BEGINNINGS

Mission statement

If you were to ask me if I had a happy childhood, the answer would be a definite yes. I was loved, fed, clothed and cared for not only by my parents but also by our extended family that lived around us. As far as I was concerned, I had no problems. Small children are oblivious to the anxious, hushed voices of their parents late at night, to the complexities of the adult world with all its worries, to the feelings of hopelessness that parents might have when they realise that they cannot offer their children much of a future. Much later on in life, I knew what people probably thought: 'He must have had a rotten childhood. He's ended up like he did because his parents probably neglected him.'

My childhood didn't turn rotten until I was ten. Like the families around us, we lived in a small hut made out of wood and corrugated iron. We had a table, chairs, two beds, a cupboard and a wood stove. There was no electricity and no running water. Behind our house was a dam where we used to catch fish and yabbies, using a bit of string tied to a small empty tin with bait in it. Often these yabbies fed the whole family with Mum's soup as well. I had a normal, poor but very happy Australian family life. Well, almost.

Most Australian families lived in a place of their own choosing, coming and going whenever they felt like it. They went to work, came home, did the shopping and bought and ate what they felt like eating. Not us. We lived on the Purfleet Mission, just outside of Taree in New South Wales. It wasn't a place of our choosing, we couldn't come and go whenever we wanted, there were no jobs to go to, no shopping to do and no decisions about what to buy and eat. All of our food was rationed out, and if the manager was displeased with us our rations could be cut or held back.

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With colonisation Aboriginal life had changed dramatically. White cedar getters and their convict servants started arriving in the Myall and Manning areas in 1816, dispersing the tribes and having a devastating effect on traditional lifestyle. Settlers arrived in the Manning Valley in 1831, and conditions deteriorated rapidly for the Aborigines. They lost land, sacred sites and hunting grounds as settlers took up land grants. Wildlife dwindled as a result of the settlers' guns, timber-getting and cattle grazing. By 1840 the natural food supplies were almost exhausted. The traditional owners of the land were driven to the fringes of the towns where some people found employment on the railways, farms and cattle stations. A fringe camp was established at Taree, and later, in 1890, an Aboriginal camp was established on Purfleet Station. Originally, the Purfleet Reserve comprised twelve acres, and it was later known as the Purfleet Mission and expanded to an area of 51 acres.

Compulsory education for all children aged between six and fourteen years was introduced in 1880. At first, Aboriginal children enrolled in local schools, but by the mid-1880s there was a policy of educating Aborigines at mission schools. A Mission school and church, run by the United Aborigines Mission, were established at Purfleet Reserve in 1902 and operated for many years.

Purfleet Station was Government Reserve Number 89 and was established in 1900 by the Aboriginal Protection Board (see Ramsland, 'The Aboriginal School at Purfleet', p. 7). It was at one time called 'Sunrise Station', but that name was later dropped because of negative associations with the Japanese flag during the Second World War. The area was known to the Aboriginal people as 'Turrumbumdeen' meaning 'long grass among the trees'. Purfleet, like all government missions scattered all over the country, existed so that Aboriginal people could be kept in the one place, where the government could keep watch over them.

After 1932 Aboriginal people were not allowed to leave the missions without permits, which were only granted to a few 'approved' Aborigines. Some women married white men just to escape from mission life. During the Second World War there was employment for Aboriginal men and some worked off Purfleet but with the end of the war came unemployment and the men had little or nothing to do.

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The management at Purfleet had no knowledge or interest in Aboriginal culture and so had their own idea of how we should be treated. This was the period of assimilation. Aboriginal culture and heritage was out. White man's culture and laws were in and we had absolutely no say in it whatsoever.

It was into this tumultuous period in Australian Indigenous history that I was born to Isaiah (Ike) Carter and Grace Simon on 30 March 1947. My great-great-grandfather was Chinese and came out in the gold rushes. My father was from the Black Duck Tribe from down near Wallaga Lake, my mother from the Biripi people who inhabited the area between Tuncurry, Taree and Gloucester. The Simon family is one of the oldest families in the district, having been settled there, with four other families, for many generations. Traditionally we spoke a dialect of the Kattang language, a language that apparently is spoken twice as fast as English. The name Taree comes from an Aboriginal word 'Taree-bit' meaning 'fruit of the wild fig', a staple in the diet of my ancestors. According to my mother, I smiled up at her and dad on that first day without a worry in the world. They however had much to concern them.

Life on a mission was particularly difficult, especially for the men. The rules imposed by the Aborigines Welfare Board had a devastating effect on them. Aboriginal men were by nature the hunters and food providers, but mission life obliterated their role and their identities. Their hereditary ways weren't just discouraged. They were outlawed. If my Dad brought a kangaroo back to the mission to cook, he would be punished by a reduction in flour rations. If the kangaroo was shared with other families, their rations were also cut. Fishing was prohibited and done in secret. Withholding the weevil-ridden flour ration was a regular punishment, but there was nothing else, as it was a staple food needed by all of the families. A kangaroo, rabbit or wallaby only ever supplemented the already scant rations allotted. Strangely, instead of the manager taking the view that our catch would just top up the food already supplied, he subtracted rations to keep everyone on minimum levels. Men on the mission felt constantly humiliated.

As children, we knew none of this. My world was not the world of stories around the campfire, of hearing Dreamtime tales of animals, spears and water holes. I knew nothing of our ancestors' skills in hunting and dot painting. Neither was it the world where children went off to school every day and had piano lessons and rode ponies. I was living in an in-between 'assimilated' world and I just got on with playing the games that kids play. After me, Mum gave birth to a baby boy whom they named Luke, but unfortunately he died soon after from diphtheria. Two and a half years later my brother Murray came into the world, then fifteen months later my brother David was born. Space was now getting short. The bed was getting...