Tuesday 16 July 2019

History isnt just stories in a book. It happened to us all.

Today mum called me and told me we lost another cousin. The third Aboriginal family member in three mums. 


To me, Aboriginal history is more than stories to be debated. They are my life and that of my families.

Too often, history is depersonalised. It happened to someone else. It becomes a collective of people who are often nameless and faceless. I decided that I needed to share some of my stories and those of my family to make history real. With permission from my mum, here is a truncated version of our families story.

History isnt just stories in a book. It happened to us all. 

History Case Study


Edna, a Yorta Yorta woman, was born in New South Wales (NSW) on Cummeragunja Mission in 1930. Cummeragunja was an Aboriginal Mission on the banks of the Murray River, which is on the border between NSW and Victoria. During this time, a Board was appointed to oversee the implementation of the Aborigines Protection Act 1909 (NSW Government, 1909). The Act controlled all aspects of Aboriginal people’s life. For example, the Board on behalf of the State:
·     was required to give Aboriginal people permission to leave reserves or missions 
·     supplied rations (sugar, flour, tea, tobacco etc.)
·     controlled Aboriginal people’s money,
·     was the legal custodian of children and the government 
·     maintained ownership of all possessions and housing issued by the Government (NSW Government, 1909).
In 1939, when Edna was 9 with her family, she was one of the 200 people who participated in what is now known as the Cummeragunja-Walk-Off. People on the mission were unhappy with their treatment and crossed the Murray River into Victoria contravening the Aborigines Protection Act 1909 (NSW Government, 1909). The Walk-Off has been identified as the first Aboriginal mass strike. 
After the strike, Edna’s family settled in Echuca in Victoria. Victoria was a much more liberal state than NSW. At the age of 15, in 1945, with some of the other girls she grew up with, Edna went to work in a factory in Melbourne. In 1951, one of Edna sisters married someone who was culturally inappropriate to marry and was forced to leave the area and headed up the NSW coast fruit picking. By this stage, Missions were still in operation; however, the Act was not being fully enforced. The Act was not formally repealed until 1969.
Edna followed her sister up the NSW coast where she met a non-Aboriginal man named Walter while fruit picking, whom she later married in 1952. Walters was the 20
Walter and Edna settled down in The Entrance on the Central Coast where Walter had grown up. 
Edna stopped working once she had the children and Walter became the sole breadwinner. Edna didn’t have any money and possessions of value because her wages had been controlled by the State, and she had only received an allowance. Walter and Edna had their first child Rhonda in 1954, closely followed by their second Wayne and third Sharon in 1956 and 1959 respectively. The family lived in a two-bedroom rented house and barely scraped through. 
In 1960, Edna and Walter moved to Newcastle because Walter had a job there. By this time, several of Edna’s siblings had moved to Newcastle and were married with children. The extended family lived close together and grew up like siblings. 
To support the family when Edna’s daughter Rhonda was 14, she went and worked in a factory. Sharon, Edna’s other daughter, moved to Brisbane to marry a man and was pregnant at 16 in 1964. 
Rhonda married a non-Aboriginal man Mark in 1977. Two years later, Edna died unexpectedly of an aneurysm, her oldest daughter Rhonda was 24.
Wayne, Edna’s son, died of an undiagnosed heart condition in May 1981, just a few months after Rhonda gave birth to her first child Summer. Rhonda and Mark had 2 more children, Kyle (1984) and Clinton (1986). 
Summer was four when her Aunty Sharon died while pregnant with her fourth child. She had pneumonia and was a smoker causing her lungs to collapse. The baby was born premature but survived. All four of Sharon’s children came and lived with Rhonda and Mark while Sharon’s husband grieved. Even after returning to live with their father, they continued to live with Rhonda and Mark for periods, even in adulthood. Reference

References 

NSW Government, 1909 Aborigines Protection Act. Last Viewed 16 July 20129. http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/nsw/num_act/apa1909n25262.pdf



1 comment:

  1. Hi Summer. Sorry to bother you. I have been helping my daughters research their indigenous history. Their Mum was adopted in 1960 and we had no idea she descended from Ernest and Janet McGee, until she did a DNA on Ancestry.com. Their daughter Lily who married Norman Ryan, had a daughter Reta, who then had my girls mum. It's been a fascinating search that recently had one of the my girls and myself traveling 2 weeks ago, to Deniliquin, Moama, Echuca, Barmah and Cummerajunga. It was a fruitful trip beginning where we live at The Entrance NSW. I am basically stuck with the ancestry of Janet McGee (Nee Ingram) Her Mother is listed as Francis Green on one document and Cissi Green on another. I see you have more "AKA's" for her and a little more info on Osley Ingram too. We believe she is the daughter of Jasper Green but can not find any info on that. Nor who her mother was. We are aware Osley then married Ethel Middleton and had more children. May i ask for a huge favour and get some of your ancestry information from you. Due to the low resolution of your tree on instagram, i can't make out what is printed. My email is kevinblackford1957@gmail.com. Any help would be hugely appreciated. Cheers Kevin

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