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

Yothu Yindi’s Powerful ‘Child and Mother’ Musical Advocacy

 By Ruth Skilbeck

Tonight’s induction of influential Aboriginal band Yothu Yindi into the ARIA (Australian Record Industry Awards) Hall of Fame, at the 2012 ARIA awards ceremony, at the Sydney Entertainment Centre, is a just and well deserved recognition not only of the band’s powerful emotive music that marries traditional Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal rock-dance sounds, but also of the wide-reaching social and cultural influence the band and its members have had, in Australia’s cultural life through their music and political advocacy since the 1980s.

In tonight’s award ceremony the band played a rousing version of their landmark song Treaty (1991) and were joined on stage  by singer-songwriter Paul Kelly (co-writer of Treaty) and Education minister Peter Garret, who before he became a politician had a career as frontman of band Midnight Oil.

The song was written by Paul Kelly and Yothu Yindi members, prompted by band leader Mandawuy Yunipingu and his older brother Galarrwuy’s desire to write a song to highlight lack of progress on the proposed treaty between Aboriginal peoples and the federal government, following Australian Prime Minister, Bob Hawke’s visit to the Northern Territory in 1988 as part of the Bicentennial celebrations for the Barunga festival where he was presented by a statement of political objectives by Galarrwuy Yunuuupingu. Hawke responded by promising that a treaty would be concluded with Aboriginal Australia by 1990.

In 1991 when no treaty had eventuated, the song Treaty with its sardonic lines “Well I heard it on the radio. And I saw it on the television” was Mandawuy Yunupingu’s response - which expressed Aboriginal feelings about the lack of action; this was a phrase that was later echoed by Aboriginal activist and academic Marcia Langton, in her book on Aboriginal media and cultural studies.

Twenty-one years later, the song’s call for Reconciliation is as relevant and as much needed as it was then.

Formed in 1986 and still going strong, the band comprises Aboriginal members from the Yolngnu homelands in Arnheim Land in the Northern Territory, and balanda non-Aboriginal members; and their music combines influences of Aboriginal and western musical cultures.  The founding members include leader, Mandawuy Yunupingu on vocals and guitar; Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu on keyboards, guitar and percussion; Witiyana Markia on manikay, traditiuonal vocals, Cal Williams on lead guitar; and Studat Kellaway on bass guitar.

The name of the band Yothu Yindi means ‘child and mother’, in Yolngu language of the Northern Territory homelands where some of the band members come from, and signifies the importance given to the relation between mother and child in the music and outlook of the band who represented the struggles of Indigenous peoples against colonial assimilation, and provided a powerful emotional voice, and some deadly dance tracks, in political protest songs. The subliminal reference in their name is to healing the pain of the Stolen Generations where for over 60 years- from 1906-1967 – it was official policy, part of the 'white Australia' policy, following Federation to forcibly remove Aboriginal children from their mothers, and place them in mission homes, in state homes, or into adoption, in a self-justifying policy that promoted the view that Aboriginal peoples were a ‘dying race’. History and the resilience of Aboriginals peoples has proven otherwise; and the new movements for Reconciliation is proof of the progress that is being made.

The band helped to found the Yothu Yind Foundation in 1990 to promote Yolngu cultural development, and from 1999 have produced the annual Garma Festival of Traditional Cultures. From May 2007 this has included running the Dilthan Yolngunha, or Healing Place.

http://www.yothuyindi.com/themusic.html. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uszdyMaC2c.

http://aso.gov.au/titles/music/treaty/clip1/.

“I’m dreaming of a brighter day, When the waters will be one” Yothu Yindi, Treaty

White Lies: Myth of the Australian Cultural Cringe

By Ruth Skilbeck

Silencing

The cultural cringe was a myth designed to stop Australians from defining their own identity, expressing themselves, and exploring their past and present conditions in cultural forms of expression and inquiry.

      The idea that Australians are culturally inadequate or cringe in front of dominant cultures is a part of the myth generated, one may surmise or hypothesize, by a dominant administration as a form of controlling stereotype and would-be self fulfilling prophesy - as the media is used …to construct realities through discourses that in Australia tend to support dominant groups.

      This fitted well and was an attempt to enable the necessary silence that was needed to enshroud the policies and practices of the stolen generation including the awful mothers history of rape.

      Instilling shame and guilt are known to psychologically instill silence in the one who feels ashamed, so by making Australians feel ashamed of their lack of cultural nous, was this ipso facto a means of keeping them silent?

      Too afraid to openly make cultural faux pas, in the wider world of cosmopolitan urbane sophisticated culture?

      This was an absolute nonsense of course: all that happened was that it led to another cliché:  the ‘brain drain’. Where the entire forces of the most talented intelligent creative Australians left the country en masse after finishing university so that they could continue their lively fervent confident cultural explorations in the very centres of dominant culture which, the myth would have us believe that as Australians, they should be cringing away from.

The Brain Drain

They left en masse and pursued successful careers in all kinds of fields that would never have been possible if they had stayed in Australia.

I speak from first hand experience as a daughter of parents who did just this (in the 1960s and 70s) and saw my father rise and rise in his career in a way inconceivable for a boy who grew up in Broken Hill, son of a civil engineer and quarry manager - if he’d stayed in his home country (albeit he took his first class Hons BA at the University of Sydney).

      No, Australia, we drove them away, our brightest and best.

      And now ironically perhaps with the changed world of globalization, government subsidies have been put into place to try to lure them back again our bright creative geniuses and talent – from the wider cultural world where they are able to explore their interests with passion and grow and develop surrounded by others. ‘Overseas researcher homecoming incentives’ they are called or something similar.

      There seems to be something a bit pathetic and futile about this policy of trying to lure back the brightest and it doesn’t seem to work well in many cases. (Many marriage break up and family breakdowns seem to follow according to statistics showing the turbulence that this kind of culture shock can bring).

      What appears to be far more promising and a positive sign of change is the proposed new policy of supporting the humanities and arts research – which apparently is about to start next year (Thompson 2012).

Readers may be surprised as I was to discover that (no I was not wrong, I was right all along I was not paranoid it really was as bad as I thought it was…) There has been no support, or very little, for arts and humanities research in Australia. At least by means of grant from the ARC.

      What this meant in practice is that multitude untold numbers of creative socially and culturally valuable projects that would undertake deep meaningful research into who we are, where we come from, and where we are going, and which would last three years and have all kinds of trickle- down effects and influences encouraging others to participate in arts culture and human interest projects, did not happen.

      Aborted, refused, denied. Sent away and buried. Silenced.

      I speak as one whose project on The Female Gaze was not funded four years ago. Since then I have seen versions and variations of my ideas appear here and there in Australian culture... At the 2010 Sydney Biennale where, just as in my conceptualization, a ‘fugal’ Australian contemporary women artist Fiona Foley and Yayoi Kusama were literally positioned next to each other juxtaposed as in my proposed curated show. I only wrote about Foley…and urban Indigenous women artists including Bianca Beetson, Jennifer Herd and Andrea Fisher. (Skilbeck 2011).

      My idea was part of the global wave of what is now called the mother art movement (a form of matricentric feminism), third wave feminism, I was ahead of the trend. (If I’d been able to curate the show last year as I’d wanted and publish my book in it I would have been right at the apex of this new global movement which has huge interest around the world).

      It’s too late to do it now; the time has past.  (Instead I went to a conference organized by a Canadian research institute, MIRCI, that rebadged itself last year in Canada and presented my paper this year). But that would have been a fantastic project for Australia if I’d been able to do it. Last year I would have curated an exhibition that would have brought people from around the world to Australia. As I said in my proposal it would have put Australia on the art world map. Well It would have.

      In the new field of global mother art movements in contemporary art where art is used as research into cultural and social environmental conditions as well as history and psychology as mode of necessary working through and processing, a global movement of postcolonial societies of which Australia is a prime example.

      My idea was silenced.

      The myth of the cultural cringe was a discourse that operated like an edict or a silencing order.

      Ye shall cringe away from expressing your self and views, making cultural productions or even thinking about what is going on in Australian culture. Anywhere else it’s ok.

      And if you’re the intelligent curious creative type who is likely to think about life and examine existence, especially if you like to examine the conditions of your own existence, then it’s better that you leave now, on a long overseas voyage. Preferably for the rest of your life.  Bye Bye!

      This has been borne out in my own experience here in the mother art movement. Extending from my failed bid at funding for my Female Gaze project I went on and continued my research.

      This resulted this year in my becoming involved as curator and media coordinator with a new mother hood art movement in Sydney, that co generated this movement. But this was in collusion with an international mother art movement based in North America.

 Refreshing change in ARC arts and humanities funding policies

So I read with some hope (although not unbridled joy as change does not come overnight) about the proposed changes to ARC research funding policy to include the arts and humanities, outlined in the National Research Priorities: 2012 Process to Refresh the Priorities Consultation Paper, Feb 2012.

     Hopefully this will come to show that times have changed and the reverse is now coming in (supported by new research policies): as it is imperative that we (want to) find out more about ourselves, our past, our identities, who we are, where we came from, so we can develop more self-knowledge and cultural understanding; a culture and stories we can share with the world, and be able to take more creative care over where we are going, including protecting and sustaining our environments for future life and new generations.

      We could hardly do any more damage to the overall environment than has been done over the past 200 years (short of a nuclear disaster)

~

The ideas of the myth, the discourse, were internalized and as with discourse achieved its own social construct, a form of ‘reality’.

So that that’s what people believe now, they continue to propagate and uphold the myth.

      Even those who think they are breaking away.

      Yet there has always been a tradition in Australia since the 1970s of change coming from with out – and Australian development of contemporary art in Australia only occurred in the process and as a result of active ongoing dialogue with art world centres (Skilbeck 2001)… as the result of very determined action by individuals acting alone and in groups; I am thinking of the pioneering curators who started up and kept the Biennale going Leo Paroissein, Bill Wright, Nick Waterlow, the latter two who came from England and re-linked to their connections there (Skilbeck 2003).

      Similarly with the women’s art and indigenous art movements in Australia, we have developed ‘out ‘ identity and in relation to communication with international art and cultural movements.

And from the start this was an intrinsic part of the Biennale content and focus.

      So that when Mary Kelly said to me when she first came to Australia it was for the 1981 Biennale. She was in the MCA gift shop, and was chatting about the 1981 Biennale, “and someone said that was the women’s Biennale and some else said it no was the Indigenous Biennale…” she laughed.  I was talking with her, interviewing her and her son Kelly Barry, at the 2008 Biennale where they had a collaborative video artwork in installation exhibition.

      Australians came to define themselves, their identity, in relation to international  art movements, that was a trend that continues as my ongoing experiences in the international Mother Art movement show and continue to show…

© Copyright Ruth Skilbeck, 2012

Skilbeck, Ruth, Mary Kelly and Kelly Barry (2011). 'Ruth Skilbeck in Conversation with Mary Kelly and Kelly Barrie', Chapter 1 in Real Mothers in Contemporary Art. Demeter Press, York University, Toronto. 46-52


Skilbeck, Ruth (2011) 'Gazing Boldly Back and Forward: Urban Aboriginal Women Artists and New Global Feminisms in Transnational Art', International Journal of the Arts in Society. Vol.5, Issue 6: 261-276



Skilbeck, Ruth (2010). 'Re-viewing Feminist Influences in Transnational Art: A Multimodal, Fugal Analysis of Mary Kelly’s Texts of ‘Maternal Desire’'. International Journal of the Arts in Society, Vol. 4, Issue 5 2010, 15-28

Skilbeck, Ruth (2003) ‘Contemporary Australian Art Comes of Age’, 4- feature series, Australian Art Collector. Issue 25. 75-89.

Thompson, Matthew (2012) ‘Top cited academics honoured (but where’s the humanity?) The Conversation.edu.au

https://theconversation.edu.au/top-cited-academics-honoured-but-wheres-the-humanity-7348

Australian Research Council (2012). National Research Priorities: 2012 Process to Refresh the Priorities . Consultation Paper, Feb 2012.

http://www.innovation.gov.au/Research/Documents/2012RefreshingtheNRPs.pdf

After MIRCI Mothers and History conference, Toronto

By Ruth Skilbeck

Silence

Silence ran in my family like a dark underground river.

If I can symbolise this silence as a river, it would be the river Lethe that, in Greek mythology, is the river of forgetting. But perhaps this would be too kind, too distant, and too academic.  Qualities that also run in my family

The silence was personal, it affected me personally, it ran through my family; but it was also cultural and historical, the silence was a tributary of the river of cultural amnesia that ran through the colonial culture of Australia, as it runs through the cultures of colonies around the world, and their metropolitan centres.

Recently I have been writing about the experience of finding out about my secret hidden grandmother and the affects of the impacts of discovering her after several decades on this planet, that I was never told about my real family history.

As I am writing this I am flying at 32, 000 feet in an Air Canada jet flying back to Sydney from the international conference on mothers and history: histories of motherhood, that I attended as a delegate, in Toronto.

I gave a paper* on this very experience.

And my mind and body are full of the dialogues and conversations and impressions and powerful thoughts and words and actions of that conference, most affective of all the stories of the (Canadian) Aboriginal women and their oppression, subjugation and struggle for identity against the official policies of assimilation. That astounded me as so similar to Australian stories. I had not even known that indigenous women people in Canada refer to themselves and are referred to as Aboriginal (as if that were only an Australian term). This alone showed me the shared connectivity of the struggles of indigenous aboriginal people across the world, aboriginal women struggling for their identity and sense of self, against the ‘dominant patriarchal culture’ that has subordinated and subjugated them as historically and none more so than mothers, especially ‘illegitimate’ mothers, mothers who have children as a result of the underground strategies of ‘assimilation’; there was in some cases secret love, but sadly there was more often rape.

But Identity and the struggle – for mothers- to regain a sense of self against loss of awareness of identity through trauma and circumstances was a major theme that I detected and picked up on in the conference,

In Art, in reports on health, activism, and in matricentirc feminist theory; the focus in ‘third wave’ feminism and matricentric feminism is on diversity,  the majority of papers I heard were from diverse voices of indigenous  mothers, immigrant women, women who are doing the hard work of cultural  and psychological healing in their art,  working through  losses and traumas of childhood experiences of  contexts of ‘illegitimacy’, the  so-called ‘absent mother’.

Juxtapositions or points of comparison

Listening to the stories and research findings of the women at the conference, made me realize that in some ways we are better off in Australia – and in other ways worse off. How we are better off is to do with the  -seemingly- more egalitarian, less rigidly class segregated society in Australia, and the health system which allows poorer citizens subsidized access to health care.

Why I say seemingly is that scratch the surface and the egalitarianism falls away. There is nothing egalitarian about the ongoing Northern Territory Intervention. The Racial Discrimination Act had to be suspended to put this racially prejudice act into being, and keep it there years later. And who is racially discriminated against? Aboriginal people, the First Australians. In the Northern Territory traditional homelands, which after a century of assimilation policies, or rape and breeding out a sense of identity has –hardly surprisingly to a rational human mind- created massive personal and social problems of shattered identity. In this way the assimilation polices have sickeningly ‘worked’. Now what? We all have a huge problem to deal with- of curing the diseases caused by these policies – they were not there before white people landed in Australia.

Yet the river of forgetting is far more pleasurable and easier to bathe in than seeking to tackle the apparently insurmountable problems of Aboriginal disadvantage and destruction.

Here the way forward is to be positive and to see what Australia does have in its favour, over other colonial countries That is that at least in Australia aboriginal mother are not blamed overtly in the media and society for the behavior of their children.

However they are punished by the policies that suspend their centrelink payments if their children don’t go to school.

What is perhaps, thankfully, lacking in Australia is a harsh media voice that points the finger of blame at Aboriginal mothers.

But in the Australia way of the river of silence, this is done silently, covertly, by the withholding of benefits and punishment, by silencing.

As if by not drawing too much attention to “the problem”, it will just go away.

And as if what’s implied these people –US – are not worth writing much about in terms of identity.

That strategy of silencing and denial has not worked; it has got us to where we are now, a situation of unacknowledged apartheid.

We who live in Australia and ‘call Australia home’ have to all take responsibility for this situation, we have to all take it upon ourselves to become aware and conscious of the appalling life situation, facing OUR aboriginal people in OUR culture and society, and start to activate, actively do all we can to help those who are not only our fellow citizens but who are in far more families than will admit this, are also our (too long hidden relatives), our family. And welcome each other as all part of the human family, as mothers and sisters and daughters and fathers and brothers and sons and grandparents going way back,  in the human race.

© Copyright Ruth Skilbeck, 2012

 I will post  passages and images from my paper and the trip, on The Skilbeck Scrolls in the near future.

The Hidden Mother

By Ruth Skilbeck

In the late Victorian and Edwardian era, in the early days of black and white photography, there was a popular photographic portrait practice – now know as The Hidden Mother.

Babies and young children were photographed in images where their mother was both present and absent, literally concealed – hidden, often (to our eyes) hilariously clumsily, or eerily, under a spread, which could be carpet or a curtain.

The hidden mother was a covered-up, obscured shape that, in some shots, the infant was sitting on, in others the hidden mother was a strange standing presence shrouded in a patterned bedspread standing next to or behind the child. In each of the images the mother was completely ‘hidden’ – no part of her protruded from the covering, yet in most of them the hidden mother was impossible not to see.

The rationale behind covering up the mother – which overturned the Madonna and child genre of painting representation of mothers and their children was that, the sight of the mother distracted the eye from the image of the child. Yet the child felt more secure in the photographic studio having their photograph taken if the mother was also ‘there.’

This strange solution of absence and presence was surely disturbing for the child- let alone the mother under the heavy stifling carpet or curtain- and the expressions on the faces of the children in hidden mother portraits show their distress and bewilderment. None are smiling or relaxed, they all look disturbed and haunted by the knowledge of the absent presence of their hidden mother.

The popular photographic portrait practice of  ‘the hidden mother’ now in retrospect serves as a reflexive visual metaphor for the highly ambivalent ways in which mothers were regarded in late Victorian and Edwardian society, and in Australia in the twentieth century decades known as ‘the stolen generations’- when under an official White Australia Policy children of “part Aboriginal” mothers were routinely taken from their mothers and their mothers’ existence was erased from official and family records; this was a practice that affected not only “part Aboriginal” mothers but also the children of mothers who for a multitude of reasons were not considered socially or officially acceptable (or perhaps the mothers had died, in childbirth or when the children were very young.) Rather than remembering these mothers, official policy erased their memory and presence from the record, so that their families were supposed to never know who they were (as was the case in my own family history). Yet, like the shape of the hidden mother under the carpet or the curtain, the mothers’ presence remained, in a way that was disturbing, eerie and impossible to ignore and not be aware of, for those who started to search. Like looking at the photos of the hidden mother. The shape of the concealed mother remains in the picture frame.

The images of the hidden mother have a great resonance and have struck a chord with hundreds of thousands of users in the blogosphere

http://www.retronaut.co/2011/10/the-invisible-mother/.

The Hidden Mother flickr photo sharing group started 32 months ago (0ctober  2010). Here’s a link to the first entries:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/1264520@N21/pool/.

The Hidden Mother group rapidly gained hundred of members and hundreds of images of children with ‘hidden mothers’.

What is most interesting is the level of interest in the group. The images of the hidden mother- that most have not known about- have spiked a huge response in the blogosphere.  Some photographs have received thousands of hit per day. The members report in the discussion pages on their surprise at the popularity of their photographic curiosities.

I came across this site through a link to another photographic archive on Retronaut that a friend posted on Facebook. When I looked it up my eye was immediately drawn to the archive of the Hidden Mother, on the menu next to the rules on dating.

When I clicked on it I was astonished to see these images - that add another dimension and context to my own research into Australia’s forgotten mothers, in the decades known as ‘the stolen generations’.

Was this a style of photography that was practiced in Australia?

I will put this onto my research project agenda to find out.

5/28/12

© Copyright Ruth Skilbeck, 2012