Last week I had an addictive couple of nights in, tucked up in terror and suspense whilst reading my way hungrily through Peter Stewart’s tale of The Myall Creek Massacre, ‘Demons at Dusk’. It’s an unpalatable story about the darker recesses of Australian settler society and the treatment of Aboriginal People, in this case the Gamillaroi people, or a small group of elders, women and children camped at the Myall Creek Station that my ancestor William Hobbes ran in his role as superintendent. When I was digging through my own family history a few years back I developed a great interest in this man and the story of Myall Creek.
At the time I was gainfully employed with the NSW Reconciliation Council and on my own personal journey of discovery which took me to the site of the Myall Creek massacre that year. There were so many questions that remained but it felt important to be there, with the small crowd that gathered, to memorialise the pain and sorrow, to celebrate survival and a new dawn. Now years later this book has helped enormously to fill in the blanks. It’s as true to ‘real events’ as one can possibly be when writing nearly 200 years after the event and enormously accessible. The language isn’t flowery and academic, which is a good thing as it’s one that should reach a wide audience and not alienate those that would not normally read a long-winded historical treatise.
For good or bad, the Myall Creek Massacre site is now well and truly a part of my being, an event which in some small part helped to create the person I am today. I don’t believe it is a coincidence that my ancestor at Myall Creek was an Aboriginal sympathiser who lost his reputation and livelihood in the effort to stand up for what he believed was right and humane. Nor that my great-grandmother was born on a mission not too far from that site but her story will never be told because according to colonial administration she didn’t really exist. When attempting to help my grandmother trace her mother’s records a researcher at the NSW Department of Aboriginal Affairs told me, “it’s certain that she was Aboriginal because her records aren’t in the database”.
This is the kind of circumstance that led to my grandmother being placed into the ‘care’ of the State at Pallister Girls home. She’s one of the Stolen Generations and how I wished to be watching Kevin Rudd’s ‘apology’ speech with her. Needless to say, this is an exciting new chapter for the history books, even if it was muddied by Brendan Nelson’s hodge podge of insincere nonsense. My mother now develops and delivers culturally appropriate health programs for Aboriginal people incarcerated across NSW. Making regular visits to infamous jails like Long Bay is all in a days work for her. I once randomly ran into a former colleague of hers at a Survival Day event on what is otherwise known as Australia Day. We got to chatting to pass the time in the line-up for kangaroo burgers as her friend informs me that she’s ‘out there doing really good things for our people’. She takes so much joy in charming the inmates with her warm character and knock ‘em dead smile and in her history as a nurse and healer, she’s always done inspirational things in bringing comfort to often lonely people.
For me to have arrived at the end of this chain of men and women means there’s a passion for justice, honesty, truth and understanding that will never be quenched and in my lifetime I will experience very different things, all rooted in the successes and failures of the past.
The kids are living proof that some things should never be left unsaid. These are the things they know, handed down through the ages. Here they are at the Myall Creek Memorial stone, 2005.
