Not Just Black and White

by Lesley Williams

  We knew less about my grandmother’s life before she, too, was sent to the Fraser Island Aboriginal Mission Reserve. It appears, from the few surviving records of the time, that Granny Chambers was sent there from the Magdalene Asylum at Wooloowin, which had opened in 1889 as a home for unmarried mothers, girls and infants. A young woman fitting Granny’s description was placed in the asylum by the authorities ‘for her own care and protection’. The records say she was severely abused by her boss, the owner of a cattle property at Longreach in western Queensland – a rural town not far from her traditional country near Winton. As a child I noticed Granny had a ridge along her scalp; she said it was from the stirrup of a saddle hitting her head. I didn’t dare ask any more questions.

  Granny and Grandfather’s removal to Fraser Island signalled the start of their life under the Protection Act. From that point on, their lives continued to be closely monitored and controlled – being moved to different Aboriginal mission reserves and settlements throughout the state at the whim of government officials. There was little if any consideration given to the severing of family and friendship ties. It wasn’t until three generations later – after the birth of my own children in the early 1970s – that an Indigenous family in Queensland like mine could live a life that wasn’t minutely controlled by government authorities.

  Tammy

  For the first half of my childhood, in the mid 1980s, I had little understanding of my mother’s past. She never spoke of the poverty and hardship that she and my grandparents had experienced. Nor did she speak of the segregation between races – of those by chance born black or born white, and the differences this skin pigmentation made to all their life prospects. Instead Mum insisted, somewhat obsessively, that her children – my two older brothers, Dan and Rodney, and I – must make the most of every opportunity.

  ‘Grab it while it lasts,’ she would say, worried that life’s chances could abruptly disappear. Like all mothers, she wanted the best for her children. But I couldn’t understand then the fear underlying her maternal wishes.

  Chapter 2

  Lesley

  In the early days Cherbourg was called Barambah Aboriginal Settlement because of the nearby Barambah Creek. The settlement was originally built on a parcel of land belonging to the huge pastoral property called Barambah Station. When the settlement was established in 1901, there was strong objection from the local white residents living in the nearby town of Murgon. Many did not want an Aboriginal settlement in their district. The Queensland Government was bombarded with petitions and letters of protest, with some even calling for the removal of the settlement to an island somewhere in the Pacific Ocean – anywhere but in their backyard.

  The protests were ignored and the government established the settlement on 26,000 acres (10,117 hectares) of land. The size of the settlement might seem large but it wasn’t as though we were free to roam around it as we pleased. The government officials referred to Aboriginal residents, both young and old, as ‘natives’ or ‘inmates’; and the name suggests how we were treated. Our day-to-day movements within Cherbourg were controlled. Contact with anyone who lived on the ‘outside’ was restricted. Even our mail was read before we received it.

  I learned from a young age to view the world, in simple terms: of ‘black and white’ and ‘us and them’. Everything it seemed was defined and divided by little more than race and colour lines. For instance, I learned to refer to my people as ‘blackfullas’ (which we pronounced ‘black-far-lars’), while ‘they’ who controlled the settlement were the ‘white officials’ or ‘whitefullas’ (pronounced ‘white-far-lars’) – but always our bosses.

  The settlement was segregated into different areas. My family’s house was on the corner of Barambah Avenue and Fisher Street, the main dirt roads that divided the settlement. On our side of the road was the ‘camp’, where approximately eight hundred Aboriginal people were crammed into about one hundred and fifty small two- to three-bedroomed cottages. It wasn’t unusual to have ten or eleven people living together under the one roof.

  The camp was a dry, barren and terribly overcrowded place. The cottages had no ceilings, only a tin roof and wooden rafters to keep the rain out. The walls were unlined and there were no floor coverings – just bare floorboards with holes here and there, exposing the earth beneath. Our home was furnished with a few pieces of essential furniture. In the hot Queensland summers we had to use an icebox to keep our food cool until we could afford a kerosene- fuelled fridge. As there was no running water inside the house, we didn’t have a bathroom or sink for washing up; instead, we filled a plastic dish with water from the outside tap. During winter, we’d bathe in a round metal tub in front of the wood stove in the kitchen.

  At the end of our backyard was an outdoor toilet, and away from the house was a small two-roomed structure we called the ‘washhouse’. Because Ma and Granny were concerned so many children in such a small house might cause too much of a racket, Grandfather moved outside into the washhouse. Perhaps he welcomed the relative quiet that the few extra metres and thin wooden walls offered him.

  Directly across the road from our house was the main area of Cherbourg. This was where the white officials worked and lived. The superintendent – or the ‘Big Boss’, as he was known – had an office in the main area, with prime position to monitor the ‘goings on’ in the settlement. Conveniently, it was also located close to the men’s and women’s gaols.

  The large homes in the main area, complete with bathrooms, running water, access to a constant source of electricity, even telephones, were strictly out of bounds to us ‘inmates’ – unless you cooked, cleaned, tended to the gardens and yards, or chopped firewood for those who lived there. The difference between their side of the road and ours was obvious, even to a child. In particular, I noticed the difference in colours. The white officials’ side seemed bright and vibrant. Their colonial-style houses, with large open verandas to catch the breeze, were painted, while our wooden cottages weren’t. They had green lawns, tall shady trees and pretty flowers growing in garden beds. When their beautiful silky oak trees were in full bloom, golden flowers would carpet the area where the white officials lived.

  On our side of the Camp, there wasn’t much colour – only stubby dry grass, few trees and hardly any flowers. My older sisters and I would admire the pretty flowers and gardens on the other side of the dirt divide, and try to make our own garden bed to match it. But the hard dry soil refused to yield, making it difficult for anything nice to flourish.

  Because of the lack of bathroom facilities in the Camp houses, a communal shower and laundry block was also built behind the old people’s home. Further down the road on Barambah Avenue, on the white officials’ side of the road, were three dormitories: one for single mothers with young babies, one for boys and one for girls. Many of these single mothers and children had been separated by the authorities from their husbands and fathers, and moved to settlements like Cherbourg. The high barbed-wire fences around each of the dormitories prevented siblings from having much contact with one another and with the rest of us living in the Camp. Permission to move between the facilities was needed from the settlement matron.

  The settlement also had a community hall, a curio workshop, where souvenirs were made for the government to sell to tourists, and three churches. It was compulsory for Aboriginal children to be raised as Christians and to attend Sunday School at one of the churches – Catholic, Anglican or the Aboriginal Inland Mission. My family were Anglican; I suppose because this was also the faith of the missionaries at the Fraser Island Mission Reserve. Without fail, once a week, my siblings and I would sit with Granny in the back pews of the church. The front rows were reserved for the white officials and their families. At the rear of the church were toilets for their exclusive use. And yet the minister would preach to the congregation about ‘loving thy neighbour’ and ‘doing unto others’.

  Once a week families would c
ollect their dried-food rations – tea, sugar, rice, sago, oatmeal, green peas, split peas, salt, tapioca, barley and a bag of flour. Families also received a couple of scoops of washing soda, one bar of soap and a billycan of sticky black treacle. Those who had a few extra dollars left over from their fortnightly pay could purchase ‘luxury items’, such as butter, Vegemite, peanut paste, jam, Weet-Bix, powdered milk and (some) vegetables from the government-owned retail store. Once again, it was the government who decided what stock could be sold to us and at what price. Then, twice a week, on meat-ration day, we’d receive a bundle of meat – bones and anything else pushed out to us through the window of the butcher shop.

  Cherbourg also had a training farm that included a dairy and piggery. Vegetables were also grown to supply the local dormitories, hospital and old people’s home. The remaining vegetables were sold at the settlement’s retail store. Some of the vegetables were also sent to some government institutions in Brisbane. There was also a sawmill, blacksmith’s workshop and trade-training centre, where the local Aboriginal men made furniture for the settlement. In addition to the hospital, there were nurses’ quarters and a baby clinic.

  The settlement had all the facilities, although basic in nature, necessary for the inmates to be self-sufficient – thus minimising the contact between the Aboriginal people and the broader Australian community.

  Workdays on the settlement officially began when the first of two whistles sounded each morning. It was a loud, high-pitched sound – more like a police siren, but we always called it ‘the whistle’. Although I heard the whistle every day of the working week, the noise always frightened me. Very few inmates had wristwatches, so these whistles were the only way we could tell the time and know what jobs we had to do next. From a young age, I quickly learned that the whistle dictated our daily lives.

  When the first whistle blew, at quarter to eight, the men would make their way to the parade ground in front of the superintendent’s office. On Monday mornings, the women who wanted to beat the mid-morning sun would be out, too, to join the long queue at the ration shed. From our kitchen door I could see the steady stream of people walking down the laneway. Everyone was dressed the same – all the women wearing the simple cotton dresses that’d been mass produced by Aboriginal labour on Cherbourg, and the men wearing government-issued khaki trousers and shirts.

  We looked the same and did the same, at the same time each day. Life ‘under the Act’ was repetitive and predictable.

  At the second, eight-o’clock whistle, every Aboriginal man capable of working would stand to attention in straight rows outside the administration office. Like a schoolteacher marks the attendance of children, the big boss inspected the rows of men, who would answer their name as it was called from a list. Roll call was compulsory only for male workers, although women worked too – if they didn’t have young children to look after at home. Once attendances and physical appearance were checked, the men were dismissed to their designated jobs, set by the white officials. Further checks on attendance were made during the day to prevent people from skipping work or knocking off early.

  Some of the settlement-based jobs included working in the sawmill, emptying the sanitary drums, collecting rubbish, plumbing and carpentry. No able-bodied person over the age of sixteen was spared from the drudgery of menial work – as farmhands, stockmen, painters, cleaners or hospital domestics. Even Granny in her twilight years was expected to work, washing by hand the bloodstained calico sheets used to wrap the meats for the settlement’s butcher shop after a couple of beasts had been slaughtered. During the winter months, she had the added job, a couple of times a week, of single-handedly making enough soup to feed over eight hundred hungry people living in the settlement, with the occasional help from us kids to chop up vegies.

  A standard working week was forty hours. However, Aboriginal people only received money in the hand for eight of those hours worked. For the remaining thirty-two hours, they were paid in kind or with goods, such as basic food rations, blankets and work-issue clothing, and accommodation. Those who didn’t work a minimum of thirty-two hours a week risked losing their home and ration entitlements. At the time, we thought these were free, but I would later discover that we were paying a special levy for them.

  It was pointless complaining because you risked being punished by the superintendent. He decided (and not a court) whether an offence under the Protection Act had been committed, or if a settlement rule had been broken, and what the punishment should be. For minor offences, such as answering back to a white official, people were sometimes locked up in the local gaol for one week, with only bread and jam to eat and black tea. In the early days, Aboriginal women were publicly shamed by having their heads shaved and being forced to walk around Cherbourg in a hessian bag with holes cut out for the arms and neck. But the punishment everyone feared most was being removed from their family to Palm Island – the punishment island. We’d heard that life stranded on this island in the middle of the beautiful Great Barrier Reef was far from idyllic.

  The superintendent, to help maintain law and order, appointed trusted and respected local men as members of the Aboriginal Settlement Police. At night they’d walk the laneways with their torches, looking for anyone who was outside their homes, breaking the ten-o’clock curfew. The footsteps of the settlement police outside the window would frighten me when I was a child. The cries of prisoners locked up in the gaol across the road from our house also added to a childhood often touched by fear. Even when I wasn’t physically frightened, the fear of doing something wrong and getting into trouble with the white officials was always in the back of my mind. In fact, I was so used to being fearful that, without that fear, I don’t think I would’ve felt normal.

  Tammy

  As a child of no more than five years of age, I’d come to know two sides of my mother. At home she was devoted and protective of her three children. Regardless of the hurdles and obstacles that came our way, especially after our father died, she would reassure us - ‘It’ll be all right,’ she’d say to us, ‘not to worry, I’ll find a way’.

  Yet when Mum was around people we didn’t know well, she appeared shy, nervous and wary. Gone was the strong, intelligent and witty woman I knew. I didn’t understand why she changed like this and could act so differently. But over time I noticed there was a pattern. Mum became this nervous creature whenever she was around people with skin lighter-coloured than ours, who held positions of authority, like police officers or even bank tellers.

  Looking back, I can see why she carried her childhood fears into adulthood and how it influenced the way she parented.

  Chapter 3

  Lesley

  I grew up in a normal Aboriginal family or ‘mob’, as we like to call our extended family; but to an outsider my family tree is a puzzle. An outsider might use labels like ‘half-brother’ or ‘half-sister’ for some of my siblings, or refer to others as ‘first cousin’ or a cousin ‘twice removed’, rather than recognising all these as my siblings. But to me, I simply belonged to a large family consisting of twelve brothers and sisters, two mothers, three fathers and two live-in grandparents. We were all one mob, which I took for granted, and there was nothing complicated about it.

  My sister, Alex, who is two years older than me, shares the same birth parents as me. Our birth mother, Hazel, was born in Cherbourg and was a younger daughter of Granny Nancy and Grandfather Charlie Chambers. Our father, Arthur, grew up on the riverbank in an Aboriginal camp the local people called the Yumba, near the town of Mitchell in southwest Queensland. Some Aboriginal people, like my father’s family, lived on the fringes of white country towns, but still under the watchful eye of the local police. The Yumba camp in the 1930s was one of those places. When our father’s father died, the white police removed his entire family from the Yumba camp to Cherbourg, for their ‘care and protection’.

  It was at Cherbourg where our parents met. Despite being
of age and having the blessing of their own families, they could not marry without first obtaining written permission from the white officials. Our father had to prove he was ‘of good character’, ‘free of disease’, ‘thrifty with money’ and ‘capable of maintaining a wife’. His chances of being issued with a ‘permission to marry’ certificate were significantly improved because of his enlistment in the Australian army during the Second World War. Why he signed up to the armed forces, when Aboriginal Australians were yet to be recognised in the national census, I can only guess. Perhaps he was persuaded by the propaganda that he should fight for ‘his country’. Or more likely he saw it as a temporary escape from life on the settlement.

  When Arthur signed up, he and his new bride were both granted temporary exemption from ‘living under the Act’, so that he could undergo army training in Brisbane and deployment overseas. It was then they both abruptly discovered that exemption from the Aboriginal Protection Act didn’t automatically mean they’d have the same rights as white Australians living in the community. The Queensland Government controlled my father’s wages and allowances, as it did those of every other Aboriginal worker who lived under the Act, unlike their fellow white soldiers.

  My parents lived as part of a ‘grey’ class: they weren’t white and so didn’t have the same rights as them; yet they weren’t like the rest of their families, who were blackfullas living a controlled life on settlements and mission reserves. In fact, my parents risked losing their temporary exemption from the Protection Act if they were caught ‘habitually associating with Aboriginals’.

  The effect of this government policy had dire consequences for my mother, who was left to raise my older sister Alex, a toddler at the time, without access to my father’s entitlements. My mother had no choice but to re-enter the workforce and place Alex in the care of her sister and brother-in-law, Naomi and Jack Malone, and my grandparents, who also lived with them in Cherbourg.