Remembered By Heart: An Anthology of Indigenous Writing (10 page)

I'm the one used to wait on them when they having a feed. I used to sit in the corner waiting on the people eating. You know when the whitefellas have a dinner they have the soup first, so I bring the soup in, then get the tray and get all the dishes when they finish, take them to the kitchen. Then bring the dinner and sit down waiting in the corner until they finish. That was really, really hard, and I was learning a lot of different things all the time. I had to do all those things.

Mr and Mrs Kelly changed the old ways the Aborigine people lived at the station. We had to know how to dress, keep clean and eat at the table. They teach us to eat at the table. They change the house and all, made a big dining room thing for the blackfellas, no more having our meals in the woodheap, like the other stations. That's why, sort of, they change our lives, you know.

Had to keep clean and know how to dress and things like that. In early days old people never used to have pants and them things. That lady now used to order all the clothes: pants and petticoats, bras and everything. Old people used to say, ‘I feel uncomfortable with this cockrag on.' They used to call pants a cockrag.

We used to have fun dressing the old girls, laugh and everything. We have a good laugh when we put that bra on Auntie Mabel and them. They say, ‘What this! Is too tight, hurting my
piwi
and everything.' They have the biggest
laugh about it. Mrs Kelly tell them, ‘You have to wear them, this is different now. Grab all the old clothes and chuck them in the bin.' Then she make them old people wear them things, petticoat, pants and bra, and she come with a bamboo stick, lift their dress up when they not looking, you know, checking if they got pants on. They say, ‘Aah, what all having a look at my
thumpu'
[backside], and all that. They used to get shame, yeah. She used to be really strict, check it if they got pants on, because when they get home they chuck it away, feel free again.

All the old people, when they get the calico material, used to sew pants and things for us little kids, but they never used to have it, you know. ‘I don't know why that woman maybe worrying about our
thumpu
– we born with nothing', they say, you know. The other old girls used to them things, Mum and them. Them hard corset thing, they used to put it on Mum, because my Mum was big, put the stomach down, you know. When they have a party or something, I used to put my foot on Mum's tummy and push it back and somebody used to lace that thing straight away, you know, lace it up zigzag and tie him up. We used to have the biggest laugh. ‘Walk straight,' they tell us. We had some fun all right.

Dad got better and worked at Munda Station. He never come back. The doctor in Port Hedland was trying him out, keeping an eye on him, Munda not far from Port Hedland Hospital, you know. Anyway, we stayed at Ashburton Downs. Long time later, Dad died, but I don't remember when that was.

No men around, so me and my brother used to go and kill a sheep for the station. It's no trouble for us to ride a horse to go get one, we already know them things. You got to go out and get the sheep, bring them in and put them in the yard, then put them in the pen when they settle down. Whenever you want to kill them, kill them. Mum's brother, Stanley Delaporte, he used to teach us how to grab them and how to sit on them and all that. Lucky we learning as we going. We had to learn tough ways, that's the only way to learn how to work.

We used to grab him, cut his throat. I'm the one used to cut the throat. Sound like a murderer! Boy, did we make a mess of that sheep, skinning it. We had to skin it rough ways at first, not properly; then you got really used to it, you know. You got to learn how to do it. We had to put it up on a hook and it used to drop down on the ground. Try to put it up again with Nick down the back trying to put the weight on the pole to lift it up. We used to sing out for one old fellow, one old grandfather. He used to come and help us. Then get the sheep down and cut him up in the meat house.

Anyway, I worked there, and this Mission time coming up now. Mum took Nick and my sister to Carnarvon Mission to go to school then. They never sent them to Onslow, sent them straight to the Mission. Mum come back to work again, leave those two in the Mission, and the Inspector, Mr Geer, come look for me then. Asked Mum, ‘You got another older daughter somewhere?' They had it in the paper, they was looking for me. Mum said, ‘Yes.' Dobbed me in!

That white woman, Mrs Kelly, she didn't want me to go; she hide me away, tell me to go bush till the Inspector go away. She used to tell me, ‘Inspector coming looking for you, to take you to school. You got to saddle up your horse and go.' We sit down and watch from the hill, seen the stranger car coming, dust coming, you know. Soon as he's coming closer, I gone. I'd saddle the horse up and go down the creek, hiding. Stop all day while the Inspector there looking for all the kids. I didn't want to go.

If something different going to happen to you, might be Inspectors and things like that, you be touchy – what going to come at you next time? I was thinking that bush life was good in the early days, but when we first moved into Onslow all these different things happen, and job getting more and more tougher as we grew. I didn't know what was going to happen to me if they sent me to the Mission. That woman said, ‘Oh, she not here.' She used to cover for me as I'm the last one to work there. Anyway, they went away, didn't find me. I stayed at the station. I was fourteen then. Been long time there now, working.

Abridged from
Lola Young: Medicine Woman and Teacher
Lola Young with Anna Vitenbergs, 2007.

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 each 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.