Add Category
Posted
Judith Stubbs was just two when she and her five sisters were taken from extended family at the Brewarrina Mission and sent to the Cootamundra Aboriginal Girls Training Home.
Her two older brothers were removed to Kinchela. The year was 1943.
Nearly 60 years later Judith recorded her story, breaking down in tears as she recounted the pain of the physical and sexual abuse she endured in the home, and the "brainwashing" against her Indigenous heritage.
"The blacks didn't want you and the whites didn't want you," she said.
"You sit on that fence all your life."
Judith died in 2016 but her story has been preserved in a unique audio archive at the National Library of Australia (NLA).
Her daughter Rebecca Bateman is the NLA's newly-appointed Indigenous curator and she said she was determined to make stories such as her mother's more publicly available.
"Listening to my mum's story reminds me of what a strong and articulate woman and clever woman she was," Ms Bateman said.
"She was very passionate about making sure Australia knew what had happened."
In her oral history, Judith recounted screaming and running away when "an old black man" appeared outside her primary school, calling out to her and her sister Lorraine.
"We were told that [the blacks] were all drunks and no good," she said.
Years later she learnt that the man was her grandfather.
She never saw him again.
"He must have been absolutely determined to get the girls back," Ms Bateman said.
"To have that kind of reaction — even though maybe on some level he would have understood where it was coming from — it still would have been really heartbreaking I imagine."
More than 300 people — survivors and administrators of the child removal policy — were interviewed between 1998 and 2002 for the Bringing Them Home Oral History Project.
A shorter series of follow up recordings was made in 2010, two years after Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's apology to the Stolen Generations.
Ten years on from the apology, Ms Bateman has vivid memories of the day.
"Mum didn't actually … want to come down to Canberra … to the live apology … she thought it would be too much for her," she said.
"So I went to her place in Sydney and we sat there and watched it on the TV — both bawled our eyes out."
At the time, Judith was ambivalent about the apology, wondering what it would mean to her on a day-to-day basis.
"There was some reluctance to accept it for what it was," Ms Bateman said.
"Although obviously on an emotional level it did mean an enormous amount to her to have that acknowledgement that … yes, this happened."
Ms Bateman said the oral histories were an important record of recent Australian history and a way to foster understanding.
"There's still a lot of people who think that all the bad things that happened to Aboriginal people happened 200 years ago," Ms Bateman said.
"While those misconceptions linger there's never going to be a full, proper understanding between the entire community."
A selection of the oral histories are available to listen to online.
Topics: indigenous-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander, indigenous-policy, library-museum-and-gallery, history, human-interest, canberra-2600