‘WE WERE LIVING IT’
In The Wonder of Little Things, Vince tells many stories of his younger years living in five different places, before moving to Adelaide as a ten-year-old to board at an Aboriginal boys’ home called St Francis House. Vince arrived at the home in 1948 and left seven years later.
I’m more than twenty years younger than Vince and my early years were spent in a town north of Adelaide called Clare. In the 1970s when I went to high school, Australian history wasn’t taught. The only history I learned about was British and European.
A decade after leaving school, it hit me how little I knew about my country’s history. I’d just returned to Australia after two years in England, in the days before the internet. It was 1988 and Australia was marking 200 years since Britain claimed ownership of what’s now known as Sydney. As I followed events on television, radio and in newspapers, the dominant stories were of commemorations of the First Fleet arriving and the beginnings of British rule. But Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were also making their perspective known through protests and media coverage. Their slogan for the year was ‘White Australia has a Black History’, while the theme for that year’s National Aboriginal Week was 'We have survived'.
All this was new to me, though, and I wanted to learn more. I read history books and went to talks and lectures. Slowly I gained a truer picture. By the time I met Vince, nearly thirty years later, I thought I had a good grasp of the broad strokes – Colonisation in 1788, Federation in 1901, the 1967 Referendum, the Royal Commissions into the Stolen Generations and Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.
But as I listened to Vince’s stories, I realised how much I still didn’t know about how government laws had impacted on him and other Aboriginal people. From before Vince was born in 1936 until well into his adult years, each Australian state had its own laws and policies on Aboriginal people. While many of these were similar, they also varied.
In the timeline of history at the back of The Wonder of Little Things (adult edition) and online here, there’s a disturbing description of one of the South Australian laws:
The pressure to change laws like this varied from state to state. Indigenous people and their non-Indigenous allies worked hard to undo the systemic discrimination sanctioned by the laws, and the great harm they caused Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Many laws were being reformed or repealed, but this process didn’t happen uniformly across Australia.
This inconsistency became clear to me when Vince and I worked on his story about a holiday he had on Queensland’s Hayman Island with his friend Sparkes, who wasn’t Aboriginal. Here’s what Vince told me:
In the middle of 1965, Sparkes rang me out of the blue. ‘Do you want to go on a holiday to Hayman Island?’ he asked. That was the first time anybody had ever asked me to go on a holiday with them. I’d been making big money lumping wheat, so it wasn’t a problem.
We headed off and met up with a couple of other people who were coming too. Sparkes and I were in the same unit sleeping and we were eating together. Later on, after the trip, I realised we’d broken the law. ‘Do you realise we could have been jailed?’ I said to Sparkes.
Map showing Hayman Island in the Whitsundays off the Queensland coast
When Vince first told me this story, he said it was because of a law that said Aboriginal and white people couldn’t ‘consort’ (mix together), unless they had a good reason. Initially I was confused. I’d learned that the actions of people like Vince’s Aunty Gladys Elphick and the St Francis House boys, among others, had led to the repeal of a similar law in South Australia in 1958, seven years before Vince’s Queensland trip.
In an earlier chapter, Vince tells us more about how the law was changed in South Australia. See pp 105-106 adult edition; pp 138-139 young readers. He summed up its injustice by saying: ‘Not many people knew what the government was doing, but we were living it.’
Vince was spot on with his memories of things that happened, so I knew if there was a discrepancy in the law and his Hayman Island holiday, something else was going on. When I dug deeper into the history books, I found that Queensland was late to repeal its version of the consorting law. Vince had known this through his own experience and I was now clear about the historical context.
After Vince told me the Hayman Island story, he wrapped it up in true Vince fashion. Always determined to make the most of his life, in spite of the racism and discrimination he encountered, Vince said, ‘I didn’t find out about the Queensland law until after I got back home, so it didn’t stop me enjoying my holiday.’
A family photo of Vince in 1958, working on a farm in Curramulka. He was also into his second year as captain-coach of the Curramulka A grade football team. This was the same year that politicians in Adelaide were finally repealing the South Australian consorting laws that affected Aboriginal people. [Copley family collection]
© 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.