By Ruth Skilbeck
After
my Mother passed away, on October 1st 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
