by Sally Morgan
Abridged from Lola Young: Medicine Woman and Teacher
Lola Young with Anna Vitenbergs, 2007.
David Simmons
HIDING
I was born in Subiaco, Perth. My mother is an Aboriginal woman from Kukerin in the Lake Grace area of Western Australia. My father came from the Margaret River area. He is an Aboriginal man. My stepfather is part of the Isaacs family from Perth. My parents are Nyoongahs.
My schooling as a young fella was undertaken at different places. Our family used to travel around a lot then.
In 1951 the Native Welfare Officers were still active. My younger school days were occasionally spent hiding from the Native Welfare. My mother insisted that I go to school, but there was always that dread that I would never come home from school because of Native Welfare. We knew that if Native Welfare ever found out that there were Aboriginal kids like myself at those schools, they would take them away. Native Welfare didn’t necessarily go and tell the parents that they had taken their child. We were all vulnerable to Native Welfare, who were always grabbing Aboriginal kids. I started school in 1950. I would turn six in June so I had to start when I was five and a half years old. It was at a very small place called Parkerville. I’ve been back since, taken my kids, it’s just a one-room building.
Parkerville is up in the Darling Ranges, not far from Mundaring. We shifted there as the old man, my stepfather, was a returned soldier working at Hollywood Repatriation Hospital in Perth. Some of the old returned soldiers had country properties. He used to negotiate with them. The family had to keep out of the way of the Native Welfare because Mum wouldn’t give up her Aboriginality.
Not long after I started school we shifted to Mount Helena. It is another very small place back in the hills around Perth. I used to catch the bus to school myself. The school building there was the town hall. Quite a few kids went to the town hall. There was more than two busloads, all mixed up, but I was probably the only Aboriginal kid at school. I can remember my mother taking me to school and asking the teacher, if the Native Welfare were to come, would they hide me?
I remember that on several occasions that a Scottish teacher called Miss Lang raced into the class and grabbed me saying, ‘Quick, quick, come in here.’ And she got another boy, who is my friend to this day, to go with me and hide under the wooden stage. So we ran and hid under the stage. She said, ‘Don’t you kids come out until I tell you.’ The Native Welfare man came in and asked if there were any Aboriginal children at school and the teacher said, ‘No.’ It was probably an hour or so before we could come out.
On another occasion we were out in the yard playing when the Native Welfare officer came. She told one of the kids to get me and go up under the hall. We had to climb right under the school. A few of the kids came with us and they thought it exciting hiding under the school until the Native Welfare bloke went. But it wasn’t a prank for me. I think these visits were a response to someone dobbing me in, but I’m not sure.
But we were dobbed in on a couple of occasions when we were at Parkerville because the bloke came to our house. But we had a system. Mum set it up. There was a tree two hundred metres away from the house and another about five hundred metres away. She would leave bottles of water under the trees. The system was that if the Native Welfare came we were to rush to the first tree and stay there. The dog was to come with us and he wouldn’t let anybody come near without barking a warning. If the dog barked a warning and it wasn’t Mum yelling out, then we would go to the next tree which was further out and hide there. We had about half a dozen bottles of water that we would take with us and Mum would give us some bread or damper, whatever she had, and we were off. I was the eldest. We all had fair skin. Clarrie has got the darkest skin of all of us.
Native Welfare would have just grabbed us. My elder brother and sister were in Sister Kate’s children’s home. Mum put them in Sister Kate’s so she knew where they were. In this way she could stop Native Welfare efforts to grab kids. She put Alice and Bill, who are older than me, into Sister Kate’s. Sister Kate’s at the time had a lot of half caste kids.
Unfortunately Native Welfare took the kids from the south and sent them north. They took kids from the north and brought them south. They crossed the people up all the time.
Mum always taught us about little things when we were kids in the bush. How to track rabbits, know the difference between the animals, how to catch the animals, where to look for them all and which animals we could eat, those sorts of things. The old man worked at Hollywood Repatriation Hospital. He only came home four days in a month. He didn’t have a vehicle to drive home every weekend. We wouldn’t see the old man for months at a time. What he would do is try to work for three months and then get twelve days off. In this way he had some sort of time off especially when we were on holidays.
So we spent a lot of time at home with Mum. It was really good. She always taught us to respect our elders, which I always follow. When we moved to East Perth we were among a lot of Aboriginal people who were like fringe dwellers. We never turned the people away and we were never afraid to mix with them. I certainly was never afraid of the people. Those were the things that my mother passed on.
Then there was the Coolbaroo League, it means black and white magpie. Back in ’55, ’56 it had a little meeting place in Murray Street. It was the Young Men’s Christian Association, I think. They had a lot of the old people come in there and sit down and tell us stories. In those days they still brought in the traditional spears and shields and boomerangs to those meetings. They used to have a lot of arts and crafts there to sell. Not so much art but craft. We heard all the stories about why the crow was black, how the red robin got red, how the emu and the goannas swapped feathers and all of those stories.
I was never part of a corroboree, never went to one in those days. But there was an elder, Bill Bodney. He was the old tribal top man back in the 1950s, responsible for Perth. I remember to this day when the Queen came, she had to be given the boomerang of peace by old Bill to say that she could come to his country, because that was his place. He was on the airstrip when she came to Australia.
I finished my primary school in East Perth and I went on to high school. It was for boys and I left halfway through the second year, as soon as I turned fourteen. In those days you were allowed to leave school at fourteen. I could have gone on to do wonderful things. I was told by the headmaster that I would have made an excellent accountant. But in those days, you had to know somebody who could get you into accountancy. We didn’t have those sorts of contacts.
In those days there was plenty of work around for young blokes straight out of school. I started off working with my brother in a timber mill just up the road from us in Charles Street. The Tower Hotel was on the corner. The old fella next door had a little bit of a timber yard at the back and I worked there for about a year and a half. Then I left and went and worked for an old fella in a nursery.
At this time we’d moved to West Perth. I left school in 1959. We were there for only a short while and got our first State Housing house in Barney Street, Glendalough. Later, I was the last member of the family to live in that house. We lived there until 1986.
Once we were in that house in West Perth, Mum set it up as a halfway house for the kids coming out of Sister Kate’s. There was a need which she saw. Kids coming out of Sister Kate’s had nowhere to go when they turned fourteen or they finished high school, because then they had to get out.
Not far from us, on the corner of Fitzgerald and Carr Streets, was a place called McDonald House. McDonald House is part of the Aboriginal history. They taught the kids, in a TAFE type situation, to do things like bookkeeping, accounting, etc. It was the first sort of Aboriginal access in Perth. There were limited numbers of kids getting places there, so Mum set up this halfway house. No government funding, just did it off her own bat. The kids who wanted to get into there came and stayed at our place. We had a big four-bedroom house. Mum put beds in, about four or five kids in e
ach room like a little dormitory set up.
They stayed with us. There was plenty of work around so they were able to support themselves and they had a place to come home to, three meals a day or prepared lunches. Then as places became available in McDonald House they went there and they were able to go on with schooling. That worked really well. Mum certainly made use of her time.
Abridged from Karijini Mirlimirli
edited by Noel Olive, 1997.
Eric Hedley Hayward
OPPORTUNITY
At the beginning of the 1950s, in line with the changes in government attitude and legislation about social programs for Aborigines, a scheme had been introduced so Noongar students could go to high school in Perth.
How it worked was that officers of the Native Welfare Department identified boys and girls capable of taking up the opportunity, and after a selection process involving the officers, teachers and parents, a committee in Perth made the final selection. Those who were doing well at school and were willing to leave their families were selected first.
This was a great opportunity for Noongars. At that time, living conditions, school costs and the general marginalisation Noongars experienced in the country were factors, we believed, that made it almost impossible to be successful in regional high schools. Few Noongars in the country were achieving results comparable to Wadjalas’, and this new opportunity gave us a chance to do so. So, many Noongars thought the idea of kids going away to better themselves was a good one, and, certainly, parents knew they would never have been able to pay for what was on offer from the Native Welfare Department.
But some parents wouldn’t allow their children to be sent away. Our communities had experienced many years of forced child removals, and even then children were still being removed from their parents, and so much doubt remained that the program was ‘for their own good’ rather than just another way to take their kids.
Grandfather Williams had had plenty of experience of Noongars being taken away, and my mother talked to him about allowing kids and teenagers to go away for work or school.
She remembered: ‘He was visiting one time and since we began to hear about this education thing for our kids going to high school away in Perth, we talked about it. I wasn’t sure about sending my kids away, but I knew deep down that we had to do something to help our kids do better at school. “Wadjalas,” he said, “aren’t to be trusted with our young ones. Too many have been taken away. Be careful Lily,” he told me, “they may never come back. We don’t want to lose any more of our people.”
Mum understood what he meant. She, too, had almost been taken away by the Protector of Aborigines, and had some reservations about whether going away for schooling would turn out good for her kids and for the family. Uncle Len and Aunty Elsie had their doubts, too. Years before, when their son Jack had been a little boy on the Gnowangerup reserve, he was fearful of being taken away by the authorities. Jack had a fair complexion and was a target for the officers. At the first inkling that the van to take them away was in town, all the fair Noongar kids would run away to the bush and hide. Jack was as scared as hell of being taken away and was one of the first to head for the bush.
Mum said he used to say: ‘Why am I so fair? Why do they want to take us fair kids? We are all the one family.’
That stuck with me. I was fair too and could understand how Jack probably felt about being chased down to be taken away. They nearly got away with taking me, so what happened with Jack I never forgot.
It wasn’t forgotten by the Williams family either. Like Mum, they had reasons to be reluctant to let their kids go in case they didn’t come back. But more Noongars began to believe it was okay and a good thing for their young ones, as some kids went for work or schooling and came back.
In the very early days, many of our women were domestics on sheep stations and farming properties, and then Mum and her mates did that type of work at Gnowangerup. Then younger ones in our families continued similar work. At least six close relations went to properties in the south-west part of Noongar country to work as domestics. Vernice, Dawn and Barbara Williams worked for Egerton-Warburtons in the South-West, and my sisters Norma and Edna worked for Hesters and Muirs there as well. These property owners were among the early settlers of the South-West. Then a lot of young women got work at the Homes of Peace, in Subiaco, as nursing assistants. My sisters Joan, Norma and Wilma worked there, and so did cousins Vernice, Dawn, Barbara, Judy, Treacy, Averil and Rhona. Several of Aunty Elsie’s daughters went to Alvan House and on to Homes of Good Peace to work in nursing. As it became apparent they could return home as they wished, our families became more confident in allowing their young ones to venture out on their own.
Not that I lacked confidence about returning. Mum certainly encouraged me, and I knew that Ted Penny, Uncle Bill’s stepson, had been in the first group to go to McDonald House, and my brother Bevan attended the following year. And Norma had gone and returned too.
It wasn’t as a result of my mother’s own schooling that she emphasised the value of education to us — she had never been to school. But she did observe others well and could see the potential in her kids, and of course she knew, as I did from an early age, that Noongars most often got the rough end of the stick in dealings and opportunities in our town and an education was the way this might be changed.
So in February 1960, I got on the train, travelled through the night to Perth, was picked up by Miss Styles, the hostel manager, at the Perth Railway Station and was taken to McDonald House. I had made it. I knew then it was up to me to do the best I could to survive in a new environment — to me, it was a new world.
Living in the city was nothing like I had experienced before. McDonald House was in West Perth, about three kilometres from central Perth, in an old semi-industrial area. The house was above average size and big enough to accommodate a manager, a maid and eight boys. I shared a room with two other boys and had my own bed and a small wardrobe. There was plenty of space. I had come out of a crammed, uncomfortable shack and I thought this was perfect. Three other boys were in a second bedroom, so there were six of us who stayed there for that year.
Most of the boys in the hostel had lived in humpies on reserves, and so it was totally new to live in a spick-and-span home where we were regimented by rules and regulations most of the time. You were told to keep the noise down and be respectful to those in charge. Things were totally different from back home, and learning to be different was hard. But I think that with all the requirements and standards of conduct set for us, we did manage it quite well, considering.
Native Welfare provided us with a set of school, home and social clothes at the beginning of the year, along with football gear and shoes. Generally, clothes and shoes were handed down from one boy to another, though we did get some new clothes at times.
Native Welfare also provided us with five shillings a week pocket-money for our own use, which seemed like a fortune to us.
The daily routine at the hostel was to get up at seven, make our beds and have a shower. Those on breakfast duty would set the table, make the toast and cook the eggs or whatever we were going to eat, with the help of the maid, Miss Chadd. She was a Noongar lady from Roelands Mission who helped the manager, Miss Styles, run the place. Miss Styles had worked at the mission too. She was a tall and large imposing person who didn’t move very quickly but was very aware of how we behaved and made it clear that ‘rules were rules’ and we had to stick to them, always. I soon learned that we didn’t mess with Miss Styles, but still managed to have problems sticking to the rules.
Following breakfast, two others would wash, wipe and put away the dishes. The other two would sweep the floors and tidy the dining room.
Miss Chadd did the washing on Wednesdays. The boys were required to fold and iron their own clothes, and wash their socks, singlets and undies on that day. Every Saturday morning we cleaned and tidied our rooms and washed and polished the floors.
Jobs had to be done p
roperly. Miss Styles insisted the house was always clean, dusted and polished. We had an electric polisher that was big and very difficult to handle and it took a while for the boys to learn to use it safely.
When us new boys first arrived and had our duties allocated, I recall the older boys from the year before setting us up for the demon polisher. It had a round disc-shape brush that protruded out the front a little, and there were two small wheels at the back that allowed you to move it from one room to another. The motor, which sat on top, turned the single brush in a clockwise direction. When you were polishing, the brush was the only thing that touched the floor. It spun around very fast. Of course new boys didn’t know that, not having seen an electric polisher before, let alone used one. The trick was to balance this powerful machine, and if you didn’t, it would run off in the direction it was leaning towards, even if you had a firm hold on it. It was difficult to get it right. If it took off it would smash into whatever was in its path. It must have weighed fifteen kilos. It also tended to go off in different directions as you tried to get the balance correct.
There was no instruction from Eddie, an older boy whose job it was to get me going. With him, it was just trial and error. He was a practical joker and had fun watching others mess up. I had to polish the lounge and passage.
‘There you go,’ he said, after he had pulled the polisher out of the passage cupboard and into the lounge room. ‘Switch it on at the switch,’ he instructed, as he pointed towards to the switch on the handle.
I had no idea what was to come. I turned the switch on and off it went, whizzing and spinning. I clung to it as that’s what Eddie had advised. I hung on in desperation as it went all over the polished boards of the lounge room as I tried to balance it. Left, right, front and back, the thing went.
‘Keep it up level — level — level!’ Eddie instructed.
