See What You Made Me Do

by Jess Hill

  Following more than a century of war across the frontier, these protection acts were, in the words of human rights advocate Mick Gooda, ‘the first real attempt to “divide and conquer” Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’.57 In some states, mixed-blood Aboriginals could be granted exemptions from the strictures of protection acts and allowed to live off the reserves and among the white community, so long as they surrendered family connections and gave up the right to visit relatives (under threat of jail). Tribal languages were forbidden, culture was outlawed, and even the simplest traditions – like eating bush tucker – became secret acts. Every action was policed to align with standards of whiteness, down to how much grief was ‘appropriate’ at a funeral. ‘If anyone had wailed,’ said the white manager at Brewarrina mission, near Bourke, in 1954, ‘I would have had them thrown out of the cemetery … the Abos must be given an example and made to be like white people.’58 As Aboriginal groups were forced to live in ever more cramped conditions, the carefully balanced arrangements of mutual obligation and kinship were also, under the control of clueless and often cruel managers, chaotically dismantled.

  Within this insidious regime of coercive control, a new kind of violence permeated Indigenous life: gossiping, jealousy, bullying, shaming, exclusion, humbugging and feuding. This ‘lateral violence’, explains Associate Professor Richard Frankland, ‘comes from being colonised, invaded. It comes from being told you are worthless and treated as being worthless for a long period of time. Naturally you don’t want to be at the bottom of the pecking order, so you turn on your own.’59

  Key to the overall strategy of absorption was the assimilation of Indigenous children into white society. The state assumed even greater control over the custody of Indigenous children, forcing them to live in dormitories away from their families, and sending boys and girls away to work – all unpaid, of course. After periods away as domestic workers, many young Aboriginal girls would return pregnant. Protection boards were well aware of this, but they were unconcerned: as long as the offspring of these ‘unions’ were brought back under state control, they simply aided the process of biological absorption, or ‘breeding out the colour’. The Chief Protector in Western Australia, A.O. Neville – the legal guardian of all Indigenous children in Western Australia from 1915 to 1940 – was explicit about this when he addressed a conference in Canberra in 1937:

  Our policy is to send them out into the white community, and if a girl comes back pregnant our rule is to keep her for two years. The child is then taken away from the mother and sometimes never sees her again. Thus these children grow up as whites, knowing nothing of their own environment. At the expiration of the period of two years, the mother goes back into service so it does not really matter if she has half a dozen children.60

  The separation of Aboriginal children from their parents occurred throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, but it didn’t become formally administered by the states until around 1910. If the reserves were the first attempt to divide and conquer Indigenous people, the policy of forced child removals – later known as the Stolen Generations – was a hammer blow to Aboriginal family life. Over sixty years, up to 50,000 Indigenous children were abducted from their families. Some children were removed from family situations of neglect and poverty, but as historian Inga Clendinnen explained, maltreatment was not the reason for this policy: ‘Children were taken on the basis of skin colour: a fair child taken, a dark sibling left … Half-caste children were to be removed from their families and taken into protective custody until they forgot black ways, and could be absorbed, at whatever the personal cost, into the dominant community.’61 Often, light-skinned Aboriginal children had white fathers.§§§ As Rosemary Neill writes, ‘Australians have yet to fully acknowledge how the widespread sexual use and abuse of Indigenous women and girls literally spawned the stolen generations.’ 62

  From 1910 to 1970, babies and young children were stolen from loving mothers who screamed and sobbed and ran after them.‡‡‡ Many of these children – some still breastfeeding – were sent to institutions, where they were routinely humiliated, punished for speaking their language, forced into menial labour, and sexually and physically abused.63 They were the kids whose cries in the night were never answered. They were the kids who were told their mothers had abandoned them. They were the kids who had to use their wits to survive, as one described: ‘There was no food, nothing … Sometimes at night we’d cry with hunger. We had to scrounge in the town dump, eating old bread, smashing tomato sauce bottles, licking them.’64 They were the kids who knew which adults to keep away from and which trees to hide in. They were the kids who hid within themselves, floating away to an imaginary place as the white men heaved on top of them, until they were not really them anymore.

  In traditional Aboriginal life, harming a child was a crime that attracted severe punishment. As the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner observed, young Aboriginal children were cherished to the extreme: ‘Aboriginal culture leaves a child virtually untrammelled for five or six years. In infancy, it lies in a smooth, well-rounded coolamon which is airy and unconstraining, and rocks if the child moves to any great extent. A cry brings immediate fondling.’65 As Atkinson writes, ‘physical or emotional punishment of a child in the way of Western child-rearing practices of the time was incomprehensible’.

  It took just sixty years to break 65,000 years of traditional child rearing, and wreak havoc on future generations of parenting. Speaking at the landmark 1996–97 national inquiry into the Stolen Generations, Bringing Them Home, one mother, who was thirteen when she was removed to Parramatta Girls Home in the 1960s, said: ‘Another thing that we find hard is giving our children love. Because we never had it. So we don’t know how to tell our kids that we love them. All we do is protect them. I can’t even cuddle my kids ’cause I never ever got cuddled. The only time was when I was getting raped and that’s not what you’d call a cuddle, is it?’66

  Bringing Them Home reached the strongest possible conclusion: the forcible removal of Indigenous children was not only a gross violation of their human rights – it was an act of genocide.67

  ‘If you say, “let us look to the future, all that is in the past” I will say – what effects will there be on a child wrenched from its parents, then subjected to extreme loneliness, extreme abuse, all by order of a democratic state, under the rule of law?’ asked Clendinnen in her 1999 Boyer Lectures. ‘What effect will that grotesque experience have on that child’s child? Then tell me that it is over.’68

  *

  This is not a story of then and now – it is a story from then until now, a ‘trauma trail’, as Atkinson depicts it. Unlike the trauma experienced by European convicts – who, after brutal treatment, were eventually able to ‘take up land’ and live free – the trauma of Aboriginal people is ongoing. New and horrific traumas have been inflicted on each of the ten generations born since invasion. Today, Indigenous families are still being devastated by the removal of their children, who are being taken (for a variety of reasons, but mostly ‘neglect’) at ten times the rate of non-Indigenous kids.69 There is rolling grief over the suicide of their children, who are killing themselves out of despair: in 2018, one-third of Indigenous children who suicided had been sexually abused.70 Suicide is not a traditional practice – until thirty years ago, it wasn’t even a phenomenon in Aboriginal communities.71 Today, Indigenous men aged twenty-five to twenty-nine have the highest suicide rates in the world.72

  ‘Through the generations we have seen too much violence, too much pain, too much trauma,’ writes Atkinson, ‘it sits on us like a rash on the soul, and it stays in our families and communities to destroy us.’73 The compounding of trauma and grief has been passed down through generations of Indigenous kids, and has spawned ‘disaffected, alienated, angry young men’ who have lost status, purpose and self-respect, and are themselves ‘tinderbox situations in remote communities’.74

  For her PhD on intergenerational violence, Caroline
Atkinson (Judy’s daughter) studied fifty-eight such men, who had been jailed for violent crimes. Almost 90 per cent had been exposed to family violence (and 59 per cent met the benchmark for post-traumatic stress disorder).75

  One man with symptoms of PTSD had a childhood ravaged by some of the worst recurrent abuse imaginable. Here, he explains how he crossed back and forth from victim to perpetrator:

  When I was three, yeah about three or four, I was molested by a [female] family friend. When I was five, I had to perform some sexual acts on a [male] neighbour. In the same year [1985] I had to give someone a blow job. I was, well, probably seven or six … When I was about seven years old … my father molested me in bed. Well he raped me actually; that went on for a night. [Actual penetration?] Yep … That left a big stabbing hole in my heart actually. But I don’t know, I suppose being ignored was the worst part about it I suppose. I did try to tell people, but not straight out. You know, only because I was afraid to. When I went to the mission I got gang raped by these two [family name], [male name] and [male name]. They caught me on my own in the bush while we were all walking back from the front gate. [I was] about nine I think. At the same time up there you know, I molested a young boy up there, out at the mission and attempted to molest a young girl that was there also … She was about eight or nine, I don’t know. I was in this sort of like idiotic state where I was about nine or ten, eleven maybe even and we were boyfriend and girlfriend sort of thing, which is stupid I suppose. [A few weeks after] my own sexual abuse by my father … he told me to go around the corner and grab one of my cousins … One was a female and she, I don’t know she was like a can short, and I went around and grabbed her. And he told me to grab her and tell her that mum wanted to see her over here. So we went over there and as soon as we walked in the house my fucking father was standing up there in the dark, and he just slapped me in the ears and said to me sit down there and don’t move. For about three or four hours I could hear this girl just fucking screaming her head off in the room, ‘I want to go home’. That was all she repeated for about three hours … I groomed this young girl into walking with me for some money. And I yarned with her and just walked with her to an isolated spot in the middle of the scrub, up in [town] and I just raped her. [And can you remember what she was doing while you were doing that, was she crying or fighting you?] No she passed out [quietly spoken].

  A number of the men Atkinson interviewed described witnessing the murder of a family member, friend or stranger, and how they turned that pain into violence. Said one:

  When I was six my old man shot my mum, yeah fucking shot my mum, bang in the head. They had been blueing all night. He made me clean her brains off the floor. When I raped that girl I felt like all my pain was going into her, when she screamed that was me screaming. I know it sounds fucked up but that’s what it felt like. I looked at my hands after, the blood on my hands and the shit, it was all slimy, I thought I was cleaning up my mum’s brains again, it felt the same.

  Reading these stories, it’s both revolting to see what these men did to others, but also hard to imagine how they survived. It’s also difficult to imagine how anyone could absorb such pain without reacting badly, in one way or another. For many of these men, the opportunity to talk – and, more importantly, to be listened to without judgement – was something they’d never experienced, and was hugely cathartic. Said one participant: ‘no one wants to listen … nobody has asked me like this before (crying) … It helps, do you know what I mean? I haven’t told anyone before about what happened to me with the, you know, [rape] and it kind of like, like lets me, what’s the word? Release some of this shit that sits in me. It’s not a secret anymore. That helps, I reckon.’

  The extraordinary impact of intergenerational trauma and grief on Indigenous perpetrators is critical to understand. It tells us that in order for them to reform, they need – first and foremost – to address their long-hidden trauma and shame.

  But an explanation is not an excuse. Many Indigenous women are sick and tired of male perpetrators hiding behind the excuses of colonisation and child abuse. These women too have survived generations of trauma, but have not gone on to perpetrate sexual violence. They are calling for truth-telling in their own communities. But too often it’s not the perpetrators but the women and children who try to hold them to account who are punished – through intimidation, isolation, and even violence. ‘Consider Merillee Mulligan,’ Hannah McGlade writes, ‘beaten to death in Derby with a rock by a man after she opposed and threatened to expose his sexual abuse of a girl.’76 Lucashenko bravely recorded the same pattern more than twenty years ago. When black men are dispossessed and brutalised by police, ‘it is seen as unproblematic in the Black community for Black women to “talk up” about the injustices of the State,’ she wrote in 1996. ‘Talking about the bashings, rapes, murders and incest for which Black men are themselves responsible, however, is seen as threatening in the extreme.’77

  On the phone from Perth, McGlade is frank. ‘In the Aboriginal world, there’s truth-telling about certain things, but not everyone is comfortable with truth-telling about violence against women and children. There’s been some real silencing around that. You can be marginalised, silenced,’ she says, pausing. ‘I’ve done a lot of truth-telling.’ McGlade says that in the world of Aboriginal rights, the identities of Aboriginal women fall through the cracks. ‘My issue has always been: how much truth do you want to talk when it comes to gendered, racial violence towards women? No Aboriginal women want to be the stereotype of abused bodies. We’re not – we’re so much more than that. But yet we know this is a real, live issue. All these apologies that we’ve had, nobody ever talks about this abuse of women – this utter abuse of black women’s bodies.’

  *

  Across Australia, though, the silence is breaking. In communities that have been wracked by violence and plagued by powerful perpetrators, women and men are devising their own ingenious strategies to achieve peace.

  One of the most startling examples comes from the remote community of Yungngora, in Western Australia’s central Kimberley region. In 2017, a group of seven Indigenous women led by Judy Mulligan formed a council to enforce by-laws set by elders that outlawed disruptive behaviour such as drinking, fighting and reckless driving. The conditions were strict: after three warnings, offenders would be evicted from the community for three months.

  The results were stunning: in twelve months, domestic violence incidents went from six per week to none, crime dropped 60 per cent, and school attendance – which had been as low as 50 per cent – reached around 90 per cent. That basic deterrent – temporary exile – was enough to transform behaviour. As Senior Sergeant Neville Ripp told The West Australian, ‘People saw [others getting moved on] and thought, we better stop doing this or we’ll be kicked out for three months. I haven’t known this to happen in any of the communities I’ve worked in. We need to empower these people to take ownership of their own communities … and a lot of people should have a look at Judy’s work. They wanted peace, and they’re a peaceful community now.’ Making peace wasn’t easy – Judy was threatened and abused at the beginning, but now, she says, people are happy. ‘I am proud of what I’ve done. It has to be a safe community, especially for the young ones.’78

  Another impressive example of community-led change is the ‘No More’ campaign, spearheaded by broadcaster Charlie King, which uses sport as a skeleton key to unlock intractable problems of violence. A Gurindji man from Alice Springs, King is one of the most familiar voices in the Territory, calling the football on wet-season weekends for ABC Grandstand. What he saw as a child protection worker more than twenty years ago has made him commit to ending family violence in Aboriginal communities. The No More campaign rests on a simple premise: men are perpetrating most of the violence, so men should take responsibility for stopping it.

  But nothing happens without women. At the core of King’s campaign is a commitment to gender equality, not just because it’s the right t
hing to do, but because it works. ‘We think the answer lies in having men and women on the same page committed to doing something to stop the violence,’ says King, ‘and to build a strategy that’s going to be successful, and owned by them.’ King tells me one of his success stories, about the community of Ramingining, home to around 800 people, in Arnhem Land. ‘This community was always fighting over football, because the clans were getting even out on the footy field,’ says King. The fighting wouldn’t end with the match: ‘Someone would get even with them in the street, then it would erupt in the home. It was pretty horrible.’ A key element in this violence, and other violence triggered by sport, was the humiliation and shame felt by supporters of the losing team. The heat on the football field was igniting so much chaos that the Ramingining community banned footy outright in 2009.**** After seven years, they rang King and asked, ‘How can we get it back?’

  King did what he’s done at sporting clubs across Australia – he went there and talked to the men about family violence, and got them to write a domestic violence action plan (DVAP). ‘In these plans, we say things like, “Teach players that this is a game. One team wins, one team doesn’t win.” We strike out the word loser.’ Typically, DVAPs declare a club’s zero tolerance for domestic abuse (including suspensions for players who offend), educate the players and use selected matches to declare support for No More, including a ‘linking of arms’ on the field. But every DVAP is unique. In the Ramingining plan, there was a critical element: women. ‘They’re going to be on the board. They’re going to be playing the game, and we’re going to be supporting them. And the men were like, “What the hell is going on?”’

  Come grand final day, the atmosphere on the field was not combative, but festive. The men danced before the women’s team played, and then the women danced when it was the men’s turn. Elders spoke before both games, telling the teams they wanted whatever happened on the football field to be forgotten as soon as the game ended, and for them then to resume their normal lives. ‘It was beautiful – it worked so well,’ says King. Again, the results were startling. ‘The police told us three months later that family violence in that community was reduced – have a listen to this, Jess – by 70 per cent … Why? Because football became a festival, not a warzone.’ Local constable Paul Keightley sang the program’s praises: ‘The difference now is absolutely incredible.’