PAPA JOE & GRANDFATHER BARNEY
Whenever Vince spoke about his grandfathers – one he’d known as a child, the other he learned about as an older person – I’d hear tenderness and respect in his voice. His mum’s dad, Papa Joe Edwards, was born in 1877. His dad’s dad, Grandfather Barney Warrior, was born two years later, in 1879.
Over their lifetimes, both men witnessed and were directly impacted by government laws that controlled their day-to-day lives. Non-Aboriginal people didn’t have their freedom curtailed anywhere near the extent that Vince and other Aboriginal people did.
In the timeline of history at the back of The Wonder of Little Things (adult edition) and online here, you can see that in the first half of the 1900s, government laws and policies affecting Aboriginal people often changed – and not in a good way.
Read through to the 1950s and 1960s and you can see how the lobbying by Aboriginal people, supported by their non-Indigenous friends and allies, started to bring positive changes to these laws. But it took many years of struggle.
For me, one of the most poignant parts of Vince’s memoir is when he is reflecting on the gains that he and his Aboriginal friends and colleagues would finally make, after years of hard work. Then suddenly the government or the politics of the day would change, and as Vince put it, ‘away it all goes’. See p 261 (adult edition).
The more stories about his grandfathers that Vince told me, the more I realised he was part of a continuing struggle by his people – going back to when Europeans first arrived on their lands – to overcome injustices they were dealt, over and over. Both Papa Joe and Grandfather Barney are on the public record for their efforts in the struggle.
Papa Joe Edwards
In 1913, the South Australian Government set up what it called ‘The Royal Commission on the Aborigines’. Its purpose was (in the language of the time) ‘to inquire into and report upon the control, organisation and management of the institutions in this state set aside for the benefit of the aborigines and generally upon the whole question of the South Australian aborigines.’ The commissioners – all white men – submitted their report to government in 1916.
Vince’s mum’s parents, Grandma Maisie May and Papa Joe Edwards. [Copley family collection]
Papa Joe, then in his thirties, was one of a group of men living at the Point Pearce Aboriginal Mission who appeared before the commissioners. Joe and the other men spoke about how mission life affected them, and the barriers it presented to their attempts to make a living and look after their families. Joe and his wife Maisie May had several young children at the time, including Vince’s mum Katie, who was around four years old.
In the report there’s a transcript of the questions asked by the commissioners and the responses from Joe and the other Point Pearce men (see report pp 112–120) . It’s heartbreaking to read. The excerpt below is included in the timeline of history at the back of The Wonder of Little Things (adult edition) and online here (see report entry for 1913).
Like any historical document, it’s important to know the context it was written in. To that end, here’s a quick recap of recent Australian history. British colonists and settlers arrived in what’s now called Adelaide in 1836, just 100 years before Vince was born. To put that into a larger Australian context, Sydney was colonised in 1788. Hobart in 1803, Brisbane 1824, Perth 1829, Melbourne 1835 and Darwin 1869. A few decades later – when Vince’s grandfathers were in their early twenties – the colonies began negotiations to form a federation of Australian states. In 1901, what we know as the Australian Constitution passed into law. . The South Australian Royal Commission on the Aborigines ran from 1913 to 1916.
In all the time since the British Government colonised their traditional lands, Aboriginal and Torres Strait people, among them Vince’s ancestors, have never ceded sovereignty.
Grandfather Barney Warrior (also spelt Waria)
Vince’s dad’s father, Barney Warrior (also spelt Waria). [Copley family collection]
As far as Vince knows, he never met his dad’s father, although in later life he realised he’d probably seen Grandfather Barney a few times at family gatherings when he was very young. Grandfather Barney left behind cultural knowledge that had a big impact on Vince when he came across it as an older man. In The Wonder of Little Things, he talks about learning more about Grandfather Barney, and the extraordinary meetings Barney had with three anthropologists in the 1930s and 1940s. See pp 287-294 adult edition; pp 253-262 young readers.
Like Joe Edwards, Barney fought for the rights of his people to be treated with respect. He wrote at least one letter to the editor of South Australian newspaper The Advertiser. This one was published on Tuesday 1 February 1944. When Barney wrote it, the 1967 Referendum – when Australians would finally vote Yes to count Aboriginal people in the census and recognise them as citizens – was still more than twenty years away.
If you’d like to understand this period of history better, there are many excellent books around, such as this about South Australia: Colonialism and its Aftermath: A history of Aboriginal South Australia, edited by acclaimed historians Peggy Brock and Tom Gara. It was published by Wakefield Press in 2017.
© 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.