Much is said by little black marks with their scratching lines and screaming curves, heartless, loud and cold. I hate them for their power and for their apathy about the outcome of their screaming. The casual life of obscene words and careless thoughts on a page now yellowing with age.

I became angry with myself for allowing that note I found in the National Archives to hurt me. I knew who had written it, and my hands, which always reach and yearn for the familiar feel and touch of a pencil, curled into fists so tight that my knuckles popped.

My grandmother, her humanity, her motherhood, her womanhood, her living, all dismissed by contemptuous comments, permitted and condoned because of her skin colour.

… died in Mt Isa on 13th March and was a Native of Alexandria Station N.T.,

… I would think well over 35 years as this child in question was her 10th. As far as I know she was married Black-fellow fashion to one of our boys called …, as most of the Abos here only have the one name.

I would think her parents are dead as I cannot find any trace of them.

… has not made any arrangements for the well-being of the child, but I have just had word from Cloncurry that the infant has died. … was a resident of Alexandria all her life.

Living children on the station are L (Half caste), A, L, A and B, where the rest are I do not know.

How did she manage to draw breath after what had been done to her? And that is the tragedy – she could not and did not draw breath. She died. Alone and distant from her children, both the ones she managed to keep and the ones who had been taken from her.

She died in the 1950s, a long way from family and Country, where no ceremony was held for her to pass into the next living, away from where her family could do the things that would have made it possible for her to travel home to that ancestral place.

Her last drawn breath was not the air of her homelands that contained the kin of all those entities she had lived with. She died with the knowledge that she had lost yet another child and was leaving five behind in a place that had already scarred her with the violence of colonialism.

Debra Dank’s grandmother lived on Alexandria Station until her death in the 1950s. Robin Smith Collection/Picture NT, CC BY

A stolen workforce

My grandmother, as told in that letter, had lived on Alexandria all her life except for a time, at the start, when she was on her own Gudanji Country. Our place was never to be her physical home because this was when they were beginning to take our homelands.

She escaped to Alexandria, where her siblings eventually joined her, and they lived there in the homelands of the Wakaja. She married a Wakaja man. My dad was born on Alexandria at the birthing place of the Wakaja and he continued to live and work there as he grew.

There is an indescribable irony here. Those who stole our place utilised my family’s attachment to home to secure a largely unpaid – but not, it continues to be claimed, enslaved – workforce. This was the practice across too many places in Australia.

This is not such ancient history, but it raises too many hard, pointed edges and so the conversations don’t happen, because the words that should be used, such as slavery, poison, violence, rations and massacres, are too big for modern-day sensibilities and fragilities.

In their efforts to stay on Country, my grandmother and many other Aboriginal women did the work of stockmen and helped to establish vast cattle and sheep stations during those times. The women wore men’s clothing, had their hair cut or tucked under their hats and tended to herds of bullocks, sitting on horseback all day. They were known as drovers’ boys.

Their work has been written and sung about by several people, including a well-known past Territory administrator, Ted Egan, in his song, The Drover’s Boy. It makes for painful reading or listening, even more so with the mention of Camooweal, north-west Queensland, where I grew up and where I know many Aboriginal women worked, and continue to work with, cattle.

Debra Dank.

Several years ago, one of my students in a pre-service teacher education program wrote about the drovers’ boys. I had initially thought that her task presented an appropriate response to the criteria and showed a constructive, reflective critique through a culturally aware lens, but then I read, “Thus while they [the women] worked the cattle by day, they worked to please the men at night.”

I immediately saw the violent treatment of my granny and others like her and knew I could not read and mark that task with the integrity that I hold close, so I asked my line manager to do it.

In that tiny arrangement of words, I saw Aboriginal women being relegated to the non-human, again. My heart broke for my granny, cutting her hair short, donning a shirt and long pants and hiding what she was – a mother and a nurturer.

And in all that toil, which very few non-Aboriginal women were expected to do, and where those who did have been and continue to be celebrated, there was no financial remuneration. Pay consisted of rations and rations do not create generational financial security, only intergenerational poor health and poorer wellbeing.

Those unpaid workforces had a long wait for what was rightfully theirs. It is only now that compensation is being given, but certainly not in any real and meaningful way. I have a carefully worded letter from the Queensland government assuring me that there was no intent to harm through the withholding of my own wages in the 1970s, but nor was there any overt apology or acknowledgement of wrong.

The amount of money offered to claimants, and which I received as part of the Queensland stolen wages case, was just about right for my then 15-year-old self, working on weekends and Thursday nights at a government hostel, but it was so far removed from what my parents and other adults were entitled to. Some people had the opportunity to receive further money at a later stage.

I wait now to see the results of the same process in regard to my dad’s early working years in the Territory and it is a bittersweet waiting, because the lack of that income affected his ability to provide for his family. He could not give us what he wanted to and what was his right to offer his wife and children. And then we, Aboriginal people, were punished for not living in the ways that money allows.

Something called a certificate of exemption may have helped with economic stability and long-term planning but I am grateful that my father did not qualify or apply for one. Goodness, what a price he paid for that choice. The exemptions gave Aboriginal people some ability to have control over their finances, movements and daily lives. In order to keep the exemption, Aboriginal people had to remove themselves from the Aboriginal community, including their families.

So, I find myself again waiting the outcome of another Stolen Wages case, this time in the Northern Territory, but I cannot claim my grandmother’s money, after her working for almost 30 years, because my dad has died. The government needs a cut-off point when it comes to historical reimbursement of wages because the cost that could be asked of contemporary Australia would be astronomical and not one that polite Australians would want to know about or to pay.

Our nation’s inability to have hard but respectful conversations about what was and, in some places, continues to be done to Aboriginal people, is chilling. This country was built on slavery and just because the dominant community says no slavery existed here in Australia, does not make that denial true.

What other way is there to describe the way my family and many others were treated?

‘Childhoods were not necessary’

My owja had worked all her adult life and much of her childhood. Aboriginal people didn’t get too much choice in that. Childhoods were not necessary when it wasn’t considered that these beings were indeed human. Her five children were left on that station with a property manager who held the Aboriginal population in contempt, so it is not a story of childhood joy.

I spoke with my dad several times about his experiences back then and his was always a slow and considered telling. “They treated the cattle better than they treated us.” His voice remained full of confusion and pain and his neck was bent forward to give his miserable gaze somewhere else to stop, away from my face.

‘I did terrible things’

The behaviour of the manager in those years was brought home to me in a very real and shocking way when I was about 17. We were at a club in town to support the band my father played in. He loved music and if it was Slim Dusty’s music, he loved it all the more. With my mum and younger sisters, I sat and watched Dad play lead guitar and sing his bracket of songs, but we were also watching a man across the dance floor.

He was staring at Dad with an intent and focused gaze. Mum was getting upset and we all wondered what his problem was and decided he was a racist. We then tried to control the number of times our eyes returned to him.

As Dad took his break and came to sit with us, the man’s unblinking gaze followed him, but we obeyed Mum’s direction not to say anything. When Dad returned to the stage, the man stood and made his way cautiously to our table. He seemed to be picking a careful path to where we sat and walked as if through mud and glass.

“Hello,” he said very warily, still with that absorbed gaze. “Are you his family?” and he tipped his head towards Dad, who I saw was already watching.

My dad saw things better and faster than anyone I knew. He once spied a brown wallet on the brown ground in the brown shadow of a bush growing at least 30 metres from the road. We had been travelling at about 70 kilometres an hour but he noticed, stopped the car and retrieved the wallet before any of us could find anything that would cause such commotion. I knew that Dad could and would very quickly leave that stage to be with us, commotion or otherwise, if he thought that we were being threatened.

Mum didn’t like speaking to people she had no reason to speak with and certainly not a strange white man. I said, “We are”, and waited for him to continue. We all sat in varying degrees of waiting – mostly for the axe to fall, because we seemed to know that it would not be a good thing and not necessarily worth that wait.

“I knew your father –” he looked between Mum and me “– when we were younger. Out on Alexandria.”

It was almost possible for those of us sitting at that table to feel our blood run cold. I didn’t say anything because already my ambivalence had turned to anger and was growing into rage. We all knew what had happened at Alexandria, to Dad and to our grandmother and to too many others of our family.

‘We knew what had happened at Alexandria.’ StateLibQld/Wikimedia Commons

We lived with its outcome in the form of Dad’s occasional violence, and we lived with the ongoing silence of its benefactors and its perpetrators across the community where we lived.

He started again. “I wanted to apologise to him – for what we did. I did terrible things to him and to his family.” The struggle to articulate his involvement was easy to see in his tense stance and the visible tremor in his body and words, but I couldn’t find any space within me to offer reassurance or comfort.

Mum was already looking to other points in the spacious room, whose occupants carried on as if this huge moment were not happening. Her seemingly casual glance, though, was negated by the trembling of her lips and the sheen in her eyes that was very different to that showing her previous enjoyment of the music. I was vaguely aware of laughter and music but was no longer in that place.

In my head, I had already gone to my grandmother, my owja. I knew she had suffered significant physical violence at the hands of this man’s father, and I wasn’t interested in his pain. To me hers was the bigger, most significant to me, pain, and her body the site of the most wicked trauma.

“I just wanted to tell your dad that we had to do what my father told us to do. He was my father, but we knew that he would flog us the same way he did the Aboriginal people. If we didn’t do what he told us to do, we got the same treatment. I’m so sorry. It was awful. He flogged us with whips but he did horrible things to him and his family.”

And on that last almost whispered comment, his voice faded.

I was glad, because my immediate thought was nowhere near the live and let live philosophy we largely abided by. I was not interested in being even remotely respectful of the right of everyone to live their life and certainly not interested enough to forgive him and his father. And all the while, my dad was watching, and I could see that he was deciding if he needed to come and rescue us.

My mother looked at me and shook her head to send some kind of message I couldn’t find beyond the pain in her eyes. She was the closest to knowing the wildest truth of Dad’s growing up on Alexandria. I could see Dad looking at Mum’s face and perhaps he read the message in that shake of her head. I stood and uncurled my fists, I made my body appear relaxed and at ease and I very consciously made my voice soft so Dad wouldn’t hear.

And I told the man to go. I told him to go and take his apology somewhere else because it was too little, too late for Dad and his mother. I told him to go and to never approach my family again. I told him to continue to live with the pain because that was what my grandmother had to do and my father and us.

And then I said something that still causes me bone-deep sorrow and hurt, I told him to wake every morning and to give thanks that he had not felt the rape that was meted out by his father and his offsiders, and I told him to be grateful that his punishment was mere whip floggings.

How could I articulate anything else and not remain loyal and loving to my dad and my granny? I could barely stand and could not imagine the pain of this person who epitomised all the violence that had been visited on my family, but I did see that he, too, was hurting.

Pain that was deep and real and profound for all of us, that had arisen from what I had thought was the same event, grasped and held tight – and perhaps did not need to be grasped so tightly. Perhaps it had now become part of who we all were. None of us were so capable in managing it but were all ranged around it, with many positions and roles.

There is a danger in thinking that there is some kind of hierarchy of pain, but that neither sees nor honours the validity of individual pain and the right of different people to feel it in different ways. How can we move to a place where we each manage to live with the other?

The following day, when my sister Jolly and I were driving to the store, we carefully discussed the man from the night before. She said, “Debra, you know what, I was so wild, I really wanted to spit on him.” I looked at my soft-hearted and super-protective 15-year-old sister and reminded her that she couldn’t spit.

That the last time she tried, as we were watering the horses, she almost swallowed a fly and her attempt to spit the insect away just dribbled in an ugly mess of slobber to hang down off her chin. She responded, “Well, Mum would have slapped me probably too, if I’d tried.”

I don’t think it was any humorous recalling of that image that made us both burst into laughter.

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This is an edited extract from Ankami by Debra Dank (Echo Publishing).