Free Remembered By Heart: An Anthology of Indigenous Writing by Sally Morgan Page B

Aboriginal girls to be domestic servants in those days. Mum was taken away from her family when she was two years old, so I suppose she didn’t know any different. When you’re that young you don’t ask what happened to your mother or your father or even wonder how your life is going to turn out.
    So Mum was bought up by people who weren’t her family. When she was fourteen, she was farmed out from Moore River Settlement to a place called Petworth Parkin Moora, where she worked as a farm girl. I have some photos of her sitting there on the farm. She was a nanny to the kids and also helped with the cooking. That was the fate of many young Aboriginal girls and that was the kind of work she did on and off till the day she died.
    Mum was a wonderful mother. She was very good with her hands and great at making jams and cakes. Every time we had the school fete they would send down and ask her to make a cake to raffle. On rainy days she’d entertain me by making little dolls out of stockings — we didn’t have any money to buy toys. She also showed me and my two brothers how to paint; she was a great artist herself. She knitted our clothes and she taught me how to knit and crochet and I was quite good at it. Since I was the only girl in the family, she liked to teach me homemaking things so we were real cobbers.
    When I was young I didn’t know where Mum came from or who her people were. Mum didn’t know herself, but my dad was a Nyungar man. He was Phillip Heath from Katanning, and he was the one who kept us three kids in line.
    The Chief Protector of Aborigines, A.O. Neville, had been very angry when Mum married Dad, because at that time a woman was supposed to marry someone lighter in colour than she was. The Aborigines Department was trying to breed out our colour so we wouldn’t exist anymore. That’s what White Australia was all about. Probably Neville was angry too because Mum had worked for him as a housegirlthen gone and married someone he wouldn’t approve of behind his back. The Native Welfare controlled every aspect of your life in those days. It was very hard for Aboriginal people then and I learned very young that I’d have to be determined if I wanted to get anywhere.
    It’s funny the things you learn in childhood. I remember an annual work picnic for Dad’s work that we attended once as a family, I learned a valuable lesson there. I was a fast runner so I entered the open race and won. I was really excited and ran over to my parents, shouting, ‘I won! I won!’ I couldn’t believe it! The prize was an electroplated nickel sugar bowl, which was a big thing in those days. The next thing though — they were running the race again. Well, that was it! I wasn’t going to be beaten by anyone, so I lined up again and I won again, only this time by an even bigger margin. I’ve still got that sugar bowl, but nothing before or since has more graphically signified to me the uphill road that we have as Aboriginal people in competing in Australian society.
    I loved my mother very much, but I lost her when I was only twelve going on thirteen. With no sisters to talk to I really felt it deeply. It was a terrible blow. She was still with our family in spirit for quite a while though, which wasn’t unusual because as Nyungar people we are used to living with spirits. I grew up talking about gennarks and other sorts of spiritual things. After Mum died though, the spiritual world came a lot closer to me.
    Not long after she passed away, I was sitting in thedining room doing some mending when suddenly I felt a bit strange. There was something at the back of my neck and it made me look up. There was Mum, standing in the passageway, as clear as day. Well, I nearly died of shock! My brain told me she was dead, but there she was, standing there. And she wasn’t just like a flimsy bit of white smoke that people sometimes describe when they say