by Antonio Buti
He manages to hold down a job in spite of the chaos that consumes him from within. From August 1982 to April 1983 he is a trainee under the National Employment Strategy for Aboriginals. Later, he is a gardener and groundsman at the Meningie and Districts Memorial Hospital. He will not remain in Meningie, however. Veronica is hinting that she wants to return to east Victoria, her country. Perhaps she hopes that, in moving far away from the site of his childhood ordeals, Bruce will find the stability—the calmness—that has eluded him even into adulthood. So in 1984 they leave South Australia for Bairnsdale, 280 kilometres east of Melbourne. They return to Meningie and Murray Bridge intermittently, but infrequently, and for only short stays, over the next eight years.
In Bairnsdale, Bruce has no trouble getting a job. Soon after arriving, he finds work at the local Bairnsdale Primary School as a school assistant and grounds and maintenance worker. He enjoys this work but, as elsewhere, he cannot settle. In May 1988 he finds another position as an administrative officer with the Victorian Department of Agriculture and Rural Affairs. He is a good worker, in spite of his personal difficulties, and for five months in early 1990 he is seconded from the Department to work as a prison officer at the notorious Pentridge Prison.
Bruce leaves the workforce in 1991 to go back to school. He wants to complete his secondary education at Bairnsdale High School but, now in his thirties, he feels uncomfortable at school and soon drops out.
The move to Bairnsdale does not purge Bruce of the poor health that has plagued him through his adult life. Moreover, he continues to drink heavily. He is a frequent patient of the local Bairnsdale hospital, where he receives treatment for asthma, shortness of breath, abdominal and chest pain, angina, hypertension, blood clots, hernia, ethanol toxicity and alcohol intoxication, and many other health issues. It is little wonder he has suicidal thoughts, on at least one occasion coming perilously close to throwing himself in front of a truck.
He continues to be violent towards Veronica. He knows what he does is wrong, hurtful to those around him, but he cannot control this overpowering anger. Nevertheless, he tries. On March 1992 he voluntarily admits himself to the psychiatric unit at Latrobe Regional Hospital. The stay is short, the outcome predictable. Before long, he is drinking heavily and arguing with Veronica.
In August he commences work as an Aboriginal educator at Lakes Entrance Secondary College. He enjoys the work but the unhappy cycle continues: anger, heavy drinking and violence towards Veronica. Will it ever end, he wants to know. He is afraid of what the answer might be.
In late July 1993, Bruce appeals to the local hospital again for help. They know, as he does, that there is little anyone can do. He is a broken man. He is depressed. He knows why. But how can you undo a past, particularly one you have had little control over?
In desperation, he falls back on another change of scenery. It didn’t work with Queensland, it hasn’t worked with Bairnsdale, but this time it might be different. Besides, Meningie is his ancestral home. And maybe, just maybe, this time he can form a relationship with his siblings.
So on 1 September 1993, Bruce, with his family, returns to Meningie. Will this work the miracle for which he wishes? Or is the man they made from the child beyond repair?
PART TWO
THE CHAMPIONS GATHER
Chapter 8
BRUCE MEETS HIS WARRIOR CHAMPION
Cootamundra in the Riverina area of regional New South Wales is a pretty town, the home of the widely popular wattle tree that bears its name and inspires the town’s annual wattle festival and associated arts festival. It is also the birthplace of Australian cricket’s greatest ever batsman, Sir Donald Bradman. Yet Cootamundra also has its darker history. It is the site of the Cootamundra Girls’ Home, which, between 1911 and 1969, was the prescribed home for many Aboriginal girls forcibly removed from their families.
This was where the Aboriginal Welfare Board had thrown a little girl called Dora Williams when they forcibly removed her from her family. She grew up in the home until, at age fifteen, she became a domestic servant for a white Sydney family, during which time she became pregnant, and at age eighteen returned to the Home to await the birth. Dora’s daughter Joy arrived on 13 September 1942. Mother and daughter were to have a mere four weeks to bond before the Aboriginal Welfare Board wrenched Joy from Dora’s arms forever. They say Dora agreed to them taking Joy.
They deposited the newborn babe at Bomaderry Home for Aboriginal Children, which was run by the United Aborigines Mission under the eye of the Aboriginal Welfare Board, where Joy stayed until she was four and a half, when they moved her to Lutanda Children’s Home. The Plymouth Community, which ran Lutanda, saw it as a place for white children of European background. Because Joy was a ‘fair-skinned child’, the Aboriginal Welfare Board thought she should no longer have anything to do with Aboriginal people. Joy’s Aboriginal birthright was of no consequence. It was as if, by a process of osmosis, the predominant ‘whiteness’ would rub off on Joy. Such was her misery that she ran away from the home when she was thirteen, when she discovered she was Aboriginal. This truth was confirmed with blunt cruelty when, on returning to the home, staff told her she had ‘mud in her veins’. By the time she left Lutanda in 1960, aged eighteen, to take a job as a housemaid, she had already spent considerable time in psychiatric care and had been diagnosed with severe psychiatric disorders.
About fifty years after being removed from her mother, in January 1993, Joy Williams began an action against the State of New South Wales in the Supreme Court.1 She would allege, unsuccessfully, that the State had failed in its duty of care to her when, as its ward, she endured hardship and neglect during the years she spent at Lutanda. She would say that inadequate care at Bomaderry led to her developing an attachment disorder, a psychiatric condition arising out of the absence of a parental figure. The Supreme Court would hear evidence that, while at Lutanda, ‘she began to exhibit disturbed behaviour, fought regularly with other children, was unable to participate in group play, was attention seeking, and engaged in acts of self-mutilation’. Joy did not cope well after leaving Lutanda. She lived precariously as a vagrant, resorting to petty crime and prostitution to support herself. In 1988 the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry confirmed the earlier diagnosis of an extremely severe form of mental disorder.
In spite of the circumstances of her life, the trial judge, Justice Abadee, found there had been no discrimination against Joy Williams. Decisions had been made according to the standards of the time and, he concluded, ‘it is difficult to see how the law can always be expected to provide the solution to all problems arising from life itself, from nature or nurture’.2 On appeal in 2000, the Court of Appeal refused to disturb the trial judge’s findings. Furthermore, in rejecting Joy’s claim that the Aboriginal Welfare Board owed her a duty of care, the Court found that, ‘Recognition of a duty of care in the area concerned in this case might well not only increase the number of cases to be processed by a crowded court system, but also impose on it tasks which it would find difficult to perform in view of the potential complexity and length of many of the cases.’3
Bruce had not heard of Joy Williams. Almost nobody had heard of her. Those who had were mostly lawyers working in Aboriginal legal services or community legal centres. That she had initiated legal proceedings against the State of New South Wales aroused their interest, even though her case failed. The reasons why it failed would be the basis on which Bruce’s yet-to-be-appointed lawyers would build his case. As he made his way to Joanna Richardson’s office in 1993, he was not to know that his timing was propitious.
The harm of the practice of removing Aboriginal children from their parents was at last on the national agenda. It was also on the national conscience. For the better part of six decades, the practice had been systemic. Now, inspired by the advocacy of Aboriginal rights and social justice champions, calls for a national inquiry were growing louder. Many of the calls were from Aboriginal leaders who had been removed from t
heir families as children. The personal tragedy of Rob Riley, chief executive of the Western Australian Aboriginal Legal Service, gave these calls added poignancy.
Rob Riley was a former adviser on Aboriginal affairs to the Hawke federal government. He was an articulate and forceful advocate of a royal commission. He knew firsthand how traumatic separation could be, having been separated from his parents at the age of eight and a half years and placed in Sister Kate’s Children’s Home in suburban Perth in the 1960s. There he was sexually abused, hit with a leather thong for asking about his parents and told they were dead. Although plagued by depression because of the abuse, Riley had a distinguished career as a public servant and Aboriginal leader. In 1996, at just forty-one years old, his depression overwhelmed him and he took his own life in a suburban hotel not far from the children’s home in which he had been institutionalised.4
Only four years earlier, a sense of hope had been stirred in Aboriginal people by the landmark Mabo court case.5 It was a seminal moment when, in June 1992, the High Court of Australia held that the egregious legal fiction of terra nullius was dead. The Court held that there was an established system of Aboriginal legal property ownership that existed before, and survived after, European settlement. The finding recognised a common law native title to land. Eddie Mabo, who, with four other Murray Islanders, had initiated proceedings ten years earlier, did not live to celebrate the decision. Nevertheless, in the High Court’s finding, he achieved posthumously what he had been fighting for: recognition of his right to his land.
The Mabo decision had caught Bruce’s attention. He wondered what it meant for him, and for his sister and brothers living on the Coorong, however distant his relationship with his siblings now was. Another voice, a few months after Mabo, also stirred Bruce. In a speech at Redfern Park in Sydney, Prime Minister Paul Keating won rapturous approval from a largely Aboriginal audience when he told them, ‘We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases. The alcohol. We took the children from their mothers.’ This voice spoke to Bruce; he was one of those children. He knew he had to find out more about his own story. Could he find what he sought in Meningie, he wondered.
The move back to Meningie was in part driven by a need for change, in part because of a desire to learn more about his family, and partly in the hope that he could reconnect with his sister and brothers. After so many years apart, leading such different lives, was it anything more than a desperate hope that they could become a family again? Hilda, and George and Tom especially, had been busy over the years turning their ancestral homeland into a place for cultural education. George was regional adviser in Aboriginal education for the Education Department, where his focus was the development of Camp Coorong as an Aboriginal Cultural Centre. Although the Education Department did not provide continuing funding for the centre, it did consider Camp Coorong an essential element of Aboriginal studies in schools. Tom, a trained national parks and wildlife ranger, ran the day-to-day activities at the centre.
Although his drive for reunion with his sister and brothers was more visceral than reasoned, Bruce would have found a sad paradox in this quote explaining the importance of cultural identity and the centre’s role in preserving it: ‘As a cultural centre, Camp Coorong transmits Ngarrindjeri cultural values to tourists around Australia and overseas, to school students and to members of the Ngarrindjeri community itself. It is not just a “keeping place” for cultural objects from the past but a living cultural centre. At Camp Coorong aspects of contemporary Ngarrindjeri culture are fostered and promoted, along with a knowledge of the past. Camp Coorong staff argue that a knowledge of one’s past is crucial for building a strong sense of identity.’6 That, in a nutshell, explained Bruce’s intuitive need to return to Meningie.
Bruce knew all about surviving, if only barely. At every turn in his journey down a long, spiritually forsaken road, it seemed that Europeans had thwarted his attempts to reach spiritual wholeness with his people. Could he even call the Ngarrindjeri his people? He had lived away from Ngarrindjeri lands for so long, perhaps too long. Hilda, George and Tom were in harmony with the Ngarrindjeri’s spiritual link with the Coorong. They could talk about it, teach it and fight to preserve it. Tom had spoken about it at Harvard University. And he had fought for the repatriation and cultural reburial of the stolen remains of Ngarrindjeri people held in museums in Australia and overseas.
Like Bruce, his brothers and sister had fought their personal battles. But the support that comes from family togetherness, and strength gained from knowledge and harmony with their cultural heritage, had seen them through the gauntlet being thrown down at them by a sometimes indifferent, sometimes hostile, world. They are confident of their standing in the local community. Bruce feels strongly the contrast with his own lack of self-worth and his isolation. He has never known that kind of support. All he has ever known is heartless bureaucracy.
Back in Meningie, he is still lost, suffering from health problems, depressed, trying to hold the future and the past at bay with heavy drinking. There are too many unanswered questions. Why did they deprive him of his history, of his links to family and to culture? Why did they decide his life should be so different from his brothers’ and sister’s? Why did they decide that he, the youngest of the four, should be taken away? Perhaps there are no answers. Yet the Prime Minister’s words gnaw away at the back of his mind: ‘We took the children from their mothers.’ Well, Bruce mulls, if Mr Keating can name the wrong and the amorphous ‘they’ who committed it, there must also be a way to right it. What is it?
Just as all seems lost, and Bruce is thinking about moving on again, he hears about something. Something about being able to sue the government for taking him away from his family. He smiles wryly. He knows about courthouses: he’s been there often enough. It would be a change to be sitting on the other side of the dock.
The 1993 Commonwealth Native Title Act has prompted the emergence of native title units in most Aboriginal legal services across the nation. Bruce contacts this unit of the Aboriginal Legal Rights Movement (ALRM), South Australia’s Aboriginal legal service, and meets Tim Wooley in December 1993. He is nervous and speaks hesitantly: ‘I want to sue the government because they took me away from my family when I was a baby. Can you help me?’
He goes on, so softly that Wooley has to lean forward to hear him. ‘I think they should compensate me; they should give me money for what they have done to me. They took me from my family, and from my people, the Ngarrindjeri people.’
Wooley stares at the sad, broken man in front of him. He is silent, wondering how to answer.
Bruce staggers into the silence, shattering it. ‘What they did was wrong. Can you help me find out more about what they did to me? Can I sue them?’ He deflates into his chair to wait expectantly for the answers.
This isn’t Wooley’s area, but he cannot just send this man away. ‘Look, Bruce. I want to help you, but I only work in the native title section. I don’t have anything to do with this sort of problem.’
There is another long silence. Bruce has summoned up the courage to come this far. He doesn’t want to get up and walk out with nothing. He can see that Wooley is thinking. He waits.
‘I have a colleague, Joanna Richardson, she is the manager of the civil unit at ALRM. We’ve done a lot of work together in the past, worked on many cases, including negotiating heritage agreements for Aboriginal groups. I’m going to ask her to talk to you.’
‘Thank you.’
‘You’ll have to travel up to the ALRM headquarters in Adelaide. Can you do that?’
‘Yes,’ Bruce answers quickly.
‘It’s on King William Street, only a few blocks from the Supreme Court.’ He pauses. ‘I can’t promise anything. But she will listen to you.’
Later that month Bruce travels by bus from Meningie to Adelaide and immediately heads, on foot, to 321–325 King William Street. He finds Joanna Richardson in one of the many cramped offices
from which lawyers and paralegals work day in, day out, attending to the concerns of their Aboriginal clients, many who come in from areas outside Adelaide, just like Bruce.
She is expecting him. Wooley has told her a few details, including Bruce’s date of birth. She was born in the same year as him, in 1956. That is all Richardson knows when Bruce steps into her office. Oh my God, she thinks on seeing him for the first time. Are they really the same age? Bruce looks at least ten years older than the woman who is about to become his solicitor. His gait is slow and tired for a man of only thirty-seven years. His face shows the signs of someone who has had a hard life, someone who has too much sorrow, someone who has abused his body with drink.
He speaks slowly, and without fluency. Stop, start. But he makes himself understood. Richardson is not sure what to make of her first encounter with Bruce. He is obviously a damaged soul. She needs so much more information before she can know where she can go with Bruce and his story.
Richardson makes no commitment to Bruce on being able to take legal action. This type of legal proceeding in Australia is largely unchartered waters. The initial signs from the Joy Williams litigation are not promising. In August, Justice Studdert refused to grant an extension of time for Williams to continue her civil action against the State of New South Wales.7 An appeal against this decision will not be heard until sometime in the new year. However, Richardson does agree to help. She will gather as much information as possible about his life; in return, he promises to do what he can to assist. It is a pact Bruce is happy, eager to make. As Wooley had promised, at least she is listening. Yet all she can do for now is set up a file for Bruce Trevorrow.
Richardson will return to the file when she comes back from her Christmas holiday in Tasmania with her seven-year-old daughter. She always enjoys returning to the Apple Isle, the place of her birth. Her Australian heritage goes back to the convicts on both sides of the family. The first convict on her maternal side was sent to Norfolk Island in 1796. Five to six generations later Joanna Catherine Richardson was born in Bernie, Tasmania, on 15 February 1956. She spent the first ten years of her life growing up in Hobart and then the family moved to Geelong, where she met Alfonsie Shields, the first Aboriginal person she had met in her life. They both felt like outsiders and formed a close friendship. Two years later the Richardsons moved to Adelaide, where she attended Unley High School, the same school that the first female Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, would later attend.
