Prisoners of Racism: The History of Rob Riley's Family

'I can picture exactly the way it was', Rob's uncle, Sam Dinah, exclaims. Time and desecration have taken their toll on Moore River Settlement; only a few of the original structures survive at the once notorious prison for dispossessed Aborigines. Sam sees past the crumbled foundations and the scattered bits of fallen buildings, and reels off where the bakery, Superintendent's house, dormitory, staff quarters and other sundry parts of the once expansive and crowded Settlement were in the 1940s when he lived there as a small boy along with his mother (Rob's maternal grandmother), sister (Rob's mother) and other siblings.

Set on two imposing sandhills which rise sharply out of an isolated part of Perth's dry but environmentally unique coastal plain, the Settlement today is ghostly quiet. Only the occasional screeches of birds and the breeze rustling the tops of the imposing stands of pine disturb the silence. This is a place where hundreds of Aboriginal people suffered and where their sorrow can be felt to this day. It is where Rob's story begins.

Even before this visit to the Settlement, Sam had given me a raw insight into its lasting impact. From the start of the project, he had been helping me piece together the family's history. One day, when I was in his office at the Aboriginal Legal Service, he unexpectedly asked me: 'Do you want to see my mother's Native Welfare file?' Sam thrust his arm into a huge cardboard box sitting in the corner of his office. After rummaging around in a metre-deep bundle of papers, he pulled out a file, 5 centimetres thick. It was the 'Native Welfare' file belonging to his mother, Anna Dinah (née Miller), a documentation of her life maintained by officers of the Department of Native Affairs. 'Here,' he said, 'have this. I've never read it. It's too painful'.

Sam's periodic visits to the Settlement are emotional occasions. This was his childhood home. His memories are bitter-sweet. Our visit turned up some unexpected reminders of how embedded is his family's history in this place. We toured the dingy prison known as the boob. As Sam read through the names etched into the wall he came across the name 'Dinah', and concluded that his father must have scratched his name into the wall during a period of incarceration for infringing the authority's draconian rules. We moved over to the resource centre set up in recent years for former residents and visitors. Sam rifled through the five thick photograph albums and was struck by an image of himself as a grinning five-year-old. He does not possess photographs from this part of his childhood and did not know this one existed. It was a moment of pleasure for him as he examined all the cheeky-looking faces around him.

Meanwhile, as I flicked through a visitors book, my eye caught an unexpected entry. On 2 September 1990, Rob Riley visited Moore River (by then renamed Mogumber) with his mother. He had come to pay homage to the place that had shaped the destiny of his family. Next to his name, the small space allowed for visitors' comments was left blank.

Sam and I moved to the cemetery. Here, scattered through a large area of scrub, were small, rusting, mass-issue iron crosses with nothing more than RIP inscribed on them. The scene resembled a war-grave site, only without the reverential small white crosses and neat landscaping that marks such symbolic places. For Moore River internees, the final indignity was to be buried in an unmarked grave. These people's bodies had simply been dumped, disposed of haphazardly in the least costly manner and with the least possible respect. Even though the authorities had kept copious files on their lives and had issued many with anglicised names, they were buried nameless in an unfenced grave site. There are many of these small, rusting crosses dotting the bush surrounding the far end of the second sandhill. 'Mum's buried somewhere around here,' Sam said, 'but you'd never know where'.

Of the vast, coercive powers the white authorities had to control the lives of Aboriginal people, the power to remove children from their families was the most feared. And this job usually fell to local police officers. The sight of parents wailing as black police cars sped away down dusty roads carrying traumatised children bound for institutions was common throughout Australia in the 1930s and 1940s, especially in the west. While not all Aboriginal children entered institutions by such coercive means, it is most likely Anna Miller did. When taken to Moore River Settlement in 1922 she was a feisty fourteen-year-old with a father who loved her. She was bright, spirited and literate. It is unlikely she would have gone willingly. Force would have been required. But we cannot confirm the manner of her departure, which, in itself, is a chilling testimony to the power exercised by the state over the lives of Aborigines. The book-length file on Anna developed by the Native Welfare Department is silent on the circumstances of her removal; a child could be taken and no-one had to account for their actions.

At the time of her removal, Anna was living with her father, Sam Miller, at Mount Barker. Nothing is known about her mother. Sam, like many male Aborigines in the south-west in the 1920s and 1930s, was an itinerant farm worker. He lived through the dispossession and economic marginalisation which the Noongars of the south-west of Western Australia suffered from the time of settlement in 1829. While maintaining on-going links with their traditional lifestyle for much of the nineteenth century, Noongars had, by the early decades of the twentieth century, been largely reduced to an itinerant rural labour force. Though impoverished, Sam wanted to care for his daughter. In the several letters he wrote to authorities over a number of years, he pleaded for her return, stressing his ability to provide for her.

In the years following Anna's arrival, occasional reports surfaced in the press that Moore River functioned more as a prison or a concentration camp than a 'settlement'. But few objections were raised to the infringement of the basic rights of the people forced to live there or their mistreatment. Not only was suffering inside its boundaries well hidden from view, but prevailing attitudes towards Aborigines did not allow a humanitarian response to their plight. Anna Miller grew into an adult in this austere and isolated world. A loving and maternal person by nature, her confinement sharpened her defiant and tenacious side as she...