Remembered By Heart: An Anthology of Indigenous Writing by Sally Morgan
Authors: Sally Morgan
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come in here.â 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, âDonât you kids come out until I tellyou.â The Native Welfare man came in and asked if there were any Aboriginal children at school and the teacher said, âNo.â 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 wasnât a prank for me. I think these visits were a response to someone dobbing me in, but Iâm 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 wouldnât let anybody come near without barking a warning. If the dog barked a warning and it wasnât 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 Kateâs childrenâs home. Mum put them in Sister Kateâs 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 Kateâs. Sister Kateâs 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 didnât have a vehicle to drive home every weekend. We wouldnât 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 werenever 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 â55, â56 it had a little meeting place in Murray Street. It was the Young Menâs 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
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 wasnât a prank for me. I think these visits were a response to someone dobbing me in, but Iâm 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 wouldnât let anybody come near without barking a warning. If the dog barked a warning and it wasnât 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 Kateâs childrenâs home. Mum put them in Sister Kateâs 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 Kateâs. Sister Kateâs 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 didnât have a vehicle to drive home every weekend. We wouldnât 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 werenever 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 â55, â56 it had a little meeting place in Murray Street. It was the Young Menâs 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
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