Joy Williams)

[Q]: What is your earliest memory?

I remember when people used to come and visit us at Bomaderry Home. There was a lady came with her lovely silver belt buckle and it was Auntie Nuggo [Mrs Louisa Ingram] and she always used to wear it with this blue flowery dress and I used to think she was my mother.

[I was at Bomaderry] till I was six. [Then] I went to Lutanda, that’s a [Plymouth] Brethren Home. [At that time] it used to be in Wentworth Falls and I can still remember the train trip. I had a new tartan skirt and a red jumper and a blue coat and red patent leather shoes. I remember the steam train and one of the workers from Bomaderry took me to Lutanda. I remember we stopped at Strathfield because the station master, you know how you get the shrubs along the railway station, he had cut them into animal shapes. I remember an emu and a kangaroo. And I remember getting to Wentworth Falls ‘cause I was given bread and milk, hot bread and milk, and it was raining and there was another little girl there and she was going to be the youngest. It’s funny because I ended up in all the eighteen years, third eldest, so I went from second youngest to third eldest in 42 kids. And I was the only Koori [Aboriginal] kid there.

[Q]: Were you ever told why you were there, instead of Cootamundra [Home specifically for Aboriginal girls]?

No, I was never told of any decision even as I got older. But obviously there was a decision because a few years ago I wrote to the Home and asked why I was there and they sent me back a certificate that was made at Lutanda. I showed it to Mum, who’d signed it, but she told me it didn’t have anything written on it when she signed it, and that was ‘47. It says ‘Reason for admission: a fair skinned child to be taken from association with Aborigines’.

[Q]: What was it like at Lutanda?

Well I’ve been told I should be grateful. Very difficult! Very straight, very religious. I think I was converted six million times-was saved. That entailed another piece of cake on Sunday. Had nice clothes, always had plenty of food. There was always a big changeover of staff so there wasn’t any use getting attached to anyone. [After the Home moved to Sydney] I went to Hornsby Girls High, was told I should be grateful for that.

[Q]: When did you learn that you were Koori?

When I was about eleven. I wondered why I didn’t have any visitors. They had visiting days, the first Saturday of every month, and I used to wait at the top of the gate for Mum. See, at Christmas I was the only kid left in the Home, and they used to sorta draw lots to see who was going to take me home with them, otherwise somebody’d have to stay at the Home to look after me. Practically drew lots. But I wasn’t happy with that, that’s when I started running away. I spent the night-nothing happened though-with this fellow at Hornsby. Next thing they hauled me down to the cop shop at Hornsby, and that’s where they told me. I was given an internal, and I was still a virgin, much to their surprise. And when I got back to the Home, I got a hiding with a butter-pat, and I had to write 500 times ‘God is love’.

The only Koori I’d ever heard of was Albert Namatjira. Look at the cuts on me arms. I started doing that when I was about twelve, ‘cause I wanted to find out what colour me blood was. Nobody wanted me there-only to work. I was looking after the girls all the time when I was sixteen. I grew up thinking I was ugly and stupid. I didn’t think anyone wanted me. I used to watch those girls being fostered out: nobody wanted me. Angry most of the time. Always attention-seeking, whether it was good or bad. That’s why I was converted so many times, they were all over you like a rash.

Then they put me in the Nurses’ Home at Parramatta District. The majority of [Lutanda] girls went to business college in Hornsby, I went to the nurses’ quarters. The first thing I did was to get a picture of the Everly Brothers and stick it on with nail polish on me mirror, ‘cause we were never allowed to do those sort of things [at Lutanda]. They were heathen! And I used to sneak in and put the wireless on, real soft, and hear ‘Diana’ and then I’d have it on ABC and I’d hear Harold Blair, that was nice too, John McCormack. That’s where I got used to Beethoven.

[Q]: How long were you nursing?

Not long! I remember my roster was such that I started off with two days off, so I went back to Lutanda. All the girls went home on their days off, so I went. And they said, ‘No, Joy, you can’t come back here, you live at the nurses’ quarters now, that’s where you have to stay’. I was sixteen, just over. I was put into male surgical, doing dirty pans and trotting round with bottles, a nursing aide more, I think. But I ended up at North Ryde [mental hospital] as a patient. I had a little six months in jail, on remand, and I was offered either to go to North Ryde Psychiatric or a conviction, and I was cunning enough to take North Ryde.

[Q]: What happened at North Ryde?

We were put in pyjamas for seven days, then they worked out our medication. Had to go down to groups twice a day, I think, and they just tried different things like Stellazine, Melsaden, Tryptanol, Tofranil, Largactil-good old Largactil-Mogadon and barbiturates. See when I started nursing one of the senior nurses gave me some amphetamines to keep me awake. I asked her what it was and she said Methedrine and I liked the feel of that. Then I was getting sleeping tablets at night, Phenobarb or something like that. Carbital. Junkie! In groups you’re supposed to talk about your innermost feelings, and I know it now as confrontation therapy. If you said you felt good, everybody’d be on to you till you felt absolutely rotten, so you weren’t allowed to say how you really felt, because you’d end up feeling exactly the reverse. I got pretty clever at that, pretty cluey, and in the small groups we’d turn i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Prologue: The Stolen Generations: Who are we?
• 1 The oral evidence
• 2 The written evidence
• 3 The Stolen Generations
• 4 ‘Like being born all over again’: the establishment of Link-Up
• 5 ‘I don’t mix with Aboriginals, you know’: working with Link-Up clients
• 6 At the edge of the firelight: coming home, partly
• 7 Calling in the accounts
• 8 Sorry Business
• 9 In the courts: ‘In the middle of the ocean, drowning’
• Bibliography
• Endnotes
• Index