And you thought the Titanic was a drama... - part 4 of a series

 Quite a few years ago, during the lockdowns, I stumbled across an article that had been written by a Carolyn Webb at Fairfax. It piqued my interest for a couple of reasons. The first reason being that Webb had the same great-great-great-grandparents as I did on my maternal side. The second being that it mentioned them surviving the wreck of the Sacramento ship at Point Lonsdale.

The survival of the Tuttlebys has been documented by Webb, and another cousin named Judy Baird. I am a descendant of Mary (nee Hockley) and Henry's son Alfred, who was born here, and married twice - his first wife Sarah Brown is my great-great-grandmother. Their son, Cyril Purser Tuttleby, was my great-grandfather. He married Bertha Robinson - a woman of Irish and English descent - and they had four children. Their youngest, Ernest Frank Tuttleby, was my grandfather. 

Due to this link, there are so many of my family members who are buried in unmarked graves at the Will Will Rook Pioneers' Cemetery. Mary Hockley remarried when Henry died and is buried out there with her second husband, under her married name of Bogle. Henry is also buried near her. Sarah Brown Tuttleby is buried there, having died young of kidney failure. I went walking out there, mindful of just how many family members I was probably walking over as I did so, but how I will also have no clue just where they are.

In her article, Webb details the strength and will of Mary Hockley, and it is quite an incredible story. By chance, I was contacted by Webb recently for a different article she was preparing. I mentioned not only the fact that we were related and shared these forebears, but that actually, I have a second set of forebears who survived that exact same shipwreck - Mary Purser and her husband, Joseph Brown. It is therefore a bloody miracle that we came to exist at all, let alone are still around, five generations later to tell the tale!

I have mentioned that I had to correct records in the Waller/McVeigh lines, and this was no different in the Tuttleby/Robinson lines. Because Sarah Brown was unwell and died quite young, for example, there are more living descendants from Alfred's second wife Mabel Palmer, and therefore, I think a couple of them may not have taken as much care checking Sarah's records (they were not as relevant to them). It also doesn't help that there was another Joseph Brown living with his wife (Margaret Rowley) in a similar area, and these two also called their first two daughters Sarah and Mary. It was therefore that I dug down into the births, deaths and marriage records, confirmed Sarah's parents names, and corrected this record.

Mary Purser and Joseph Brown were newlyweds when they boarded the Sacramento. From what I have been able to find out about both of them, they came from families of agricultural labourers in Kent. There was something else though: Mary's parents were Sarah Meen and Richard Purser. Both the Meens and the Pursers were kind of renowned for having extraordinary constitutions - Richard died the youngest of his brothers, the rest were in their 80s. There seems to have been one very clear reason why Mary and Joseph decided to move to Melbourne - she already had family here. It appears that her uncle, Edward John Purser, who had served as part of the colonial forces across the world, had settled with his wife and family in NSW, and he had, in-turn, become the first teacher in the Castle Hill district. 

Joseph Brown died at the corner of Regent and Spring Streets, Preston - mere minutes from where I live. He was discovered collapsed outside by a neighbour, and the cause of his death was listed as exhaustion and hepatitis. Mary never remarried, instead, she brought up her children, and did some domestic labouring to keep things going. 

I deduced that they were the Mary and Joseph Brown listed on the manifest of the Sacramento for two very basic reasons: firstly, the age profiles were correct - they were 22 years old. Secondly, it was the only ship they could have taken to have gotten here in time to have given birth to my great-great-grandmother Sarah at the "Merri Creek". For years, there was a letter in possession of members of my family, that had been received by my mother's cousin from the state library. While I think that people easily recognised the Tuttleby names in that letter as forebears, I am not so certain they also realised that the Mary and Joseph Brown listed were also our forebears. My correcting of these records meant that this became apparent.

It is my belief that Mary Purser and Mary Hockley, having survived the ordeal of the shipwreck, remained friends, or at least in contact, for the rest of their lives. I actually cannot think of another way that their respective children, Sarah and Alfred, could have met and married if they did not maintain this contact, as they were located in Preston and Campbellfield respectively. Alfred's final address was 45 Byfield St, Reservoir - again, not far from where I live now. 

Unfortunately for Mary Purser, half of her children inherited their father Joseph's constitution, they died quite young. Mary though, on the other hand, lived until 1915. She was in her mid-80s when she passed away from "senility" - dementia, in modern day parlance. At the time, she was living with one of her sons and his wife, and she became the first of four generations of my family to live at 19 Parslow St, Clifton Hill. It is this address which will pick up the next bit of this tale.

"Waller Waller, blackfella" - Part 3 of a series

 Unless you've lived it, I am not necessarily sure people would get this. But as a mixed-race person, and one who has grown up Aboriginal, in my brain there have always been two sides of my family: the black side and the white side.

The black side has, of course, been populated by my paternal side. Being visibly non-white, and growing up in this colony, it has also been the part I have had to fight hardest to be proud of. As I was growing up, there were plenty of forces and people who were ready to make me ashamed of it, plenty of school classes that erased it, plenty of newspaper articles that demonised it. Yet there were also plenty of freedom fighters that stood up, said no, and reinforced that our heritage was something to treasure, to be proud of, and to fight for. And thus, so it all began.

As my previous entry showed, however, within a single generation in my family, I have family members whose lives were controlled by the NT wardship acts. Within two, I have stolen generation members. Within three, I have the frontier and the anthropologists. There are Scottish Australians who claimed land, exploited Aboriginal labour, and created descendants, some of whom are still finding their way home. And yes, I also now have a very unexpected Irish heritage - one that connects me to County Cavan, and which saw members of my family as a curiosity, as knowledge people, but also, essentially, as not long for this world.

The "white side" of my family, however, has always been just that - white. We knew some members of it, but given that both my maternal and paternal grandfathers died in 1981, I am the only child in my family who got to meet them. My memory of either man is blurry. I know that I used to call my maternal grandfather "cocky" rather than poppy (my hearing difficulties were dealt with a little later in my life), and I have a vague memory of where they lived. I only have a memory of my paternal grandfather smiling while holding me. That's it.

Perhaps it's because whiteness, after colonisation and then generations of the White Australia Policy, is the default in this country, that it wasn't considered necessary to know very much about where these white people who led to me came from. We knew that they were free settlers who came to Victoria, and that they came roughly five generations ago, in the main. We knew that they were working class, that they were mainly English or Irish, and that if they weren't working at the Carlton United Brewery, they worked in bootmaking factories. We also knew that they lived in areas like Collingwood and Clifton Hill when these places were factory worker slums. More on this later.

My grandmother was born Lorna Waller in 1922. She married my grandfather Ernest Tuttleby (more on that lot later too) when she was 18 years old and had four children, of which my mother Lindal was the third. Her parents were Harold Waller and Avis McVeigh (pronounced McVee). Their marriage was short-lived, and though she was essentially brought up an only child, she had a half-brother, Raymond, from her father's second marriage. 

After digging around in her family tree, I am convinced that nanna knew very little about her background. She knew, via her mother, that she had Irish heritage, and due to both record checking, and guess work, I have traced her McVeigh surname back to Belfast. This was not without problems - though I am convinced I have found the names of Lorna's great-grandparents in NSW records (her grandfather was born in Surry Hills), there are inconsistencies in spelling of the surname. This was allowable though as, via checking the marriage record of those I suspected were her great-grandparents, I found both signed their certificate with a simple 'x', thus highlighting that they were likely illiterate, and I additionally found that her likely great-grandmother (a woman named Mary Murphy - I doubt I will ever be able to trace her!) lived in Surry Hills. Precisely where nanna's grandfather John McVeigh was born. These same people then reappeared in a Victorian death certificate for a William McVeigh - they had moved to Melbourne when John was about one, and his father had died a couple of years later. John married a woman named Eliza Louisa Hibbert who was born in Panton Hill, Vic, and they had four children - Avis was their only daughter. This family lived in Northcote, in Bastings St, and then Raleigh St, the latter of which is where my nanna Lorna was born.

There are some mysteries that remain there - with both the McVeighs and the Hibberts - and these are not made easier by the fact that Eliza had an older sister (18 years older) whose name was Louisa Elizabeth. There is also no birth record for Eliza, but her parents names appear on her marriage and death certificates, along with her age, her mother was giving birth well into her 40s as evidenced by an even younger brother, and Louisa has a marriage certificate of her own to a George Podesta. I was therefore able to correct some erroneous information that other descendants had entered into the system. The Hibberts had married in Australia, having come over from England and met here. For now, this is where I will leave Avis (she is getting her own entry!).

I therefore thought, with the mysteries and twists and turns with Lorna's maternal line, her father Harold Waller may prove an easier line of enquiry. I was right, but for completely wrong reasons. I made the assumption, for example, that Harold's family were likely English, and were stonemasons given the surname. Harold did indeed have some English ancestry, but as I watched his family tree stretch out in front of me, and do so in a remarkably easy way, I knew I was dealing with something much more.

I need now to return to the title of this post. I have named it such because it refers to a slur that my nanna Lorna experienced when she was at school. There was no real reason behind it, kids just noticed that nanna had a bit of an olive tint to her and some darker features. Given she lived in Melbourne, it was just assumed she tanned easier than other kids - not a huge deal in a place with this UV rating. Mum noted that she and her siblings also tanned up quite readily. Her poor father, on the other hand, died in his early 60s from melanoma. 

Nanna knew she had Irish and English heritage. I am convinced, however, that beyond this, she knew nothing. There was talk from nanna of some nebulous "Prussian" heritage - no one had further information about this. And as I watched nanna's paternal Waller line unfold easily in front of me, I knew there utterly no truth to this idea whatsoever. It was actually amazing just how documented this "unknown" bit of history was. I crosschecked everything with the available birth, death and marriage records, and it was all correct as marked.

Nanna's father was, as mentioned, Harold Edmund Waller. Harold was a jeweller and bootmaker, and he was born in East Melbourne to James Emanuel Waller and Amelia Sanders. He was the youngest of four children - of his siblings, one brother died in childhood, his sister Ethel Mina Waller married a man named Joseph Melbourne Ogden, whose father was the president of the Felt Hatters' Union, and they had two children - Edna and Edmund. Edmund died in infancy, while Edna died from reproductive cancer in her mid-40s. She never married, and had no children, but remained close to her cousin Lorna, and was my mother's godmother. Harold's other brother, Arthur, I have found no other records for. I only really know that he also died quite young - about 39 years old. So despite only living until he was hit by a truck on Hoddle St, Harold making his mid-60s was comparatively old-age in his family.

James Emanuel Waller's parents were a man named James George Waller and his wife, Caroline Hodges. Caroline was born in Bristol, and I believe came here as a sponsored domestic servant in the early 1850s, before meeting and marrying James George Waller in 1858. They lived in Prahran and had 9 children together - 6 daughters and 3 sons. James was their third-born child (1863) and their oldest son. Of his sisters, his oldest sister Harriet married a man called Ebenezer Coventry - of the famous AFL family - and their first-born daughter Elsie died in infancy. Both her grandparents were interred with her in a plot in St Kilda Cemetery, but for decades, James George Waller had been incorrectly recorded in the cemetery records as John George, and it wasn't until I started searching that this was corrected and we had a resting spot for my great-great-great-grandparents. Caroline passed away in 1894, predeceasing her husband James who lived until 1909. 

There were a couple of things that struck me about James George Waller. The first was though he occupation was a "clerk" according to marriage records, in his will, he was not only listed as a "gentleman". This suggests he was a man of independent means. In his will, he he divided up his worldly possessions equally regardless of sex, leaving portions to his 8 remaining children, and one portion to the widow of a son who had predeceased him. He was, therefore, a progressively-minded fellow, it seemed. The second thing was though he was listed as a "British subject", he was born in Java, Indonesia. I cannot find a record of him arriving here, but I believe he came from England, which was where his parents had settled after having the majority of their children in Indonesia. 

His father's name was also James George Waller. He was a master shipbuilder who was born in Chatham, Kent and who died in Totnes, Devonshire. A eulogy available of him and visible on findagrave, states he died of "cancer of the cheek", and gives his title as Esquire. Certainly, this perhaps explains why his son had some money behind him. With his wife, he had numerous biological children (half of which survived to adulthood) and one step-child from her prior marriage. These children, rather like James, ended up scattering across the world. One sister emigrated to Canada, another to Jamaica - they were definite seafarers.

Here's where I solve another mystery: the elder James George Waller's wife was a woman named Hermina Wilhelmina Quint Ondaatje. She was honoured in subsequent generations of the family by multiple girls being given the name "Mina" - which she was fondly known as - as either a first or middle name, all the way down to Harold's sister Ethel Mina. "Ondaatje" immediately grabbed my attention - it was a decidedly non-British name, but also, it was a name I recognised. Hermina was born in Utrecht, the Netherlands, but had spent vast chunks of her life in the Dutch colonies of Sri Lanka and then Java. She was the youngest daughter of Christina Hoevenaar and her second husband, Pieter Philip Jurriaan Quint Ondaatje - better known as "Quint Ondaatje".

It was with uncovering this line that I found out that not only am I the great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter of an incredibly famous Dutch revolutionary and forefather of Dutch democracy, but that the "white side of my family" was not actually completely white. Quint Ondaatje was, very famously, a Dutch Burgher man, born in the colony of Colombo in Sri Lanka. Ondaatje itself is a Tamil name, that had been translated into Dutch, and Quint was a descendant of a Tamil physician (in Dutch) who, on being successfully able to heal the Dutch governor's wife of a mystery illness, was engaged as the official governatorial physician. This man adopted the name Michael Jurgen Ondaatje, married firstly a Portuguese colonial woman named Magdelena Croos, and secondly, a Sinhala woman named Eega Juri, and then became the progenitor of the entire Ondaatje family. When Quint stormed the Utrecht town hall and threw out the Orangists, he was already famously a Dutch-Burgher man. Far from nanna being of "Prussian descent" - her real ancestor rather crucially fought the Prussians!

This ancestry therefore means that as well as Dutch-Burgher heritage, I have some distant Tamil and Sinhalese ancestry. My ancestors in this line spoke Dutch, English, Tamil, Malay, and Portuguese. It also means that I am indeed distantly related to writer Michael Ondaatje, his brother Christopher, Sri Lankan-Canadian rhythmic gymnast Anna-Marie Quint Ondaatje, and many others. I am a descendant of a distinct ethnic group in Sri Lanka, and as such, have learnt a lot more about the differences between English and Dutch colonisation. I cannot wait to travel to these areas - Netherlands, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia - and learn more.

So Waller was not a "blackfella", but nor was she white. In my introductory post to all this, I mentioned some hurt over the years, and I have to say that finding out that not only was my "white side" not completely white, but actually, I am the descendant of such an incredible man of colour, has been affirming and wonderful. Due to the prominence of this family, there was no denying this heritage, nor my descent from them, as they were incredibly well-recorded. I have to wonder how, in the intervening generations, this information was so very easily forgotten. I cannot help but think that had the White Australia Policy not been in force for so long, it may not have been.

Photos: Lorna Waller Tuttleby, the grandmother of the writer and the great-granddaughter of James George Waller, firstly in the year before she passed away, and secondly with the writer in the early 1980s

The question at hand: a significant historical shock, with repercussions - Part 2 of a series

 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.

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.

-

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.

Speech at the Palestine rally - 3/3/24

                             Pic credit: https://www.instagram.com/kedzhifotowala/ 

Before I begin, I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands on which we meet today – the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation – and pay my respects to their Elders, past and present. As a visitor on these lands, I introduce myself as an Arrernte woman and Mparntwenye, whose traditional lands include Alice Springs, and east and south east of there, and who has familial ties to other parts of the greater Arrernte nation in Central Australia. Finally, as an Arrernte woman, I wish to acknowledge that we are on stolen lands, that the Wurundjeri people have never ceded their sovereignty, and that a treaty or agreement is yet to be negotiated for use of these lands, and therefore, as a traditional owner of elsewhere who has made her home here, I pledge to walking in solidarity with the Wurundjeri people in their ongoing struggle for justice. Always was, always will be.

I am not going to speak for long today. There are far more important people to listen to than me, and therefore I am choosing to use the time the organising team have generously given me to speak to you today as smartly and pointedly as possible. As an ally to Palestinian people - thirty thousand of whom have now been brutally murdered by this genocidal, and disgraceful Israeli regime. I also stand in solidarity with the many conscientious objectors and long-term peace protesters, such as the Women in Black, and those currently being thrown into prisons for refusing to answer their call-up from the IDF. When first we began gathering to call for a ceasefire, and for the liberation of Palestinian people living under what can only be described as a murderous apartheid regime, I think I speak for all of us when I say that nobody here hoped that five months later there would still be a need to gather on a weekly basis and call for justice.

Yet here we are. Still gathering. Still mourning. Still calling on our political leaders to take action. And still building solidarity between the movements. As an Indigenous activist, and a union organiser and member, the notion of solidarity is one close to my heart, for it is in the connecting of the minorities that we become a majority they can no longer afford to ignore. And they can no longer afford to ignore us, because not only are their jobs at stake, but their humanity is at stake. The longer they fuel this, the longer they remain complicit and irredeemable. Do they truly wish for their legacies to be the rivers of blood they currently have on their hands?

We know this genocide, this apartheid, this deprivation of human rights did not begin on the 7^th of October last year. It also did not being in 1967, with the breaching of UN resolution 242, nor did it begin in 1948 with the Nakbar, though the oppression has obviously been going on for this long. No, it began well before this, with colonising powers such as Great Britain, France and the US dividing up lands which never belonged to them, in order to maintain power in a resource-rich region. It began with centuries of pogroms on Jewish people in Europe where, following World War 2, the allied powers whilst patting themselves on the back for a job well done, also treated the Jewish people they had just liberated from the genocidal Nazis like hot potatoes. Australia has been there every step of the way, through its undying loyalty this colonial forebears, to the institution of the White Australia Policy, to Australia – via its own anti-semitism, disregard of Indigenous rights, and xenophobia – twice refused to establish a Jewish homeland in Western Australia. When there are global allies to maintain, and resources to exploit, Arab lives have long meant nothing to the west, and this country has been a constant offender.

I look out here, and I see thousands of incredible people, gathered to say “no more”. So many different people, so many different colours, creeds, genders, sexualities, socioeconomic backgrounds, and so forth. With this, I would like to address various groups of people, one-by-one.

As an ally, I wish to say to all my Palestinian sisters and brothers, and, by extension, to other Arabs here: I am so sorry. I am sorry that thanks to resource snatching and colonial ambition, so few of your families have had the privilege of knowing peace for countless generations. I stand with you in your time of pain, and torment. I mourn your families and your communities back in Palestine, and I join you in your call for a ceasefire, for the end of forced settlements and land grabs, the freedom of all those incarcerated in Israeli prisons, and for a free Palestine. I call for the preservation of your lives and your liberty, and for true self-determination as the strong, proud people that you are. In his will, Aaron Bushnell expressed a wish, if a free Palestine was achieved and if it were amenable to the people, that his ashes be scattered there. I hope his wishes are able to be carried out, but even more than that, I wish that Palestinian people are able to bury their own people on the lands they have never given up, with honour and dignity, and then rebuild a society where they are safe and happy. I hope there are many more alive who have the ability to enjoy it, or the right to return and see it.

To my Jewish sisters and brothers, I wish to say that I see you. I acknowledge you. I know that as long as there has been a recognised “Israel” there has been opposition to any Israeli regime that seeks to displace, imprison, incarcerate and murder Palestinian people. I see you come out every Invasion Day, every anti-fascist rally, and now every week for Palestine. To you I say, I am proud to know you, I am sorry that through your commitment to life and justice, you end up ostracised in your communities and in an Australia which, via its own commitment to its allies, consistently fails to confront its own legacy of anti-semitism. I am in awe of your strength and will always walk beside you.

To my Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander brothers and sisters, I say this: right now, we have the media and members of our own community distorting our history, and twisting our activism in a bid to discredit Indigenous solidarity with Palestine. This is a true shame job. As far as I am concerned, if those people who the media is so keen to exploit as spokespeople who claim we are threatening longstanding solidarity from Jewish community members by standing with Palestinians are not showing their funding interests right now, they are certainly baring their arses for all to see. Stand strong, stand proud. As fellow victims of genocide and colonisation, walk tall in the fact that we have survived and we know our Palestinian brothers and sisters will too. Know that they can twist the legacy of people such as William Cooper in order to try and unsettle us, but we know, REALLY KNOW, that Cooper, if he were alive today, would be out here with us, taking a stand against persecution against a people like he did back in 1938.

To my fellow Arrernte people and to Mparntwe for Falastin, I say this: I am so proud of you. Keep going. The fact that the Pine Gap facility sits there still on Arrernte lands is a disgrace and as an Arrernte person, I say SHUT IT DOWN. No more genocide being fed remotely by the US on Arrernte country.

As a trade unionist, I say this: workers, we need to shut down the war machine. Join your unions, speak to your fellow members, organise hard, work out how your industry contributes to the war machine and collectively SHUT IT DOWN. We have all been inspired by the Webb Dock actions, but there needs to be so much more. As a media practitioner, for example, I believe that the biggest war machine this country has is the media, as it’s through our reporting that propaganda is forged and ignorance flourishes. As such, we need to collectively push back on the media companies and refuse to write or report any untruths designed to promote this propaganda. As the union movement says – “touch one, touch all”. Every single worker has a role to play in shutting down the war machine and ensuring a peaceful future for Palestine, so let’s do this.

Finally, as a past political candidate, I say this to individual Labor MPs: GROW A SPINE. I know there are many of you there who don’t support this war, and I know that you keep your mouths shut and don’t cross the floor for fear of party expulsion. I have also done the maths and know that all it takes is 20 of you to band together, speak up in opposition to your party stance, and put the fear into them that they will lose their right to govern. So do it. How many more deaths do you need on your hands before human rights wins out? How many more?

From the river, to the sea. Always was, and always will be.

Thank you.

 

A break

 My writing side hustle went on hiatus when I became a political candidate (bar one article which I nearly got into trouble for) and I haven't returned to it. Why? Because I realised I was writing the same articles over and over again and nothing changes in this racist colony. Something like:

1. Indigenous kid murdered by white person or killed by police action;

2. Aboriginal public figure hounded by press and racist public into submission;

3. Aboriginal woman killed in FVDV incident no one cares about;

4. Indigenous person upholds white status quo by selling out our activists. Gets elected "Aboriginal leader" by Murdoch Press;

5. How blatant racism isn't the only form of racism;

6. Policing and imprisonment as racist state apparatii;

Rinse and repeat. I hate this "sunburnt country".

So again, who knows if this blog will make a comeback or in what form? But I'm rebooting it to say this today.

PS I have also been off Twitter for nearly two months now. I don't miss it. So yes, have stepped back from commentary in a couple of ways.

This Blog is Defunct, for now

Folks, it's clear I haven't written on here for a while. Nor have I updated my "about" section since 2016. This is because life took over. I now have columns and freelance gigs and therefore maintaining a blog in my "spare time" just ain't going to work.

Therefore, if you're looking for my latest work, google my name. My current stuff is seen on Eureka Street, ABC, SBS, Whimn and a few others. I also frequently step back from writing due to my schedule (I still work full time and therefore have to try and achieve balance).

Thanks for coming here. Appreciate your interest. 

CL