Remembered By Heart: An Anthology of Indigenous Writing by Sally Morgan Page B

parents wouldn’t allow their children to be sent away. Our communities had experienced many years of forced child removals, and even then children were still being removed from their parents, and so much doubt remained that the program was ‘for their own good’ rather than just another way to take their kids.
    Grandfather Williams had had plenty of experience of Noongars being taken away, and my mother talked to him about allowing kids and teenagers to go away for work or school.
    She remembered: ‘He was visiting one time and since we began to hear about this education thing for our kids going to high school away in Perth, we talked about it. I wasn’t sure about sending my kids away, but I knew deep down that we had to do something to help our kids do better at school. “Wadjalas,” he said, “aren’t to be trusted with our young ones. Too many have been taken away. Be careful Lily,” he told me, “they may never come back. We don’t want to lose any more of our people.”
    Mum understood what he meant. She, too, had almost been taken away by the Protector of Aborigines, and had some reservations about whether going away for schooling would turn out good for her kids and for thefamily. Uncle Len and Aunty Elsie had their doubts, too. Years before, when their son Jack had been a little boy on the Gnowangerup reserve, he was fearful of being taken away by the authorities. Jack had a fair complexion and was a target for the officers. At the first inkling that the van to take them away was in town, all the fair Noongar kids would run away to the bush and hide. Jack was as scared as hell of being taken away and was one of the first to head for the bush.
    Mum said he used to say: ‘Why am I so fair? Why do they want to take us fair kids? We are all the one family.’
    That stuck with me. I was fair too and could understand how Jack probably felt about being chased down to be taken away. They nearly got away with taking me, so what happened with Jack I never forgot.
    It wasn’t forgotten by the Williams family either. Like Mum, they had reasons to be reluctant to let their kids go in case they didn’t come back. But more Noongars began to believe it was okay and a good thing for their young ones, as some kids went for work or schooling and came back.
    In the very early days, many of our women were domestics on sheep stations and farming properties, and then Mum and her mates did that type of work at Gnowangerup. Then younger ones in our families continued similar work. At least six close relations went to properties in the south-west part of Noongar country to work as domestics. Vernice, Dawn and Barbara Williams worked for Egerton-Warburtons in the South-West,and my sisters Norma and Edna worked for Hesters and Muirs there as well. These property owners were among the early settlers of the South-West. Then a lot of young women got work at the Homes of Peace, in Subiaco, as nursing assistants. My sisters Joan, Norma and Wilma worked there, and so did cousins Vernice, Dawn, Barbara, Judy, Treacy, Averil and Rhona. Several of Aunty Elsie’s daughters went to Alvan House and on to Homes of Good Peace to work in nursing. As it became apparent they could return home as they wished, our families became more confident in allowing their young ones to venture out on their own.
    Not that I lacked confidence about returning. Mum certainly encouraged me, and I knew that Ted Penny, Uncle Bill’s stepson, had been in the first group to go to McDonald House, and my brother Bevan attended the following year. And Norma had gone and returned too.
    It wasn’t as a result of my mother’s own schooling that she emphasised the value of education to us — she had never been to school. But she did observe others well and could see the potential in her kids, and of course she knew, as I did from an early age, that Noongars most often got the rough end of the stick in