HISTORY TOLD LIGHTLY
One story Vince tells in The Wonder of Little Things is about looking for work when he was 18. It was late 1954 and he’d spent the winter and early spring in Curramulka on the Yorke Peninsula, playing football for the local team and working as a farm labourer. For Vince and other Aboriginal people at the time, any labouring work they could get in country towns began and ended with the footy season.
He headed to Adelaide with two of his cousins who’d been living at Point Pearce Aboriginal Mission. When they arrived in the city, they had nowhere to live. They had relatives they could sometimes stay with, but with three of them sometimes that could be tricky and they’d end up sleeping rough. While they managed to pick up a day’s work here and there, it wasn’t enough to survive on and not nearly enough to secure their own accommodation.
Eventually they decided to head to Barmera in the Riverland, a few hours north east of Adelaide, to try fruit-picking. But they were broke and couldn’t afford bus fares. As Vince he tells it:
“Then I remembered a little office in Kintore Avenue in the city that Mum used to go to sometimes, so we went to the office and put our case to the bloke, and in the end he gave us three bus tickets to Barmera.”
See p 120 adult edition; p 156 young readers.
When Vince told me this story sixty years after it had happened, I asked him if he knew what the office name was and what it was for, but he couldn’t remember. That led to us talking about how much historical information to include in the book.
Vince with his mum, Katie, and sister, Josie, probably taken near their Adelaide school, in the 1940s. This is the era when Vince’s mum had to have an exemption certificate to be able to work and live in Adelaide. [Copley family collection]
Vince was keen for future readers to know more about the laws and policies that controlled Aboriginal peoples’ lives, and also the courage his people had to eventually overturn them. But it was just as important to him to tell his own story as simply and directly as he could – and not clutter it with too many facts and figures.
We found a way to do both. We decided to include tiny bits of historical detail within the actual stories, then have a separate timeline of history at the back of the book. See from p 327 adult edition; online resource for teachers, young readers. Here’s a sample.
When I was working on the timeline, I tried to find out what the Kintore Avenue office had been back in the 1940s and 1950s. Nothing turned up in a quick search and I had a deadline to meet, so I left it. But I recently looked again and learned it was the site of what was known as the ‘Aborigines Department’.
In those days, Aboriginal people who lived on missions weren’t paid proper wages for the work they did. They were also beginning to be encouraged by the government to leave the missions and live and work elsewhere. The ‘Aborigines Department’ would provide small amounts of money to people like Vince and his cousins so they could travel to places where there was work.
This office was also where a government officer known as the Protector of Aborigines was based. Later the single role of Protector was replaced by a board of people known as the ‘Aborigines Protection Board’. The former protector became the secretary to the board, and still wielded a lot of power over Aboriginal people. One job they had was to issue exemption certificates to Aboriginal people, like the one Vince’s mum Katie had to get so she could live and work outside of the mission. They also had the legal power to remove Aboriginal children from their families.
If you’d like to know more about this history and how it resulted in Aboriginal children being stolen from their families during the 1900s, the Bringing Them Home report is a good place to start. For more specific information about the protection system as it worked in South Australia, check out these two books by historian Cameron Raynes:
A Little Flour and a Few Blankets: An administrative history of Aboriginal affairs in South Australia, Cameron Raynes, State Records of South Australia, 2002.
The Last Protector: The illegal removal of Aboriginal children from their parents in South Australia, Cameron Raynes, Wakefield Press, 2009.
© 2024 This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Acknowledgement: Vince’s continuing legacy has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.