Recollections of Brewarrina Aboriginal Mission.

Latukefu, Ruth A. Fink

Abstract: In 2013 I revisited Brewarrina Aboriginal Mission after nearly 60 years. This paper describes what life was like for Aboriginal people living on the mission during my fieldwork in 1954. Information from Aboriginal informants at that time is supplemented by Jimmie Barker, whose memoir records 20 years as handyman on the mission (1920-42). There was historical continuity in racist attitudes, fears of child removal, suppression of languages and culture, inadequate schooling and authoritarian controls by the managers from the Aborigines Welfare Board (New South Wales). People felt ashamed to be seen by white people doing anything traditionally Aboriginal, and skin colour and Aboriginal features were socially stigmatised. Apart from its cemetery, Brewarrina Mission, established in 1897, was closed in 1965 and later demolished.

Background (1)

I was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1931 of Jewish parents, both of whom were doctors. By 1938 my parents had been deprived of their rights to practise medicine and we were declared stateless, but we were fortunately allowed to leave Germany on Kristallnacht ('Crystal Night', 9 November 1938) because we had exit documents; Australian friends had sponsored us to emigrate to Sydney, where we settled at Kings Cross in February 1939, when I was seven.

Growing up in the early 1940s I was very conscious of being an outsider, as there was intolerance and xenophobia towards foreigners, especially after the outbreak of the Second World War. European refugees were constantly reminded that they must assimilate to Australian ways and forget their past, which for us meant not speaking German in public or behaving differently from other Australians. Older people who had language difficulties and heavy accents tended to mix mainly with other refugees, who were often called 'bloody Reffos' and ridiculed. One had to become like other 'dinkum Aussies' to be accepted.

This childhood experience of being an outsider made it easier for me to empathise with Aboriginal people when I came to know them, and to understand how they felt as an oppressed and socially outcast minority in mainstream Australian society.

In June 1954, as a 22-year-old graduate and tutor-research fellow with Sydney University's Department of Anthropology, I was sent by Professor AP Elkin (2) to study the Aboriginal community living on the Brewarrina Government Aboriginal Station, one of the earliest in New South Wales, locally known as the 'Mission' (it was administered by the New South Wales Aborigines Welfare Board and was located nine miles from Brewarrina town).

My four months of research became the basis of a thesis for a Master of Arts degree in anthropology from The University of Sydney in 1955 (Fink 1955), in which some of the quotations used in this paper first appeared. However, in my thesis and later published work I disguised all personal names and in an article published in Oceania in 1957 I referred to Brewarrina by the fictitious name 'Barwon' (Fink 1957).

Previous research had been conducted in northwestern New South Wales by the late Dr Marie Reay and her assistant Grace Sitlington nine years earlier at Brewarrina, Walgett, Moree and Cummeragunja Aboriginal Station (Reay 1945, 1948, 1949). Reay had worked with Aboriginal people living in the towns, whereas my study focused on those living at the Brewarrina Mission. Nine years had elapsed but our conclusions were broadly similar, although there had been further cultural loss through the deaths of most remaining Elders during the 1940s. We both noted the status distinctions that existed between people living on the Mission and those individuals and families in town, who aspired to live as white people and tried to conceal their Aboriginal identity where possible.

Apart from these brief anthropological studies, we are fortunate in the eyewitness account of the earlier years at Brewarrina Mission recorded in a remarkable memoir by James (Jimmie) Barker (1900-1972) for Janet Mathews in the 1960s (Mathews 1988; Thomas 2003). Jimmie came to Brewarrina from Cunnamulla with his mother Margaret, a Murrawarri woman, in 1912 after the Aborigines Protection Board gained powers to remove children from their families, (3) but she was so appalled by conditions at the Mission that they camped near town until 1915, when she returned to the Mission and remained there until her death in 1922. Jimmie became the Mission handyman, and married and continued to live there until 1942, when he moved with his family closer to Brewarrina town, and then to Lightning Ridge (Goodall n.d.). His son, Roy Barker, married June Ferguson, whose family lived on the Mission where she grew up. (4) In more recent years, Uncle Roy and Aunty June Barker maintained a cultural centre at Lightning Ridge. They were highly respected Elders who both passed away in 2012 (Tracker 2012). I have used Jimmie Barker's memoir to supplement the earlier period at the Mission, prior to any anthropological research.

In 1954 there were more dark people with Aboriginal features living on the Mission, who identified as Aboriginal, even though they had been deprived of cultural knowledge and language through their Mission upbringing. Many nostalgically remembered the passing of older people who had grown up with knowledge of traditional languages. Few such Elders were still alive in 1954, although some knowledgeable old people were alive during Reay's research in the 1940s (Reay 1949:101-10). Jimmie Barker observed that many of the traditional customs had already been lost by 1922 because so many older people had died during the influenza epidemic in 1919. (5)

The policy of assimilation for Aborigines was adopted during Paul Hasluck's term as Minister for Territories between 1951 and 1963 to encourage them to merge and 'disappear' into the general community and abandon their Aboriginal identity. Managers at the Brewarrina Mission had for generations discouraged Aboriginal beliefs and rituals that came to their attention. Children on the Mission were indoctrinated to believe that anything connected with the Aboriginal past was primitive and should be forgotten. (6) They were moved to dormitories (7) so that parental cultural influences would be minimal. This helps to explain the sense of shame they felt in 1954 if a white person observed them engaging in anything culturally Aboriginal, such as eating traditional bush foods.

Deeply entrenched racial prejudice towards Aborigines had continued throughout the early twentieth century. Jimmie Barker described what it was like in 1922 to be Aboriginal in Brewarrina (Mathews 1988:121-2):

   Although I was still young--my twenty-second
   birthday was approaching--I found
   the attitude of white people to my colour a
   constant strain. Even a visit to the cafe or
   a shop was an effort. When a dark person
   entered he would usually have to listen to
   comments on his colour and low social position
   and would probably have to wait a long
   time before being served. It was not what
   they said to me about my colour that worried
   me, it was having to listen to it so often.

   In the course of a day in town I heard
   unpleasant remarks and jokes countless
   times. If there were two men behind the
   counter when I went into a shop they would
   probably start their conversation by saying,
   'What does this blackfellow want? There are
   other places for him.' One gets used to being
   called 'Abo', 'buck-toothed nigger', 'Jacky',
   'boong', 'Charcoal', and 'no-good nigger'.
   To the people who called us these things it
   was all good fun; for us it was depressing
   and horrible.

This made him decide to settle at the Mission, 'to spare me having to listen to these remarks about black fellows' (Mathews 1988:122).

In 1954 racist attitudes were still evident and were not only directed by white people towards Aborigines, but by some Aboriginal people living in town towards their own darker relatives on the Mission.

In this memoir of Brewarrina, I try to convey in their own words what people at the Mission told me in 1954 (8) and to look back from the present to find evidence of what it was like there 60 years ago. There have been many changes, some for the better, others still in need of further improvement. At least there is now a much greater appreciation and understanding by many Australians of what those of Aboriginal descent had to endure for so many generations in places like the Mission at Brewarrina.

The research: overcoming suspicion and fear

On 23 June 1954 I drove from Sydney to Brewarrina in an old Singer 9 utility van, which proved very useful later for pig-hunting trips with the young Mission boys. I arrived in Brewarrina town covered in fine red dust, as there were no sealed roads. I had booked a room at the Royal Hotel, and that evening I walked around nearby streets, noticing many young Aboriginal people who were there to enjoy a visiting fair with merry-go-rounds, a boxing tent and side shows. I had never met an Aboriginal person before February 1954, when two Aboriginal athletes, who were staying at Wesley College, visited the Anthropology Department at Sydney University.

Next morning I gained a foretaste of what to expect in Brewarrina when talking at breakfast to a Lands Department official, who warned me that 'The Blacks out on the Mission are a bad lot', although he admitted that he had never visited the place.

The Aborigines Welfare Board had determined that I must stay in the manager's house, which was considered the only suitable accommodation. My arrival aroused curiosity and concern among residents because they assumed that I must be working for the Aborigines Welfare Board, since I was living in the manager's house.

People on the Mission referred to themselves as 'dark people' or 'Black fellows'. They called white women wodjin and white men were wunda or gubba. Everyone called the manager 'boss' and his wife was known as the 'matron'.

At first I did not understand why people seemed so afraid of me, and why the children called out in warning if a strange wodjin or wunda approached their houses. Everyone then rushed inside and peeped through the windows, to make sure it was not an official who might be coming to take away their children.

I was ignorant then of the Stolen Generations and that their fears were based on past experiences, which they later talked about, telling how people used to hide their children when a police van arrived to forcibly take them from their mothers and send them away. Boys were sent to Kinchela Boys Home, girls to Cootamundra Girls Home, and brothers and sisters were often separated. The forced removal of children, which was still happening in 1954 in some places, was largely unknown to urban white Australians like myself. It explains why there was so much fear and mistrust when I began the research.

Gaining people's trust took many weeks. On my first day they were so frightened and suspicious that everyone stayed in their houses and shut the doors as soon as they saw me coming.

I found a group of children and showed them a toy lizard. They couldn't resist seeing it wag its head and were soon crowding around, laughing shyly. Then I played a mouth organ and sang to them. They thought it terribly funny, seeing a strange wodjin playing the mouth organ and showing them a toy garni.

After a while they were more at ease. A tall boy named Norman started calling my name, chanting 'Ruth Fink' and jumping as he called out. I said to him, 'Make a song about me'. The other children laughed and Norman said he would dance a corroboree if I would dance and play the mouth organ. However, I did not take up his offer.

After the first few days, children became less shy and were their more normal, cheeky selves. They made fun of my name, calling out 'Miss Flink' and 'Miss Milk', while a few would run and touch me and others laughed. An older girl sometimes tried to intervene, but I told her I didn't mind, as they were only playing.

For some weeks, I was repeatedly asked by the mothers why I had come. A rumour had circulated that I must be the new welfare officer, and that I was therefore watching them to see if they were caring for their children properly. They thought I would have their children sent away if I found signs of neglect.

When they felt more reassured, some told me, 'We all thought you was the new welfare officer to replace Mrs English' and 'The children all thought you came for them', or 'When the school teacher said you would be here for several months we did not know what you were doing--we thought you come to put our children in homes'.

I encouraged children to call me 'Ruth' instead of 'Miss Fink' but after a few days the school teacher's wife, who was also a teacher, came on the pretext of asking me to drive her somewhere. She then explained that she had instructed the children to call me 'Miss Fink'. She said they were being disrespectful and too familiar with me. I replied that I wanted them to feel less afraid and that I had allowed them to call me 'Ruth'. She insisted I was wrong to encourage them and said she could not understand my doing so. I knew there was an accepted code of behaviour for white people always to assume superiority and to never treat Aborigines as equals. She believed that 'the blacks' must be taught to look up to white people to maintain 'white prestige'. Her husband, the headmaster, later accused me of causing disturbance at the school because I failed to demand respect from the children. One evening at the manager's house he came, partly drunk, and insisted that I did not know what I was doing and that the people would never tell me anything.

As the weeks passed, people became more accepting and I joined in many activities, such as swimming in the river, fishing on the riverbank with women I'd befriended, and driving the Singer van with borrowed pig-hunting dogs and boys in the back to go after wild pigs and kangaroos. I recorded all these activities with my camera and the photos provide a historical record of those times. Some photos were taken on longer trips, such as early in September when I drove with Lily Hall, Percy Coombs, Elvey Bonney and three children to Walgett and then to Lightning Ridge, where we camped out. I wanted to prove to them that I was not trying to be 'flash' like other wodjins whom they knew.

Acting 'flash' meant trying to show that you felt superior to coloured people, but the expression was also used to criticise Aboriginal people who were pretending to be superior to others, when they were really no better. They sometimes called women 'black wodjins', which meant they were acting like a white person, which they knew to be false since everyone still regarded them as Aboriginal.

Gradually, the mothers whose children I had befriended became more willing to talk with me, allowing me visit their houses and take photos. But it took more than two months before I was invited into a house and offered a mug of tea. That indicated that they trusted me not to 'dob' them in to the manager or Welfare Board. They no longer worried if I walked past when they were sitting outside on blankets, playing cards and gambling. Earlier on, they would not have allowed me to see them.

In the evenings we sat around a cooking fire (the houses had no interior stoves), while they sang favourite Slim Dusty songs, such as Rusty, it's goodbye and A dear John letter, accompanied by men playing their mouth organs. Occasionally, I drove people to town at night to informal dances held on the claypan near the riverbank camps.

Shortly before I left, some of the young boys had caught a goanna. After it was secretly cut up in the manager's laundry, they cooked it in the ashes and brought some meat for me to try--it tasted like chicken and I quite enjoyed it. It was a sign of their trust and friendship, because they had allowed me to share 'Black fellow' food, which they believed white people considered dirty and unfit to eat. Appreciation of bush foods has greatly changed since then through television programs such as the Bush tucker man, and they are now served at some exclusive restaurants!

Aborigines lived in isolation on the Mission

The original intention of the Mission had been to keep Aborigines away from Brewarrina town, and past conditions at the Mission had been much harsher. It had improved by 1954, but many Aboriginal people had already moved to town, and only 21 families (143 people) remained on the Mission. Their isolation, under the control of the Welfare Board and its managers, kept them living in an institutional setting, which contributed to their dependency.

There were advantages in living at the Mission, as it was cheaper and easier to live in free housing if families had no regular employment. Health care was provided at the clinic by a trained nurse, and a doctor visited fortnightly. It was also more secure, since no alcohol (then illegal for Aborigines) was permitted and the managers intervened in any disturbance and kept the place orderly.

However, the school was inadequate, and people were isolated except for twice-weekly shopping trips, when the Mission truck, known as 'the Gubby', would drive them to the town centre, where they waited in a park until everyone had done their shopping. They were then driven back to the Mission.

There used to be a railway line at Brewarrina and a thriving pastoral industry. Most Aboriginal men could find work as shearers, drovers, cooks, station handy-men, fettlers on the railway, fencers and timber-cutters. Some were self-employed, while others worked for wages, and plenty of work was available on nearby sheep stations. Some of the younger single women had jobs in town as domestics or laundresses at the hospital; others worked on stations as domestics. After they married and had families they usually stayed at home. When men returned from work to the Mission, they often brought quite large sums of money but it usually ended up being distributed through the gambling games.

Few people were able to save money; if they did, they had to hide it from their kin, as everyone would regularly 'humbug' them, borrowing food or money when they ran short themselves. One woman locked her food away in a box and her husband would take the key to work to prevent people asking for it.

Women spent money on food, clothing and necessities for their children. Others preferred to use taxis to travel to town, instead of the Mission's Gubby, especially if they'd had a win at cards: 'People don't want to save the money as long as they get their little fun and pleasure out of what they ride in.' It was one of the few occasions when the Aboriginal passenger had the satisfaction of giving orders to a white driver. 'Everyone has a right to decide for themselves what they want to do with their money--if they want to gamble it or spend it on taxis, that's their business.'

Men who were not Christians regularly bought illicit 'grog', risking imprisonment in 1954. There was a long history of alcohol problems in the town. Jimmie Barker described how, in 1922, men who had been working for months on remote stations would come to town and remain drunk until they returned to work. Alcohol was prohibited at the Mission (with the risk of expulsion), so men stayed in town.

I noticed that a lot of methylated spirits was being drunk on the river-bank or in the park. The money these men earned was never spent on food or for the benefit of their families; always on drink. A situation arose where dark men were being arrested in town whether they had been drinking or not. An Aboriginal who did not drink and was chatting to a white man near a hotel could find himself pushed into jail...The feeling of injustice could make a man drink for the first time in his life when he was released. (Mathews 1988:134)

Gambling was also widespread. Barker noted that 'Aborigines have seldom stopped gambling with cards or dice' (Mathews 1988:135):

   A man comes home with a cheque for say,
   one hundred dollars. He cashes the cheque at
   the first opportunity, spends some of it, gives
   away a lot more, and within hours it is all
   gone. He uses very little of it for himself. This
   attitude goes back to the basic Aboriginal
   tradition of sharing with one another ...

Most Aborigines I knew in the 1950s were passionate gamblers. The camp gambling rings were a social occasion where people would exchange gossip and those short of money might be lucky enough to win some. Gambling at the Mission in 1954 was not as important as it had been in earlier years. This was because an increasing number of families had become Christians. Those who decided to convert (with a baptism in the river) had to cease gambling and drinking alcohol. However, in the past, there had been very big gambling schools and large sums of money changed hands every weekend. Weilmoringle

station near Goodooga was often talked of as a centre for gambling:

   The betting up at Weilmoringle was high! If
   you were lucky, you could walk away with
   500 pounds. One girl won 150 pounds at dice
   one night. She then played the lot back and
   went broke and even lost her own 15 pounds.
   So she had to go to work next day--'If I'd
   won', said Dora 'I'd have spent that in town'.

Dora was one of those who ceased gambling after she became a Christian.

On remote pastoral stations and reserves from early in the century Aboriginal people who earned money had nowhere to spend it, so they played dice and card games, such as Coon-can (a game played in Brewarrina and Bourke), in gambling schools to pass the time. Most of their earnings were held in trust funds, which they could only access through the Mission managers. It was a system open to abuse, as managers could easily cheat people by requesting a larger sum and then pocketing the extra for themselves. The management of people's earnings by the Board, which deprived them of personal control of their earnings, may explain the way money was used and viewed. The trust funds have recently been called 'Stolen Wages' and in 2004 an apology was given by the New South Wales Carr government, which set up a Trust Fund Replacement Scheme to which Aboriginal people or their descendants could apply for restitution of their earnings, some claims going back to the early 1900s.

Men and women on the Mission received handouts of food rations, clothing and a little spending money; the rest of the money they earned was kept in trust by the Board because they were thought incapable of managing money. However, the trust fund system deprived them of the need to personally manage their earnings, and it has contributed to the continuing problems of welfare dependency and the 'trap of passive welfare', which Noel Pearson (2011) described so convincingly in Up from the Mission. Jimmie Barker observed, 'The problem with an Aboriginal is that when he gets some sort of "hand-out" he is well content to let it continue for ever ...' (Mathews 1988:146).

People living on the Mission had few contacts with white people, other than their employers and its manager, matron, school teachers, and occasional visiting officials and ministers of religion. Percy Coombs, a drover, who had grown up on the Mission, explained why people felt uncomfortable and afraid of white people:

   The people on this mission have never mixed
   in much with the white people. They never
   got away among the white people. They lives
   here and don't like white people to go among
   their company. They feel they don't like a
   white person to see them cooking down in
   the ashes and near the dirt and eating their
   own food. These people don't realise that
   the white people among the working class
   are just the same. Their natural way of
   thinking is that the place is not descent and
   good enough. Then the food they eat, they
   don't want white people to see them eat it.
   The black feels shy and ashamed of himself,
   the place is not good enough for a white
   person nor is his food good enough for
   white people to see.

After the last old people with traditional knowledge died in the 1940s, it was said that most of the Aboriginal lore was lost, though a few groups of people living on remote sheep stations away from the town reserves still knew languages and practised some aspects of their culture. By contrast, in recent years there has been a revival of interest in Aboriginal beliefs and young Aboriginal people are now keen to learn language, practise dance and learn about what is still known of their traditions. They no longer have the feeling of shame that surrounded everything Aboriginal and that was apparent in 1954.

If there was cultural knowledge then at the Brewarrina Mission, it was kept hidden from white people, including myself, because of the prevailing attitudes. There were still a few older people who respected the old laws, despite years of suppression:

'As far as the old laws of the Aborigine are concerned', said one old man, 'He carried out the best rules there ever were--there's no white people as strict as old Aboriginal law ... it wasn't love at first sight like it is today--you had to be shown and told what to do and where to go. Those people were healthy and ate their own foods, they were fine upstanding young men and women.'

In 1954 many people still feared and believed in ghosts, curses and supernatural happenings. They were afraid to walk around at night, and I was often warned about ghosts. One Christian man admitted that he still had some of the fears which, as he put it, 'were in everyone'. He said:

   The old Aboriginal beliefs are still there, but
   the old people that carried them out have
   gone--there's no one to take the place of
   them old types: I'm a bit dubious about them
   old stunts--there's no one here to do it now,
   so we're not afraid of them, but say a curlew
   was to call out there, a shivering still goes
   through everyone of us, 'Who's the message
   for? [the curlew's call meant someone had
   died] They seem to be in you somehow.
   There's still belief in all those rackets but no
   one to carry them out.

One Sunday afternoon I went pig hunting in the bush with a group of women and children. At dusk one woman grew worried that we would not be back in time for church. She made a fire, burned some green gum leaves and 'smoked' herself. She said this was to protect herself from the ghosts of old people who had lived there and who might still be wandering in the bush. The practice of smoking to keep away spirits of the dead was a belief that had persisted on the Mission since Jimmie Barker was young. However, after the influenza epidemic in 1919, funeral practices of destroying the deceased's belongings changed (Mathews 1988:129):

   At the time many people still believed in the
   use of smoke to confuse the spirit of the dead
   man. Although they could still use the smoke
   they could not move away from the place
   of death, which took some adjustment and
   caused fear and unhappiness. Until 1922 they
   destroyed all the possessions of the dead man--they
   were either burnt or thrown in the
   river. The manager did not know about this;
   he would never have condoned the destruction
   of clothes and blankets. Eventually
   Mr Burns found out ... and made trouble for
   all the people who had destroyed government
   property. He insisted that all the belongings
   of a dead person be given to him and that
   he would have them fumigated ... Before this
   people would chop up a sewing machine with
   an axe, or destroy other items of value the
   same way. Plates and crockery were smashed,
   and a comfortable house would suddenly
   become a hovel.

However, Jimmie Barker himself did not bother to smoke his mother's possessions after her death and kept her photographs, china and linen, telling people he would keep anything of value, which horrified them. Despite their disapproval, from that time on relatives kept the possessions of a person who was deceased (Mathews 1988:129).

A growing number of Mission residents became Christians in 1954 after I had left. Duncan and Blanche Ferguson led them in regular Sunday evening worship at their house as there was not yet a church building on the Mission. Later Duncan Ferguson and others built a church of bush timber with corrugated iron roofing, which was used for Sunday school and funerals. The film Singing the spirit home, made in 2010 by Steve Hodder and screened at the Red Ochre Festival, Dubbo, has early footage of the Fergusons and visiting American Evangelists at the Brewarrina Mission, taken in the late 1950s.

The failure of assimilation policy

Assimilation policies failed in the 1950s because Aborigines were still discriminated against and experienced colour prejudice. Welfare officials, police and white town residents still treated people who were darker and looked Aboriginal as 'Aboriginal' irrespective of whether they held citizenship rights or exemption certificates. If you looked Aboriginal, you were likely to be treated differently, especially in a small country town. In Brewarrina several Aboriginal women had married or lived with white men. However, such couples were still socially excluded by other town residents. They moved in their own circles but were not welcome to participate fully in community life.

Legal and social discrimination was evident in Brewarrina in 1954. The hospital remained segregated and a new ward was built for Aboriginal people, although as soon as it was completed, they were given the old white ward and the new wing was kept for whites. People complained that some of their light-skinned family members would be admitted to the white ward but others who were darker were admitted to the Aboriginal ward. A woman whose daughter worked at the hospital was so angry when they put her in the Aboriginal ward that she refused to pay her bill, saying the Aborigines Welfare Board should pay for her.

In 1954 citizenship rights and pressures for people to assimilate and leave the Mission and deny their Aboriginal origins were driving a wedge within the Aboriginal community and turning some individuals and families living in town against people on the Mission, even though most had grown up there together. They looked down on those who still lived at the Mission. As one man put it:

   The people living in town may feel superior
   and think they have got away from the
   Welfare Board and are better than us people
   here on the Mission, but they really haven't
   got away from the Welfare Board at all. They
   can't get away because they have Aboriginal
   blood in them when they're born and it stays
   in them till they die ...

       Some of these dark families in town think
   themselves better than Mission people. They
   would rather see a ghost at their front door
   than one of the Mission people. But they're
   really no different from us. We all went to
   school together in the mission. Now they
   won't associate with us.

Another said:

   A few years ago one woman's brother visited
   her. She said he was not her brother and that
   she never had a brother. Another woman,
   now married to a white man disowns her
   own son, born before, because he is dark.

       But it isn't just colour that counts. Some
   of these people look no different from us here
   and the white people don't consider them
   any different from us. They are the ones that
   think themselves different. Those people
   don't often greet you in the street

       This is one town where the blacks won't
   pull together, they're just at one another.

       The townspeople would just as soon see
   their own folks on the Mission being put in
   jail and stamped down.

During the 1930s people from different regions and languages were moved to Brewarrina, such as Angledool people in 1936 and the Wangkumara people from Tibooburra in 1938. This brought some conflict to the Mission. People spoke different languages and when they talked in their own 'lingo' it caused fights and arguments because they would be suspected of gossiping or talking about others. This was said to be one of the main reasons why people stopped using Aboriginal languages, which only very few old people could still speak fluently.

   That's the reason they took a grudge against
   one another, because they didn't understand
   each other's language. If we talked in our
   lingo and they in theirs, they'd think we was
   talking about them and they'd take a grudge
   against us. Even today they are still suspicious
   and if they hear anyone talking their
   lingo they think they are talking about them.

However, Jimmie Barker felt that white people's reaction to people speaking in their language was also responsible for the disappearance of Aboriginal languages (Mathews 1988:123):

   I have noticed that when people were talking
   to one another in Murruwarri or Ngemba
   the white man who heard them would immediately
   jeer at 'old Jacky-Jacky speaking in
   his dirty lingo'. On many occasions I have
   noticed that dark people would just stop talking
   when a white person approached, as they
   did not want to appear foolish.

Some words and phrases were still widely used but women complained that growing up in the dormitories had stopped them knowing how to speak their own language; others said the old people had refused to teach it to them. In any case, it was discouraged by teachers and managers.

On one of our pig-hunting outings, Lilly Hall began talking in Gamilaroi, her father's language, and said in English to the boys, 'You are a new generation, you don't know things that we were told by our parents'. She began excitedly using different words and pointing to things and telling how proud she was to know and understand those words. Her old father, Richard Howell, was one of those who still spoke Gamilaroi fluently. Another was old Maria Boney, who talked with Lily in Gamilaroi because they could understand each other's 'lingo'.

The words that everyone still knew and that were commonly used were for parts of the body and foods--walla- (head), murra- (hand), widja- (bread) and dinga- (meat)--and names of animals, such as garni- (lizard) and dinewan(emu), as well as swear words and 'rude' words for genitals.

There were other differences that sometimes caused disputes--people from Angledool played dice, while Brewarrina people were card players. In Brewarrina euchre and dice were for men, while women played Coon-can and poker. After they later moved to town from the Mission, Angledool people continued holding dice-playing schools.

Managers at the Mission

During the twenty-one years I worked at the Mission there was only one good and constructive manager: Mr Danvers [1930-1934], The years with him were a happy memory for us all. (Mathews 1988:160)

After so many years as handyman, under a succession of Mission managers, Jimmie Barker was well qualified to judge the competence, honesty and behaviour of past managers. In his memoir he recounts many abuses of power, fraudulent cheating of people's wages and sexual abuse of girls in the dormitories by managers. One of the worst in the mid-1950s was a Mr Brain, who had previously been at Angledool reserve, which was closed in 1936 and the people sent to Brewarrina.

Jimmy Barker described him (Mathews 1988:157-8):

   Brain was a cruel man; he faked cheques and
   was merciless with his baton ... He was one of
   the worst tyrants we ever had, and we just
   had to suffer him. We could not complain to
   the police or anyone else ... We all knew it was
   useless to fight the manager; with the exception
   of Danvers they were all dictators ... We
   had no privacy from a man like Brain: he
   could walk into our houses at any time of day
   or night.

Mr Brain and some other managers appeared before a Parliamentary Select Committee appoined in September 1937, where evidence was heard of his incompetence and cruelty. He was charged with neglect and defrauding people of endowment money at Angledool and Brewarrina and was dismissed. It was at this hearing that William Ferguson, then Organising Secretary of the Aborigines Progressive Association, gave evidence about the unpleasant power of managers: 'Generally, the managers I have come in contact with are not a proper type to be over Aborigines. They do not seem to have sympathy for the Aborigine. Their idea is to suppress rather than uplift. They are of a dominating character' (Mathews 1988:212-15).

Jimmy Barker walked off the job in 1942 after being confronted by a new assistant manager who tried to bully and prevent him from finishing some repairs to the school verandah. He shouted at him, 'Pick up those tools and bring them to where I want them!'; Jimmie replied defiantly, 'I said he could put them where he liked, because I had finished working on the Mission now and for ever' (Mathews 1988:163).

Barker decided to leave immediately; having prepared for months, he had already packed his belongings. As he was leaving the gate of his house, the vindictive assistant manager appeared with several young boys with shovels and ordered them to dig up Jimmie's roses and destroy the rest of his garden. He also had them tear down all the electrical wiring and fittings, which Jimmie had bought and installed himself. Late that afternoon Jimmie Barker left the Mission, never to work there again (Mathews 1988:165).

In 1954 the manager, an ex-serviceman, was quite liked, even though he was strict and authoritarian. When the Board transferred him from Brewarrina, he and his family were given farewell presents and many people seemed genuinely sorry to see them leave, especially the matron whom they had liked more than her husband. They appreciated the improvements he had made at the Mission, such as getting proper playground equipment for the children.

The people had never had any say in the running of the Mission. There were no land councils or local organisations of any sort, and they had to rely on the manager for everything, but they could not sack him if he proved unsuitable, as he was only accountable to the Welfare Board. He took no orders from the people and expected to be their 'boss', much like a prison superintendent. There was one Aboriginal member elected by residents on the Aborigines Welfare Board; Bert Groves, who had formerly lived on the Mission, represented them for many years. He was followed by Mrs Pearl Gibbs. However, they were 'token' Aboriginal Board members with relatively little influence.

For a short time, under manager Danvers, people had been encouraged to grow their own vegetables, in a garden area, but later managers had simply kept or sold the produce for themselves. Former manager James Danvers appeared as a witness before the 1937 parliamentary hearing and confirmed that before his time there had been no gardens for the people, only the manager's private garden, attached to his residence. Children were suffering from malnutrition for want of fresh food (Mathews 1988:216):

   I established a community garden; I think
   that was the first of our stations. The result
   of that was extraordinary. There was a show
   in Brewarrina in which we took sixteen first
   prizes ... The people came in quite willingly
   and did their bit, it was all done with mattock
   and shovel; Within about four months we
   had vegetables on the station for everybody ... everybody
   then had a garden of his own.
   They worked in the community garden and
   also in their own gardens ... it made people
   proud of their homes and they got on much
   better.

The potential for economic development was there, but it was never realised, and a considerable amount of Mission land was sold in 1953 to non-Aboriginal farmers.

Percy Coombs envisaged how the Mission could have been developed:

   The only way to help people here is to give
   them land.

       This Station could support itself if people
   were given a chance. In wet weather we could
   have our own store so we don't have to go
   9 miles away. Why not pick the best man
   in the place, 2 or 3 of them to organise his
   own mates, not to try to be better than the
   boss himself, but why not let them run sheep
   and help the man who wants to have a go.
   If one or two are a success everyone might
   have success. We could send children to high
   school. They could do the same work as
   you do.

Although police in 1954 were more sympathetic than they had been in the past, Jimmie Barker reported that in his day they were universally feared by people at the Mission (Mathews 1988:145):

   No Aborigines would ever go near the
   police station or a policeman. When help
   was needed the police would be the last
   people approached, probably because the
   normal words of greeting from a policeman
   were: 'What do you want, Boong?' or 'Hey,
   Charcoal come here.' In those days the police
   regarded the dark people as something worse
   than animals. They handcuffed men and hit
   them on their heads with batons for their
   amusement. The Aboriginal was frequently
   innocent. We had every reason to fear the
   police. They were cruel and terrible to all
   Aborigines.

However, by the late 1960s relations were much better: 'This is not the case today: in all my years at Brewarrina we have never had a better police force than at the present time [1968?]. There is no fear at all now: if an Aboriginal needs help he will happily go to a policeman' (Mathews 1988:145).

I also found widespread fear of police in 1954, as they usually arrested Aboriginal men found with alcohol and drunks were routinely jailed. I was told that in the past it had been common practice for police to beat people, which was confirmed by Barker (Mathews 1988:145):

   One night, just as people were going into the
   picture show, they [police] hit a man until
   he was unconscious; a few months later the
   man died. They were cruel and terrible to all
   Aborigines. In those days a dark man would
   run and hide if he saw a uniformed policeman
   approaching.

At least half of the working men from the Mission consumed alcohol regularly, even though it was still illegal, except for holders of an exemption certificate. Occasionally, if a man arrived drunk at the Mission the manager called the police, but mostly men stayed away in town. Although excessive drinking has continued to be typical Australian male behaviour, it has now also become problematic, with binge drinking by non-Aboriginal young people of both sexes. However, in Aboriginal drinking there was an element of

defiance of authority, probably connected with feelings of inferiority in response to prejudice. One woman from the Mission several times became drunk and walked along the main street of town in the evening, swearing loudly until she was arrested. This seemed a deliberate defiance of authority, but it was rare in 1954 for older women to use alcohol as there was quite strong feeling against it. Most people smoked but I never saw any sign of other drug use.

Under the Protection Board in earlier times, Mission managers had absolute authority over anyone Aboriginal. This included powers to remove or expel them from the vicinity of any reserve or township. Percy Coombs remembered what this was like:

   They could not leave this place to go and
   live in town, one time you know. If they
   were in there for a week or fortnight the boss
   (Manager) would be in after them or get the
   police to send them back again.

   Well they can go anywhere now, but in the
   past they never got into white people's ways
   of living.

I had noticed in the first weeks how people seemed worried about me seeing them cook damper in the ashes or eat bush foods, such as kangaroo or goanna. The reasons became clearer as I learned how people felt ashamed about eating bush foods. For instance, one woman said:

   Mr Arnold, a white man who knew the children
   really well used to take them on trips
   and go out pig hunting. One day he caught
   a kangaroo and took it back and asked one
   of the women on the Mission to have some.
   She felt so ashamed that she would not cut
   off any meat while the Wunda was around
   nor would she eat it in front of him or even
   let him know that she ate it. Mr Arnold ate
   some himself but she only came after he'd left
   and helped herself to it.

They explained the reason for these fears:

   Yes, people here are afraid, it's a sort of fear
   deep rooted among the dark people. They
   are afraid of white people seeing them at
   their old ways. This fear has been handed
   down. I have it myself. Also I fear policemen.
   Some people here don't mind a wodjin
   or wunda seeing them gambling but they do
   mind being caught with their own foods.

The attitudes and behaviour of the manager were revealing. After a funeral for someone who had died at the Mission, he told me, 'If anyone had wailed at the funeral, I would have had them thrown out of the cemetery'. He would not allow people to culturally express their grief. On another occasion he insisted that 'the Abos must be given an example and made to be like white people'.

The station truck was in town, about to return to the Mission, when two women on the back started arguing about some trivial matter. The manager shouted at one of them, 'Sit down and shut up'. The woman took no notice so he shouted again, so loudly that everyone along the town street could hear him. Other people on the back of the truck trembled with fear and shame, and said to her, 'sit down and do as the boss says'. Then someone reminded her, 'You don't know what a good Boss you've got'.

Later the manager told me, 'That's the only way to treat them, when they get like that you have to slap 'em down and drive them into the ground'.

More than anything, people disliked a manager or matron interfering in their domestic quarrels or entering their houses unannounced. One manager had his shirt torn off for doing this and there was a bossy matron who would use the mission handy men as her messenger boys, and she would sometimes rush into people's houses to make surprise inspections.

The women became enraged when she said to one of them, who had an appointment to see the doctor, 'Be sure to remember to wear clean underwear'. They were very sensitive about how the matron treated them and resented her calling them by their Christian names, instead of Mrs So and So, as if they were children.

She later announced that she would visit every house to make sure people were feeding their children properly at lunchtime. The women furiously complained: 'No other matron ever came looking to see what we ate or spied on us.'

In 1954 the manager and matron did not socialise with the people, but I was told that in the past some managers and their wives had regularly invited women to have afternoon tea with the matron and had encouraged men to form cricket teams to play in local competitions. Formerly, there had been more organised sport and entertainment than in 1954.

Education at the Mission

When Jimmie Barker moved with his mother to Brewarrina in 1912 he had no formal schooling and she did not want him taught at the Mission, which had a restricted syllabus. The Brewarrina public school would not accept Aboriginal children, but by 1915 Jimmie had taught himself to read (Goodall n.d.). He had a lifelong thirst for learning and after he settled at the Mission he started a school himself, held at night and on Saturday afternoons, using a blackboard to teach children the alphabet, sums and geography: 'On other occasions I showed them pictures from an old-type projector; I had made an amplifier so that there could be a musical accompaniment ... I felt some satisfaction in adding a little to the knowledge of the young people' (Mathews 1988:133).

Later he taught his own children by talking and reading to them so his sons knew more than the others, but his son Jack suffered because he was clever at school, which annoyed his schoolmates, who would hit him (Mathews 1988:156):

   It was much the same for him as it had been
   for me in my youth. The children were in
   school, the teacher-manager was somewhere
   else and the result was that the children
   played games and learnt nothing ... it was
   an unusual child who returned home from
   school showing some interest in what he had
   learnt during the day.

The schooling given to children at the Mission did not provide them with a full primary education, as they only had to be taught to the grade-three standard, and originally they did not have qualified teachers and were taught by the mission manager or his wife. Percy Coombs described what the Mission school was like when he was young in the 1920s:

   In those days you wasn't to know nothing--you
   was to go to that school house and just
   sit down with a pencil and piece of paper and
   you could scribble on it all day--that's all
   they wanted you to know. They didn't put too
   many figures for you to learn on the board.
   In some other country he'd be more up lifted
   than he is, but today and go back 60 years or
   so--the blacks was never given the chance ... white
   people did not want the black people to
   know anything at all. They took him down
   that way. They tried to keep the people here
   on the Mission down, and tried to keep them
   under the sole of their boots.

   Well if you're going to let him go out and
   try to find the light for himself, well how do
   you expect him to get on? We had quite a
   lot of smart people here on this station at
   one time, but the townspeople were exactly
   like the managers and the police--they
   didn't want to know anybody here or know
   how they lived. Today the people has got a
   little more freedom than they had twenty-five
   years ago, they tried to keep you down
   then and keep you beaten all the time. If they
   could stop you going through that gate over
   there, they'd stop you from going ...

His sister, Doreen Wright, remembered the girls' dormitories:

   Before we played, the manager would make
   us clean the station and pick up all the dirt.
   We had to do what he told us. He taught us
   lessons. We were allowed to play from three
   to five in the evening and then again after tea
   till 9pm. We slept in those dormitories and
   had one day off a week to see our parents. We
   stayed there till we turned fourteen and then
   were sent out to work for four years. Our
   parents did not mind because they thought it
   was best for us. Some girls used to sneak out
   at night and go to town. Every night there
   was church and hymn singing and everyone
   went to church.

Her 14-year-old daughter told me that at school she was in the top class, but all they did was build dolls' houses and learn some Australian history and nature studies. The school remained a one-teacher school until the closure of the Mission in 1965. It had no library in 1954, only a few fairy-tale books and school magazines. A teenage boy could recite the names of all the early governors of New South Wales but he had never heard of Greece or William Shakespeare. The matron said that many teachers in Aboriginal schools went there because it led to promotion elsewhere, not because they were interested in teaching Aboriginal children. However, there had been at least one dedicated teacher between 1930 and 1940: 'He tried to be of assistance but must often ... have felt discouraged ... During all my years at the Mission I cannot remember one adult or child who knew how to open a dictionary and look for a word' (Mathews 1988:156).

Prejudice from without and within

'To most white people we are like pigs to a Mohammedan, we are unclean.'

This perceptive remark was made by Blanche Ferguson in one of our conversations. It resonated with me because of my experience of prejudice against Jews in Germany. So many white people judged and disparaged Aboriginal people without knowing them personally or only as servants.

Blanche and her husband Pastor Duncan Ferguson were devout Christians. They and other Christians had renounced alcohol, gambling and other forms of entertainment such as the annual rodeo, boxing matches and side shows. They held an annual religious convention, around rodeo time, run mainly by Aboriginal lay preachers, although a few white missionaries would also attend. There were prayer nights and large numbers of people attended from other far western towns and Aboriginal settlements at Quambone, Gulargambone and Bourke. Duncan was a son of William Ferguson, the well-known Aboriginal activist who with William Cooper and John Patten had organised the Day of Mourning protest on 26 January 1938. William lived in Dubbo with his family, and publicised the disadvantages suffered by Aboriginal people and lobbied the New South Wales Government to give the Aborigines two representatives on the Aborigines Welfare Board. He served as one of these representatives from 1944 to 1949. He died in 1950 (Horton 1994:360).

Blanche originally came from Cummeragunja on the Victorian border and many of her family had also been missionaries. Duncan originally trained with the Aborigines Inland Mission (AIM) but he later disaffiliated from them. He and Blanche and their young children had been sent as missionaries to Tabulam. However, when they arrived, they found there was no accommodation, as the AIM had allowed someone else to occupy the missionary's house. They had to seek help at the police station and slept the night in a cow barn. Then Duncan found a job at a local saw mill, where he worked for some years, but later, when AIM sent white missionaries to Tabulam, someone from Sydney was sent ahead to make sure there was satisfactory accommodation. Duncan resented the way he and Blanche had been treated. He said, 'God did not send me here for this, man sent me'.

The divisions within the Brewarrina community, which are discussed more fully elsewhere (Fink 1957), were based mainly on having lighter skin colour or, for a woman, being married to a white man and, in the case of a man, holding an exemption certificate. Many of the households in town had lighter-skinned individuals who had cut themselves off from their darker relatives on the Mission. Although they had all grown up there, these families had begun to move into town in the late 1930s and during the early war years. This was an attempt to become independent of the Welfare Board. Moving into town, away from the Mission, meant that most of them lived in comfortable houses and led a lifestyle quite similar to middle-class white people (Fink 1957:105):

   Though they sometimes express colour prejudice
   against their own relatives, they are
   nevertheless extremely sensitive to any such
   prejudice when it is directed against themselves ... there
   is constant preoccupation
   with the theme of colour. When babies are
   born, the women all go to the hospital to see
   the colour of the child. One woman tried to
   scrub her younger sons with solvol to lighten
   their skins ...

But to most white people in town the 'coloured people' were all the same. They did not distinguish between town and Mission.

Sometimes Doreen Wright would invite me to come into town by taxi. We would drink a milkshake or a cup of tea, for which she paid. On one such occasion I recorded in my diary on 10 August 1954:

   I'm sitting with Doreen Wright at Pipos the
   Greek's Cafe having a milkshake. People are
   staring at us.

   A coloured girl is serving us, but she tries
   to ignore Doreen and asks me for the money.
   Doreen hands her the money and turns to
   me, saying, 'She thinks she's just it, but her
   mother is as dark as I am and walks into
   town two miles every day!'

   Later Doreen points to various people
   walking along the street and says 'You
   wouldn't think he's black would you.'

Next day, I was told how some Aboriginal women who lived in town had seen us together and were shocked that I would sit publicly drinking tea with Doreen: 'Isn't she ashamed to be seen in Pipos' with her! Isn't she ashamed?' They thought it was unacceptable that I mixed socially with Mission people whom they looked down upon.

It was obvious in 1954 that there were social barriers that affected many Aboriginal people, even if they tried to assimilate or had rejected their Aboriginal identity, cut themselves off socially from Mission relatives and were indistinguishable in their lifestyle from other white people, except for having darker skin colour or Aboriginal features.

Closure of the Mission

Brewarrina Mission, the oldest government Aboriginal station in New South Wales, was still managed by the Aborigines Welfare Board at the end of 1965, but only 42 people remained on the Mission. They were moved to a settlement about a mile from Brewarrina, locally known as Dodge City, early in 1966. The buildings that remained were used for other purposes. By 1972, when Jimmie Barker and Jeremy Long visited the Mission (Long 1970), very few of the original buildings remained.

During my revisit, in June 2013, I was driven to the Mission on Saturday morning, to see it again for the first time since I had left in October 1954. There were no buildings standing, but small interpretive posts had been erected, showing where the buildings formerly stood, and the cemetery, which was protected by a fence, had the graves of former residents, including some of the people I had known in 1954. Jimmie Barker was also buried there. The Aboriginal Mission site has been heritage listed and its cemetery is a 'place of belonging' for Ngemba and Murrawarri people, with cultural, spiritual, social and historical significance to many Aboriginal people across New South Wales (NSW Environment & Heritage 2006).

When I left Brewarrina in 1954 I had come to know people well and had made many friends on the Mission. They gave me a farewell party, lit a bonfire and roasted a pig. Some of them wrote letters after I'd left. Lily Hall, who was my closest friend, came down to Sydney for a visit and stayed with my parents later that year, and I was able to show her some of the sights of Sydney.

The most important thing I learned at the Mission was to listen to men and women who, despite their limited formal education, had wisdom and intelligence and understood the difficult situation they had to bear. I feel privileged to have recorded their words.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to David Jeffery and the AIATSIS Audiovisual Archives for converting the original negatives to digital format and enabling me to speak and present the photo disks to the Brewarrina Aboriginal Cultural Museum to a very appreciative Aboriginal audience.

Thanks to Bradley Steadman for helping me during my re-visit to Brewarrina.

Thanks to Darryl Ferguson for screening the photographs and to Linda Simpson for allowing the Cultural Museum to be used as a venue. Thanks Ian Merritt and Mary Cutts for helping me visit the site of the former mission, which has no buildings standing, but still has a fenced cemetery with the graves of former residents who were sent to Brewarrina from Tibooburra, Angledool, Goodooga and Culgoa at various times after 1886, as well as later residents such as Jimmie Barker.

NOTES

1. This paper is based on a talk I gave to an Aboriginal audience at Brewarrina Aboriginal Cultural Museum on 9 June 2013. It was my first time back to Brewarrina since 1954, when I had spent four months' anthropological research at the Mission from 23 June to 23 October 1954. The main purpose of my re-visit was to hand back to the community digitised black and white photographs from 1954, which were restored and digitised from original black and white negatives held by the AIATSIS Audiovisual Archives and its Collections Manager David Jeffery.

2. Since the 1940s, Elkin had begun to turn attention to people of mixed Aboriginal descent living in New South Wales, who came under the Aborigines Welfare Board (NSW), of which Elkin was vice-chairman. The Welfare Board was responsible for Aboriginal administration in New South Wales from 1940 until 1969. It had replaced the Aborigines Protection Board, set up in 1883, which had administered such draconian laws that it was called the Persecution Board by Aborigines. After pioneering studies by Caroline Tennant Kelly, Marie Reay and Grace Sitlington, Elkin encouraged research by younger graduates including James Bell, Jeremy Beckett, Malcolm Calley, Alice Beachamp, Esther Waite and myself. In South Australia similar studies were undertaken by Ronald and Catherine Berndt, Judy Inglis, Fay Gale and Diane Barwick (Gray 2001:10-11).

3. The Aborigines Protection Board of New South Wales (1883-1940) controlled Aborigines under special legislation that allowed it to forcibly remove Aboriginal children living with their parents and 're-socialise' them. The New South Wales Aborigines Protection Act 1909 changed the status of Aboriginal people from British subjects to wards of the state. Some Aborigines of mixed descent were allowed to apply for a Certificate of Exemption from the Protection Act.

From the 1950s, under the 'Assimilation' policy, individuals could apply for Citizenship Rights (Western Australia) or a Certificate of Exemption (in New South Wales), but they were required to prove they were fit and proper people who lived independently in the general community and not on a reserve, did not associate with other Aborigines and lived a European lifestyle. Citizenship rights allowed them to drink alcohol in hotels (prohibited to other Aborigines), to vote and to access social security benefits. Many Aborigines rejected them as 'dog licences', and of an estimated 14,000 Aborigines in New South Wales who were eligible to apply for exemption, only 1500 applied (Cameron 2000).

4. Roy Barker, Jimmie's son, had enlisted in the army and spent time in Japan with the Occupation Force. He married June Ferguson, daughter of pastor Duncan Ferguson and his wife Blanche (Mathews 1988:162). Later, Roy and June Barker were among the founders of the Brewarrina Aboriginal Cultural Museum and established the Goondee Aboriginal Cultural Museum and Keeping Place at Lightning Ridge. The Barkers worked tirelessly to maintain the cemetery at Brewarrina after the Mission was abandoned in 1966. At Lightning Ridge, Roy Barker was highly regarded for his expertise in Aboriginal history and skills in making Aboriginal artefacts, knowledge he had acquired from his father and other Elders.

5. Jimmie Barker's memoir provides historical information on the period from 1922 to 1942. He attributed the loss of traditional beliefs to the influenza and measles epidemics, which killed many mission people in 1919 (Mathews 1988:128-9):

   Only the younger people were left at the
   Mission ... Approximately thirty people died
   at the mission during this epidemic. They
   were not given any help or medical attention;
   the only medicine available was Epsom
   salts or castor oil. Then further deaths
   occurred through a measles epidemic, as
   most full-bloods died this hastened the loss of
   Aboriginal beliefs.

6. Jimmie Barker commented (Mathews 1988:189):

   We all have an inferiority complex. We have
   had years of being called 'no-good blacks' or
   worse. It has been drummed into us that we
   are the poorest type of humanity in the world
   and the lowest creatures in Australia ... so
   much damage has been done to us during the
   last century that it is hard to realise the possibility
   of getting fair treatment in the future.

7. Jimmie Barker found very poor conditions at the dormitory and school on Brewarrina Mission in 1919 (Mathews 1988:112): 'The children were ragged and dirty and showed all the signs of malnutrition. The dormitory children received the worst treatment; their condition was pitiful. Later I learnt that school lessons were given only occasionally when it pleased the manager, which was seldom more than once a month.' When they became teenagers, girls were trained for service as maids who were later sent out to work on nearby stations. The large girls dormitory was a place where sexual abuse was secretly practised by managers; one manager's son practically lived there with the girls. This led to the dormitory being closed in 1929 and from then on the girls were sent to Cootamundra Girls Home, under the charge of a matron (Mathews 1988:149).

8. To aid me in recalling the exact words used by my informants, with their permission I used a small Minifon wire recorder, which enabled me to transcribe their words into a daily field diary. The same wire recorder was used to record traditional songs in the Murchison region of Western Australia. It is visible in the photographs of traditional singers (Latukefu 2001:52). I have put these original quotes in bold type to distinguish them from other quotations.

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