Remembered By Heart: An Anthology of Indigenous Writing

by Sally Morgan

  When I found Ruby and told her she was furious. She came back with me to the dormitory, walked up the steps and said to this girl, ‘When did I tell you this?’ Well of course she couldn’t answer, so Ruby lifted her too.

  Then the girl who had told us to let off fighting butted in and it was a free-for-all. It ended up us telling them that if they wanted to find anything to make a fight over, they’d better make sure they knew what they were talking about. See Ruby was a Nor’wester — she came from Carnarvon — and all us North people stuck up for each other. It was that kind of a place, you just had to stick up for one another.

  The North and the South would have many a fight you know, they were terrible. They’d fight rather than have a feed — just like the Irish and the English. The two sides were a very strong thing. Northies were anyone from Carnarvon up. See, someone would make up a story that wasn’t even worth talking about and it’d spread and spread, until it was way out. Then that would be passed around and, before long, there’d be a fight over it.

  One thing I was lucky about at Moore River was I never got a beating. Lots of girls got a thrashing but I never did. They used to take them down to the storeroom and the superintendent would belt them until they weed all over the floor. They never spared them, and in the afternoons I’d have to go down with a mop and mop it up.

  So for those that got punished, the punishment was harsh. If girls ran away they’d send the trackers after them and they’d be brought back and their hair would be cut off, then they’d do time in the boob.

  At the sewing room we used to make clothes for Forrest River Mission, and for Moore River as well. They never had to buy clothing for us, we made it all. It was terrible material too. But if you were a good worker, at Christmas they’d give you a piece of good material and you could make yourself a frock. Me and another girl, Dorothy Nannup, were really favoured — we used to get a piece and we’d make ourselves something nice to wear.

  One morning me and Dorothy stepped outside to get into line for church and all these boys looked across and wolf-whistled and shouted. We had our new dresses on and they reckoned I was a butterfly and goodness knows what else. My dress was a plain one, but Dorothy, she made a flarey, flouncey one. When she’d spin around it would twirl out. Mine was more of a plain Jane sort of thing, but still, I made a good job of it.

  Although there were awful things that went on at the settlement, and once you were there you were there until it suited them, good things used to happen too. I used to really enjoy going to church, and I loved swimming down at the river. Another one of the things I liked was going to the dances they held once a fortnight. The compound would have our dance on a Wednesday night, and the campies would have theirs on the Saturday.

  Everybody looked forward to these dances. We’d wear the dresses we made, and get electric wires and do one another’s hair. Olive Harris was a good friend of mine and we used to go off to Nanna Leyland’s, or down to old Aunty Pat Rowe’s, and sit by the fire warming up our electric wires. When the wire gets hot enough you curl your hair around it and you end up with ringlets or lots of curls. Matron used to give us some hair clips, and we’d all get dressed up for the dance.

  These old fellas from New Norcia — Charlie Bullfrog and Ben Jedda — used to come over. Old Charlie played the piano accordion and Ben played the violin. Oh, Ben was beautiful, he used to make that violin talk, and we’d all just get stuck into it. We used to love square dancing too you know. Four here, two over there and two there, and you promenade, and do this that and the other. Oh, it was beautiful. We enjoyed it so much we’d be saying, ‘Oohh, come on Wednesday night.’

  Abridged from When the Pelican Laughed

  Alice Nannup, Lauren Marsh and Stephen Kinnane, 1992.

  Hazel Brown

  GROWING UP AROUND NEEDILUP

  The first children taken to the Carrolup Native Settlement from around Ongerup were Clem and Anna Miller, Lily and Fred Wynne, Fred Roberts. Would’ve been about 1914. They took ’em from Toompup; got Bonnie Jean Woods too. Their great-aunt was looking after them. Most of their mothers had died.

  Fred Roberts and Fred Wynne ran away from the settlement in 1916. People there got terrible treatment, and the black trackers who did all the bossing of the inmates were really brutal. They used and abused most of the young girls, and the real fair girls nearly all took husbands just to get away. Sometimes the girls ran away, but they tracked ’em down and brought ’em back.

  The old people lived in camps on the other side of the river, and the young boys and girls were locked up in dormitories every night. People weren’t fed properly, and the young people had to work, but pay or money was never heard of. They buried people wrapped up in chaff bags, and a lot of them died when they shouldn’t have, because they didn’t get medical treatment. Nearly all the babies were born in the camps.

  The dead bodies were kept in the jail, a big mud and stone building with only one window with a thick wooden door and a big bolt and padlock. If you didn’t do what they ordered, they locked you up in there, with the bodies.

  My mother Nellie came with Maggie Williams, Daisy and May Dean. They were all taken from their mothers up in the Murchison area. My mother often told me how the girls were treated in Carrolup. She was unhappy and always afraid. They didn’t always understand the ways and laws of Aboriginal people down here. Another five cousins joined them a few weeks later, and that was better. Better for her, anyway.

  My mother was brought down from Carnarvon on a cattle boat. They kept them down in the bottom of the vessel and didn’t let ’em come up top. It was a rough trip and they all got sick. From Fremantle they took ’em to Balladonia Mission, and then a few weeks later took ’em all the way to Carrolup. The white people musta thought they were gunna try to run away back to where they come from.

  My mother did run away, but they caught her and made her marry my father, Fred Yiller Roberts. He had quite fair skin, they reckon. She was fifteen years old.

  She died in 1975. She never ever saw her mother again. Most of the children sent down from the north married, and not many of them ever went back to their own people.

  Different times now, they say.

  When they were little, my kiddies were asked if they wanted to go there for the holidays. You know, Community Welfare ran a holiday place down there for children. But even though they’ve changed the name to Marribank …

  Well, for the years they ran the Carrolup Settlement … well, just the name, it sickens you. They’ve changed the name, but none of us ever forgot that it was Carrolup. To us that was a concentration camp. And that was somewhere we had a fear of, and didn’t ever want to be sent.

  I remember Lionel Howard, who had been taken away from his own relations and didn’t know why as he hadn’t done anything bad. He came back to Borden, only to be caught again by the police and taken back to Carrolup.

  He used to tell us many years later of the treatment he received there, and of the food they were given to eat, and how they were locked up in the night and flogged by the black police whenever they spoke up for their rights. He had a special hatred for these black police, and I remember one time telling us he was glad they were all dead.

  Lionel was able to run away from Carrolup again and never ever let the police catch him after that. He was always very timid and frightened of the police and Native Affairs people.

  Well, there was a lot of people like that … There was a lotta reasons to be frightened, for us to be careful, you know, back when I was young.

  We moved around the Borden, Ongerup, Gnowangerup and Needilup area until I was about four years of age. Then we came back to Gnowangerup to live, about 1930. That’s when Freddy Yiller died. My mother then had two children, so Fred Tjinjel Roberts — really the only father I’ve known — he married my mother.

  They got legally married about two weeks after Fred Yiller Roberts died because that was Noongar way, you know. She was accepted Noongar way, and his brother died, and so he
had to look after her. He had to care for her, and for us. And then about ten months after, my brother Stanley was born. We were living on a reserve, oh about half a mile from the township. Brother and Sister Wright had a mission house about two mile away.

  On this reserve where we were living we had an old tin hut that served as a church and a school. And they had a hospital. It wouldn’t have been half as big as this room, and I can remember it well, it had an open fire. My mother used to act as a midwife, and look after the women when they had babies.

  If you lived in Gnowangerup you got what they called the government rations. The government gave the missionaries flour, tea and sugar, and tobacco, to share out among Aboriginal people, see.

  We stayed in Gnowangerup for a while, and then Daddy said, ‘Well, not worth staying here, we might as well go somewhere else to raise the kids and give them a better life.’

  Daddy took us out to Needilup. Dad used to go around the district shearing in the season, but we stayed at Charlie Brown’s farm, and Dad worked all through that district.

  Daddy used to go out and set snares for kangaroo, ’cause you could sell the skins, you know. You used to get about one pound ten (they used to call it thirty shillings then) for one good skin.

  He used to skin the joeys too, and peg ’em. Mummy used to scrape the skins and tan ’em and cut ’em into squares. She used to make blankets. Well, they ran out of cotton thread one day. We used to buy it in big reels.

  ‘Ah well,’ I said, ‘can’t do any more sewing.’ We used to sit down and watch Mummy sew and sew. She used to make blankets and sell them to farmers and travellers, you know. That sort of helped us keep going.

  But there came this time when the thread ran out.

  So she used the sinew from a roo tail. They cut the tip of the tail off, and they pull it, and when the tail comes out this sinew comes out. You pull it all into pieces, make it like cotton, and dry it. Sometimes before you dry it, they twist it on a bone. When it’s dried it’s just like thread anyway. And Mummy used to use that to sew the blanket.

  She had one big needle like a darning needle. And Aunty Ellie said, ‘You know you can make that needle.’

  ‘How?’

  They used to have oilstones, rasps, axes, three-cornered files.

  ‘Well,’ Aunty Ellie said, ‘I’ll show you how.’

  Mummy didn’t know how to do this, Daddy didn’t bother to show her, and neither did anyone else. She didn’t have to do it before she met my father.

  In a kangaroo’s arm, there’s that long, skinny bone. Anyway, Aunty Ellie got one. She filed it right down, filed it right down. Made it real skinny. Then with the corner of the file, she made a hole in it, for the thread to go through.

  She made Mummy two, three of them.

  You could do that out of hard wood too. Aunty Ellie used to do that out of sandalwood. Make a needle, make the point, and then burn a hole through the head part. Then you pull the thread through. She used to do it with sinews, too. She used to make us boots out of the kangaroo tail, and moccasins, you know.

  She’d sit down and scrape the skins. Nothing was ever wasted. Used to sit down and take the sinews out of the tail, and use the boomer skins and that to make the carrying bags.

  Noongars were very efficient, only because they were taught by their people. It was more or less about survival.

  And in 1935, Mum was pregnant and we went back to Gnowangerup. And she had my brother Aubrey.

  After Aubrey was born our family consisted of four kids, and we went back to Brown’s. We had relations all round, we used to see them at Christmas time. Browns were terribly good white people, because Daddy had been working with the two Brown brothers ever since they came back from the war. We stayed at the Browns until 1936.

  In 1937 we went back to Gnowangerup. I used to go to school with the white children; Aunty Mag and Lenny and myself went to school. Audrey was born then.

  The Aboriginal people had shifted from living on the reserve near town, most of them. There was a block of land about three miles from Gnowangerup, and Sister Wright made a mission there. And Audrey was one of the first babies to be born up there. I think she was the third baby to be born at that particular place. Well, we stayed there then and Daddy used to go to Borden and shear all around. Around 1938 we stayed in the mission and went to school. We stayed and my mum had treatment for her bad eyes.

  We’d been at the mission before, right at the very beginning of it, for a few weeks. This was even before the people started to build the mission house. We planted a lot of trees which are still there today.

  My mother knew Sister Wright when she was back at Carrolup, and she wrote her a letter and told her there was a lot of Aboriginal people in the district, and how the ones she had made friends with had asked her to let this good Christian white woman know that they all would welcome her and wanted her to come and help them as all of them wanted to live as free people.

  Brother and Sister Wright lived in Gnowangerup for all these years, and saw many of our people born and grow up and die. There was over two hundred people at the mission, everybody was happy, and the children went to school and Sunday School. The men worked all around the district; the ones who didn’t find work picked wool and sold it to buy food and clothes for their families. I went to the mission school with my two brothers. Most of the girls and teenage boys went to work as soon as they left school. Those days you had to work hard and the pay was always poor.

  Lots of times the boss from Carrolup — Mr Bisky, he drove a brown Ford car — would come and want to take away some fair children or perhaps a widow or someone who done something wrong.

  Brother never wanted them to take kids and that. As soon as anyone used to come down in that car, Brother Wright always knew. They couldn’t come on the mission because that was owned by the church, and they had to have Brother Wright’s consent to come there and look around. They wanted women that had no husbands, or children that had no mothers, or the fair ones.

  But Brother always knew that he was coming. Sometimes he’d come to the school and make an excuse. Maybe he’d say, ‘Teacher’s not well today’ — we only had but one teacher — ‘so you can all have the day off’ — and he’d go down to the camp, all around on his old pushbike and say, ‘Now I want all the big ones to take all the little ones away, and you boys to act as watch’ — you know, lookouts — ‘take ’em into the scrub.’

  Or better still we used to take them into the paddock. And we stayed in the big scrub there, and there was a dam there. And then the mothers’d cook up food and the big boys’d bring it.

  The big boys’d stay around, play football or pretend that they were doing something but always keep an eye on that car and where that man was and when he was on his way. And Brother’d go with him as far as town, come back, get on his pushbike and go out to the boys and say, ‘Well, he’s gone, youse can all come home now.’

  All the time, we had that fear. Sometimes, when we used to see the police come in a horse and cart, come up in a sulky, we used to all go and hide, thinking oh well, if you weren’t working they’d get you. I used to work sometimes in town, with Mum, before I went to the Richardsons. My mother used to wash all over the district. Down there with the MacDonalds for a while.

  If they found a girl was not working, the police would come, take the girl away. That man in charge of that settlement, he always found excuses, you know?

  Even if, say, someone used to run away with someone else’s wife and they’d go and tell the police. Well, that was a criminal offence. They’d take you away to the settlement for six months or something.

  Brother Wright had some Christian friends who had a timber mill down near Manjimup, a timber town called Wilga. This was where the timber was sent to from Gnowangerup mission and our men paid Brother whatever money they could afford for the timber, and also for the iron for the roofs. So cottages were built on the mission; one or two rooms, and much better than bag huts.

  Aboriginal peo
ple were not allowed in Gnowangerup town after six o’clock. We weren’t allowed to go to the pictures and the women all had to have their babies in the camp.

  In about the early forties the government gave money for a two-ward maternity hospital, which was built on the mission and it was really nice. All the people were happy at the mission and Brother Wright ran a little store where the people could buy food and he protected the Aboriginal people all the time, always.

  But the townspeople and other people made complaints, reckoned that Brother Wright was making profit from the Aboriginal people, and the mission got closed down.

  All he was doing was buying the wool people plucked from dead sheep. He gave them a reasonable price for it.

  Christian people used to send second-hand clothes to the mission but, well, not many people wanted to have charity. It sort of made you feel independent if you could pay something for things.

  He’d maybe sell a good dress for about tuppence or thruppence or something like that. Well, when people had the money they bought things that they needed and I couldn’t see that that was robbing anyone.

  And while Brother and Sister were there, conditions on the mission were really good. You had proper medical attention. Well, Dr Boyd used to willingly give that. And Sister used to get medicines, ointment, and eye drops and ear drops. But, those days, not many children had runny noses and bad ears, I can say that for a fact. Very few of them did.

  Runny noses and that only came about when people started living in the houses with concrete floors. But Brother and Sister really helped, you know. The kiddies went to school regular. Brother Wright used to ride a bike around to every camp and you had to explain why you weren’t at school.

  Brother had a dam built there and that was clean water. The women carted water and washed at the dam. They washed their kiddies and they washed their clothes and everyone wore white sandshoes and socks to Sunday school. We only had the one-room church and that was crowded with people.