A year of discovery - part 1 of a series

 Hello, gentle readers!

This series of blogposts are taking a different tack. Earlier this year, I made the decision to undertake a commercial DNA test, and therefore, the posts I am about to embark upon are going to be about what I have found out, how this knowledge has impacted me, and the loose ends I still need to tie up. This series will not be for everyone - like all of my posts, they will be political, and they will give food for thought, but they will be so because the personal is political. I am a colonised Arrernte woman, living on stolen lands, and certainly, what I have found out gives some angles into this process of colonisation.

For any racists or haters coming on here, with preconceived ideas about why an Aboriginal person would take a test like this, I say this straight up: I did not do this test to "discover" my mysterious Aboriginal relative. My Aboriginality is a fact. I am a member of two well-known Aboriginal families from Central Australia - the Liddles and the Perkinses. Indeed, the DNA test merely confirmed this was the case as I matched with my Liddle and Perkins relatives who had already tested. I am the great-niece of Stolen Generations activist Bob Randall, first cousin - twice removed of Charles Perkins (and second cousin - once removed to his children), and the granddaughter of the first Aboriginal pastoralist in Central Australia, Harold Liddle. I have a first cousin currently sitting as a Liberal senator in federal parliament. You can google my grandparents' names, and they appear both on Strehlow's genealogies, and government records of the time (because not only was my grandmother Emily stolen, but all Aboriginal people were "wards of the state" for decades in the NT, which dictated their movements and living arrangements). In short, my Aboriginal status is known, has always been known, and didn't need to be proven. 

There are two reasons why I undertook the test:

1. Many years ago, on my paternal (Aboriginal) side, I had been informed by an elder relative that the biological father of my great-grandmother Mary Earwaaker was not the man who acted as father to her (and husband to her mother). At the time, not knowing how this relative could possibly know this, and the fact that it's 120 years down the track, I wrote this information off. However, when I saw this same relative claiming this as fact in the public sphere as part of the "conservative no" campaign, and doing so proudly, I became disturbed, and decided that perhaps I could, myself, try a test and see if I could prove or disprove this information. I ended up proving it by a second Liddle line (more on this later);

2. There has been pain, and estrangement related to my maternal "white" side, and at one point, I was even accused of not celebrating this heritage. The trouble was, despite these hurtful accusations, that seemed to not take into account that regardless of any other heritage, I had grown up Aboriginal in the middle of white suburbian, and had been "othered" my entire life, not a single person actually seemed to know a thing about this "white" side that they thought I should be celebrating. How can you celebrate something you don't know, particularly when your life has been shaped by a society that wants to take away the parts of your heritage you do know?

What I have found out has been extraordinary. As someone whose family tree was already quite incredible (in my view), I have found, and learnt so much. There are some hard truths, some good surprises, some funny and painful stories, and therefore a bunch of lives and experiences that have led to me, sitting here, in 2024. 

Finally, before I launch into any of this, I want to highlight some things: 

Firstly, I do not recommend people do commercial DNA tests. There are risks with putting your genetic information on these systems, particularly as an Aboriginal person, and people should consider this thoroughly, especially considering 23 & Me looks like it is going to be selling to big pharma. I went ahead only because, as I was aware multiple people on both sides of my family had undertaken tests, I reasoned that my DNA was actually already on the system, whether I wanted it to be or not.

Secondly, nobody can use these tests to determine Aboriginality, no matter what the racists in One Nation Party claim. I did two tests. On one of them, my estimated percentage of Aboriginality has already gone up and down twice as they have adjusted my results due to more data coming in (it also adjusted all my other percentages, and redistributed the "heritage" percentages my parents had given me. On the other test, it could not even measure Aboriginality - instead, it gave a vague Melanesian and Papuan reading for me, while also turning up heritage I absolutely do not have - Finnish, Greek and Italian. I elected to destroy the data of that test immediately due to its inaccuracy, even though I had mainly done it to connect with Dutch relatives.

Anyway, I am unsure how long these reflections will take me, or how many entries there will be. I also do not know how long they will live on this site, even if I do write them up here - this may, very well, end up being a part of a much bigger project. Such was the nature of what I found. For those that read, kick back, relax, and here goes nothing.

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PS To anyone who reads these, please consider them "ongoing edits". I will be adding photos, and certificates, and will probably be correcting facts and typos non-stop. The reality is, these are draft documents, while I work out where their final destination will be. I just needed to write them now as, for months, I have wanted a home for both my findings, and my responses to those findings.