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