Cirrus@Austlit

'Ann Curthoys, the Manning Clark Professor of History at The Australian National University, has already contributed so much to Australian studies through her excellent work on Indigenous and women’s history. Freedom Ride: A freedom rider remembers may be her best and most important legacy yet.' (Introduction)

'This is a story about individuals and families that, at face value, appear to be rather ordinary—labourers, domestics, mothers, grandmothers, skippers, school children, fishermen and mechanics. But this story is anything but ordinary and their life experiences were anything but mundane: growing up without parents on a mission in far north Queensland, living on Kunmunya Mission in the Kimberley, skippering a boat along the Western Australia coast, living in Broome during the Japanese air raids, raising eleven children and fostering others, being exempted from the Act, contracting leprosy and spending time in a leprosarium. The family fished on the Fitzroy River to earn extra income, attempted to establish a community on traditional land, and were reunited with family on the other side of the continent after more than 70 years of separation.' (Introduction)

'The author has bravely and thoroughly tackled a group of very embarrassing and difficult topics. Embarrassing, because we do not like to admit that Australians could ever have been as non-egalitarian, nor as racist, as she shows them to be. Difficult, because most of the evidence must come from official documents, which reflect official, that is, ‘settler’ attitudes, rather than the painful experiences of the young kin, servants and ‘slaves’ who had no opportunity to recount their own tales. Rarely can we detect the authentic voices of the little ten-year-olds who scrubbed and dug and weeded and washed under guise of being taught to become useful members of society.' (Introduction)

'The interview material described and excerpted here grew out of the National Library of Australia’s Bringing Them Home Oral History Project from 1998 onwards. This created:

a comprehensive public record based on first-hand testimony [of] Australian Indigenous children being removed from their homes and placed in non-family care.

'The full record is accessible through the National Library.'  (Introduction)

'Early on a July morning in 1983 I drove with Ruth Lipscomb from Darwin to Jabiru. She was visiting the school there and had offered to take me along. She picked me up from my motel around 6 am. Just before we reached the Alligator River, she pulled off the road and produced a flask of hot tea and a packet of sandwiches that she had thoughtfully prepared. As we stood by the roadside she drew my attention to the song of a distant bird. ‘People around here’, she said, ‘when they hear that bird know that a particular tree is in flower and coming into fruit’. I do not recall either the name of the bird or of the tree. But what has stuck with me was the sudden awareness of the importance to a hunter-gatherer people of their knowledge of the signs of seasonal change around them. They lived and still live by a calendar not divided into mathematically determined months and seasons but one they can read in the appearance of winds and cloud, in the songs of the bird life around them, in the behaviour of the animals, reptiles and insects, and in the flowering and fruiting of the plants growing in their country. ' (Introduction)

'One week ago in Canberra, at night, I woke up very early and went outside. It was still a little bit dark, and there was only one star left in the sky. It was the Morning Star—Goyulan. When I was looking at the Morning Star, I heard a bird calling out, calling out from a long way away. In English we call that bird ‘plover’. Its Gidjingarli name is Burreparrepa.  (Introduction)

'Kenneth Maddock, who died in June, was born in New Zealand. He graduated in law at Auckland University in 1960, and began practising, but made this his daytime job, while studying part-time for an MA in Anthropology. Preferring the uncertainties of a career in anthropology to a secure profession downtown, he nevertheless maintained an interest in legal anthropology, and perhaps unexpectedly spent a part of the final decade of his career as an expert witness in court cases concerned with Aboriginal issues.' (Introduction)

'Judith Stokes, Member of the Institute from 1968 to 1990, passed away on 12 June 2003. She was a woman ahead of her time, working together with the Anindilyakwa speakers of Groote Eylandt and Bickerton Island to keep their language and culture strong. In 1997 she was awarded the Order of Australia Medal for her service to the Aboriginal community on Groote Eylandt as a missionary and a linguist.' (Introduction)

'The man instrumental in establishing the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (subsequently AIATSIS), former federal Member of Parliament and the Commonwealth’s first Minister with responsibility for Aboriginal Affairs, the Honourable WC Wentworth AO, died in June this year. Mr Wentworth—‘Bill’ to many—had championed the rights of Indigenous Australians throughout his long political career.' (Introduction)

'Aunty Ida was born Ida Amelia Armstrong on 30 September 1919 on the Reserve at Cape Barren Island, which is one of the bigger islands in the Furneaux Group of Bass Strait. She passed away, with her family beside her, in the Whittle Ward of the Repatriation Hospital in Hobart on Monday 8 September 2003 following a battle with cancer. Aunty Ida was a leader whose passing breaks a link in a strong chain.' (Introduction)