I am an Arrernte woman. My father, Allan, was born in Alice Springs in 1950. His parents were Harold Liddle and Emily Perkins Liddle. Emily was a stolen generations girl, was born at Deep Well Station, and was the daughter of Alice Grant (later, Costello) and Burke Perkins. Her aunty Hetti Perkins worked at the Bungalow and Jay Creek missions, looking after the children who had been taken there, and her mother Alice was known to ride a camel to visit her children at these missions they had been taken to. Nanna's time at the Bungalow and Jay Creek was well-documented - she was a part of the Between Two Worlds exhibition in the 1990s, and a recorded account from her of this time is available on the internet.
Contrary to what I was told to look out for on Nanna's side regarding potential surprises, there were actually none. I have matched up with fellow cousins on that side extensively, and to the correct degrees of separation (for the purposes of ease, I will be documenting these connections how non-Indigenous people would, as most non-Indigenous people would not understand how someone could be my "aunty" when they are my father's second cousin). The family names on that side are as expected: Perkins, Costello, Bray, Lake, Rawson, etc.
The "historical shock", on the other hand, was on my father's paternal side. His father, Harold Liddle, was the son of William Hurle Liddle - a pastoralist of Scottish descent whose family had emigrated here from the Orkney Islands - and Mary Earwaaker. Mary was a remarkably strong Arrernte woman who, despite leading an incredibly tough life in near poverty, also helped set up a couple of cattle stations and other businesses in Central Australia. My father remembers her as being strong-willed and wickedly funny - she loved teasing her grandkids. She was apparently of a similar height and build to me, which was rather lovely to find out when I was hitting the family with questions as I researched.
The Liddles have been extensively researched by other members of the family, which is why I did not delve in too much there. William was the son of Thomas Liddle and his second wife Matilda Hurle, from SA. His grandfather, also Thomas, had come over to SA with his young family. The Liddle line are all Scottish, while the Hurles were English and from the Wiltshire area. I have uncles who have made treks to the Orkneys to visit the hometown of Shapinsay, and see the family graves and parish records. A Hurle ancestor - my 4x great-grandfather Thomas Hurle - rather humorously has, as his death cause, listed as "visitation from God". He actually died in a public house out-house from a stroke whilst intoxicated. But yes, while the Hurles were working class folks, mainly from urban areas, the Liddles were mainly sheep farmers from some of the most rural areas of Scotland possible. One day, I myself hope to trace the steps of both lines.
Mary Earwaaker, on the other hand, was the daughter of an Arrernte woman named Alethe Angale, alternately anglicised as Alice and Angelina. Her father, and her mother's acknowledged husband, was the Alice Springs Telegraph Station blacksmith - a man named Harry Earwaaker who was of English dissent. Mary had a younger sister named Rosie and it is notable that both the girls appear to have been named after women in Harry's family - his mother and his sister, respectively. In the Alice Springs General Cemetery, Mary is buried under both the Earwaaker and Liddle surnames, whereas her sister married and was known as Spencer.
Prior to meeting William Liddle, Mary had a daughter - Linda Kunoth to Sonny Kunoth. Mary and William had four children - Milton, Hilda, Harold and Arthur. William also had other children,mainly when he was later out at Angas Downs station.
The thing is though, while Harry Earwaaker appears to have been a father to Mary, and a husband to her mother, the DNA testing has shown we have no genetic connection to other members of the Earwaaker family and their descendants. We are not related to them at all.
Instead, all descendants of Mary thus far have shown up as genetically related to the Gillen family, and therefore Mary's father was a man named Frank Gillen. Her year of birth, due to this connection, would have been around 1893.
This is significant for so many reasons. For those who are unaware, Frank Gillen was an anthropologist, and was the research partner of Walter Baldwin Spencer. Gillen was also the sub-protector of the Aborigines in Central Australia at the time, and therefore had a number of powers and responsibilities. He was a man of Irish descent, who had worked on the overland telegraph line for a number of years, and prior to being stationed in Alice with his wife Amelia Besley, and their children, had been out at Charlotte Waters.
The research of Spencer and Gillen became famous worldwide, and is one of the reasons why the Arrernte became one of the most documented Aboriginal peoples in this country. For better or worse, it inspired others to document tribes across the country. Yet, while I can say that there was a fascination and respect that was a part of why they did this work, there was also the unescapeable fact that Aboriginal people were being studied because we were seen as a dying race. What's more, Spencer was a noted eugenicist, and both him and Gillen believed that children of part-white descent should be removed and assimilated for their own good.
In the book, "My Dear Spencer" which features a foreward that was written in the late-1990s, it was noted that there was no evidence that Gillen, like so many other white men who headed up to the interior, "fraternised" with the Aboriginal women up there. What a difference a couple of decades worth of technology can make, hey? At this stage, the descendants of Mary Earwaaker number in their hundreds, and like it is a shock to me confirming this bit of information, so it must be a shock to his legitimate descendants, and those of his siblings, to suddenly have hundreds of Arrernte cousins. To their credit, on engaging with a couple of them, I have found them to be sensitive, welcoming, and keen to share information. Perhaps one day, we may even meet and try and piece the story together that links our families.
But yes, as I mentioned, proving or disproving this link was an aim of me taking this test in the first place. I was driven to do so because I saw an older relation claiming it as fact in the public sphere, and doing so in a proud, and a non-critical way. And I had a massive problem with this.
For starters, we do not know how Mary came to be in the world. Was it a loving secret relationship leading to a secret child? Was it a power play by a man in authority in a frontier town? Or was Mary a cruel experiment of men trying to prove theories of part-descent children? I cannot find any proof that Gillen was a father to Mary, but I can find proof that Earwaaker was. And until we are able to definitively state how Mary came to be, I am not willing to erase the stories of her, her mother, and the man who claimed and named them. It feels wrong to do so. We can only theorise, and continue to gather the evidence where it exists.
But we also cannot ignore reality now that it is known. Particularly since this reality means that my direct ancestors were the very same people who were being documented in the works of Gillen and Spencer. It was their knowledges, their histories and their families. It was also their experiences at the frontiers that led to the Spencer and Gillen conclusions, and fed into policies such as those that created the stolen generations. That is pretty significant. As a researcher myself, the ethical considerations of all of this are extraordinary.
People might ask why I am choosing to write this. I guess because while I do acknowledge the many people impacted by this historical secret, I have decided after conducting so much research on my own family tree that this is all part of my story. That I do have a right to claim the stories that led to me being here. And that, in an environment where we are talking a lot about "truth telling", it is important to acknowledge this massive truth in my family. I am the direct descendant of the frontier activities. And that, in itself, is a truth Australia must examine.
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