When I look back on my life I can see experiences that have my own mark of choice on them, and experiences that were way beyond my control. This is because half of my life was lived in a state of oppression, while the other half has been spent rediscovering who I really am. The road to self discovery has been long and traumatic because I was taken away from my family and culture and institutionalised. This hasn’t stopped me from delving back into my taproots though. I’ve embraced the challenge in order to understand myself and my life better.
The taproot is the root of the tree that goes the deepest. In my family, taproots are really important because, as my mother always says, ‘We didn’t get here by ourselves. We have others to thank for that and we should acknowledge it.’
One of the taproots in my family was Great Grandma Minnie Knapp Keen-Hayward, who was a dainty sort of woman. Her mother was a traditional Nyungar woman from the Great Southern region of Western Australia. Her father was a whitefella called Charles Knapp. Although quite young, I still have a faint memory of Great Grannie Minnie staying with us when we lived in Tambellup, which is a small town in the south-west.
I was a bit forward as a child and with this came an interest in my extended family, so I was always asking questions. Whenever anyone came to the front gate, which I would be swinging on, and ask for my mum, I’d say. ‘Who are you? Are you coming to stay with us? Have you brought me any lollies?’ Even though I was like this, the oldies didn’t seem to mind. They thought highly of me and knew and loved me as Beryl’s oldest girl and Len and Em’s grandkid.
I was around four or five years old when Great Grannie Minnie used to visit and because she didn’t come around much there were lots of hugs and kisses when she did, which I lapped up. I would take her hand and walk with her up the steps to our house and get a cushion for her to sit on because sometimes she liked to sit on the floor. Then out would come the cigarettes. She’d unroll them, rub the tobacco in her hands, then pop it into her mouth and chew it. Sometimes she’d sit in our lounge room beside the fire and she had a tin cup which was affectionately known in our house as ‘Grannie Hayward’s spitting cup’. To my delight she’d occasionally spit into the flames and make them flare up the chimney, but she’d only do that if Mum wasn’t watching.
My mother took good care of Gran. She always made sure there was plenty of wood for the fire when Gran was coming, because it was real cold in that part of country. She also stocked up on tea, sugar, damper and treacle, because that’s what Gran liked.
Mum was good at making people feel welcome. She’s always been there to give family members a helping hand, and has been especially good to the oldies. Family members would often say, ‘If you need anything, Ber’s here …’ She was known for making sure the old fellas were looked after at family gatherings, and she kept her door open for them to stay with us and put their feet up when they needed a bit of peace and quiet.
Granny Hayward’s oldest child, who was my grandfather on my mother’s side, became another important taproot in our family. His name was Lennard George Keen, and he was a grandfather any child would be delighted to call their pop. He was a very loving, gentle person and he never raised his voice to growl at us, but then we respected him so much he didn’t have to. When we worked on farms Dada Keen would come and spend time with us, taking us out rabbit trapping, mallee root picking, snaring kangaroos along the fence line and picking wool off dead sheep for pocket money. He even taught us games to play in the open paddocks that surrounded our house.
He’d get us to stand in a line on the rise of a small hill, where we’d each have an old car tyre at the side of us. What we had to do was run with it alongside us, hitting it with our hand. The first one to get to the bottom of the hill and touch the fence was the winner. If you fell over and were left behind, usually on the ground laughing your head off, and the tyre went rolling away in its own direction, or if it got to the fence line before you, you lost. The winner would get threepence next time we went to town for our stores, but Grandad would give the losers the same amount so no one felt left out. You could buy a lot for threepence in those days.
Dada Keen was a patient person and I really liked to follow him around, watching what he was doing and asking him questions about everything. He always took the time to stop and explain things to me and I think he liked having someone young in tow, so we enjoyed each other’s company.
Sometimes when he was visiting we’d have a cook-up outside and us kids would help him to make a big fire. Then we’d arrange our stumps around the fire so we could sit and listen to him tell us stories about our culture. He’d talk about the animals, the land, the waterways, the stars and how we were all connected. He used to say that Aboriginal people could feel the land’s pulse. All that we had to do was be very quiet, close our eyes, and put our bare feet on the ground. Then we’d feel the land’s heartbeat. He also told us that we needed to respect all these things, as well as the old people who’d gone back to spirit. He talked about the hardships they’d had to endure, but he also told us to have pride in who we are. He told us about the birds too.
He always knew when it was going to rain. ‘It’s going to rain soon,’ he’d say, ‘the rainbird is calling out to us.’ When I asked him how he knew, he’d reply. ‘Well, the spirits have sent that rainbird along to tell us to get movin’ and get our jobs done because there’s gunna be a downpour any time now.’ Sure enough, it’d rain. I never forgot that bird. Years later, when I heard it calling out, I’d say to my own kids, ‘It’s going to rain.’ And it always did.
Grandad also told us to go by our gut feelings, especially when we were out in the bush. When he was a young boy he looked after sheep and in those days the bush was very thick and could be dangerous, especially with those little hairy fellas who Nyungar people call woodatchis, running around. He said not to be afraid, but to be watchful of where you were and what was going on around you. ‘Remember what I’m tell’n you because this is a part of who you are, it’s your culture and I don’t want you to forget it. Always remember this my girl.’ He gave us kids a lot of cultural teaching, but sadly our lives wouldn’t stay like that.
It wasn’t long before my brothers and sisters and I were put into Sister Kate’s Children’s Home. Sister Kate’s was set up by the Native Welfare Department in the 1930s. Its aim was to turn lighter skinned Aboriginal kids into white citizens and I suppose it was part of what used to be called the White Australia Policy, because the politicians of the day wanted this land to be white. It was a very racist policy because they expected us to forget all about our families and our culture and take our place in white society instead.
I became rebellious in the Home. I was fed a diet of Western religion, which I always questioned, so I was often in trouble. ‘You are a wilful, disrespectful child and a bad influence on the other children.’ That’s what they liked to tell me because they didn’t like me challenging what they were teaching.
‘Why can’t you tell us stories about other spiritual beings besides Jesus and the Holy Ghost?’ I used to ask them. I wanted to hear stories like the ones Grandad used to tell.
‘Your grandfather made all that up,’ they told me. ‘Your family don’t really care about you or your brothers and sisters.’
They played a game of divide and conquer with all the Aboriginal families who had kids in there.
‘If you don’t stop questioning us you’ll be punished and the other children in your cottage won’t get their weekly ration of sweets. So stop misbehaving!’
This went on and on until I learned to shut up and keep my thoughts to myself. I had to suppress my knowledge of the cultural stories I’d heard and just listen to their Christian ones.
This meant that while I was there, something very deep was missing in my life and it was that deep sense of being connected to my people, my family, my ancestors and to our cultural beliefs. It was a spirituality the Sunday School teachers couldn’t understand and because of this oppression I started to lose my sense of being a Nyungar kid. The Home took away our sense of self worth and we didn’t know where we fitted in the world anymore. I wasn’t going out bush with Grandad looking for bush tucker, and he wasn’t showing me the animal markings on the ground and how to track them. I wasn’t involved in the cultural things that gave me a sense of place and a deep spiritual understanding of who I really was. I lost all this when we were placed in the institution, and it led to a lot of self-destructive behaviour later. It was a long time before me and my brothers and sisters sorted ourselves out.
While there were mostly bad times for me at Sister Kate’s, there were a few good times too. Like when the kids from various state orphanages got together at the Zoo, the Royal Show, the pictures, or Peters Ice Cream Factory. It was great having a chance to meet up with other kids in the same situation and let off some steam. Those times were fun and loud and our ears would be ringing for hours afterwards. Imagine being stuck in His Majesty’s Theatre with hundreds of screaming kids from institutions like Sister Kate’s, Castledare, Clontarf, the Mt Lawley Receiving Home and the Salvation Army Boys and Girls Homes.
Still, even though they were fun times, if an outsider was looking in on us all they’d be thinking: where are all these kids’ parents and why aren’t the kids with them? All any of us really wanted was our families.
Dada Keen only visited us once that I can remember when we were in the Home. This wasn’t because he didn’t want to; it was because they used to stop people at the gate so we couldn’t mix up with our families. This made the whole situation even harder for us. By the time we all left Sister Kate’s and the Salvation Army Boys and Girls Homes, we were teenagers, and a lot of damage had been done to our family connections. We went into the Home together as a family, but we didn’t come out as one. At Sister Kate’s we were separated and put in different cottages, so even as brothers and sisters we hadn’t lived together as a family for years. When we came out we had to adjust and Mum had to adjust too.
One by one we made our way back to our mother, uncles, aunties and grandparents. But a lot of things had changed. I’ve never asked my brothers and sisters, especially my older siblings, how they felt about suddenly being last in line in a group of cousins for our grandparents’ attention, when before they’d been the first.
Some of the last meaningful times I had with my grandfather were when I visited him in hospital. I remember once when I was sitting quietly on the bed holding his hand as he slept, but then he suddenly woke up and looked at me and smiled. I saw an amazing thing. In his blue eyes I saw a young soul. And that’s how I remember him and his beautiful spirit.
After Sister Kate’s I went into the Salvation Army Girls Home until just after my fourteenth birthday. By then the people in charge all agreed I was very disruptive so I think they were glad to get rid of me. I’d run away a few times looking for Mum and they were sick of having to deal with the result.
The last time I made a run for it was at night. I kissed my two sisters goodbye and asked two older girls to keep an eye on them while I was gone. Then I jumped out of the window of the girls dormitory, made my way down the back of the Home and jumped over the back fence. I headed to my girlfriend’s house from school, where I slept in her chook pen for the night and early next morning she gave me some food to hold me over. Though I looked a bit the worse for wear and was a bit high on the nose from the chook poo, I didn’t care. I was ‘on a mission’ and I was not going to let anything or anyone stop me. I walked along the railway line till I reached Perth, where I made my way to my aunty’s house. My mother’s sister gave me a feed and a couple of cool drink bottles to cash in at the local shops for a train fair to Midland. When I hopped the old ‘dogbox’ I was scared stiff that I was going to be pulled up by one of the train guards because I was just a kid and he would’ve known I should be in school. Every time the train pulled into a station, I’d put my head out of the small window just enough to see where the guards were before I felt safe to continue. When I got to Midland I kept my wits about me because you had to be careful when you were on the run as a kid, as there were many dangers that could befall you.
I kept to the back streets, making my way from the Midland train station to my grandparents’ house in Midvale, ducking the ‘Bunjii men’ and ‘rock spiders’ — I think the words used now are sleazy old men and paedophiles — that prowled the streets looking to take advantage of anyone young and innocent. I’d learned the hard facts of life early, so I knew I had to protect myself. I also kept low because the police seemed to have an innate radar when it came to spotting runaways and I didn’t want to get picked up before I even got to my granny’s house. If I got caught too soon, it would’ve all been for nothing.
The trouble was, when I finally did arrive, I was made to go back again. It upset Mum and my grandparents to do that but they were worried my running away would work against my mother, as well as my younger brothers and sisters, in finally getting back together again as a family.
Mum and one of my younger aunties walked me into Midland to the police station and left me there. Mum mouthed ‘I love you,’ and then she was gone. I felt so alone and angry, so I started to cheek the old police sergeant and a woman officer who were on duty. The old boy looked at me from over the rim of his glasses with a bit of a scowl on his face, but the woman officer had sorrow and sympathy in her eyes, which made me feel kaarna — real shame for my behaviour. So I stopped swinging around in the swivel chair, kept my mouth shut and just sooked quietly till they drove me back to the Home.
Matron met us on the steps and was very nice to the police and not too bad towards me either. I think they’d already decided I wouldn’t be there much longer. My punishment was to polish the long walkway in the entry hall of the turn-of-the-century mansion we lived in. It took me all night, on my hands and knees, and I still had to go to school the next day and by then I hadn’t really slept for twenty-four hours.
Not long after that they let me go. I was happy to finally leave, but sad too because my two sisters weren’t coming with me. They were still stuck there. When I got out I lived with a few different family members because Mum had to work away in the bush to make enough money to get a decent house and furnish it to the Welfare’s standards. All that had to be done before we could all be together again as a proper family.
The kind of institutionalisation that I and my brothers and sisters experienced as children doesn’t prepare you for life, it just prepares you for more institutionalisation. A lot of the kids from homes ended up as prison inmates and this included my own brothers. They graduated from the homes to stints in various institutions for youth, and finally into maximum security prison for men. They were on a treadmill of hopelessness, of feeling beaten before their lives had even begun, and that all started at Sister Kate’s. They’d been deprived of basic human rights as a child, and as they grew older they were harassed by various government officials, especially the police. It wasn’t easy for them to turn their lives around. I ended up in prison too, but not as a prisoner. I was one of the first Aboriginal women to work in the prison system with our people.
It took years for my brothers to find happiness, but they are an inspiration to me now and I feel very proud of them and how they’ve come through all the hard times.
Abridged from Speaking from the Heart
edited by Sally Morgan, Tjalaminu Mia and Blaze Kwaymullina, 2007.