Indigenous Women Recount Their Stories
RARE and PRECIOUS are these stories, never to be told again, of the lives of senior ex-residents of the Mogumber Mission in Western Australia. Hazel and Ernestine were captured as small children and taken by government officers from their homes in the bush to live at the settlement.
Aunty Hazel and Aunty Ernestine tell about more than their experiences at Mogumber, known as Moore River Settlement. We read very old stories which include unusual experiences, spirit stories and teaching stories remembered as they were told by Hazel's mother. Ernestine's husband, Oscar Little relates ancient mythology.
I recount these stories told to me by the indigenous women who quickly adapted my name to the sounds of their own Nyungar language calling me 'Wondy'.
Getting to Know Hazel Anderson
Hazel Anderson and I had not yet known each other for long when one day we were chatting and she made the suggestion:
“We could go fishing at the river. We might catch Marron.”
Marron are freshwater crayfish found in rivers of southwest Western Australia. I could not imagine myself catching Marron and fishing was not one of my usual pursuits but the idea of a fishing expedition sounded like fun so I happily agreed. Equipped with lengths of fishing line we set off and with Hazel giving instructions on the route to an ideal spot we soon came to a sandy embankment near a bend of the Canning River.
Here we settled down and Hazel remarked that her mother used to take her fishing when she was a small child. They lived in the bush and fish was an important food source.
This is how Hazel began to tell me the story of her early life:
“I came from the Mount Barker area of Western Australia where I was born in about 1918. My brother and sisters and I lived in the bush with Mum (Ida Harris). Our Dad, Joe Colbung, who we called ‘Pop’, had died, so Mum was on her own and lived in a bush house that she had built by herself.”
Hazel Anderson
I enquired how she built the house in the bush and Hazel described how her Mum had made it:
“It was one of those three stick huts. The way you make it is you put one stick at the back and one at the side, like that … (here Hazel demonstrated with her hands) … then add the third. Then you join them together and you bring up all the other little sticks to fill in the spaces. It is what people call a mia mia.
“Mum had to work to get our food because there was no pension or allowance in those days. She had a horse and cart and she used to kill kangaroos. She would cut the tails and hang them to dry then she would take the skins and tails into town to sell them.
“Mum also used to collect bark to sell, mallat bark they called it. (Eucalyptus astringens, Brown Mallet). She stripped it from the trees and put it all into bundles. That is how she used to take it into town, into Mount Barker. She never got any money. I suppose they just gave her food and that is how she managed in the bush with seven children.
Hazel’s Family are Taken to the Settlement
The Moore River Settlement had already been established at the time when Hazel Anderson was an infant.
Soon after the creation of the Settlement a law came into force by which an Aboriginal person from any part of Western Australia could be removed from their place of residence and interned within the new reserve. A magistrate’s signature on a document was all that was required for a person to be detained and sent there. Or it could be at the whim of a local police sergeant who was the local protector of Aborigines.
With Hazel’s father gone and her mother managing alone in the bush with a young family they were vulnerable under this new law. One day a sergeant appeared at their bush home and as Hazel described it:
“He said that we all had to go to the Settlement. The eldest of the family was my brother and he refused to go. He ran away while the rest of us were taken to the Moora Native Settlement.”
To add to their grief they were never to see their brother again. The family had been torn apart.
Life at Moore River Settlement
Looking at an old photograph Hazel explained to me:
“That is my Mother’s old home, the one at the settlement that she built herself with only old tins and things. We were going to school then and I must have been about eight or nine. We helped Mum to carry the rails that were held up on forked sticks. There was a little gate, sunflowers and trees.And there was an open fireplace. It was really good, that open fireplace."
Hazel’s Mother’s House at Moore River Settlement. Courtesy State Library of Western Australia
"At the settlement we children had to live up in the place they called the compound but Mum had to live down at the camp, the old people’s camp. Mum would want us to sleep with her for company. So we would go and ask the boss, the superintendent, could we go down to the camp and sleep with Mum because she was lonely. And he used to let us go.”
“We would take it in turns, me and my sister, to go down and stay with her. It wasn’t far to go down from the compound to where the old people had their camps. They built their own homes, nobody built it for them.”
“The people living down at the camp were called the ‘campies’ and they used to come up to the main compound every morning for their rations. Sometimes I would go and ask the teacher could I help Mum down to the camp with her rations and he would say yes. My sister and I would take turns to help Mum down."