Chapter 1

Lesley

It was the mid 1950s and I must’ve only been about ten. As I jumped from one square to the next in our game of hopscotch, I remember my long black hair and cotton dress bouncing in time. My older sisters and I were playing with a couple of friends beneath the bunya tree by the road’s edge. This majestic, rough-barked native had been planted by our grandfather many years earlier. It gave us shade and shelter as we played, and our mothers could still watch us as they did their housework.

On this particular day, we were startled to see a grey bus coming towards us along the dusty road. We stopped our game and stood staring at the approaching vehicle in silence. We were not used to outsiders coming into Cherbourg. The only white people we saw were the government officials who ran the settlement and lived on it. We didn’t have much contact with those living in the world outside its boundaries.

As the bus came closer, the older children realised what it was. ‘Tourist bus, tourist bus!’ someone shrieked. The rest of us remained frozen, not sure what we should do. The government officials had drummed into us that we must always be on our best behaviour – especially when those from the ‘outside’ came for a visit.

Although we had seen a tourist bus weaving through the settlement’s dirt laneways before, it was still a bit of a novelty. The tourists came with their cameras, to look at the settlement and take pictures of us. A bit like you do when on a safari, I suppose. Their faces at the windows were creamy coloured, just like the white officials’ – not chocolaty brown, like ours. It was easy to believe that these pale-skinned people, always so in control, must be better than us.

We continued to watch as a white official boarded the coach to take the tourists on their ‘guided tour’ of Cherbourg. It wasn’t until the bus disappeared that we felt relaxed enough to resume our game. But before long we heard the sound of the engine again, as it returned from its tour of our streets. The great big black wheels slowed before coming to a complete stop, just metres away from where we were playing.

‘Wha … wha … what do you think they want?’ I asked my older sister Alexandra, whom we all called Alex. Back then I had a bad stutter and it ‘made me shame’, as we used to say. I’m not sure what caused the stutter, but I know it usually came out when I was especially nervous.

‘I don’t know,’ Alex whispered back, her full focus on the bus. I shuffled beside her, seeking some sort of sisterly protection.

I saw several of those creamy-white faces pushed up against the glass, peering down at us. A couple of passengers climbed out of the bus and stood not far from us, one with a camera at the ready.

‘Lollies, lollies!’ yelled Patsy, one of my best friends, as she ran towards the bus.

‘They’re throwing lollies!’ someone else yelled, as all different kinds of treats were tossed out of the opening windows of the bus. We jostled one another to grab the most. There were flashes of light from the camera and clouds of dust rising from the dry ground as we scratched, like chooks searching in the dirt for something to eat, and scrambled for those bloody lollies.

When I think back, it makes me shame, but as kids we didn’t sense this was degrading. We were just starved for a good feed of lollies. Any child would be, if you grew up like us. We didn’t know any different. How could we?

Cherbourg Aboriginal Settlement became my family’s new home in the early 1900s after the authorities removed both sets of my grandparents from their traditional lands and relocated them. Grandfather and Granny Chambers, my mother’s parents, lived out their days crammed alongside us. At various times over the years, sixteen people called our small three-bedroomed cottage ‘home’. The old folk feature strongly in my earliest childhood memories, somehow making a homely life out of very little for my siblings and me. Yet, like all children, we never stopped to think what their lives were like before all of us grandkids came along, and took it for granted that they’d always be there to look after us.

Grandfather was a quiet, gentle old man. Without a birth certificate it’s difficult to say exactly when he was born, other than sometime in the mid 1870s, but he knew he was born near a river in northern Queensland. Somehow, as a young boy, he got into the clutches of Fillis’s Circus from South Africa. He once confided to a family friend that he was tricked by the circus into becoming an act, along with the performing animals, to entertain the paying public. Later, it was discovered that in 1892 Fillis’s toured the east coast of Australia – to rave reviews. In a Brisbane newspaper of the time, a resident from the town of Gympie complained about the circus’s treatment of the performing elephants – but there was no mention of the Aboriginal boy and the treatment he received.

The following year, Grandfather was found by missionaries on the streets of Melbourne, where he was deserted after the circus had abandoned him some 3500 kilometres away from his home. Without being able to read or write and barely understanding English, he lived a hapless existence in a city of white strangers. Witnesses had seen him in a miserable condition, sleeping on the streets with other homeless boys.

The authorities charged Grandfather with some minor offence and later released him into the custody of the missionaries, who give him a new life and name – Charlie Chambers – to mark the Christian he became. With that, Grandfather lost the traditional name his mother and father had given him. I suppose, compared to others, he was lucky that at least his new name wasn’t offensive. Some Aboriginal people in those times were given names like Billy Ugly Monkey, Blind Sally, Gin, Mad Tommy, Scratcher, Cigarette and Pluto No. 1. My own ancestors on my father’s side were bestowed the names Jimmy and Annie Flourbag. Could they have simply been near a flour bag when the government official was renaming them?

Grandfather Chambers, with the help of his new Christian family, was finally returned to his home state. But in the years since he had been taken by the circus, Queensland had passed the Protection Act and had taken total control of its Indigenous population. Under the Act, Grandfather, despite now being a young adult, was deemed a ‘Ward of the State’ – with every aspect of his life to be determined by the government.

‘Aboriginal natives’ like Grandfather, the government decided, were to be shipped off the mainland to the newly established Fraser Island Aboriginal Mission Reserve. But before this happened, Grandfather was charged by the authorities for vagrancy and sentenced to three months in the notorious Boggo Road maximum-security prison in Brisbane. It must have been far from the homecoming he was hoping for.

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.