Aileen Marwung Walsh in The Conversation - Friday essay: back to Moore River and finding family

Aileen Marwung Walsh in The Conversation - Friday essay: back to Moore River and finding family
Image from the collection of Elsie Lambadgee (dec.)
Tuesday 18 December 2018

Exercept from Aileen Marwung Walsh, Laureate PhD student's piece titled Friday essay: back to Moore River and finding family:

"Untangling the web that is the history of the stolen generations is a very satisfying process. In October, I went to the Centenary Memorial gathering at Mogumber, on the site of the Moore River Native Settlement, about 130 km north of Perth.

The memorial was a commemoration of a tragedy that is part of the history of apartheid in Australia. The Moore River Native Settlement is a large part of many Aboriginal people’s family histories, all over Western Australia. People were sent there from the Kimberley and the Pilbara, from the Western Desert and the south west. Doris Pilkington’s book Follow The Rabbit Proof Fence is the most well known story of Moore River but there are thousands of others, including that of my grandparents.

The settlement was established in 1918 as a solution to the Aboriginal problem, as perceived by colonists. There were too many Aboriginal people “wandering about” WA, usually on reserves near ration depots where they received flour and blankets. The colonists did not want to see them.

Plus A.O. Neville, the Chief Protector of Aborigines, had a plan to breed out the black of the Aborigines so they would not be Aboriginal anymore. The full bloods would die out and the half castes would blend in. Neville laid out clearly how he would do this in his book Australia’s Coloured Minority."

View the full article published in The Conversation and republished on SBS NITV.

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