Remembering Australia's Forgotten Mothers Revisted

An essay from my research into Australian colonial family histories and "stolen generations" is now published in the latest issue of the Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement, produced by the MIRCI research Institute at York University in Toronto which is the leading research institute in the world in this field.
"The mandate of the Journal is to publish the most current, high quality scholarship on mothering-motherhood and to ensure that this scholarship considers motherhood in an international context and from a multitude of perspectives including differences of class, race, sexuality, age, ethnicity, ability and nationality."
The inspiration for this article is documented on this blog in the eponymous post "Remembering Australia's Forgotten Mothers", (The Skilbeck Scrolls 29/6/2011) and this blog post is included as a part of the article.
 I was employed, throughout 2012, on a one-year contract as a Lecturer at the Journalism and Media research Centre (JMRC) at the University of New South Wales, and the JMRC fully funded my conference trip to Canada to present my research at the MIRCI conference Mothers in HIstory, Histories of Motherhood, in Toronto.
I have found out much more since then, in my "secret research" into "hidden histories" in Australia.
Ground breaking is hard work and little rewarded historically by the administration in this country- as the ghosts of convicts and Indigenous peoples will testify. So I am just glad that I managed to ferry this dream-vison of a creative non-fiction writing piece into international publication.
And as the author I raise my glass to launch its passage into the world. Cheers.

http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/jarm/issue/current

Remembering Australia's Forgotten Mothers Revisted

An essay from my research into Australian colonial family histories and "stolen generations" is now published in the latest issue of the Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement, produced by the MIRCI research Institute at York University in Toronto which is the leading research institute in the world in this field.
"The mandate of the Journal is to publish the most current, high quality scholarship on mothering-motherhood and to ensure that this scholarship considers motherhood in an international context and from a multitude of perspectives including differences of class, race, sexuality, age, ethnicity, ability and nationality."
The inspiration for this article is documented on this blog in the eponymous post "Remembering Australia's Forgotten Mothers", (The Skilbeck Scrolls 29/6/2011) and this blog post is included as a part of the article.
 I was employed, throughout 2012, on a one-year contract as a Lecturer at the Journalism and Media research Centre (JMRC) at the University of New South Wales, and the JMRC fully funded my conference trip to Canada to present my research at the MIRCI conference Mothers in HIstory, Histories of Motherhood, in Toronto.
I have found out much more since then, in my "secret research" into "hidden histories" in Australia.
Ground breaking is hard work and little rewarded historically by the administration in this country- as the ghosts of convicts and Indigenous peoples will testify. So I am just glad that I managed to ferry this dream-vison of a creative non-fiction writing piece into international publication.
And as the author I raise my glass to launch its passage into the world. Cheers.

http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/jarm/issue/current

The Enigma of Being Australian

By Ruth Skilbeck

Throughout the posts on this media publication site made since its inception in the last days of April 2011, as author and editor,  I have followed a theme of flight which has emerged from the spaces beyond words in my sleep and in my dreams of writing, such a poetic not usually articulated in contemporary journalism however did drive the early journalistic writings of Romantic poets such as Thomas de Quincey in the early 19th century, as the inhabitants of the British Isles struggled to adjust to the changes of industrialisation that- historically and culturally - brought into being the era of modernity and in arts the era of modernism that reflected the alienation of the individual in modernity. Part of the enterprise of industrialised modernity was colonialism, and colonial exploration and discovery- and "conquest" of "indigenous" peoples was part of this power trip as it may now appear retrospectively.
As I have written into this online media publication,  I have voiced some impressions from my perspective as an Australian, and emotionally driven writings about the experience of finding out about my family history  in the wider history of Australian colonialism, and family histories which make up the body of writings that is known as colonial history in Australia.
I have not directly found any traces of indigenous or Aboriginal family in my research into my own family history on my mother line, which remains mysterious and enigmatic.

What I have found I shall publish in the future in this publication.

Meanwhile I shall say that this has made me profoundly sympathetic to the struggles of all who were affected by the Stolen Generations, and that as far as I am concerned this deeper cultural impact is greater than the enforced divisions of "aboriginal" and settler in the history of being Australian.

My Story: A Family’s Hidden History

By Ruth Skilbeck

After my Mother passed away, on October 1^st 2008, my life changed irrevocably. Not only was this a profound event of personal grief. But I have found out things since then, about her life and her family history, which is my family history and identity, which I had not known before whilst she was alive. I have found out about a hidden history in my own family, an erased grandmother, and family, aunts, I’d never known about. This has revealed a history of “white lies” and cover-ups, in the older generation of my family, which had an even deeper impact than finding out about the hidden family. In effect what this meant was that for over 40 years of my life, I had not known who my family was, I had been brought up under an illusion, benignly deceived about my own family- by my family. Yet, this was not malicious, my experience is commonplace in Australia.  Between 1909 –1969, the era known as the stolen generations, possibly over 100,000 children were taken from their mothers and families and brought up as wards of state, in homes, and missions, or in adoptive families.

This was part of the  “White Australia” policy of assimilation that was brought in with Federation in 1901. Prior to this, Aboriginals were considered along with white settlers to be colonial subjects of the British Empire.  The policy of assimilation, through removal and adoption, did not only affect one or two groups.  It was a policy that profoundly and literally and symbolically mixed up Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, indigenous and non- indigenous identity in Australia.  At the same time that there was deep insecurity and searching in the ‘white Australia’ national psyche as to what was national identity. As a consequence of this widespread practice, a very significant (yet precisely unknown) number of people in Australia do not know their families. When I asked a male relative why we had never been told the truth, he said:

Nobody talked about those things then.

What has impacted on me most strongly in the experience of researching through approaches of art writing and historical research, is the dis-regard and de-valuation of mothers and motherhood in this cultural and personal family history, which is the history of the last century of Australian history, since Federation.

Aboriginal women and mothers, in particular, were treated appallingly in this time. Rape was a weapon and tool of assimilation policy that was one of those things that were not talked about. Covered up in a cloak of secrecy and shame. Yet the official policy of assimilation held that if a child had not “100% Aboriginal blood” then they could be taken and brought up as a ward of state, this was a policy with an ugly mission to “breed out” “aboriginality”. Supposedly, colonial authorities “believed” that the Aboriginal people were a dying race and in three generations would be gone (Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, www.hereoc.com).

The strength of feelings, and endurance, of Aboriginal women looking back on this now are well expressed by the broadcaster and Aboriginal activist Aunty Shirley*, speaking at a 2007 rally on Human Rights Day, in Sussex Street, Sydney.

“Aboriginal women are the backbone that has built this country. They have lain on their backs and been raped and given birth to white fella’s babies and had their children taken away and grieved for their children. And their blood is in this city and in these buildings. We won’t go away. Will we stay around? Come back next year…” (Skilbeck 2007).

Aunty Shirley, Human Rights Day, Sydney 2007. Photo: Ruth Skilbeck

At the Rally, I took photographs of Aunty Shirley’s passionate speech and was deeply moved by her words (which I quoted in an article I wrote soon afterwards on Australian identity, dislocation, exile and art). This was a year and a half before my mother passed away. It was only afterwards, that I found out how closely connected I am my self to the experience of internal exile, that I too am part of this experience of mass dislocation and loss of identity that resulted from the mass exclusion and denial of Mothers in Australia throughout the 20th century."

*Not a family relative,  it is Aboriginal custom to call elders Aunty and Uncle.

This is an extract from  Ruth Skilbeck's forthcoming article: "Remembering Australia's Forgotten Mothers: Reclaiming Lost Identity on Colonial History", to be published this December in The Journal of the Mother Initiative, a peer-reviewed journal produced by the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (MIRCI) at York University, Toronto in Canada.

"I wrote this article after presenting a paper on these themes at the MIRCI Mothers in History: Histories of Motherhood international conference, in May in Toronto, Canada. It is part of my ongoing creative arts and humanities research into Australian colonial and family history, which includes writing a novel, about my search for my Mother's birth family."  

Copyright Ruth Skilbeck 2012

 Skilbeck, Ruth (2008) ‘Make Art Not War’. Homepagedaily.com (Pink Oblong column, writing in nom-de-plume Rosa Viereck) Feb 2008.

Skilbeck, Ruth (2012), ' Remembering Australia's Forgotten Mothers: Identity and Colonial History', Journal of the Motherhood Initiative, Vol. 3, Issue 2, Fall/Winter. Forthcoming