Painful removals, mission history detailed at inquiry
Aboriginal people had to walk in chains, or were forced into the back of a cattle truck to travel to missions across the state, Queensland’s truth-telling and healing inquiry has been told.
Aunty Florence Watson told the inquiry the story of her mother, who survived a massacre on the Palmer River in north Queensland in the early 1930s when she was four years old.
Aunty Flo’s grandmother was killed and her mother shot in the hip during the massacre.
Aunty Flo remembers her mother walking with a limp her whole life.
After the massacre Aunty Flo’s mother and her aunts and uncles were taken to missions across Queensland, a trip they were made to do on foot, which took days.
“They had to walk in chains from Maytown to Cooktown,” Aunty Flo, a Ghunghanghi and Kuku Yalanji woman told the inquiry on Friday.
“Can you imagine … most of them were bleeding and to walk to from there to Cooktown to wait for the mission boats.”
Eventually Aunty Flo’s mother and aunt ended up at Yarrabah, near Cairns.
The trauma of the massacre and being removed from her Country lived with her Aunty Flo’s mother.
Aunty Flo told the inquiry she remembered walking home after school, laughing with some of the other children.
“She slapped us,” she said.
“She goes ‘I was there (at Palmer Creek), I was laughing, I was carrying on, I was having fun and they all came in – the troopers – came and got us’.
“It was pretty painful.”
When Aunty Flo was 14 she was forced to leave her family and go to boarding school in Charters Towers.
She didn’t want to leave her family, but her mother said, he had to go to get educated, telling her she was going to make a difference in her life.
This is something which stayed with Aunty Flo throughout her life.
“When I did go an get educated I made sure that I did get educated and listen, remembered her words,” she said.
“I think I did make a difference.”
Michael Aird is the director of the anthropology museum at the University of Queensland.
His evidence to the inquiry focused on photographs taken by Aboriginal people throughout history.
Some of the photographs, were taken by anthropologist Norman Tindale on missions throughout Queensland.
Aunty Flo’s parents were among those who were photographed and had their genealogies recorded by Tindale.
Although these people were victims, Mr Aird told the inquiry the photographs also present a positive element – they are physical representations of history for the descendants of these people.
“The racist scientific motivations of the expedition.. it is a negative thing,” he said.
“But these photographs are incredibly wonderful.
They are such clear photos of these people…you can look at them, you can only ask… about what their lives were like.”
Jackie Huggins told the inquiry her mother’s family were rounded up and put on the back of a cattle truck to make the journey from Springsure in central Queensland to Cherbourg.
“They were very cold in the truck, they were huddled together and mostly everyone was crying about where they were going to,” the Bidjara and Birri Gubba Juru woman said.
“They couldn’t do anything, they were powerless.”
The first hearings of Queensland’s Truth-telling and Healing Inquiry have focused on the stories of elders.
The inquiry will continue on Tuesday, and is set to hear from government officials, including the police commissioner.
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