November 16.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Concentration camp
It was how we felt about being Aboriginal that mattered
One winter's night, troopers came riding on horseback through our camp. My father went to see what was happening, and my mother stayed with her children to try to stop us from being so frightened...Dadda and some of the older men were shouting angrily at the officials. We were being taken from our lands...I saw the distressed look on my parents' faces and knew something was terribly wrong...A strong smell surrounded us as we entered the truck...
They packed us in like cattle with hardly any room to move...The night was cold and colder still on the back of an open truck. It took the whole night across rough dirt tracks to reach our first destination of Woorabinda Aboriginal Settlement. Woori was a dry and dusty place compared to the home we were forced to leave...the people did not come too far outside their gunyahs but watched from a safe distance as our older people were unloaded by the troopers.
I will never forget how they huddled, frightened, cold and crying in their blankets. Some of our old relations were wrenched from our arms and lives that day and it is for them that I shed my tears. One old lady broke away from the others and screamed, 'Don't take my gunduburries! Don't take my gunduburries!' as the truck moved off, taking us away from her. After running a small distance, she was stopped and held by the officials who wanted to keep 'wild bush blacks' on these reserves.
My father's ashen face told the story and we were never to see our old people again. Dadda could never bring himself to speak about it. Our tribe was torn away – finished…
The old people from both Cherbourg and Woorabinda always told the story that the 'full-bloods' were sent to Woorabinda and the fair-skinned to Cherbourg. Both my parents were considered 'half-castes' because they both had white fathers. I had always wondered why our people were spilt up and found out sometime in my twenties that the government people thought that those of us who looked whiter would more easily assimilate than the darker ones, but this was not so. Sometimes it was vice versa. But skin never mattered to us. It was how we felt about being Aboriginal that mattered. It was when I was in my twenties too, that I was given a certificate which specified my 'breed'. 'Cross out description not required', it said. 'Full blood, half cast, quadroon'.
The truck went on, travelling for two terrible days, going further south. As if in a funeral procession, we were loud in our silence. We were all in mourning...
It was Barambah Reserve (renamed Cherbourg in 1932) that we'd been brought to, just outside Murgon on the Barambah River. Here we were separated from each other into rough houses...each family was fenced off from the others into their own two little rooms where you ate and slept. The houses were little cells, all next to each other in rows. A prison. No wonder that along with 'mission', 'reserve'. 'settlement', 'Muddy Flats' and 'Guna Valley', Cherbourg has been named 'prison' and 'concentration camp' by Aboriginal people. The place in fact had its own goal. A prison in a prison. There were white and Aboriginal areas. Government authorities and teachers stayed away from us, and their areas were off-limits to all Aboriginal people...
Acknowledgment: Rita Huggins and Jackie Huggins, Auntie Rita, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 1996, pp. 9-12.