November 17.

Artwork by Glenn Loughrey

 

‘... a cruel time for my mother...’

“Domestic service was a cruel time for my mother, like so many women of her generation.”

When we first arrived at Cherbourg all the children were sent to school. We'd never seen a school before. School was the place where we had most contact with European ways. The lighter-skinned children would be separated from the darker children in the classes with the idea of improving their learning. The teachers and missionaries were surprised when this did not happen. The dark-skinned children were just as bright as the lighter...I always thought how awful that system was...

We never went outside the reserve on excursions to Brisbane like the white children and there was never any mixing with them outside school hours...We were told not to speak our Aboriginal language, although we still spoke it out of hearing of the whites. We lost most of the Pitjara language, but we learnt Wakka Wakka words. That was the name of the local Cherbourg tribe. My brothers and sisters still know some words of that language...

When I was twelve I was sent to the mission dormitory by the superintendent. I was very frightened. It was pretty rare to have escaped this experience for so long. I was put there as punishment for seeing boys. Just because we spoke to the boys, the officials thought we were doing niggi niggi. A Black tracker came to our house and took me to the dormitory...

The dormitory became home then. We were discouraged from thinking of our real home with our families. It did damage here but it could never sever the ties we had with our families. We were allowed visitors but my parents kept my brothers and sisters away in case they were kept in there, too. We were allowed to go home at weekends...

Relocating Aboriginals on reserves effectively removed them from opportunities to participate in an already depressed labour force. Instead, their labour was closely managed by superintendents and police who, without any consultation with Aboriginal people, arranged positions for them on the stations. In the late 1930s and the 1940s, control of Aboriginals' work was made law under the Queensland Aborigines' and Torres Strait Islanders Preservation and Protection Acts of 1939-1946 which empowered the minister, acting through a system of superintendents and police, to enter employment contracts on behalf of Aboriginal people, to hold any funds they might have had, and to supervise spending. The Acts essentially legislated a system of slave labour. From the 1920s to the 1960s, the Aboriginal Welfare Fund held that money. No Aboriginals have ever seen that money...

Aboriginal women were sent to work as domestic servants [1] and nursemaids in station homesteads and in some cases as stock workers...This work began at thirteen or fourteen years. Domestic service was a cruel time for my mother, like so many women of her generation. The working relation was of the master-slave order. The men were addressed as 'Boss', the women as 'Mistress'. Many women endured appalling treatment, including beatings and sexual abuse, and it was an experience that stood in gruesome contrast to the loving companionship they had known among their own people...Rita is reticent to talk about regular beatings she received from one white mistress...

  1.  Rita's first job, aged 13 was at Barcudgel Station at Charleville, working “from dawn until the late hours of the evening...The days were long and tiring and never changed”.

Acknowledgment: Rita Huggins and Jackie Huggins, Auntie Rita, pp. 26-28, 33-34 n.1.

For further information, access Biography > Rita Huggins at Indigenous Australia website (https://ia.anu.edu.au).

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