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Tripping Over Feathers: Scenes in the Life of Joy Janaka Wiradjuri Williams: A Narrative of the Stolen Generations
No full textJoy Janaka Wiradjuri Williams was a member of the Aboriginal Stolen Generations. She was taken from her mother at birth and put into a home for white girls. As an effected adult, she spent ten years in court suing the State Government for negligence. Not only did Joy lose the case, but lost two separate appeals. Several years later she was found dead, alone, in her Primbee flat in New South Wales. In this book, Peter Read - an award-winning author and prominent historian of Aboriginal history - tells Joy Williams's story, which exemplifies the detrimental effects of Aboriginal children removed from their mothers at birth. Joy suffered abuse, anger, violence, and mental illness. The book is a new style of biography, written in direct speech and dramatized, often using Joy's own words, with a reverse chronology from death to birth. Tripping over Feathers offers rare historical insight into the institutions, street life, and Indigenous and urban culture from 1942 to 2006. Also included are many of Joy Janaka Wiradjuri Williams's poems
Reanimating Lost Landscapes: Bringing Visualisation to Aboriginal History
Get PDFIn Public History Review volume 11, Peter Osborne called for the methodologies of environmental history to be brought more securely and more imaginatively into public history. Environmental history by its own definition, he argued, encompassed Indigenous, ethnic and Anglo-Celtic histories, and heritages natural and built, material and intangible. I believe too that we public historians need to Incorporate changing landscapes and topographies as a vital element in understanding why communities and their built heritages constantly transfigure. Sometimes a single geographic factor such as the northern Gulf Stream can go far to explain the spectacular rise of a small island like Great Britain to world power. Equally we can help to explain the precipitous decline of towns like Bourke by degradation and siltation in the Darling River.
This paper uses the case study of the Narrabeen town camp to explore the potential of digital visual technologies in Aboriginal History
Where are you Uncle John?
No full textThe author examines his and others' feelings towards a family member killed during the Second World War. He ponders the meaning of secrecy, grief and long-term mourning within the family, and re-assesses his own feelings towards his Uncle John in the light of what he now realises were the lessons that he was supposed to absorb
Making Aboriginal history
No full textI can’t usefully start this chapter by asking ‘Who writes Aboriginal history?’ because the written word forms but a small part of the historical endeavour. Australians, particularly Aboriginal Australians, now have recourse to much
more than a history beginning ‘This is what happened’. Aboriginal history today takes form in dance, art, novel, biography, autobiography, oral history, archival research, family papers, drama, poetry and film. More useful is the
question: ‘To what effect?’ In the early post-World War II decades, it was the works of non-Indigenous historians that were read by Indigenous people – and that transformed their perceptions of themselves. By 2013 the Indigenous
people had become equal partners in relating and interpreting their own past. Most others followed the Indigenous lead in subject matter, attitude and interpretation. Far more than in, say, military history, the subjects of these historical endeavours, not academic authors, carry their views to the
mainstream in a way which seemed impossible in 1970. It is in that year that we start
Reconciliation without history : state crime and state punishment in Chile and Australia
No full textChile in the 1990s struggled to confront the brutal oppression of the left during the Pinochet years (1973–1990). In the same period, Australia struggled to confront the brutal persecution of its Indigenous minority, especially the Stolen Generations (1788–1970s). My paper asks: did the enquiries into state repression by the two nations encourage or impede national understandings of their pasts? Did they lead to national reconciliation? Do we expect too much of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions
Biography in the court room? : far from a final judgment
No full textThe Maori scholar Aroha Harris, writing a biography of her grandfather Joe, asked, Once again I find myself in search of that happy but elusive equilibrium between telling Joe’s story and “doing” history, mining one man’s past for solutions to methodological puzzles: How do I write the hard stuff ? How do I academically distinguish between Joe’s emotions, my emotions and the biography? How do I write over and around my own emotional responses? And on the other hand—on the Maori hand—should I? With its appreciation of subjectivity, does Maori scholarship seek some connection. . . . But then, if Maori scholarship calls me to embrace my personal responses, does it also call forth more problems, for instance, allegations of bias or of academic restraint to the detriment of academic freedom? (96) How much more acute is the predicament of this Indigenous woman, steeped in such cultural discontinuities between Western and non-Western modes of thought, than that of a non-Maori biographer? This chapter takes the dilemma a little further. Granted that such cultural tensions are very likely to be encountered by biographers like Harris, we may expect a situation more unsatisfactory still when an Indigenous plaintiff asks a court of Western law to make cultural and historical judgments about a life history
The Truth That Will Set Us All Free: An Uncertain History of Memorials to Indigenous Australians
Get PDFAborigines and other Australians have not met with amity. Memorials to the Aboriginal people of Australia are not common and some of the more prominent are regularly damaged. Eddies of past tempests slap disturbingly at modern day memorials thousands of kilometres and several generations removed from the eye of furious storms. This article traces a difficult story of what seems at first sight to be blind racism, at a second sight, a rampant colonialism, and at a more reflective third, perhaps, the economy of the pastoralist and the farmer in deadly disharmony to that of the hunter gatherer. Whatever the origins, the consequences of conflict endure for centuries
To get back home, to belong : Nancy de Vries : a story of the Stolen Generations
No full textMany members of the Stolen Generations have now told their stories in autobiographies, films or interviews. One of the most powerful stories is that of Auntie Nancy de Vries, born in Barkindji country, near Bourke, in 1931. I chose her story because, despite her terrible experiences as a child, she remained an indomitable optimist. Despite her lack of formal education as a child, she was a wonderful historian and storyteller. Although she never embraced her mother in the way that one day she imagined and hoped that she would, she raised her own children and grandchildren as proud Aboriginal citizens of Australia. I chose her story because for many years I worked with Auntie Nancy in finding her family and because I admired her immensely
Tripping over feathers : beginning a biography of Janaka Wiradjuri (Joy Williams)
No full textDoretta Williams was born in Cowra NSW in 1920, of the Wiradjuri Aboriginal
people. At the age of seven she and two sisters were removed from their mother
and placed in the Cootamundra Training Home for Aboriginal Girls. At the age of
sixteen she was sent into domestic service and in 1942 she began working as a
housemaid in North Sydney at a Rest and Recreation establishment for soldiers.
On 1 January 1943 she fell pregnant to a soldier of the Sixth Division. Her
daughter Eileen, later known as Joy, was born in September. Three weeks later
Eileen was taken to the Bomaderry Children’s Home managed by the Aboriginal
Inland Mission. When Joy was four, in part due to overcrowding in the Home, the
Bomaderry matron asked that she be transferred to the Lutanda Home managed by
the Plymouth Brethren. There Joy grew up. When she was about twelve, she was
told that she was of Aboriginal descent. Isolated, and aggressive and believing
herself unattractive, Joy had a sad and lonely upbringing
Dispossession is a legitimate experience
No full textGiven that so much of the Darug’s claim to custodianship is based on oral evidence, it seems pertinent to present a little of it here. It is not the point of this article to argue one side or the other of what seems to be less an Aboriginal historical argument but rather one deeply entangled in the contemporary politics of self-representation. Rather I propose to embrace the historian’s task, which is to contextualise and explain the social context of any period under discussion, upon which basis non-specialists may then form their own judgements. Needless to say, the European colonisers’ persecution of Aboriginal people was not directed at the Darug alone. I do not seek here to represent the historical context of only those who, like the Darug, demand recognition as Sydney’s Indigenous custodians. Aboriginal people from the bush who came to the inner city were treated as harshly if they bore obvious Aboriginal features. The Redfern race riots of the 1970s, in which of course some Sydney traditional custodians also took part, revealed that police brutality and injustice, encouraged by the state government, could be worse again than the casual but bitter hurts endured daily at Parramatta or the Hawkesbury half a century earlier. In presenting the context in which this cultural loss occurred, I shall advance very many instances, drawn from research by the team producing the website historyofaboriginalsydney.edu.au, that will outline some of the reasons why Aboriginal people in Sydney had very good reason not necessarily to extinguish their identity, but to take it ‘underground’. Indigenous descent sometimes became a secret shared only by the immediate family or Aboriginal neighbours
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