stolen generations – Michmutters

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Australia

Sharon and Deidre had never met — the institution that brought about their father’s abuse connected them

Sharon and Deidre had never met — the institution that brought about their father's abuse connected them

Sharon Shillingsworth and Deidre Bolt are sisters in their 50s but have only just met for the first time.

WARNING: This story contains details of an Aboriginal person who has died and has been used with the permission of family.

Their separation was influenced by intergenerational trauma which stemmed from their father’s experiences as a child of the Stolen Generations.

It took the women years to track each other down, and while they had been connecting over the phone, a face-to-face meeting had eluded them until now.

It was a pivotal moment for both women; Ms Shillingsworth said she held her sister de ella for what she felt like “the longest time”.

Their father, John Carroll, was one of up to 600 Aboriginal boys who lived in the notorious Kinchela Boys Home in Kempsey on the NSW Mid North Coast.

The institution operated under the authority of the state’s Aborigines Protection Board and forcefully removed Indigenous children from their families and communities from 1924 to 1970.

young boys standing in a line outdoors
The Kinchela Boys Home in Kempsey opened in 1924 and operated up to 1970.(Supplied: Kinchela Boys Home Aboriginal Corporation)

Like many of the boys in the home, Mr Carroll’s life was plagued with psychological and physical trauma from the abuse he endured in the institution.

Ms Shillingsworth said the trauma her father suffered at the home affected his adult life.

“He was in a lot of turmoil, he basically drank to numb the pain; it was just heartbreaking learning what he went through,” she said.

Her father left her mother and later had three other children with another partner, one of whom was Ms Bolt.

‘They were lost’

While the siblings knew of each other’s existence, they had never had the opportunity to meet or contact each other until after Mr Carroll’s death in 2016.

“Our brother Neil hired a solicitor to find us; we had known about them [John, Neil and Deidre] and they had known about us, but they were lost,” Ms Shillingsworth said.

A list of young boys names that attended the boys home
A list of boys who were in the Kinchela Boys Home is displayed at the healing forum, including Deidre and Sharon’s father.(ABC News: Arianna Levy)

The solicitor managed to track down the siblings and connected them through Facebook.

“We’ve been talking over the phone for a few years now but had never seen each other face to face,” Ms Bolt said.

Ms Shillingsworth said with her sister living in Forster-Tuncurry and herself living “in the scrubs of Trundle” in central west NSW, linking up while also working six days a week was difficult.

“We were getting old too, I’m 57 and Deidre’s 53, we knew something had to happen soon,” Ms Shillingsworth said.

The meeting was facilitated by a charity set up to help the survivors of the Kinchela Boys Home and their families.

Operating with a collective goal of healing the trauma and intergenerational trauma suffered in the home, Kinchela Boys Home Aboriginal Corporation (KBHAC) holds annual healing forums to help survivors and their descendants connect.

A metal gate with the words 'boys home' welded to the top.
Boys were stripped of their names and given numbers at Kinchela Boys Home.(Supplied: National Museum of Australia/Katie Shanahan)

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Australia

How the Cherbourg Marching Girls moved in step from an Aboriginal mission to sporting history

How the Cherbourg Marching Girls moved in step from an Aboriginal mission to sporting history

Aboriginal sporting history has been brought to life in a new book that details how a group of women from a south-east Queensland mission nearly won a national title in the most popular female sport of the era.

Faced with a future working in heavily controlled conditions in the 1950s, a group of young Aboriginal girls from Cherbourg held their head high and marched.

Marching was the lead sport for Australian women at the time, with participants dressing up in white boots, skirts, sashes and formal hats to perform at agricultural shows, city parades and for visiting dignitaries.

Teams competed against each other on weekends and were judged on their timing, uniforms, synchronization and performance.

On the government-controlled mission at Cherbourg, it was the only sport available to the young women.

A black and white photo of Indigenous girls in the Cherbourg marching girls with their trophies in Melbourne 1962.
Aunty Lesley Williams [second from right] and her team received trophies in Melbourne during 1962.(Supplied)

A sense of pride

Aunty Lesley Williams began marching in Queensland’s only Indigenous troupe in 1957 when she was just 11.

The sense of pride gave her as a young person who had been denied her culture and freedom was something she would never forget.

“We were told you are going to have this career. Stop practicing your culture. You can’t speak your language,” Aunty Lesley said.

“If you look back to this point in time, it was about controlling this group of people.”

Dressed in uniforms created in the community, the Cherbourg Marching Girls went on to become the best in Queensland in the six years they competed, and then went even further to place second at the national championships.

“We had a lot of fun. We were so proud,” Aunty Lesley said.

“We’d travel around on the back of the settlement truck that carted wood, flour and meat down from the slaughter yard to the butcher shop.

“When it was time for us to travel, it was scrubbed down, seats were put on it and we didn’t care because we wanted to travel and be part of what was happening in the wider world.”

A group of Aboriginal women wearing blue skirts, red tops and hats
A photo of the Cherbourg marching girls in 1958.(Supplied)

why marching mattered

Aunty Lesley, her sister Sandra Morgan and a Cherbourg committee, have worked alongside co-authors Professor Murray Philips and Dr Gary Osmond from the University of Queensland to document the history in a book entitled, Marching With A Mission: Cherbourg’s Marching Girls.

Professor Phillips studied sport history and said she was researching in Cherbourg when the idea was born.

“We had just finished the day and [were] walking to the car when one of the female elders said, ‘When are you going to tell our story?’

“And we swung around and said, ‘What story is that?,’ and they said, ‘The marching girls’, and that’s how it started.

“The key drivers at Cherbourg are some women elders and they were giving us all this information about the men’s sport, Eddie Gilbert, Frank Fisher and all these other high-profile male athletes.”

The book’s storyline follows the history of marching, the opportunities it offered and how the sport shaped their lives.

A group of women stand behind a woman speaking at a podium.
Aunty Lesley, surrounded by former marching girls, launches the book at the State Library of Queensland.(Supplied)

Professor Phillips said it was an important period for Queensland First Nations women.

“You’ve gone from that era of protection to assimilation, and these girls really rode the crest of that wave,” she said.

“For many of these women, this was the first opportunity to get out of Cherbourg and see the opportunities that lay beyond.”

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Categories
Australia

Melbourne’s Fitzroy hides a past as a hub for the Aboriginal civil rights movement

Melbourne's Fitzroy hides a past as a hub for the Aboriginal civil rights movement

When Aunty Denise McGuinness looks up and down Gertrude Street in Fitzroy, she sees her community’s history everywhere.

“Fitzroy’s so significant to Aboriginal people … if you come from Perth, anywhere, you come straight to Fitzroy,” she says.

The inner-Melbourne suburb is now dominated by expensive houses, trendy bars and designer homewares, in recent years garnering a reputation as a hipster haven.

But it’s still home to the large public flats where Ms McGuinness lived as a girl.

Shop fronts line Gertrude Street, viewed under cloudy gray skies.
Fitzroy’s recent gentrification has transformed Gertrude Street, but a new project is bringing its history back into focus.(ABC News: Joseph Dunstan)

Through the 1960s, 70s and 80s, Fitzroy and the surrounding suburbs were a meeting place for Aboriginal people who’d left behind restrictive lives on missions or emerged from state institutions, searching for family links the government had tried so hard to severe.

“We were discriminated against, there was only one pub that would let us drink, and that was the Builders Arms,” ​​Ms McGuinness recalls.

The Builders Arms Hotel, photographed under gray skies from across the road.
Several stories shared in the project involve life-changing meetings at the Builders Arms Hotel.(ABC News: Joseph Dunstan)

Now, the stories of laughter, tears and powerful civil rights victories born on this part of Wurundjeri land are free for all to hear, through a truth-telling phone app.

Named Yalinguth, after the Woi Wurrung word for “yesterday”, the app follows your GPS location, producing rich audio stories that reveal the recent history of the land you’re walking on.

An artistic display of a street map, with a white drop indicating the user's location and large bubbles to mark story zones.
A map marked by bubbles invites the user to step into the stories of elders.(Supplied)

Wander past the Builders Arms Hotel, and Uncle Jack Charles comes through the headphones, telling you how he discovered Melbourne’s Indigenous community inside as a teenager.

Stroll down to Atherton Gardens, and the late Uncle Archie Roach’s haunting lyrics and story invites you to reflect on the cruel cost of the Stolen Generations.

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Categories
Australia

Nukunu woman Amy Daniel on an uphill battle to connect to her Indigenous culture

A girl holding a Quandong and Emu feather earring.

Amy Daniel grew up with constant questions about her heritage and culture, something she still faces to this day.

“A lot of people question me and say, ‘You’re too white to be Aboriginal. You’re too pretty to be Aboriginal. You don’t speak like one’,” she said.

She said initially it made her angry and left her questioning herself, but now she used it to educate others.

“I take that opportunity to teach people that no matter how much milk you put in a cup of tea, you’re still a bit black on the inside.”

The 23-year-old Nukunu woman first found out she was Indigenous while in high school.

She was born and raised in Queanbeyan but her descendants are from Nukunu country, near Port Augusta in South Australia.

Ms Daniel recently began connecting more deeply to her culture after moving to Wagga Wagga, in southern New South Wales.

“I grew up painting a lot so I found a bit of a connection there and loved learning more about my culture,” she said.

“Then I moved here [Wagga Wagga]. I met a few of our friends and they taught me more about the importance of being on country.

“They’re helping me find my way and helping me find my story.”

A woman smiling and wearing quandong and emu feathers.
Amy Daniel is a Nukunu woman who grew up in Queanbeyan.(ABC Riverina: Romy Stephens)

a long journey

Ms Daniel always felt a sense of connection to her Indigenous roots.

“When I do things on country, when I paint, when I make jewelery and weave, I am so calm and peaceful,” she said.

“My mum always said when I was growing up [that] I was the most impatient person ever.

“But she was amazed that I’d sit down for six hours straight and do 1,000 dots on a piece of paper without moving.”

A pair of football boots with Aboriginal art painted on them.
Amy Daniel grew up painting Indigenous artwork.(Supplied: Amy Daniel)

But Ms Daniel said connecting to her culture has come with its challenges, such as being questioned because of the color of her skin.

She said it had also been difficult to connect to culture, because she did not grow up on Nukunu country and was not exposed to it from a young age.

“Now I wish I would’ve seen more stories or read more about young ladies or men who are on the fairer skin side, and read about their journey into finding their culture,” she said.

“Maybe even doing it with someone and knowing that you’re not really alone.”

A woman wearing quandong and emu feather earrings leans against a gum tree with her head down and smiles.
Amy Daniel began exploring her culture more when she moved to Wagga Wagga.(ABC Riverina: Romy Stephens)

Reconnecting to ‘vital’ culture

Ms Daniel is not alone in her journey to connect to culture.

The Coota Girls Aboriginal Corporation has been helping descendants of Stolen Generations survivors reconnect to their culture.

It has managed a project, called Nurture Our Youth, to address intergenerational trauma caused by the forced removal and institutionalization of family members.

Wailwan and Gamilaroi woman Meagan Gerrard’s grandmother was in the Cootamundra Domestic Training Home for Aboriginal Girls, in southern NSW, for almost 15 years.

A woman smiling and looking in the distance towards the right.
Meagan Gerrard’s grandmother spent 15 years at a training home for Aboriginal girls.(Supplied: Coota Girls Aboriginal Corporation)

Ms Gerrard said practicing culture was forbidden in the home, which impacted generations to come.

“So much was taken from us — we lost language, we lost that connection to culture,” she said.

Two boys wearing caps standing next to each other and smiling.
Descendants of Stolen Generations survivors are being supported as they reconnect to culture.(Supplied: Coota Girls Aboriginal Corporation)

“That journey back to reconnecting to those vital things as Aboriginal people, it’s a hard journey.”

Ms Gerrard said the project would allow descendants to take part in cultural gatherings, which involved activities like weaving, eating bush tucker and yarning.

“To support them to reconnect to culture, to learn language, and to come together as a community,” she said.

“To embrace that would be such a powerful thing for them to experience.”

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