Silent tears

She explained how the girls managed to travel such vast distances without detection - with their only companion being a kangaroo dog (greyhound) - by resting during the day and travelling in the cool of the night.

She laughed when she recalled her grandmother’s story of catching a kangaroo with their kangaroo dog and how they successfully overcame its brute strength and later dined on it that evening under a bright moon light.

As the class hung on every word of this great 1930’s adventure of young Aboriginal girls in the vast outback of Western Australia their thoughts of an epic Miles Franklin-like conclusion were unexpectedly brought to an abrupt end when Auntie Rhonda explained how her grandmother surrendered to the authorities.

She said her grandmother got word from local elders at the community of Meridon that a close relative wasn’t well in a fringe camp near Moore River Mission and unreservedly presented herself to the local police so she could be returned to the mission where she could be close to him.

I could tell the students were confused and wanted to know how the elders in that community knew Edna would be in that district and also know that her close relative was ill.

This unexpected ending of a riveting story needed no further explanation as its conclusion was an inevitability that only Aboriginal people understand. It is Aboriginal knowledge (intuition of knowing of a far-a-way illness and individual movements) that I didn’t really expect students to understand and is something I will discuss with them in a later class.

Auntie Rhonda continued her fascinating journey by explaining that there were four generations of her family who were all members of the “stolen generation”. She was very brave in opening up the pages of her life to complete strangers as it became patently obvious throughout the talk that the emotional scars had not fully healed.

Auntie Rhonda told of her sad and painful recollection of being taken, at three-years of age along with her nine-month-old baby sister, from her mother by police and moved to the Carnarvon Aboriginal Mission.

Auntie Rhonda recalled how she forced herself to memorise the address on the back of the only letter she ever received from her mother: Mrs A Webb, c/o Go Go Station, via Fitzroy Crossing, West Kimberley. She still remembers it to this day and said back then it was her only knowledge of her mother’s whereabouts and she was keen to remember it in the event that she was ever successful in escaping that horrid mission.

The class didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when told of the pitiful words used by missionaries when they dealt out severe beatings (with leather straps or canes) to her for the most minor of offences: “… this hurts me more than it will hurt you.”

Auntie Rhonda said she couldn’t fathom how a burly priest could say such wretched words as he lashed into her fragile, undernourished body time and again.

Over lunch after the session and away from the students Auntie Rhonda revealed more horrendous assaults perpetrated on other Aboriginal children, physical and sexual, that young children should never witness let alone be subjected to, from her time at that mission.