Too Dark To See

TOO DARK TO SEE

Commemorating the Lives and Contributions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Veterans and Military Personnel Serving in the Australian Defence Forces

MELISSA WILLIAMS PRINCIPAL RESEARCHER

Front Cover Image: AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL P10608.010 Name: Private Miller Mack, 50th Battallion From: Point Mcleay, South Australia © 2016 Elders on Campus, Office of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Employment and Engagement, Western Sydney University This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be produced by any process without written permission from the Elders on Campus, Office of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Employment and Engagement, Western Sydney University. Requests and enquiries concerning reproduction should be addressed to: Elders on Campus Office of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Employment and Engagement Western Sydney University Locked Bag 1797, Penrith NSW 2751 This publication is available online at www.westernsydney.edu.au/oatsiee Every reasonable effort has been made to contact copyright owners of materials reproduced in this publication. Western Sydney University welcomes communication from any copyright owner from whom permission was inadvertently not obtained.

WARNING: THIS BOOK MAY CONTAIN NAMES AND IMAGES OF ABORIGINAL AND TORRES STRAIT ISLANDER PEOPLE WHO ARE NOW DECEASED. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data: Title:

Too Dark to See

Subtitle: Commemorating the lives and contributions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Veterans and military personnel serving in the Australian Defence Forces

The stories in this book have come from personal conversations with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people associated with Western Sydney University. These stories are told in their own words, and reflect their long and varied journeys while living in two very different cultural worlds.

It is my hope that the publication of these stories and the accompanying documentary film ‘Too Dark To See’ will raise our collective awareness, recognition and acknowledgement of their sacrifices on behalf of all of us.

The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ long and distinguished history of service in Australia’s military deserves to be commemorated.

To those who contributed, I offer my sincere thanks for sharing your story and enabling me to walk with you.

It is my hope that all of you who read this book will join us in acknowledging the veterans and military personnel currently serving in the Australian Defence Forces.

Published by Western Sydney University.

ISBN: 978-1-74108-416-0

Photo courtesy of Daryl Charles Photography.

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TOO DARK TO SEE

Commemorating the Lives and Contributions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Veterans and Military Personnel Serving in the Australian Defence Forces

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CONTENTS TOO DARK TO SEE

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FOREWORDS

HISTORY

STORIES

HOPE

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Professor Scott Holmes

15 WARS

44 Uncle Harry Allie

102 LEST WE FORGET

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Professor Lisa Jackson-Pulver

22 Boer War (South Africa 1899–1902)

50 Uncle Charlie Mundine

104 WESTERN SYDNEY UNIVERSITY

23 First World War (1914–1918)

56 Professor Lisa Jackson-Pulver

106 A Note on the Sources

28 Second World War (1939–1945)

62 Uncle David Williams

109 Acknowledgements

33 Korean War (1950–1953)

68 Uncle Cliff Daylight

111 THE FUTURE IS UPON US

34 Malayan Emergency (1950–1960)

72 Uncle Norm Newlin

112 Index

35 Borneo (1963–1966)

78 Uncle Rob Bryant

37 Vietnam War (1962–1973)

84 Uncle Vic Simon

38 Peace Keeping and Army Reserve Units

90 Uncle Villington Lui

8 WELCOME AND WALK WITH ELDERS ON CAMPUS 9

Uncle Harry Allie

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Uncle David Williams

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Uncle Roy ‘Zeke’ Mundine OAM

12 Squadron Leader Gary Oakley 13

Michael Bell

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94 Uncle John Kinsela

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FOREWORD BY

PROFESSOR

SCOTT HOLMES DEPUTY VICE-CHANCELLOR & VICE-PRESIDENT (RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT) WESTERN SYDNEY UNIVERSITY: AFFIRMING JOURNEYS

This work shows us the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men and women that have been obscured from the debt of memory we owe. The authors pose a question at the point where this work moves from images of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men and women to their personal histories. In a caption they ask, ‘Why would they risk their lives for such a country?’ The histories that follow provide different answers to that question: mates, family, country.

It is commonly understood that we owe the nation’s present to those who have fought for it in the past. We try to honour this debt through remembrance.

From an early age, we are told not to forget. It is hard to admit ignorance.

This work made me confront histories I knew nothing about. In the pages that follow, humorous, stern, gentle and proud stories of service address you squarely: here is my service; here is my history; here is my country. This work presents the fact of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander service to the defence forces of this nation and challenges you to continue in ignorance.

When we remember the sacrifice of our servicemen and women on the appointed days we tend to think of them fighting to preserve the nation against threats from outside it. Our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander servicemen and women were also fighting against their own nation’s present prejudice and ignorance.

They were fighting for a future in which their service, their place in the nation, was no longer left in darkness.

Photo courtesy of Ms Sally Tsoutas, Western Sydney University Photographer.

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FOREWORD BY

PROFESSOR

LISA JACKSON-PULVER PRO VICE-CHANCELLOR, ENGAGEMENT & ABORIGINAL & TORRES STRAIT ISLANDER LEADERSHIP AND PARRAMATTA CAMPUS PROVOST WESTERN SYDNEY UNIVERSITY: AFFIRMING JOURNEYS

Despite awful discrimination and cruel treatment they still volunteered and they had to overcome racist attitudes to do it. They worked really hard to go because there is such a strong core element in them about service. It’s about love, it’s about respect, and it’s about standing up for what we believe in, as people, that we belong to country.

That’s why so many of them served willingly and freely.

As the Pro Vice-Chancellor of Engagement and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Leadership it’s my responsibility to lead the University's pursuit of positive, practical outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in our community. To achieve these outcomes really is a collective effort, from both the University and the community as a whole.

It takes more than providing the right pathways and programs for fulfilling education. They need to have a genuine sense of equality in both opportunity and perception. They also need respect for what they have to offer us, and for what they have done for us.

In this regard, they have done far more for us than we have done for them.

This book helps all of us to do our part in providing a positive outcome for all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. It recognises their contribution, it acknowledges their sacrifices, it celebrates their courage. It opens our eyes to their hearts. It gives them the respect they have so richly deserved for so long.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have done our country proud with their courageous and selfsacrificing service in the Defence Forces. Their military history is a long one, participating in every major theatre of war our country has fought in since before Federation.

Photo courtesy of Ms Sally Tsoutas, Western Sydney University Photographer.

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WELCOME AND WALK WITH ELDERS ON CAMPUS, WESTERN SYDNEY UNIVERSITY Melissa Williams, Principal Researcher, for her unfailing commitment to commemorating Elders’ and other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices in text. Given that research involving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples has long been vexed with issues of knowledge appropriation and, in particular, establishing standards of legitimacy, it is to Ms Williams’ credit that she has been open to defining the research process with the collaboration of Elders on Campus and has worked in a way which satisfied the need to respect cultural protocols while accomplishing the task of bringing such a large project together.

We acknowledge the unbroken connection of the Darug, Tharawal, Gundungurra and Wiradjuri peoples to their country which Western Sydney University campuses span.

Elders on Campus wish to thank the Project Team for their support and assistance in capturing these important stories.

We would like to give a special mention to certain individuals for their collaboration on this project.

We wish to thank: Professor Peter Shergold, Chancellor, Professor Barney Glover, ViceChancellor and President, Professor Denise Kirkpatrick, Deputy ViceChancellor and Vice-President (Academic), Professor Scott Holmes, Deputy Vice-Chancellor and VicePresident (Research and Development), Professor Lisa Jackson-Pulver, Pro ViceChancellor Engagement and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Leadership and Angelo Kourtis, Vice President People and Advancement, for their commitment to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander affairs.

Professor Kevin Dunn, Dean, School of Social Sciences and Psychology for his sponsorship, ensuring we have First Peoples’ perspectives. Associate Professor Terry Sloan, School of Business who gave his time in guiding the compliance with the National Ethics Application Form (NEAF). We acknowledge that we owe him a debt in terms of the way we have needed to question elements of the Western scientific method which has not always been an easy thing to raise, nor respond to. Further, for providing a sound interview framework from which to start and which truly captured the living memory first recorded orally and which has now been transformed into text with the support of the entire team.

Photo Credit: Too Dark to See Documentary Photographer Robert Cameriere. Left to Right: Uncle Steve Williams, Natalie Whyte, Mrs Hurley, His Excellency General the Honourable David Hurley AC, DSC.

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UNCLE

HARRY ALLIE CUDJULA ELDER (CHARTERS TOWERS) BEM WARRANT OFFICER (RETIRED), ROYAL AUSTRALIAN AIRFORCE

But the Defence Forces gave them equality and they showed just how equal they were when they stood side by side and also fought and died with their fellow Australians. Their service to country is also highlighted by the many medals that were awarded to them for their gallantry over many campaigns.

I am proud to relate back to the early times when Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who wanted to serve country, especially to have had the opportunity to serve overseas in a foreign land. It was a decision not taken lightly to leave country and those that were close to them, and it took a lot of dedication, particularly when there have been occasions where their commitment to serve has not been fully understood and appreciated.

This book allows their stories to be heard, to be understood and, I hope, to be finally appreciated. Unfortunately, prejudice comes out of ignorance, and these stories must be told, in a personal way, to break down that thinking, not just now but for all future generations.

They are stories that have to be told, so that we do not continue saying ‘I didn’t know that’. We have to understand and appreciate the contribution these men and women have made by standing together to serve this country.

I believe that many people are unaware of the contribution that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people made to serving their country. By enlisting and serving, they also took the opportunity to improve themselves, improve their communities, not only just for themselves but for future generations that were to follow.

This will also help to bring us together as Australians. As a country for all.

Many were treated very badly, were denied equality, also refused service in shops and hotels and job opportunities because of their race and colour.

Photo Credit: 2016 Portrait from the ‘Generations of Knowledge Sharing the Spirt of the ANZACS’ Project as conceived and commissioned by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders on Campus, Western Sydney University. Portrait co-created by Uncle Harry Allie and Photographer Robert Camarerie.

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UNCLE

DAVID WILLIAMS BUNDJALUNG RETIRED NAVAL SUBMARINER RETIRED CHIEF PETTY OFFICER VIETNAM WAR VETERAN ROYAL AUSTRALIAN NAVY

That’s why we need books like this one.

We need them to kill off our ignorance with an accurate presentation and understanding of this country’s history.

As we read about these people’s sacrifices we need to put ourselves in their shoes. We need to ask ourselves: ‘How would I have gone without family or community support? How would I have survived in a strange city, a strange state, in a war zone?’ It’s only then that we can begin to make the shift that is necessary, from ignorance to understanding, acknowledgement and finally, to genuine respect.

This book asks a question that many have either ignored or refused to answer. Why is it that the Armed Forces of Australia treat Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people with equality, entrust the lives of others to them, and give them the authority to use expensive equipment, while Civvy Street continues to discriminate and disrespect them? Why? Ignorance.

Australians are simply not taught about the history of service and sacrifices made by them on behalf of all the country. To our collective shame, Australians are taught the names of American Native tribes, their warriors and chieftains, while the names and achievements of our very own First People are almost non-existent in our memories.

Our greatest weapon is our right hand.

We have to hold it out to each other.

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UNCLE

ROY ‘ZEKE’ MUNDINE oam BUNDJALUNG RETIRED WARRANT OFFICER CLASS ONE VIETNAM WAR VETERAN THE AUSTRALIAN ARMY

This book is a memorial to all the sacrifices they made on behalf of their country and their fellow countrymen. It’s important that we all remember what they did for us. They earned the right to be acknowledged and respected and we owe it to them, as a nation, to give them that acknowledgment and respect. It’s the least we can do for those who gave so much.

My appointment as the inaugural Army Indigenous Elder is an important acknowledgement of the proud history of service that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have made in the Army, the other military services, and to our nation.

They have served with distinction, winning many medals for gallantry, in all the wars Australia has fought since before the Boer War. Not many people, including a lot of Aboriginal people, know or understand what those blokes did. They served, fought and died side by side with their non-Aboriginal colleagues, but they didn’t get the recognition they deserved when they got back home.

Photo Credit: 2016 Portrait from the ‘Generations of Knowledge Sharing the Spirt of the ANZACS’ Project as conceived and commissioned by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders on Campus, Western Sydney University. Portrait co-created by Uncle Roy Mundine and Photographer Robert Camarerie.

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SQUADRON LEADER

GARY OAKLEY INDIGENOUS HISTORICAL CUSTODIAN ABORIGINAL & TORRES STRAIT ISLANDER PROGRAMS ROYAL AUSTRALIAN AIR FORCE NATIONAL PRESIDENT, ABORIGINAL & TORRES STRAIT ISLANDER VETERANS & SERVICE ASSOCIATION

The Australian Defence Force gave Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people the opportunity to serve| the nation, and when in uniform, for the first time in their lives these men and women were seen and treated as equals.

For too long the service of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people has been a secret history known only to their families and communities. For too long the stories of these men and women have been in the shadows.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have been defending this country since time began, and have a rich tradition of serving country and the nation. For what reasons did Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people join the military? Was it for money? For recognition? The hope of equal rights? We shall never know all their reasons but this book and companion documentary go a long way toward giving Australians the answers.

Today society is changing, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are no longer in the shadows but are making their way in a more enlightened society, and being recognised for who they are and what their culture has to offer.

'Too Dark To See' opens the doors to a better understanding of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples' history and their part in the Australian story.

We need more documentaries and books on this subject, for all of us.

For love of country and of the land, for the right to serve your nation and its people, for just wanting to do the right thing, and to follow in the footsteps of their ancestors. These are some of the answers that come out of this production.

Photo Credit: 2016 Portrait courtesy of Gary Oakley.

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MICHAEL BELL INDIGENOUS LIASON OFFICER, MILITARY HISTORY SECTION AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL, CANBERRA

tell their stories in the pages of this book provide us with yet another powerful symbol of reconciliation. It is of the utmost importance that we all remember their sacrifices, their deeds, and their dignity, by creating an Australia that will and does remember them, and honours their sacrifices.

Many Australians appreciate that our country’s unique Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people cultures enrich our nation, and are a crucial component of our distinctive national identity.

Sincere understanding and true healing, through recognition, will help to protect us all against any loss of our unique Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people cultures for future generations.

Australians don’t need permission to be proud, either individually or collectively, so we should take pride in knowing that all of us, together, will do all that is required to repair the damage done to our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. In unity of purpose, and in a spirit of togetherness, we must work together, shoulder to shoulder, in the trenches of the war on ignorance, to be an inclusive nation in which the original people, who have been the custodians of this land since time immemorial, are recognised and honoured; to be a nation in which all people can live rich and full lives, regardless of their past experiences, or those of their ancestors.

The historical injustices are beginning to be rectified through a concerted effort to identify, recognise and tell the stories of the approximately 7,500* Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who enlisted and fought for Australia, in every conflict since the Boer War. Numerous local organisations, state bodies and nationally funded research projects are endeavouring to get the recognition all these men and women so richly deserve. Many dedicated people have worked tirelessly to honour those veterans through building awareness with documentaries and books such as this one, and with ceremonies, headstones, memorials and the Serving our Country project.

Slowly, through this work, the broader Australian community has begun to notice and appreciate their selfless contributions. The veterans who

*Please note: The numbers quoted are estimates as not all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people identified as such on enrolment. Some claimed to be other nationalities, or they were not accurately recorded during the enlistment process.

Photo Credit: 2016 Portrait courtesy of Amanda James, James Photography.

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AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL EZ0140

HISTORY AND PHOTOGRAPHS

AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL PB0522 Soldiers from 29th Reinforcements to the 4th Light Horse Regiment at Station Pier Port Melbourne

WARS ARE NOT FOUGHT BY THE MEN WHO START THEM. They merely look on, hoping for victory, glory and vindication.

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AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL P01073.002 Name: Private Sydney Williams (second from the front in row closest to camera) one of the 8th Division Battalions from: Brewarrina, NSW

AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL 01225 Name unknown. A memorial to heroes of Tobruk

Wars are fought by men and women who believe in higher values and who hold stronger feelings toward their fellow human beings.

They don’t give up their lives for political ideals or strategic alliances, they don’t sacrifice their lives for real estate or resources. They do it for people they know.

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AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL 007494 Names unknown. Guards at 9th division rear H.Q. at Tobruk

‘NO ONE HAS LOVE GREATER THAN THIS, THAT SOMEONE SHOULD SURRENDER HIS LIFE IN BEHALF OF HIS FRIENDS’ – JESUS CHRIST (JOHN 15:13) Since the Boer War more than a million Australian men and women have enlisted into the services, and more than 102,000* of them have died serving their country. *Source: Australian War Memorial site ‘Deaths as a result of service with Australian units' – www.awm.gov.au/encyclopedia/war_casualties/

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AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL 007562 Names unknown. War cemetery on the Bardia-Tobruk road. Graves of men who have fallen in the fence of Tobruk

Hundreds of thousands** more have been injured and imprisoned, leaving them permanently damaged. **Source: Australian Government Department of Veterans’ Affairs site – ‘Australians at War’ – www.dva.gov.au

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AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL P02140.005 Names unknown.

Volunteer Aboriginal soldiers at Number 9 Camp Wangaratta, Victoria. The only aboriginal squad in the A.M.F

Australia, quite rightly, honours the memories and deeds of most of these self-sacrificing men and women.

Sadly, not all the men and women who put on an Australian uniform were rewarded with recognition – let alone respect – for their sacrifices.

This army of men and women returned from the wars to be shunned and treated with contempt and, most unforgivably of all, to be forgotten by the very people they fought to protect.

They were shamefully treated, not because of some failure on their part, but simply because they were Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

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AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL 305321 Names unknown.

Group portrait of ship’s company, HMAS Matafele

Despite suffering racist attitudes, discriminatory policies and often cruel treatment, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have served in military uniform since before Federation.

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AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL P01208.010 Names unknown. Mafeking South Africa

BOER WAR (SOUTH AFRICA 1899–1902) Undeterred by prejudicial federal government laws, which refused to acknowledge so called ‘full-blooded’ Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as being citizens of Australia, and exempted anyone who was not ‘substantially of European origin or descent’ from military service in time of war, a number of Aboriginal people are now known to have served in both colonial and federal military missions during the Boer War. 22

AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL P01242.0002 Name: Private Alfred Jackson Coombs (front centre) group portrait of NCOS and gunners who served in Gallipoli

FIRST WORLD WAR (1914–1918) At the start of the First World War the Australian government still applied the ‘substantially of European origin’ rule for military service.

However, many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were accepted because their racial background was overlooked if they had not lived in a tribal environment.

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AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL P02140.005 Name unknown.

Volunteer Aboriginal soldier at Number 9 Camp Wangaratta, Victoria. The only Aboriginal squad in the A.M.F

Even so-called ‘full bloods’ were accepted if they’d been raised in white households. In 1917 the rule was modified to allow recruitment if the applicant could satisfy a medical officer that they had ‘one parent of European origin’.

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AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL P00889.003 Name: Trooper Horace Thomas Dalton 11th Light Horse Regiment from: Dunwich, Queensland

It is estimated that between 1000 and 1200 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people served in the Australian military during the First World War. They saw action in Gallipoli, in the Middle East and on the Western Front, winning many decorations for gallantry including three Distinguished Conduct Medals and eleven Military Medals, as well as being Mentioned in Dispatches and in other nations’ honours and awards.

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AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL 013492 Australian Anti-Aircraft Battery, New Guinea

AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL P01696.001 Name: Driver Albert Franklin (third from left middle row) group portrait of the ‘Roughriders’ of the Australian Army Service Corps Remount Section from: Yea, Victoria

AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL 010375 Names: Private George Leonard and Private Harold West informal portrait of 14th Reinforcements to the 2/1st Battalion, embarking at Sydney pier

SECOND WORLD WAR (1939–1945) Despite the continuing demand to be ‘substantially of European origin’, it is estimated that at least 6000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men and women served during the Second World War (excluding ancillary and home front services).

The numbers are not precise because of the prevailing discrimination against them in the enlistment process.

What cannot be argued is the fact ‘black diggers’ fought and died in the Western Desert, Greece, Crete and Syria, Singapore, Malaya, Papua and New Guinea, Bougainville and Borneo, as well as many of the other theatres of war.

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AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL P01688.001 Name: Lance Corporal Kathleen Jean Mary Walker. Later changed her name to Oodgeroo Noonuccal. Australian Women’s Army Service from: Stradbroke Island, Queensland

IT WAS DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR THAT THE ARMED FORCES BEGAN TO ACCEPT ABORIGINAL AND TORRES STRAIT ISLANDER WOMEN INTO THE WOMEN’S BRANCHES OF THE ARMY, NAVY AND AIR FORCE.

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AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL P01757.007

WARRANT OFFICER LEONARD WATERS in his winter flying uniform, c. 1943 Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF)

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AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL P057894

FIRST ABORIGINAL COMMISSIONED OFFICER – CAPTAIN REGINALD SAUNDERS Men of the 2/7th Infantry Battalion, including Sgt Reg Saunders, waiting at their troop train in Queensland, 1943. http://www.awm.gov.au/collection/057894"057894

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AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL P04641.179 Names unknown. Armoured vehicle, Korea

AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL HOBJ4288 Name: Corporal C.K ‘Joe’ Vea-Vea 3rd Battalion The Royal Australian Regiment

KOREAN WAR (1950–1953) Records indicate that upwards of 35 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people served during the Korean War.

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AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL FRE/57/0008/MC Name: Lance Corporal Sarob Sambo ex Paratrooper, of the 28th Commonwealth Infantry Brigade from: Torres Strait Islands

MALAYAN EMERGENCY (1950–1960) During the same decade, the Australian services were also involved in the ‘Malayan Emergency’ where as many as 25 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people served.

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AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL P00944.006 Names unknown. Members of 1 Platoon, a company, 3rd Battalion, The Royal Australian Regiment, near Kalimantan – Sarawak

BORNEO (1963–1966) During the conflict between Indonesia and the newly-formed Federation of Malaysia, Australian forces fought on the island of Borneo where up to 19 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are also thought to have served.

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AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL CUN/66/0469/VN Names unknown. Troops of the 6th Battalion, the Royal Australian Regiment, landing from Chinook helicopters, South Vietnam

AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL CUN/66/0507/VN Name: Corporal Thomas Henry Lee 10 Platoon, D Company, 6 Rar, Vietnam from: Rockhampton, Queensland

AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL DNE/021/2/VN Name: Private Joe Minecome (carrying M60 machine gun) Members of 1st Battalion, the Royal Australian Regiment on patrol, Bien Hoa province, Vietnam

VIETNAM WAR (1962–1973) During the 11 years of Australian involvement in the conflict, a very large contingent, upwards of 300 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, served in the armour, artillery and engineering units of the Army as well as support units of the Navy and Air Force. Their contribution is especially noteworthy given the fact the National Service Act of 1964 exempted Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from having to register for the call-up and mandatory service.

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AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL P01735.402 Name: Private Graeme M. Brown 2 Platoon, A Company, 1st Battalion, The Royal Australian Regiment, Baidoa, Somalia

PEACE KEEPING AND ARMY RESERVE UNITS Since 1975 the Australian Defence Force has undertaken peace keeping operations overseas in Somalia, East Timor, Cambodia, Rwanda, Solomon Islands, Afghanistan and Iraq, with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people serving in all of these deployments.

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AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL P02140.003 Name: Colonel Rogers inspects the Special Platoon of Aboriginal soldiers, all volunteers, at Number 9 Camp Wangaratta, Victoria

AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL 089736 Name: Private Victor Nelson 17 Platoon, D Company, 2/3rd Pioneer Battalion, Oon John’s Track

In the face of this long history of sacrifice on their part, the sad, shameful fact is that, prior to the 1970s, little was known publicly about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ contribution to our military services. It wasn’t until the 1980s that the Department of Defence even began collecting information about its own Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history.

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AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL ERR/68/0474/VN Name: Bombadier John Burns (left) and gunner Bruce Morris 102nd Battery, The Royal Australian Regiment, Operation Toan Thang, Vietnam from: Holland Park, Queensland (Burns) and Morwell Victoria (Morris) in Somalia

This book has been made to remind all of us of that which has been forgotten for far too long. War is not the central character here, and neither are the services in which they served, or the theatres in which they fought. The heart of this book is not their uniform or the colour of their skin, but their humanity. That has been the motivation for their sacrifices, even as they were rejected and ignored, abused and forgotten. They enlisted, served, suffered and died for the very same reasons all other Australians enlisted. Not because they were black or felt they needed to prove some point, but because they were Australians, on the inside, where it made them all equal. This now leaves us with a question that only they can answer.

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AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL P00898.001 Names: (left to right back row) Private Alick James McDonald, Bob Cook, Private Michael Laughton, Private Harry Bray, Private Alec Turner (front row) Private Alec Kruger, Privae Alick Jackomos, James Smith. 2/18th Australian field workshop

WHY DID MEN AND WOMEN, WHO WERE NOT EVEN RECOGNISED AS CITIZENS BY THE COUNTRY IN WHICH THEY LIVED, WHO WERE OFTEN SHUNNED AND ABUSED, RIDICULED AND DISCRIMINATED AGAINST, WANT TO RISK THEIR LIVES FOR SUCH A COUNTRY?

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Photo Credit: Too Dark to See Documentary Photographer Robert Cameriere.

Left to Right: Natalie Whyte, Mrs Hurley, His Excellency General the Honourable David Hurley AC, DSC, Jordan Williams,Uncle Harry Allie, The King's School Cadet Corps accompanied by Mr James Tyree The King's School Cadet Corps.

PERSONAL STORIES AND EXPERIENCES

This is the second publication in the Generations of Knowledge series.

The core of this publication is about the motivation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to serve in the Australian Defence Forces and the sacrifices they made over more than a century as they were shunned and ignored, abused and forgotten.

UNCLE

HARRY ALLIE CUDJULA ELDER (CHARTERS TOWERS) BEM WARRANT OFFICER (RETIRED), ROYAL AUSTRALIAN AIRFORCE

I was always aware of that proud history, of serving country. I’ve been inspired by men that I had worked with, who had served in World Wars I and II. They had always marched proudly on ANZAC Day in Charters Towers.

Photo Credit: 2016 Portrait from the ‘Generations of Knowledge Sharing the Spirt of the ANZACS’ Project as conceived and commissioned by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders on Campus, Western Sydney University. Portrait co-created by Uncle Harry Allie and Photographer Robert Cameriere.

Also in my grandmother’s house there was a photo of my uncle who served in World War I and World War II. My other uncle served in World War II, my aunty served in the Women’s Land Army and my father served in the Construction Corps. So I was always aware of that proud history, of serving country, and I felt it particularly when the ballot came up for National Service and my name didn’t come out.

I’d seen many men around me that were called up but I still had that desire, I still wanted to serve country. I was aware of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people not having to serve or enlist in the military services but I would have been disappointed if I had been turned away or rejected. Which comes back to what I always firmly believe – there is no equality for anybody if they’re going to select and determine my future. So on 5 January 1966, I signed on the dotted line and enlisted in the Royal Australian Air Force.

I was christened Harold James Allie, but from day one when I joined the Air Force, I was called Harry. On my mother’s side we identified as Cudjula people, which encompasses the area around Charters Towers in north Queensland, about 84 miles west of Townsville on the old scale.

I was born in Charters Towers, and I grew up and spent my early days going to school there. I was even one of the fortunate ones to get employment in the town. A lot of the young Aboriginal men went out onto stations and became ringers or did similar jobs. A lot of the young girls in that period worked as domestics, or in the laundries, but never had a secretarial role or anything in the drapery shops or anything like that. This was sort of handed down from generation to generation, to be the domestics.

The schools and colleges, which were very prominent in Charters Towers, employed a lot of our aunties and my cousins and the younger girls as domestics at the colleges. It was looked upon that Aboriginal students weren’t very bright. So if there was somebody reasonably bright they went on another two years, to year 10. And if there was an exceptional one, they went on to year 12. I have a cousin that passed his year 12 but he was an exception, he was the only one that we can remember, that I sort of relate to and grew up with, who was so bright to achieve and pass in year 12.

I wanted to follow my cousins and the other young Aboriginal men by going to work on a station but my mother, who never had the opportunity to be educated, felt that I was not going to go and work on a station.

I was kind of quite upset. I saved up all my pennies, threepence and sixpence and bought my first swag cover, which was seven pounds in those days and it was a large amount of money. And I said to my mother, ‘I’ve bought a swag and I’ve got to go and be a ringer. I’ve got to go and work on a station.’ She politely reminded me, and said, ‘I don’t care what you paid, but you aren’t going to go and work on a station.’

Probably her reason for that was that there were a lot of Aboriginal people that were put under the Aboriginal Protection Act back then, when they were working on stations. Her family had been in that situation. She and her sister were very fortunate because they were on a different station when her mother and all her brothers and sisters were put under the Aboriginal Protection Act. The Aboriginal Protection Act was very restrictive. You didn’t have access to your wages, they were held in custody, because when you were under the Act and you were employed on stations, you only came into town twice a year. You’d only come in weeks before Christmas time, Christmas and New Year. Then you were allowed into town for two weeks at the Annual Show time, which was in the June period. In that time, if you wanted money, you had to go down to the police station where the Protector of Aboriginals was. He made out a cheque for a certain amount of money, which you then took and cashed, to buy what you needed, like clothes for the next period of working on the station, and also to socialise for that period that you were in town.

There were various things like that in place if you were under the Aboriginal Protection Act. Under the Act, you were not supposed to mix and mingle with other Aboriginal people. So when you got out from under the Aboriginal Protection Act you weren’t to mix and mingle with people that were still under the Act. So that’s where that old saying came from in those early days – the top end and the bottom end of the town.

The bottom end of the town was where you were under the Act and lived in that part of town, and if you were up the top then you weren’t under the Aboriginal Protection Act and you kept away from mixing and mingling with those at the bottom.

It was, I think, aimed at Aboriginal people, because on occasions the constables that came under the Protector of Aboriginals would look and enquire if there was some other person that they did not know, and enquire of his background and why he was there. We felt it was an intrusion, where you couldn’t be yourself, where you couldn’t live the life that you were going to be happy with.

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What’s certainly grown on me is that I am a strong advocate for equality. And that’s something that wasn’t the case in those early days. We never had equality.

This was particularly so in my early life, because my father was away working on stations, and we were always aware if the police truck came down to where we lived. Many a time we were put in cupboards or under the bed. Or when we were older, if we heard that the police truck was coming, we would run into the bush, because our family were so worried that we would be taken away, and there is nothing more heartbreaking than to lose your children. Particularly as we are coming up to National Sorry Day Week, where we are recognising that children were taken away. If your children were taken away, up where we were, they were sent to Palm Island which was 30 miles off the coast.

That is another story in itself.

It was always about equality. I didn’t call it equality but I just wanted a fair go. What changed that around was when I was 14 and I tried to get a job. There was a very big Air Force contingent in Charters Towers and there was an ex-Air Force cook who started a pastry business in Charters Towers, and I said to him that I would like to get a job because I’ve walked the streets.

He said, ‘Alright, I’ll take you.’ Once I got there and threw the pots and pans around it gave me a lot of self-confidence. My first pay was around four pounds and that was indeed a lot of money when I look back on it. Particularly when you could buy ice cream for only threepence, and I like my ice creams. I had to give my mother two pound board, oh goodness me, but that’s what you did. I also had to put 10 shillings in the bank.

So with the board and 10 shillings in the bank, a couple of ice creams and a couple of nights at the movies, there wasn’t much left over.

There were no jobs around the immediate area of Charters Towers then, so the men had to go something like 100 miles away, and be in a camp. That’s when the responsibility fell on our mothers and aunties, and the women in the community, to keep the households going, and make sure the children had an education.

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Like everything, it’s a little bit of robbing Peter to pay Paul sometimes, particularly when you’re growing up in an area where there was no electricity. You had kerosene lights, and then you graduated to carbide lights. And then if you wanted the electricity to come out your way you had to pay for the extension of the electricity line. I could never forget my father, the first time we had electricity, he kept turning the lights on and off, because it was dark one minute and light the next, just by pressing a switch.

When I was just about ready to leave school, one day I was away and the principal came out and he said to my mother, ‘Harold has a lot of potential. Why don’t you get him to sit for the Post Office exam?’ Which I did do, but I didn’t expect to do any good. I got a call from the Postmaster and he asked if I would like to be a telegram boy, and I jumped over the moon. To be a telegram boy was indeed an honour, because you look smart in the PMG uniform. It was good money and better than the pastry cook shop. So away I went and I still haven’t forgotten that Postmaster’s name because he gave me my first taste of equality. That changed my life because there were good people to be working alongside of, to nurture me.

I’ve also been inspired by men that I worked with, that had served in World War II. They had always marched proudly on ANZAC Day in Charters Towers, which was always a big affair. Also, in my grandmother’s house next door, there was always a photo of my uncle who served in World War I and World War II. My other uncle served in World War II, my aunty from my father’s side served in the Women’s Land Army, and because they wanted men on the land, my father served in the Construction Corps. So I was always aware of that proud history of serving country, and I felt it particularly when the ballot came up for National Service and my name didn’t come out.

I’d seen many men around me that were called up and I still had that desire, I still wanted to serve country. So in 1965 I went to enquire about enlisting in the Defence Force. I wanted to join the Air Force because in my early

days I would sit on the fence, watching aircraft taking off and landing at Garbutt in Townsville, and I always had that desire to serve. So on 5 January 1966, I signed on the dotted line and enlisted in the Royal Australian Air Force.

opportunity for anything that they are trying to achieve.

Or if they’ve got a vision of what they would like to aspire to. With us, it’s striving to give them that opportunity, and it’s certainly different than what we had when I was growing up.

I was aware of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people not having to serve or enlist in the military services. I would have been disappointed if I had been turned away or rejected, if I had the qualifications to enlist. It comes back to that thing which I always firmly believe – there is no equality for anybody if they’re going to select and determine my future.

What gives me a lot of joy are the people that were with me when I first started to make something of my life, particularly in the Air Force, that I still have that opportunity to be very close friends with them to this day, and we’re talking about getting on to over 50 years.

The aircraft that I was involved with, particularly at Sale in Victoria, were the DC3 and the Vampire jets used for training pilots. Also what was exciting was when I was moved to Amberley Air Force Base in Queensland, where we worked on the F4 Phantom aircraft. Then later on, after the Phantoms had finished, we took delivery of the F-111 aircraft.

It takes many people to keep and support one of these in the air. My role was in the supply logistics side. Whether it be for the refuelling of the aircraft, or whether it be for the arming of the aircraft, there are so many things to keep an aircraft like that flying. But we all came together, to see that the aircraft was operational in the role that it had to do. And most importantly, when it took off – that it came back safely!

After the government approved delivery of 24 F-111s, I was in the United States for five months, while they prepared the first 12 aircraft to ferry back to Australia. I also served at the RAAF base in Malaysia.

I reached the rank of Warrant Officer and I applied for discharge in July 1989.

I retired some years ago and I am now involved with many committees and boards, to ensure that our people have every opportunity to compete and achieve and that they’ve got a level way of going ahead; particularly our young people, who aspire, so that they have an equal

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We have a history and certainly things we can’t forget.

That’s all part of the make-up of, not only Australia, but also each and every one of us. We’ve come on a journey from somewhere. I believe that we must continue to tell that story to the generations. Like with our culture, our stories have been passed down from generation to generation, and why that story and that history is still around is because of passing it down. We have to ensure that the generations will take it forward as well. By doing that it is bringing us all closer together as Australians.

UNCLE

CHARLIE MUNDINE BUNDJALUNG (NSW) SERGEANT (RETIRED) ELECTRONICS TECHNICIAN, ROYAL AUSTRALIAN ARMY ELECTRICAL MECHANICAL ENGINEERS

‘I hope that I’ve affected some non-Aboriginal people when I was in the Army about what they were actually defending.’

Back in the ’60s, at the age of 18, every male in Australia had to register for National Service. That was based on your birthday, and if it was drawn out of the lottery then you went in. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples didn’t have to. I did. But my birthday wasn’t brought out of the barrel. However, the group of people that I was working with, well I was the only Aboriginal in among them and some of them did get called up. Why them and not me, you know? I’ve got the same responsibilities that they had, so why not do it?

Australia is Australia. I’ll go out and pick up a handful of dirt and it’s the same bit of dirt if you went and did the same thing, but it’s the reasoning behind why you want to defend it. The difference between an Aboriginal and their defence of country and a non-Aboriginal person is that we defend country. We belong to the country; the country doesn’t belong to us. A non-Aboriginal owns the country.

Born of the land, when I die, I’m going back to the land.

Photo Credit: 2016 Portrait from the ‘Generations of Knowledge Sharing the Spirt of the ANZACS’ Project as conceived and commissioned by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders on Campus, Western Sydney University. Portrait co-created by Uncle Charlie Mundine and Photographer Robert Cameriere.

I relate back to my father’s side of the family because that’s where I was born and grew up, at a little place called Baryulgil, which is inland along the Clarence River.

Grafton is where we went to school, about 60 miles away. I did most of my schooling within Grafton.

My older brothers and sisters had moved away for work, as they finished school, while Mum and Dad followed them, to keep the family together and look after one another. We then moved down to Sydney, into Auburn, where I finished Year 10 and that’s when I left school.

We were sort of out of town, with a bit of bush around us, so it was a totally different lifestyle because you were close to the bush. Most of the men around the area did a bit of hunting, and of course everyone shared everything.

They also all looked after one another, it didn’t matter who you were – black, white, blue, green or brindle – it was like one big family. We didn’t have any trouble with the non-Aboriginals, we didn’t live on a mission or a reserve, and we actually lived in town. We all got on well together because we went to school together, the parents mixed together, and also played social sports together like football and cricket.

The Aboriginals who lived on the reserves and the missions were more or less under total control of the Welfare Board in that they had a mission manager who actually lived on the mission, or on the edge of it, and they were controlled as to where they could go, on and off the mission. If they worked, the majority of their money went back to the mission manager, who then dispersed it for the upkeep of the people living on the mission or reserve, whereas our family lived off the mission, so our work was our own, and we got paid for that and we survived that way.

I was lucky as my dad had a good job at the time, and he was in the process of buying his own home. There was the odd occasion with people who would have a go at him, thinking that he was one better, even more so from

the non-Aboriginals, because there were non-Aboriginals couldn’t afford their homes.

It was a lot of hard work. My dad was working 16 hours a day, seven days a week and I was one of 11 children. He worked very hard and we didn’t see him Monday to Friday, because he always seemed to be at work. What time we did have with him on the weekend was really full-on with him. Mum’s side of the family also didn’t live on a mission or a reserve, they lived on their own land and they all had work. It was an accepted thing that you would, if you were eligible or old enough, go out and get a job. There was the old saying that a lot of people used at the time – the ‘get out’ rule. You either ‘get out and get a job or you get out’.

And that was it, because we all did.

Aboriginals were seen to be very much laid back, not responsible. Everyone around me might have been a bit of a larrikin, or whatever, but they did contribute something to the family in big ways.

My aunty lived diagonally across from us, and all her children and grandchildren worked on the railway. If one family was doing well, we did share it and we never begrudged one another, or think they were one better than one another. Most people all got on well together, and they looked after one another.

Like the Aboriginal families, naturally, we were somehow really related. That went back to blood relatives, so I had aunties, uncles and grandparents around. Also, we had the other people that were respected around us, like the shopkeepers, the butcher etcetera, and they looked after one another. There were two barbers in the area where we were, and one barber had trouble with my dad – wouldn’t cut his hair – so he was virtually ostracised and put aside.

And it wasn’t just the Aboriginal people that wouldn’t go to him, it was everyone else. So he had to change his attitude if he was going to survive in business in that town.

And of course he didn’t really do that well for a long time.

We all knew about the Welfare Board that was around and how the children were taken away, so families looked after one another. I remember my grandmother used to say:

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‘If I whistle, you run and hide, and when I whistle twice, then you can come back out.’ That meant the Welfare was coming with the police to take away whatever children.

Some of the families lost their children. You know, some lost nearly all their children, others only lost one or two.

They were taken by the Welfare Board and, you know, we talk today about the Stolen Generation – these were those kids. It was deemed at the time that the families couldn’t look after them. Of course you look at the families, and if you worked say on the railway, you might be only 50 miles away from home but in those days, that was a day’s travel. The only way to get home was waiting for a train to come through or walk back, so they camped out there.

So, the men weren’t there and the women were at home by themselves with the children. So the first thing you see, when you look at them, there was no carer there, to look after them, no-one to look after their monetary values, to give them money etcetera, even though these blokes were out working. And so the Welfare Board said, ‘We’re taking the kids,’ and so they did, and they never, ever came back until they were 18, until they were old enough, until they were deemed an adult.

They were sent to the ends of the world as far as we were concerned, and of course some of them never, ever came home. Total racism, really, because of the White Australia policy. You know – you weren’t good enough unless you were all white sort of thing. That was the attitude to people. And if you didn’t fit in, well, bad luck, because the colour of your skin was what it was based on. It didn’t matter what your academics were, or your skills on top of your academics, it was, ‘Sorry, you’re an Aboriginal. Bad luck.’ I was in the era, yes, and I could’ve been one of those Stolen Generation children, but I wasn’t, because of good management by my family that kept me away from that.

With work I looked at probably going to something like a manual labour type job, like a chippy, carpenter, joiner, and I got a traineeship or an apprenticeship with the Postmaster-General, the old PMG, as a communication technician. I worked at that, and I did my training in that, and I worked for about seven years before I had gone as far as I could possibly go at that stage.

Photo Credit: 2016 Portrait from the ‘Generations of Knowledge Sharing the Spirt of the ANZACS’ Project as conceived and commissioned by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders on Campus, Western Sydney University. Portrait co-created by Uncle Charlie Mundine and Photographer Robert Cameriere.

The reasons I changed from the job that I had with the Postmaster-General into going into the Army was I had a brother that had already been in the Army.

He appeared to me, from the outside, that he was doing okay for himself. Also, two cousins that lived near us prior to moving from Grafton, they’d actually joined the Army.

It was something different; I needed something different, that’s what it came down to in the end. Something that I could achieve for me, and that was a big thing. I needed something where I could achieve and do something better. Within the Army I knew that they had other things besides just being a soldier, and I could pick one of them and go with it. They had their preselection criteria, where they sit down and go through everything with you, and do assessments, and because of my background working with the PMG they offered me the electronics tradesman position, and I went away and did the training in that area on military equipment.

At 18 every male in Australia had to register for National Service, and that was based on your birthday – if it was drawn out of the lottery then you went. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders didn’t have to. I did. Call it lucky or unlucky, whichever way you want to look at it, but I didn’t get called up, my birthday wasn’t brought out of the barrel, but one of my cousin's was. Then the group of people that I was working with, they were very much Aussie and I was the only Aboriginal in among the group, and some of them did get called up. I thought, ‘Why them and not me? I’ve got the same responsibilities that they had, so why not do it?’ That was at 18, and then when I was 23, five years later, I did join the Army.

I went to Kapooka and then I got moved out to a field workshop at Ingleburn, and then went back to Bandiana.

I got my training there with them and I stayed on for another six months to specialise in doing radar. I remember an American bloke, he was a Master Sergeant in electronics, and he was only allowed to do half the amount of work that I was allowed to do as a private or a craftsman, as they classified me. He said if I went to America I would be offered a commission because of the depth that we went into. That was the depth that the Australians trained their military personnel.

Photo Credit: 2016 Portrait from the ‘Generations of Knowledge Sharing the Spirt of the ANZACS’ Project as conceived and commissioned by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders on Campus, Western Sydney University. Portrait co-created by Uncle Charlie Mundine and Photographer Robert Cameriere.

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A lot of the field workshops I went to were in Vietnam.

They had a rollover where they sent the unit in and then the unit didn’t come home. What they did was they just replaced all the personnel in it. There were people overseas, not necessarily Vietnam, which had come to an end, but there were other things going on overseas where we had to look after all the equipment. Of course it would be nothing to get a package coming back from the United States saying ‘Here’s someone’s piece of gear and it needs to be repaired, and get back to them ASAP’.

My feelings about missing out on action? My trainers were all either ex-Vietnam or even some of them were ex-Korea, so going right back through the ’50s, right through the ’60s, I had all the wealth of knowledge that they brought back from those things put into me. I never thought anything about it at the time, but as years go

by I remember things they were preparing me to do, or preparing the next generation beyond me. I look at it this way – alright, I was saved from all the gory details of the actual conflict of war but I still had all those gory details implanted in me by other people that had been there, just to say, how do we minimise it?

I joined in 1972 and I left in 1993, so just short of 21 years, and I went up through the ranks to Sergeant. To me, personally, that was a good achievement, to be the first Aboriginal person to actually go through the trades, or the only one anyone can think of that had gone through as a tradesman within the Army and make Sergeant.

Australia, how do they see it and add their values to it?

You don’t run out and die for your country; it’s about how you are actually trying to make the country bigger and better. Because if you die your actions stop, which means that we’ve lost something really valuable, and we can’t afford that. It’s how we look after one another which helps look after country. That’s it.

Australia is Australia. I’ll go out and pick up a handful of dirt, and it’s the same bit of dirt if you went and did the same thing, but it’s the reasoning behind why you want to defend it. Each individual person, you’ve got to weigh them up as an individual, and see what they are actually going to contribute to the country. And we do place different values on it. Every individual has different thoughts, and part of that is where we come from within the country.

The difference between an Aboriginal, and their defence of country, and a non-Aboriginal person, is that we defend country. We belong to the country; the country doesn’t belong to us. A non-Aboriginal owns the country. They want to buy their block of ground, build their fences and keep everyone out. Born of the land, when I die I’m going back to the land. But a non-Aboriginal says, ‘No, I’m here I’m making a quid.’

My memories of being in there are probably the comradeship, you know, the friendships that I’ve made.

The time with the service and my growth throughout that period of time, it was the values that my family had placed on me. I take very great personal pride in the way I deal with people, how I work with people, and also how I help and support people.

I hope that I affected some non-Aboriginal people when I was in the Army, about their thoughts, about what they were actually defending. I used to talk to them about it.

I’d say, ‘This is my reasoning: I believe it’s country, it’s my country, and it’s your country. Aren’t you going to look after your country?’ And I don’t mean that little patch of ground you’re standing on today. What about next door?

What about the Queenslanders? We hate them, you know, we’re coming up to Football State of Origin – we’re going to have a big war. But the thing is, Queensland is part|of Australia.

The values of life, the values of friendships, the values of everything around you, like country. To me as an Aboriginal person, yes, the land is something you can’t replace, no way. But seen from the defence side, what do other people that live off the land, that live within

Well, since I left the Army I decided to have a rethink about who I was and what I was doing. I went to work for New South Wales Corrective Services, as a sexual health and drug and alcohol worker. We’d do programs within the jails, trying to educate inmates into creating a better

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life for themselves. I also ran my own business for a little while, contracting back to the Army, looking after their electronic ranges.

Once I finished that I went to work for Link Up, working for the Stolen Generation children. That's something I have a bit of a passion for, trying to help them find families and communities. For some of them their families don’t exist anymore, so you try and find the communities they come from.

Then I decided to have a break and I even thought about retiring, but a friend of mine offered me this job working with her with the AFL, Aussie Rules. It involves working with school children, to keep them in school as long as possible, so they make the right decision for later, into their working lives. And then to help them with that transition, from school to work programs. I’ve been there for ten-odd years now. I think we are having a dramatic change, in that most Aboriginal students that get to high school will complete year 12, or the ones that I am working with and the team that I’m working with do.

My dad never finished school. I got through to year 12 but my children have done university degrees, and are doing Masters degrees. One of them has been approached to go on to do their PhD. So each generation has some kind of effect on the next one to do better. It’s not a matter of trying to outdo one another, it’s a matter of we need a better life.

Everyone is getting a benefit out of it, so the whole of the country’s grown. It’s about the better, stronger community, which means that people start taking responsibility for looking after country. And country is, to me and most of my family, looking after the land, the community as a whole.

PROFESSOR

LISA JACKSON-PULVER WIRADJURI KOORI GROUP CAPTAIN, ROYAL AUSTRALIAN AIR FORCE

‘I wanted to be able to stand there with pride, in a uniform, in service of my country.’

When I was growing up there were a few photos of my father in his uniform, very proud in his service. I wanted that. I wanted to be able to stand there with pride in a uniform in service of my country. It took four lots of banging on the door and three serious knockbacks at the recruiting office, but I persisted and I became a Specialist Reservist in the Royal Australian Air Force.

Why would Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islander people go and serve their country, given the history and the absolute grief that has been wrought upon them, and the sheer destruction? It’s really simple: it’s not the country that did this to us, and the country is something that is in our blood, it’s in our core, we belong to country.

Country never, ever forgets us.

So when Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people march off to war, they put themselves into harm’s way for country because there is such a strong core element in us about service. It’s about love, it’s about respect and if we don’t do it, if we don’t stand up for what we believe in, as people that belong to country, then I think we’re lost.

Photo Credit: 2016 Portrait from the ‘Generations of Knowledge Sharing the Spirt of the ANZACS’ Project as conceived and commissioned by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders on Campus, Western Sydney University. Portrait co-created by Professor Lisa Jackson-Pulver and Photographer Robert Cameriere.

My mob is, like most, all over the place, so I identified as a Wiradjuri Koori person with some of my relations coming from Wagga Wagga in south-western New South Wales.

My mother’s people come from the far north coast of New South Wales. In fact, she was born on a small island in the Clarence river outside of McLean. I have other ancestry, proud ancestry, that is part Scots, Welsh, Irish and Samay from Norway. So I feel very much like a child of the world.

I was born in Stanmore, New South Wales, in the inner west of Sydney and I spent my first couple of years there. Then we moved, as a family, to Revesby in Sydney’s south west as part of the program of resettling soldiers and former service personnel from World War II. My father was a serviceman in the Royal Australian Air Force. He was air crew and he was discharged from the Air Force many years after the war and became a boiler maker. So, my dad served in the Royal Australian Air Force in World War II and he got all of the decorations that all of the men did in those days.

As a part of him coming home he moved us out to Revesby and that’s where we grew up. So I am a child of Revesby Primary School and East Hills Girls High School. My father got jobs in places like Metters and Rayco, and he worked with the guys that he served with, and with other guys who served throughout the war. The area was full of people who were service personnel from World War II. We didn’t really see colour in those days, we didn’t see that we were different. And I suppose we weren’t, really, just to the eye, because the area had Greek migrants, Italian migrants, it had people from Turkey, it had us mob and a whole stack of non-Aboriginal people, so it was a very blended upbringing anyhow. But things did start to change because my father was a very unwell man. He was really badly damaged from his service

in the war and he did not get the treatment that he needed. I don’t know why but in those days there wasn’t really much help for the families. So we kids were brought up in a war zone. Quite literally, we were brought up in a very hard way because of my father’s service to his country.

When I got a little bit older I used to talk to one of my aunties about us as Koori people and she said, ‘You know the biggest thing about being fair skinned is that you can disappear, and it’s important that you just disappear. Because look at you, you don’t speak any language, you don’t do any of that cultural stuff that Aboriginal people do. You should just be who you are, which is an Australian kid.’ So for us I didn’t really get that colour thing. What I did get, very strongly, is that it is something that should be hidden. It should be something that is not talked about. When my grandma came she was always kept indoors, kept quiet.

You know, ‘Don’t talk about where your nan’s from’.

And there was a big story that was created, that my grandmother used to say she was a Maori princess.

A Maori princess – wow! I’ve got this grandmother that’s a Maori princess, right?! I thought that was really cool, as well as having all the other parts of my heritage.

Of course she wasn’t a Maori princess; of course she wasn’t Maori. She’d never been to New Zealand.

Why? Because it was easier in those days to justify the colour of your skin as being a Maori.

That’s the thing that affected me. It wasn’t so much that we were Koori kids or a Koori family, it was more about the denial of our history, our heritage and our ancestry. Because of the grief and the problems society had imposed on the generation before me, with regards to whether or not you’re able to move freely, whether or not you’re allowed to bring up your children, whether or not those kids could go to school – terrible days – this is part of my story and I’m not that old.

What did I want to be when I grew up? Well, I wanted to be alive. I wanted to be out of jail. I didn’t want to have a million and one kids. I wanted to find true love and I

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wanted to do something useful. For all those reasons, and more, I ran away from home as a teenager. I spent part of that time on the streets. I spent part of that time couch surfing and sleeping in the backs of people’s cars.

Eventually I worked out that I couldn't really live like that, and I was hungry, and I was really skinny. I started living as a boy because I didn’t like what was happening to girls on the streets, so as a prepubescent I really did look like a skinny little boy. I shaved my head and I called myself Lee. Thank God it wasn’t for too long. I met some people who told me I could go to Tech. ‘If you go to Tech you can do the Nurses’ Entrance, or the Police Entrance course,’ so I went to Bankstown Technical College and I enrolled in the Nurses’ Entrance course. I decided I really wanted to be a nurse, and I was completely pragmatic, you know, it was like, ‘I can work and get myself a ticket, a career. I can live in a nurses’ home and get paid to do stuff. I can contribute and I’ve got a ticket to the world.’ I could go anywhere in the whole wide world. Nursing is something I fall back on every single day of my life. The skills I learnt in nursing, about compassion, about planning, about timekeeping, are all things I use today. And it was that Nursing Certificate that eventually got me into medical school.

When did I start thinking about getting into the Forces? It took four lots of banging on the door and three serious knockbacks but I persisted, because it’s something I’ve always wanted to do. I don’t know what happened but someone passed my name and details on to someone else, and then eventually I got a phone call from a then Squadron Leader called Scott De Havilland, and he invited me to go out to Richmond Air Base and have a yarn with them. And I did. From that point on I became a Specialist Reservist in the Royal Australian Air Force, and that was about 11 years ago.

When I was growing up there were a few photos of my father in his uniform, very proud in his service. I never knew that man but I wanted that – I wanted to be able to stand there with pride, in a uniform, in service of my country.

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belong to country, then I think we’re lost. And I suspect that’s part of the reason that so many of us served willingly and freely.

Many different groups would have a different take on what country is. For me it’s beyond a flag or a series of flags, it’s beyond a government, it’s beyond even the people of that place, even though they are very important. Country holds a history; country holds a story.

Country is something that will always be there no matter what. We come and go but country always remains. It’s something which persists, and it’s enduring, and it holds our story, our history, our bones, and our ancestry. It nurtures us. It connects us to place. We cannot thrive or survive without country. We now call this country Australia, but Australia is a very strong collection of many, many different groups, and Australia is changing.

But the thing that always remains the same is those of us that belong to country. Country doesn’t belong to us, and for that reason I believe that Aboriginal people will always make a stand when the requirement is before us to do so.

It’s interesting when people ask why would Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islander people go on and serve their country, given the history, the policy environment, the absolute grief that has been wrought upon them, and the sheer destruction. It’s really simple.

It’s not the country that did this to us. The country is something that is in our blood, it’s in our core, and we belong to country. Country never, ever forgets us. And if we don’t respect country, and pay dues to country, and serve country, then I believe that we’re so far disconnected, there is no hope.

So when I think about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people marching off to war, whether it was in the Boer War, First World War and any war since, they put themselves into harm’s way for country. They volunteered; they worked really hard to go, because there was such a strong core element in us about service.

It’s about love, it’s about respect, and if we don’t do it, if we don’t stand up for what we believe in, as people that

It’s being done by many out there who have got stories that would make your heart break, but are still courageous enough and committed enough to go to the cause of that behaviour and change it, now and forever.

Australia is a place that rejoices in many cultures now.

We’ve got people from all over the world that call this place home, and they all have a role to play. That whole sense of belonging that we all have that responsibility to share the stories. So as we go into the future we’ll be the great nation that I know we can be.

I’ve had some absolutely fantastic times in the uniform; I get to see our Defence Forces at their very, very best. I have never deployed into a war zone; however, everyone has a role. Not everyone can get into the pointy end of the bargain, and it is a very pragmatic decision about who gets into harm’s way, and what role you have. My specialisation doesn’t permit that kind of involvement but I still feel very much involved, even though I am working from home.

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My work is much around public health, very background work. A lot of the work I’ve done has been around censuses, and around health assessments, and the sort of things that get people prepared. If you’re not doing the job that you are doing, then there would be a terrible capability impact on our people who are out there serving on the ground.

I have a job at Western Sydney University; I am ProVice Chancellor of Engagement, Pro-Vice Chancellor of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Leadership, and Provost of Parramatta.

I’ve basically moved into a senior leadership administrative position, within a very large urban university here in New South Wales. I’ve come from a background of public health. My last job was at the University of New South Wales, where I was Chair and Professor of Public Health. So I’ve stepped up and I’m now in a senior academic position. My contribution is basically about making this university run. I’m in a senior government structure here and my role in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Engagement is endeavouring to support more and more Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to come to this institution and to flourish, and to grow into careers that they want. It’s pretty exciting stuff.

UNCLE

DAVID WILLIAMS BUNDJALUNG (GRAFTON/NORTH COAST AREA) NAVAL SUBMARINER (RETIRED), ROYAL AUSTRALIAN NAVY CHIEF PETTY OFFICER (RETIRED), ROYAL AUSTRALIAN NAVY VIETNAM WAR VETERAN

‘It’s still country.

Australia still belongs to us and I use the plural.’

Conscription was around and my mates in my footy team were getting called up. I didn’t know at the time that, being an Aboriginal, I didn’t have to fight, but that’s what mates do, they watch each other’s backs. However, it didn’t necessarily mean I had to go into the Army. At the time I was working for a waterproof roofing company and I was on the 22nd floor of a building, looking down at the fleet and thinking, ‘What are them blokes doing?’

So I thought to myself, ‘Two years National Service or nine years in the Navy? Ah bugger it; I’ll go in the Navy.’

There is a connection here to the earth. I’ll never, ever catch that thing called greed; I’ll never catch that disease.

I’m here for the majority, all of us, and there’s enough room. I’m just sorry that people don’t learn about that or they don’t feel that. It’s still country. Australia still belongs to us and I use the plural.

All I can say is, I know it takes all of us because not one of us can do it on our own.

Photo Credit: 2016 Portrait from the ‘Generations of Knowledge Sharing the Spirt of the ANZACS’ Project as conceived and commissioned by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders on Campus, Western Sydney University. Portrait co-created by Uncle David Williams and Photographer Robert Cameriere.

I was born in a place called South Grafton.

My mob is from Bundjalung country, on the Northern Coast of New South Wales.

We were a large family then: we Williams had 13 in our mob, in the immediate family.

Not too long after my birth we moved to Casino. I went to 13 different schools as I was being educated in the rich road of life.

From Casino we moved to Brisbane and then I went to New Farm. I then moved in with an aunty and uncle on Stradbroke Island and went to the Dunwich State School there. I then went back to the aunties and Uncles in Brisbane, and attended Gregory Terrace Catholic School, Paddington.

From there we came back to Sydney for a while, where I went to Bourke Street Primary for two years. It was then back up to Brisbane, out near Bardon. From there up to North Queensland, with the other uncle, to Finch Hatton and Beatrice Creek. Beatrice Creek had 14 in the school and I always came last in the class. That’s when I had my first ride in an aircraft. It was a Tiger Moth with an open air cockpit and it cost 10 bob or 10 shillings.

I knew then that flying around in a plane wasn’t for me, but I enjoyed the day.

Then it was back to Brisbane. I won a scholarship to Tranby College in Sydney where I completed my Intermediate Certificate. When I was at Ibrox Park Boys High a job came up at Channel 2 for a television technician. I was looking at that but I had always wanted to be an engineer with steam engines. That was my favourite, because my Uncle Ben Williams and his brother Allen Williams used to drive trains.

Going to 13 different schools, over all, I had to fight my way through all of them, because I wasn’t going to come second no matter what it was. I was the mouthier one. I was an Aboriginal kid, I was the blackest one, and I was born this far south with curly hair. Not a good look. So as a consequence there was a contest nearly every day. I had

a teacher in Casino who used to let me out 10 minutes earlier so the gangs couldn’t get me because I wasn’t going to back down and cop it. I don’t know whether it makes you grow up fast, but these things you’ve got to do, just be one step in front of the mob.

I don’t know the word ‘can’t’ and that’s probably the trouble. We weren’t liked, but I knew we could do things better than those people that didn’t know jack about us.

You know, I could run faster than three quarters of them.

I could hide better in a game of hide and seek, I could walk out of sight in a dark night, and I knew what food to eat. I was learning about non-native stuff, it was brought here, and I’m thinking, ‘Why would you go and pay for stuff when it’s running around free?’ I couldn’t get it. The old people told us about the massacres. I knew about massacres and all this and I used to think, ‘Why do people do this? There’s enough room for all of us.’

Movies were a major influence. In every movie I saw black people had a basic task and I couldn’t understand it and I hated it. He was never the pilot, he was never the hero, and there was no way I was going to shine someone’s shoes or be a chauffeur. I’d own the car. The harshness of the conditions of black people made me a very angry little boy and I thought that when I got the guns I was going to square the books. But as you get older and you get more educated in the ways of doing business you realise that it’s not everyone. It is policies. I didn’t like watching a race of people, whether it was my own or others, being treated like bloody cannon fodder.

They had what was called an Aboriginal Protection Board, and things like that, and we used to hear stories from the Kinchela Boys Home. That slaughter yard! There are a lot of other things that the white person wouldn’t know about because it’s under the carpet, but we certainly knew about it. We know that a lot of those people, that were sent into homes or fostered out to white families, were abused, especially the women. That hurts. That’s why I take my hat off to the Aboriginal women because of the abuse they copped for the survival of the male of the species. And it’s a story that’s not told. Thank goodness for the internet, because our kids are going to find out the truth.

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One thing I hated was when Mum would be walking me along and some white fella would come up and pat me on the head. ‘Lovely child, lovely boy.’ It used to really get to me, knowing that his thoughts were elsewhere, that I was the target to get through to Mum. And how some of the cooee calls that my other aunties copped when they were walking around the shops or whatever. Those sorts of things, I remember.

There’s a separation in that if one Aboriginal kid played up they would suspend the lot of them; they’re Aboriginals and dismissed. If you want to get rid of the problem, you would build a school 15 or 20 miles out of town. Because all Aboriginal kids had to be educated, they had to go to school, the families would have to move closer to the school, and that’s how most regional towns got rid of the Aboriginal problem. Those things were happening to me.

However, every now and then the reverse happens. The best example for me was when my uncle shunted the most powerful steam engine in Australia, the Garratt steam engine, into Casino. He pulled me up on that engine, at the rail crossing at Casino, and shunted me into the yards. I was the proudest little black kid in that town and I made sure everyone knew it, that it was my uncle.

The downside of my life is that I was sent away to learn all non-Aboriginal skills. When you leave family you lose a fair bit of language and culture. My grandmother was the strength and she said, ‘Boy, they’re always watching.

They’re just waiting for you to fall – remember it!’ So I did.

To have a good strong community you must be involved, no matter what it is. I go down to juvenile justice and I help all kids, not just specifically Aborigines, and I tell these kids, ‘See those five blokes there, two barristers and three lawyers? Guess why they’re here, son? Because of you, you idiot!’ Get smart with education: barristers earn a minimum $1000 a day when you do something wrong.

I think I had my road mapped out for me. I was the eldest in the next generation and the road had been travelled before. I had two uncles, both engine drivers for New South Wales railways.

My mother was an à la carte chef, her sister was the deputy matron at Brisbane General Hospital. My Aunty became the first recorded Aboriginal person to graduate from a university in Australia. The Williams family was strong.

There were a lot of roadblocks in front of us, but we got through them. And we always had a house in the suburbs, not down at the tip.

At 16 I was getting graded up into Balmain third grade, in rugby league. I was also heavily involved in the Police Boys (Club) and there were opportunities there, but my first job was as a cost clerk.

Well, conscription was around and my mates in my footy team, they were getting called up. I didn’t know at the time that, being an Aboriginal, I didn’t have to fight, but I was thinking, ‘Well, all my family over the years have been in the Army.’ But it wasn’t for me; I needed to do something different.

By that time I was a charge hand at Watson and Crane, in waterproof roofing. I was on the twenty-second floor of the State Office building, and I used to look down at the fleet and think, ‘What are them blokes doing?’

So I was thinking, ‘Two years National Service or nine years in the Navy? Ah bugger it; I’ll go in the Navy.’

I wanted to drive a steam engine. I used to look at the old Stanley steamer engine car, a race car that did 120 or 130 miles an hour – you had to throttle the steam or it would self-destruct. You can’t do that with an internal combustion engine with petrol, because the volume of metric efficiency can’t suck enough air and fuel in to do that, but this steam would just whoosh! My uncle’s engine had railway wheels, while my steam engine had a propeller hanging off the back end of it. So I got to drive that steam engine, it was just in a different environment.

To be a young bloke with all this power! For me there was nothing better, nothing better.

Uncle David Williams with Uncle Ray Minniecon, served in the RAN and in the CMF. An Aboriginal pastor in Sydney's inner city and continues the ongoing contribution to the recognition of Australia's Aboriginal servicemen and women.

I saw an opportunity for me on the ship. By that time a couple of mates said they were going in, so I said, ‘Well, I’ll go and do my bit.’ So I went and had a recruiting interview and the bloke says, ‘Can you fight, son?’

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which is the Engineering branch and we thought ‘We’re pretty cool’. As well as the Vampire, Stalwart, Moresby, Barricade and Snipe I served on all six submarines, but Onslow was my last boat and I have special memories.

You know, there are only a few of us that do this sort of work, in submarines. The main ones were Orion, Otama and Onslow. Remember that we’re submerged all the time, and it’s a completely different world – everything’s quiet. And the fact that everyone on the boat has to know about everyone else’s job. It takes us all to get from point A to point B and you haven’t got time to run from up the front if your main job is down the back. Someone’s got to do it. It’s just a special life and I loved it.

‘Well, those I can’t beat I can outrun.’ ‘So sign here, see the sights, away you go.’

It’s still country. Australia still belongs to us and I use the plural. My mates were conscripted into the Army so that’s what mates do, they watch each other’s backs. It didn’t necessarily mean I had to go into the Army, and I’m glad I didn’t because the Navy rugby team beat them. And we won’t worry about Tommy Raudonikis in the Air Force because we beat them as well.

I didn’t know that Aboriginal people didn’t have to serve.

The first day, there were a lot of young blokes hanging out the windows saying ‘You’ll be sorry’ when I joined the Navy. There were two and a half thousand white guys and one black fella and that was about fair odds in my books.

They certainly knew who I was.

I enlisted on 2 July 1965. I was pretty lucky when I joined up because they wanted a fair few of what we call stokers,

At the time the Australian government was involved in the Indonesian confrontation, so we would sail from Sydney to the Far East, and then go on patrol to keep the safe passage through the Malacca Straits and all around that area. That year we did HMAS Vampire escort duties in Vietnam. We’d take the Sydney up there as an escort on that surface ship, and then we’d anchor in Vung Tau Harbour. I was part of the diving team as well, and because there were saboteurs floating down, under lilies, putting explosives in the ships’ hulls, we had to dive at least every four hours. I remember one time I was the surface swimmer, which meant I didn’t have my tanks on but I was still clicked into the other guys, when the current got up over 3 knots and they got dragged away, and I got dragged under and tangled. After what seemed like ages I managed to get out of it and get to the surface.

Then I hear ‘Debbie’ Reynolds, the next bloke connected to me, had ditched his gear and surfaced. So here we are, floating out in the South China Sea in the middle of the night. How they found a black fella is beyond me. A lot of people asked if I thought there were sharks, but I was just happy to be floating, let alone thinking of sharks. Things like that happen but you do it, it’s part of your job, and I thought nothing of it. Obviously it is important, because you are in a war zone, but you think you are bulletproof.

I had goes at trying to leave the service, and I also had good jobs when I was in Civvy Street, but I was bored.

It wasn’t about the money, I just loved it. I did about 29 and a half years, and of that 29 and a half years probably

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21 were at sea on ships. All I can say is I know it takes all of us to get the objective achieved because not one of us can do it on our own.

Growing up as a young black Aussie kid, I copped a fair bit. However, I always had a counter action. I don’t know, there is a connection here to the earth. I’ll never ever catch that white man’s thing called greed, and I’ll never catch that disease. I’m here for the majority, all of us, and there’s enough room. I’m just sorry that people don’t learn about that or they don’t feel that. I take my hat off to the migrants that had the balls to leave their homelands and start a fresh life. The Aboriginal people of Australia never needed much but they did need respect, and they were never afforded that. Ever.

I might carry a couple more badges or medals than the next bloke but I didn’t buy them, I earned them. I’ve got the runs on the board in what I do in my communities and nationally. I’m currently President of the New South Wales Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Veterans Association, and National Vice President of the Association. I am in Juvenile Justice as a mentor, I am in the Koori court, and I’m also chair of the Cumberland Council Aboriginal advisory committee. There are a couple of others – I wear about ten caps.

We’ve got the best weapon in the world. I hold out my hand and I’ll say ‘G’day mate’. That creates dialogue.

UNCLE

CLIFF DAYLIGHT GUBBI GUBBI (BILOELA, QUEENSLAND) ABLE SEAMAN (RETIRED), ROYAL AUSTRALIAN NAVY VIETNAM WAR VETERAN

‘It’s not about fighting for your own mob, it’s about fighting for your country.’

The system we went through, when we were younger, treated us like second-class citizens. So, why would I risk my life for a country that vilified me? Well, I am quite proud to be an Aboriginal but I’m also proud to be an Australian person. So putting on the uniform to me has made no difference; it was something that I wanted to do and it’s something I’m proud that I did do as an Aboriginal Australian.

If you look at the war records of Aboriginal people, Aboriginal people fought in the Boer War, Malaysia Conflict, First and Second World Wars, Vietnam.

Aboriginal people have always put their hand up to serve, you know.

If an Aboriginal person volunteers to serve in the Army, Navy or Air Force, they do it voluntarily; they do it because they want to do it as an Australian, protecting Australia as a country, but they don't forget where they come from which is their own country.

It’s not about fighting for your own mob, it’s about fighting for your country. You’re serving Australia but you don’t forget where you come from. It’s simple as that.

Photo Credit: 2016 Portrait from the ‘Generations of Knowledge Sharing the Spirt of the ANZACS’ Project as conceived and commissioned by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders on Campus, Western Sydney University. Portrait co-created by Uncle Cliff Daylight and Photographer Robert Cameriere.

My mum is Gubbi Gubbi, which is on the coast of Queensland, down around Fraser Island and that area there. My dad is Wakka Wakka, which is south west Queensland.

I was born back in 1953 in a little place called Biloela, which is south west of Rockhampton. I’ve got five brothers and five sisters – I’m the third oldest – and I’ve got an older sister and I had an older brother who passed away. I went to school in Biloela until the third year and then we moved on. We moved a lot around Central Queensland, and we ended up in Rockhampton. I did my high school training down at Yeppoon High, then I went on to North Rockhampton High School, and from there I left school in 1969.

My dad was a coalminer and he got what was called lead poisoning. He became crippled and he ended up in hospital for years, so my mum just moved around and we lived with other families. It was a happy time but it was tough. A few times we were without food and that sort of stuff, but having a large family we didn’t really notice the tough times, because you had a lot of family around you, brothers and sisters, which is a good thing, by the way.

I had a few fights at school, people calling me names and things. When I was at Biloela you were sat up the back of the classroom if you were Aboriginal, because they had this funny way of thinking that Aboriginal people couldn’t learn. It was the attitude of the day, and I think most of the non-Aboriginal people thought that Aboriginal people weren’t that smart. I just assumed that was the way things were.

As I got older I got a bit wilder, and the name-calling became a thing that I took personally and I got into a few scraps at school. As a family, while we were going to school, we went together and stuck together as a family.

We were pretty good at sports, though, and when we were playing sport we were pretty well accepted.

I did my Year 10 and by that time we’d been put into a home in Queensland. Mum and Dad couldn’t look after

us so we were taken away. The priest that ran the home had two sons in the Navy at the time and he just said to me, ‘Look, if you want to get out of Rockhampton and do something for yourself, this is probably a good way to go.

You can see the world, and you can get out and get some sort of education.’

Most of the families in Rockhampton worked at the meat works, or worked on the railways or the council. Not all of them but most of the families did that and it was just something I didn’t want to do. I wanted to do something with myself. He helped me fill the papers in and then I worked on a farm for three months while I was waiting to see if I could get in. Then I got a letter saying I had been accepted into HMAS Leeuwin in Western Australia, so I packed up my gear and away I went.

I must admit I was a bit scared at the time because I had to travel all the way to Brisbane by myself, but to be truthful, my initial reason for joining the Navy was to travel overseas, to see parts of the world and to get a career out of it.

I was probably sixteen and a half when I joined. The day I joined I had myself and five others, four young Thursday Islanders, and we all had the same room on the day we’d signed up, so we all travelled to Perth together, and we’ve all been friends ever since. I made friends the day I joined and the support was there because we were all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander kids.

HMAS Leeuwin is like a naval school, so we actually went back and did school subjects. At the end of the time you were asked what you wanted to be, so for some strange reason I wanted to be a quarter master gunner and that’s what I ended up doing. A quarter master gunner’s jobs on ship means you do a lot of the work on the upper decks, and you also look after the guns and the ammunition.

Part of my job was to look after where we stored the ammunition, to go down and check temperatures. As a quarter master gunner I used to fire the 40 and 60 mm guns on board, both the twin and the single ones. We also did night watch and kept watch of the gangways while we were in harbour.

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I left Leeuwin in April 1971 after I had done 12 months schooling there and I joined the aircraft carrier Melbourne as an ordinary seaman. I spent another 12 months on the Melbourne as an ordinary seaman before I was shipped off to HMAS Cerberus in Victoria.

When I joined Leeuwin there were 183 who’d joined together, and there were probably 150 of us left when we left the base. Half of those guys were on the Melbourne with me so I wasn’t lost, I wasn’t there by myself. There were a lot of mates and we all joined up together, and we all joined the Melbourne together as ordinary seamen.

I was at HMAS Creswell down in Jervis Bay, I served at HMAS Albatross, and HMAS Nirimba, which was out at Marayong in western Sydney. I did serve on a few bases but most of my time I spent on ships, patrol boats, and destroyers after my first draft on the Melbourne.

When I served on the Vampire we were based up around Singapore for six months, and as part of that deployment we had to escort the HMAS Sydney into Vung Tau Harbour when they brought up troops and other things like trucks. We would go there and escort them in during the day and that night we’d go to sea.

At sun up next day we were back in the harbour.

Our duties were just to protect the Sydney, so I didn’t actually go ashore in Vietnam.

I think Aboriginal people in the Navy were treated quite well, 98% of the time. Everyone got on just as members of the crew. As an Aboriginal person I was just accepted as a crew member. It was never about my Aboriginality or the colour of my skin, it was about how I performed on the ship. If I wasn’t doing my job, if I wasn’t pulling my weight, people picked me up on that. Not because of my colour or my race, it was because I had a job to do, and if you don’t do your job you’ve got to be picked up on where you’re not doing it.

In my day you were accepted for who you were. You went out and had a few beers with your mates and that sort of stuff, and there was never any name calling or racial comments made towards you. What I got from that

a pretty good rugby side when I was serving with the Vampire. Travelling with us at the time was the HMNZ Taranaki and they had their full rugby team on board, so we played them all the time, too. On the Vampire we played 53 games in the six month deployment and we won about 48 of them. I boxed when I first joined HMAS Leeuwin and I won the bantam weight division over there.

I also played cricket and I played Aussie Rules, but I wasn’t very good at that.

I did ten and a half years and Able Seaman was my highest rank, because I didn’t have much interest in being anything higher; it didn’t interest me at the time. I’ve gone on to get married and have a great marriage, and a good job, so I’m quite happy with the way things went.

time was friendship and mateship, which is going to last for the rest of my life, I think. Plus, it gave me a sense of discipline. Coming out of the home I probably had that discipline anyhow, because in the home you’re told how to dress, what to do, go to church every morning. Going into the Navy I found it a lot easier than a lot of the young kids because I had been through a system where I had to do what I was told. With a lot of the kids who came straight from their mum and dad at home, when they got there they thought, ‘Hang on, I’m not listening to you. I’m not taking orders from you,’ and that sort of thing. But I found it easier because I’d been through a system before I got into the Navy.

At every port we went to we played football. Singapore was our base for the first six months deployment and the Kiwis had army bases there so we played the Kiwis a lot. Then when we were in Hong Kong and in Singapore we played the Poms a lot as they had bases there, too.

We played the Japanese national side in Japan. We were

My wife’s side of the family have always looked after me – she’s got eleven sisters so I picked up a whole new family there. Over the years I’ve made contact with my own family again. When we were split up into homes, the end result was the boys stayed in Rockhampton and the girls all went to Brisbane. So there was that disconnect within the family, but we’ve all got back together again.

In the system we went through, when we were younger, we were treated like second-class citizens. Why would I risk my life for a country that vilified me? Well, I am quite proud to be an Aboriginal but I’m also proud to be an Australian person. So putting on the uniform to me has made no difference, it was something that I wanted to do, and it’s something I’m proud that I did do as an Aboriginal Australian.

If you look at the war records of Aboriginal people, Aboriginal people fought in the Boer War, the Malaysia Conflict, the First and Second World Wars and Vietnam.

Aboriginal people have always put their hand up to serve.

If an Aboriginal person volunteers to serve in the Army, Navy or Air Force, they do it voluntarily. They do it because they want to do it as an Australian, protecting Australia as a country. But they don’t forget where they come from, which is their own country. It’s not about

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fighting for your own mob, it’s about fighting for your country. You’re serving Australia but you don’t forget where you come from. It’s simple as that.

I think I grew up in the Navy. I joined as a 16-year-old kid so I became a man while serving in the Navy and it gave me a discipline; it gave me a focus on what I wanted to do with myself. When I got out I did three years working in a foundry, which was pretty hard yakka. I wanted to make myself a little bit better, so I got a job at the Department of Lands. From there I just progressed to doing what I’ve been doing in the public service for 34 years.

I work for the New South Wales Heritage Office, as a listings officer at the moment. I look at listing old buildings, heritage buildings. The other part of my job, which I really like, is declaring Aboriginal places, so I talk to Aboriginal communities about putting an Aboriginal place nomination over their place, which makes sure that it’s protected under the National Parks and Wildlife Act.

UNCLE

NORM NEWLIN WORIMI (NSW) PRIVATE (RETIRED), ASSAULT PIONEER SUPPORT COMPANY ROYAL AUSTRALIAN REGIMENT KOREAN VETERAN

‘The Army was what I aspired to be. I liked the slouch hat, I thought it was great. I used to wear it with a bit of panache.’

During the First World War, my relatives were in the Army and they served in the Middle East, and my brother-inlaw served in the Second World War. I also had cousins that were in the Air Force during the Second World War. The Army was what I aspired to be. I liked the slouch hat, I thought it was great. I used to wear it with a bit of panache. In 1951 I put my age up a year and filled in the paperwork for the first intake of National Service. After three months I then applied for the regular Army. I didn’t tell them I was Aboriginal. I wanted to be a soldier, and I was accepted.

When you were in the Army you were treated as an equal and I thought this was great. It was probably the first time in my life that I was treated like an equal; people treated me as Norman and it was wonderful.

To be discriminated against, treated badly and then want to wear the country’s uniform, we are, and must be, the gentlest people in the world. Because even though we resisted invasion, massacres and being badly treated, we could hate, hate, hate, but we don’t. We don’t.

Photo Credit: 2016 Portrait from the ‘Generations of Knowledge Sharing the Spirt of the ANZACS’ Project as conceived and commissioned by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders on Campus, Western Sydney University. Portrait co-created by Uncle Norm Newlin and Photographer Robert Cameriere.

My mob, the Worimi people, are from Port Stephens. We were treated less than animals, and when people wanted land and our people maintained that it was part of our culture and heritage, they massacred them.

Nobody gave any of them the authority to massacre our people all over this country. Our sad memories are of massacres and things that happened to our people. And even in the modern times, with the deaths in custody, are all sad memories. A lot of sad memories. Our family was directly touched by it because it was our relatives that were massacred. But we are still there, we still exist.

The Worimi people are still there.

I was born at Soldiers Point and I grew up in the Port Stephens area. I grew up at Hawks Nest and then at Tea Gardens, but a lot of school holidays were spent at Soldiers Point with the old people there, my relatives.

One of my uncles told us a lot of things, things that he was allowed to tell us as kids. It was Uncle Jim Ridgeway. He was an initiated man, and in the Port Stephens area initiated men had a tooth knocked out the front. When he had to get false teeth he got his pliers and snapped a tooth off so people would know that he was an initiated man.

I went to school at Tea Gardens and I hated every minute of it, because I was told I was stupid. I don’t know why I was told I was stupid. I’d say it was the day that I was taken along to school by my mother and they saw that she was an Aboriginal woman. They thought, ‘The kid is an idiot, he won’t need to learn. Get down the back, sit down and shut up, or get outside and pick up papers.’

I’ve probably had a lot of pain and a lot of anger, and I didn’t know how to control it, or what to do with it, and consequently I would muck up and I would be told to get out of the room. A lot of times I would just walk out the gate and go home, or go walking in the bush.

It was humiliating.

After school was out I would be outside the gate, waiting.

I would have a fight nearly every day, with different kids from things they said to me and about my family. I would never go to school if I could get away with it; I’d stay away as much as I could. I used to go and pick wildflowers and sell them around the town, or go and get fish bait. I had a couple of customers that I’d get bog nippers for, or dig worms and sell them. One of the teachers asked me one day if I’d be at school tomorrow, which was a Friday, and I said, ‘Not if the tide’s right.’ And he said, ‘Get me five bob’s worth of nippers, then.’ And I said, ‘Okay.’

Another schoolteacher at the school thought I was a good kid and tried to help me but she wasn’t there very long.

And the other schoolteacher was the one I married.

So yeah, I hated school.

My school days were a game of survival because one of the problems was that you were always the last to be picked in the games, any games, team games, you’d be last picked. Nobody wanted you. The only time they seemed to want you was when you were playing football.

I was pretty keen; I reckon I was a good player. I wasn’t frightened to tackle anybody who was bigger than me – I’d get the ball and run at them. Coming from a family of six boys you learnt how to fight, and how to look after yourself, and not take a backward step.

I don’t know whether strength of character had anything to do with it. It was just me, and that was the way I was.

But when my young brother came to school, he was four years younger than me, I stepped in and made sure people didn’t bully him, or pick on him. I looked after him.

Growing up in that town, as an Aboriginal, you were on the outer. Nobody invited you to birthday parties, you never got invited to go and play Monopoly with the other kids.

The only sort of friend I had was from another poor family, or my cousin. I’d go and play with my cousin. We used to make games and play together, going into the bush and getting bush tucker and wild flowers. But it was only the other poor, white family that had anything to do with us.

When my father left home, during the war, he went to work in the steelworks in Newcastle. My mother had to

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go out and clean people’s houses and do their washing and ironing. If I wanted to go and see my mother, after school, I’d have to go and knock on the back door and asked permission to speak to my mother. I hated that. You weren’t allowed to knock on the front door, you had to go around the back door. I hated them!

I never lived in the town after becoming a teenager. I hated the town and I hated the people in it because of what happened. They would shun you. And yet the year that the town’s football team were undefeated minor premiers, half the team consisted of my family.

I left town when I was 15 and I went to a town called Raymond Terrace, where the Masonite factory was. I went there to work. I thought that I would have a better chance of being me, and not being labelled and treated like a leper. I stayed there for nearly a year, then a bloke talked me into going to Brisbane. He more or less implied that the streets were lined with gold. The first couple of nights, we slept on people’s verandahs. We’d gone to the Salvation Army for a bed and handout but they wouldn’t have anything to do with us.

We then went to the employment agency and we got a job, out at the West End, in the Queensland Can Company making tin cans for bulk pineapple, bully beef and all-sorts lollies. Then he decided to go back to New South Wales and left me there on my own.

It was at that time that people had to fill in the paperwork for the first intake of National Service in 1951 and I thought this was an out. I put my age up a year and I filled in the paperwork. I went into the first intake of National Service in August 1951. I thought, ‘This is great! I’ve got clothing, I’ve got free feeds, and I get paid.’ At the end of the three months’ service I filled in the paperwork to join the regular Army. I didn’t tell them anything, I didn’t tell them that I was Aboriginal, I wanted to be a soldier and I was accepted.

During the First World War my relatives were in the Army, and they served in France with my two brothers, and my brother-in-law served in the Second World War.

Photo Credit: 2016 Portrait from the ‘Generations of Knowledge Sharing the Spirt of the ANZACS’ Project as conceived and commissioned by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders on Campus, Western Sydney University. Portrait co-created by Uncle Norm Newlin and Photographer Robert Cameriere.

I also had cousins that were in the Air Force during the Second World War. The Army was what I aspired to. I liked the slouch hat. I thought it was great, and I used to wear it with a bit of panache.

Photo Credit: 2016 Portrait from the ‘Generations of Knowledge Sharing the Spirt of the ANZACS’ Project as conceived and commissioned by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders on Campus, Western Sydney University. Portrait co-created by Uncle Norm Newlin and Photographer Robert Cameriere.

After doing the three months’ rookie training in the National Service I went into the Regular Army and was sent to Puckapunyal. I went to Support Company and I became an Assault Pioneer, handling explosives, learning about mines and booby traps. I used TNT, gelignite, plastic explosive and I really enjoyed blowing up things. It was wonderful.

When you were in the Army you were treated as an equal. You did the training, and if you were capable of doing the job, you did it. Otherwise you got shifted back to the Infantry Platoon, if you couldn’t be a specialist.

I thought it was great, that I could do it, that I was capable. It was probably the first time in my life that I was treated like an equal – people treated me as Norman, and it was wonderful.

After we completed all of our training we were marched through Melbourne and then we boarded the Pommy ship, New Australia, and we were carted off to Korea. They called it a police action, but it was no police action, it was a bloody war! You were being shot at, cannons going off left, right and centre, and people were being killed, so it was no police action. It was a war. I lost some good mates there.

They talk about post-traumatic stress syndrome today, but when I came home all I got was a pass for a month, and I was drunk for a month. The only people I could relate to were the old blokes from World War I. It took me a long time, many years, to turn my life around.

My memory of Korea is the cold. It was the coldest I have ever been in my life. Even though we had so-called winter gear, you just couldn’t seem to get warm, with a cold wind that came down from Manchuria. The ground would freeze, and the armour-piercing shells would bounce off it. It was just so cold it was unimaginable. I’ve been down the Snowy Mountains in a blizzard and it was nowhere, nowhere near as cold as what it was in Korea.

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the gentlest people in the world. Because even though we resisted invasion, massacres, being badly treated, we could hate, hate, hate! But we don’t. We don’t.

A POEM CALLED ‘AUSTRALIA’

Australia, New Holland, Terra Australis, The Great South Land Some of the names this land was called, until they decided on Australia And when someone asked my Koori friend what it was called, before the white man came Chris just smiled, and answered, ours, before the white man came

Things that happened to my mother, I could be so evil that I would want to run out and murder people. But no, I didn’t. I think because a lot of the anger and hate I had I turned back to myself. But when I turned it around I didn’t hate everything and everybody, because hate, in the finish, would have consumed me.

When I started to write, I didn’t realise it at the time, but I used all that anger, I wrote it out. I turned myself around.

I wanted to be me, a person that I loved. And once I did that I became a different person, I did. I started to like me, and I thought it was great that I wasn’t drinking. I love being me, and when my children were born it was the most wonderful thing that ever happened.

I worked in the goldmines and then went onto to Perth, to work in the asbestos mine up at Wittenoom. That’s why I still don’t eat a lot of pasta today. The Italians ran the mess and it was spaghetti and steak, chicken and steak and spaghetti, then it was spaghetti and spaghetti, spaghetti sandwiches and I thought, ‘Oh bugger it! I’m going back to New South Wales.’ I got married and it wasn’t long after that that I stopped drinking and my life changed. I have been sober for 48 years.

At that time I was a linesman. After a few years on the job I had a terrible accident, badly damaging my leg.

They took me to casualty at Liverpool Hospital and one of the surgeons, there on the spot, wanted to throw me on the bed and take my leg off straight away. But the orthopaedic surgeon said, ‘No, I think I can save it.’ And he did. About nine years ago I had a complete knee replacement but it didn’t work well. All it does is ring the bells at the airport. Consequently, I couldn’t be a linesman anymore and I was unemployed for a while. The funny thing was, the night before I got smashed up I had filled in the paperwork to be a Civil Marriage Celebrant.

That put a bit of food on the table until I managed to get a job with TAFE. I was sweeping the floor, in the boilermakers’ shop at Miller Tech, when TAFE sent out a big questionnaire. They did this big questionnaire to find out how many Aboriginal people work in TAFE, so when I filled it in I was designated to be the spokesperson for Aboriginals employed in TAFE. I set up the Aboriginal network at TAFE, and I made sure that the Aboriginal people they employed got decent training, not just sorting mail and being a square peg in a round hole.

To be discriminated against, to be treated badly and then want to wear the country’s uniform, we are, and must be,

It was then that a friend of mine blackmailed me into getting an education. She’d started the Associate Diploma

I was in the Army almost eight years, then I left and worked in a factory in Sydney. After a while I thought, ‘To hell with this.’ I was better off out on the Nullarbor and I kept going back out there. Then one time, when I went back out there, I found that I was closer to Kalgoorlie than to Port Augusta, so I kept going and I finished up in Kalgoorlie.

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of Adult Education, and she said to me that if I didn’t sign up to do one she’d walk away. So I thought, well, I can’t have her waste a year. That got me into writing, because a big assignment I had to do was either write a 2000-word essay or write a poem about Jack Davis’s play The Dreamers. So I thought it would be easier to write a poem, and I hated poetry. I had never written a poem before. After a couple of weeks, I went to the lady that was tutoring me and I said, ‘Look, I’ll scrub this, I’ll do the 2000-word essay.’ And she said, ‘No, you’ve got to write the poem.’ So I did. She showed me how to put it all together and I said that I’d never write another one.

But she’d said to my friend that I should keep writing. She could see something. I couldn’t.

Then, in the middle of 1985, the next year, I got a sixmonth grant from the Aboriginal Arts Board to write.

In 1988 I got an overseas scholarship, to go to America, to talk to the black and native North American writers and poets. In 1989 I came back, and I was the Aboriginal Writer in Residence at Charles Sturt University, Bathurst.

Over the years I’ve had a couple of books of poems published. So I went from a sweeper in a tech college to an academic in six years.

I am now an Elder on Campus at Western Sydney University. I’m still involved in Aboriginal issues, I am on the Board of Native Title, I’m also on the Board of the Indigenous Advocacy Service.

UNCLE

ROB BRYANT GUMBAYNGGIRR WARRIOR (NSW NORTH COAST) LEADING AIRCRAFTMAN (RETIRED), ROYAL AUSTRALIAN AIR FORCE VIETNAM WAR VETERAN

‘When I put the uniform on, I represent Australia and I represent my contribution to Australia.’

My sister was married to a member of the Royal Australian Air Force. I’d go out to the RAAF base at Richmond and the Vampire jets just fascinated me. When I was doing the Intermediate Certificate we went to our vocation days and I said there and then that I wanted to join the Royal Australian Air Force. So by the time that ’67 came about I was finishing my Leaving Certificate, I saw Mum and I signed up with the Royal Australian Air Force.

I wore my uniform with pride, in that I served Australia.

It gave me a sense of comradeship, it gave me a sense of belonging. I was very happy being a part of that family.

Even though I was at an Aboriginal-only school, I was always taught by my own mum to rise above what was dished out: ‘Rise above it, son. Don’t let it get you down.’

And so that was my motto in regards to life in the armed services and my life today.

There’s only one person in this life I can change, and that’s myself, nobody else. Whatever their attitude is that’s their problem, not mine.

Photo Credit: 2016 Portrait from the ‘Generations of Knowledge Sharing the Spirt of the ANZACS’ Project as conceived and commissioned by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders on Campus, Western Sydney University. Portrait co-created by Uncle Rob Bryant and Photographer Robert Cameriere.

I was born in Bellingen, which is Gumbaynggirr country. My mum is Gumbaynggirr and my dad is Walbanga, from the south coast. Then I moved from there to Bellwood, Nambucca Heads.

Bellwood was south of Nambucca Heads so we were way out of town. We had to go into town to the movies or for shopping, as there weren’t any shops around Bellwood at that time. Dad and Mum had a house on, what we call the flat, which was right on the Pacific Highway.

I went to Bellwood Public School, which was an Aboriginal school, next door to an Aboriginal reserve. The original school was Stuart Island Aboriginal School, which began in 1916 and finished in 1950, then they moved it up to Bellwood, from Stuart Island.

That period, between 1952 and 1960, was just a normal part of life in Bellwood and Nambucca Heads. We went down and watched the football and we went to the movies. If we were at the movies, yes, we sat downstairs, but the most important thing was that we went to have entertainment, we had access to watching a Saturday afternoon movie. On Anzac Day I went down to the Anzac march. One of our Gumbaynggirr Elders, Uncle Charlie Wilson, was a Rat of Tobruk, so I went down to support Uncle Charlie.

All the families were leaving around then. Some of the older brothers and sisters went to Brisbane, and that’s when some of them were asking Mum to come to Sydney.

My brother went to Woodlawn from Nambucca Heads in 1959. That’s when Mum brought me and my younger sister to Sydney, for our further education and employment opportunities. So we moved to Sydney, to 285 Rose Street, Darlington. It’s from there that I remember, very clearly, someone, a non-Aboriginal person, took me across to St Vincent’s in Redfern. St Vincent’s is where the Aboriginal Medical Service is now. Then, it was like

an international school, because we had refugees from Lebanon, from Malta, and there were Aborigines there, who were in transit.

In 1961 I enrolled at Christian Brothers Newtown and it was there that I did my first year, second year and third year of my Intermediate Certificate. I got an Aboriginal scholarship when I did my Intermediate, and that was to go to Woodlawn College. So I did ’64 and ’65 up in Woodlawn, and I repeated in ’66 and that’s when I completed at St Benedict’s, Broadway. There was one class that was available then, in the Leaving Certificate.

I wasn’t really thinking about it – in ’64 I was at Woodlawn and I was part of the Army Cadets, so I was just part of the military then. My sister married a member of the Royal Australian Air Force, so I went out to the RAAF base at Richmond. The Vampire jets just fascinated me.

When I was doing the Intermediate we went to our vocation days and I think I said there and then that I wanted to join the Royal Australian Air Force. So I think by the time that ’67 came about I finished my Leaving, I saw Mum, and I signed up with the Royal Australian Air Force.

I remember very well we had to meet at Central Station, and we all got on the train. We caught the Spirit of Progress to Melbourne, and we got the Overlander from Melbourne to Adelaide. So when we got to recruitment at RAAF Base Edinburgh we knew each other, we looked out for each other, we were part of a team.

You had to do a three months’ recruitment, and then you posted from there after the three months. So I put in for Wagga to do Trainee Mechanic. When I joined there were a couple of other Aboriginals that I had met at RAAF Base Edinburgh and also at RAAF Base Wagga. I was treated just as anybody else; I was just a guy with a service number, no different. I saw myself in the Air Force as just a part of the team.

I ended up doing Airframe Mechanics and from Wagga I was posted to 5 Squadron at RAAF Base Fairburn in Canberra, and I was working on the Iroquois. I joined up

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in ’66, ’67 and ’68 so we had only A models and B models that came back from Vietnam.

I was then posted back to Wagga, to do my conversions into the Fitters, so I was an Airframe Fitter. I was posted back to the 5 Squadron, from Wagga, after I had completed my conversion to Fitters. From 5 Squadron then I was posted on to 9 Squadron in Vietnam, at RAAF Base Vung Tau. Along with 9 Squadron, 35 Squadron and Base Squadron were there, too. I was posted there in April 1970.

I was to conduct servicing of the Iroquois before flights early in the morning, and after flights when they came in, and major servicing when they were due. There were different service personnel that were required. You have to have a technical fitter, an engine fitter, airframe fitter, instrument fitter. You’re looking at around six to eight people to make sure that, when the pilots came there in the morning, it was operational.

There were at least 12 Iroquois that had to be serviced in the morning. Iroquois came in for different reasons.

We had Iroquois that had heavy landings, Iroquois that crashed or had bullet holes. The bullet holes were fixed up by the sheet metal workers. So you had a large contingent of Air Force personnel in that RAAF Base Vung Tau. You had the Base Squadron, you had the flight crew, you had a ground crew, you had your airfield defence gunners, you had 35 Squadron.

As ground crew, I saw our job as very important, in that the Iroquois was kept operational at its maximum. So I saw myself as part of that team that kept them flying, because out in the field they needed an Iroquois and we had them there.

I served in Vietnam for 12 months. I arrived in April ’70 and I left in April ’71. I was then posted to 36 Squadron at RAAF Base Richmond and remained at RAAF Base Richmond until an Honourable Discharge was effected in April ’73. So in my time I was a member of the Royal Australian Air Force from 1967 to 1973 and I left as a Leading Aircraftsman. I was quite happy with that.

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When I put the uniform on, I represent Australia and I represent my contribution to Australia. I wore my uniform with pride, in that I served Australia. It gave me a sense of comradeship, and it gave me a sense of belonging. I was very happy being a part of that family.

In my life, even though I was at an Aboriginal-only school, I was always taught by my own mum to rise above what was dished out. ‘Rise above it, son. Don’t let it get you down.’ And so that was my motto in regards to life, in the Armed Services, and my life today. There’s only one person in this life I can change and that’s myself, nobody else. Whatever their attitude is, that’s their problem, not mine.

The rest of my life has been with my own people, the Aboriginal people, in different facets, right across the board, from rehabilitation centres, to the performing arts, to small business. Today I am really involved with promoting economic development of Aboriginal and

Torres Strait Islander people small businesses. I am also part of the community in regards to Native Title. Up at Nambucca Heads I’m on the board of Gaagal Wanggaan South Beach National Park.

I’m also on the land, I’m on my mum’s land. That land was where our house was. That land was where I was brought up. That land was in my mum’s name. It has a special lease which prevented me from being part of the Stolen Generation. So when I purchased this land and I saw my name, Clive Joseph Robin Bryant on the title deeds, I said to my mum and dad – they were already passed on – I said, ‘I got a little bit of our land back.’

So I am very, very happy in that I have contributed to Australia, and I have contributed to my fellow Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

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UNCLE

VIC SIMON PRIVATE (RETIRED), AUSTRALIAN ARMY VIETNAM WAR VETERAN

‘I’m walking along and I see a poster of this bloke pointing at me… We Want You!’

I left high school at 15, and I ended up getting a job with one of my sisters at a printing factory. I wasn’t thinking about joining the Army, but I was just walking around in Sydney there one day, I think it was York Street, there’s a place there where they enlist in the Army, and I’m walking along and the next thing I see this bloke pointing at me: ‘We Want You!’ Then my father and my uncle sort of come into my head.

Well my father was a Rat of Tobruk, and my uncle he was a prisoner of war in Changi for three years, that was in the Second World War. And I just thought to myself, ‘Why not?

Why not go in and join?’ So I just signed on for three years.

I was in the Army for about 12 months before I found out that I was going to go to Vietnam. While I was there we were visited by the Prime Minister of Australia. My mother sent me over the front page of the Telegraph, me on the front page with the Prime Minister, Harold Holt … strange things happen in war.

Photo Credit: 2016 Portrait from the ‘Generations of Knowledge Sharing the Spirt of the ANZACS’ Project as conceived and commissioned by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders on Campus, Western Sydney University. Portrait co-created by Uncle Vic Simon and Photographer Robert Cameriere.

I’m originally from up the north Central Coast, a town called Forster. That’s where my childhood started, even though I was born in Taree. They didn’t have any hospitals in Forster so my mother had to go to Taree to have me. So I spent my early life in Forster, but just about all my relations are in Forster.

When I got to around five or six years old my parents decided to come down to Sydney because they couldn’t get any work in Forster. I was the only boy in the family.

I’ve got three sisters: two sisters older than me and one younger. So, when I was about five or six we moved down to Sydney, and my father ended up getting a job with the Kelvinator refrigeration company, and my mother ended up getting a cleaning job with the Water Police.

First off, we got a Housing Commission place at Merrylands, then we moved down to Matraville, into a brand-new house, and I went to school at Maroubra Primary. I have one funny memory of that time.

They had trams running back then and one day I caught a tram to school. When I was coming home I jumped on the tram again, but it ended up going down towards Maroubra Beach, and I thought, ‘What’s going on here?’

I didn’t know that trams ran that way, I just thought they ran straight back the way I’d come. As I’d bought my fare already, I didn’t have any money to get on another tram and I had to walk home.

Towards the end of primary school they had just built a boy’s school, which was called South Sydney Boys High, and I ended up going down there for my high schooling.

I left high school at 15 and I ended up getting a job with one of my sisters, at a printing factory.

I wasn’t thinking about it, but I was just walking around in Sydney one day, I think it was York Street, and there was a place there where they enlisted in the Army. I’m walking along and suddenly I see this bloke pointing at me – ‘We want you’ – and then my father and my uncle

came to mind. My father was a Rat of Tobruk, and my uncle was a prisoner of war in Changi for three years, in the Second World War. And I just thought to myself, ‘Why not? Why not go in and join?’ So I just signed on for three years.

I was in the Army for about 12 months before I found out that I was going to go to Vietnam. We went over to reinforce One Battalion at Bien Hoa. There was an airport right next to our camp and the screaming noises of the planes, coming in and going out, wasn’t very good. When One Battalion came home I found out that I hadn’t been over there long enough to come home with them. They stipulated that you had to be in an active area for at least three months before you get all the benefits when you come home. So I ended up joining 6th Battalion to do the rest of my time, in D company, 12 Platoon.

We were in camp when suddenly we got mortared, and we thought, ‘Hello, what’s going on?’ So the next morning my company, D Company, were sent out to find out where we had got mortared from. We went on a patrol to see if we could come across anything and all of a sudden we just got fired upon, and that was when the battle that they call the Battle of Long Tan actually started. All we could see were the Viet Cong running everywhere, shooting, and we were shooting back. This went on for a good three hours in pouring rain. We didn’t realise, at that stage, that there were so many Viet Cong. We were only 100 strong but we were told there was at least 1500 of them. All you saw were figures running between rubber trees, and you’re just shooting. Bang!

We ran out of ammunition, I ran out of ammunition, and then we finally got reinforcements, and helicopters bringing in ammunition. After a while I could hear our APCs coming, and reinforcements were coming out, so I got up and said to myself, ‘I’m going to go and try and get a dry cigarette.’ This good mate of mine, a forward scout from another section, followed me, and the next minute I heard a shot. Paul got shot between the eyes. I thought everything was over, but that must have been about the last shot fired in the battle. It was one big battle.

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It never entered my head that I was going to get killed; all I was doing was just shooting at what I could see.

When the battle finished I saw that the rubber tree that I was behind was that scarred with bullets it’s a wonder it didn’t fall over. I ended up getting back to camp a couple of days later, and when I was getting ready for sleep that night I pulled my poncho out and there was a bullet hole in it, with a bullet stuck in it. I thought, ‘Gee whiz!’ I didn’t realise just how close the bullets were coming to me.

While I was there, my mother sent me the front page of the Telegraph, with me on the front page with the Prime Minister, Harold Holt, who was visiting. Strange things happen!

I ended up coming home in December. I was discharged in early ’68 and when I came home I found out that I had ended up doing my ear drums in. There was an incident in Vietnam, with my section commander. The mine he was carrying just blew up and I was close behind him.

So I ended up going into Concord Hospital, having skin grafts done on my eardrums. They did a good job on them because I’ve never had any trouble since.

Being an Aboriginal in the Army, I was never discriminated against. The boys were all a bunch of great blokes, all of us mixed together. We had some good times there. One thing that did rock me a bit was when we came home – the people didn’t recognise the Vietnam War. When they finally did recognise the Vietnam War, we did a march through Sydney and what a lovely march that was. The streets were just loaded with people. A real tear-jerker.

People were coming out and grabbing you, and shaking hands, and kissing you.

After I got out of the Army my first job came about by accident. I was drinking at the Maroubra Junction Pub and the manager came up and asked me, ‘What are you doing now? Have you got anything planned?’ And I said, ‘No, I’m just having a bit of a break.’ He told me that his cellarman was going on a month’s holiday and asked if I’d do the cellar for him. I told him that I didn’t know anything about cellars but he showed me and I ended up going down to do it.

Photo Credit: 2016 Portrait from the ‘Generations of Knowledge Sharing the Spirt of the ANZACS’ Project as conceived and commissioned by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders on Campus, Western Sydney University. Portrait co-created by Uncle Vic Simon and Photographer Robert Cameriere.

My father was still at Kelvinator, so I ended up going down to Kelvinator and I did a refrigeration course. I was on the road looking after household fridges for a couple of years, until I couldn’t get on with my boss. So I ended up joining the Sydney County Council, joining underground cables and doing household electricity services. I was with them for 30 years. I am now on the board of the Matraville RSL Sub-Branch, and I’m also on the Matraville RSL Club Ltd board. I’ve got a few grandkids, and I’ve got a few great grandkids.

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UNCLE

VILLINGTON LUI TORRES STRAIT ISLANDER PETTY OFFICER (RETIRED), ROYAL AUSTRALIAN NAVY MARINE TECHNICAL PROPULSION (MTP) VIETNAM WAR VETERAN

‘When you serve your country, you’re doing something for your country.’

After I completed Year 10, I went to see the administrator and I asked him if I could go to university and he said to me we, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, were not allowed to go to university, and that was it. I got really hurt about that. I wanted to study science but there is just nothing you can do, you just accept it and go away.

After that I was going to become a pearl diver. But because a lot of my cousins, relations and my friends had all died from diving, you know it’s very dangerous, I said, ‘No, I’ll get out of all this.’

A lot of my mates, they joined the Navy before me, so when the Navy recruitment came to the school I joined up.

A lot of my friends were marine engineers, so I thought if they can achieve that in the Navy so can I, and that’s why I became a marine engineer.

I just went in and did my service to my country and I thought it was the right thing to do. When you serve your country, you’re doing something for your country.

Photo Credit: 2016 Portrait from the ‘Generations of Knowledge Sharing the Spirt of the ANZACS’ Project as conceived and commissioned by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders on Campus, Western Sydney University. Portrait co-created by Uncle Villington Lui and Photographer Robert Cameriere.

My mob is from Murray Island in the Torres Strait. I grew up on Murray Island and then from Murray Island my family moved over to Iama Island. I then went from Iama Island over to Thursday Island to do my schooling there. I joined the Navy from Thursday Island.

My family originally came from Murray and Darnley, but they are all now scattered around the Torres Strait. I’ve got a lot of uncles and aunties because of the tradition of adoption in the Torres Strait, so everybody is more or less related to everybody else.

There were a lot of South Sea Islanders there, and then the original inhabitants moved them out from Murray Island. The only Europeans who were there were the schoolteachers, and sometimes a priest.

I started school on Murray Island and then, when my family moved over to Iama Island, I completed my Year 7 there. I went on to complete my Year 10 on Thursday Island. It was a bigger school and the whole of Torres Strait went to Thursday Island to complete their Year 10.

It was a mixed school: there were Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders, Indonesian kids, Chinese and Japanese.

Looking back, I think it was a multi-national, but at the time I just thought that was how it was supposed to be.

All those people came over there for the pearling industry.

The pearling industry was the thing that brought all hose immigrants in from outside. There was pearling and there were also Trochus shells.

We were under the White Australian Policy over there.

We had an administrator who was looking after us, he was just dictating everything. The laws were all different back then. The black weren’t allowed in the pubs, the black weren’t allowed to do this and that. It is basically the same as how the Aboriginals were getting treated down here on the mainland. Because we were under the Director of Native Affairs he included both Torres Strait Islanders and Aboriginals.

When I went to Torres Strait College it was a different situation over there, but you had to abide by the rules.

There was a white person who was in charge of us at the college, and he’d tell us what to do. I couldn’t tell you about adults who were living there, but their stories are basically the same as other Aborigines that were living down here. There were restrictions on them, like getting alcohol and which places they were allowed to go. When you went to the picture show the natives were sitting up the front, the whites were sitting up on the top, and the half-castes were sitting in the back. When it rained the natives got washed out because there was no roof over their heads, but the half-castes and the whites were all right, they were under the shade. They’re the kind of things that you had to go through, you had to abide by.

What could you do? You couldn’t do anything.

After I did Year 10 I went to see the Administrator and I asked him if I could go to university after I completed my Year 10. And he said to me we were not allowed to go to university, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders weren’t allowed. And that was it. I got really hurt by that.

I wanted to study science but there was just nothing you could do. You just accepted it and went away.

Joining the Navy just happened to come by accident.

After I completed my Year 10 and I went to see the administrator and he said, ‘No’, I came back and I thought the next thing that I was going to do was to become a pearl diver. Then the Navy recruiters arrived, and that was when I said, ‘No, I’ll get out of all this’, and I went and joined the Navy. I did it because a lot of my ccousins, relations and friends had all died from diving. It’s very dangerous because they had to go down about 50 or 60 fathoms sometimes to pick shells. That’s really deep, and the drownings would happen when they got their lifelines tangled up in the coral. So, I was thinking doing that was going to be really dangerous, and that’s why I didn’t really want to pursue it.

At the end of the year, when school was just about finished, they came to do the recruiting for the Navy.

This guy came up and asked if anybody wanted to go into the Navy and I said, ‘Yes, I’ll go and do that,’ because a lot

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of my mates had joined before me. I thought that when I get in there I might be able to pursue what I really wanted, and they explained it all, about what you could get in the Navy. I became a marine engineer because a lot of my friends were marine engineers, and I thought if they can achieve that in the Navy so can I. And that’s why I became a marine engineer.

I was 15 when I signed up and I went over to HMAS Leeuwin in Fremantle and I did my 12 months junior recruiting over there. There were five of us – four of us were from Torres Strait and there was one Aboriginal.

We flew down to Brisbane and then we caught the train, I think the name of the train was the Ghan, and it took us all the way through the desert and eventually we got to Fremantle. We then came all the way back to Brisbane, and then from Brisbane we caught the plane and we flew back up to Torres Strait. After that I came over to the main ships which were in Garden Island.

When I joined the Navy there were a few things about racial discrimination but I didn’t take any notice of that, I just pushed it away. I just ignored those people and carried on doing whatever I was doing. They would look down on you when they talked to you, even people in the same rank as you. It didn’t happen in front of you but you could feel it, you know. It’s the same everywhere you go.

You get the same thing so you just accept it, you know; this is how it is.

I served 20 years. I served on HMAS Sydney and on Vendetta. When I was on Vendetta I spent time on the bridge steering the ship. That was part of my training.

I became a Leading Junior Recruit and everybody seemed to be listening to me. I got a bit of respect out of that.

When you go up in the ranks you get more respect as you go up. I ended up on HMAS Stalwart in my last years but I’ve also been on HMAS Broome, HMAS Moresby and patrol boats.

I went to Vietnam on HMAS Sydney. We went there to pick up troops, bring the troops back, and some of the dead bodies and equipment. Vung Tau was the area where we normally picked them all up to bring back to Australia.

My most vivid memory of the time was when I nearly got killed. We were doing the watch on HMAS Sydney, sitting outside on deck. Every now and again we’d stand up and go and do our rounds of inspection. You’d inspect all the vehicles, making sure they were all latched up, and then you’d come back. On that particular night it was really windy, and there was a big high sea. My friend had gone to do his inspection and I was sitting there on my own, when suddenly the ship must have turned and this big wave just came over the side and washed off everything from where I was sitting, including me. I just put my hand up and grabbed the guard rail of the ship. When I looked down there was a dinghy just underneath me, and I lowered myself into it, and I yelled out, ‘Help!’ Someone heard and they came over and pulled me out of there, otherwise I could have lost my life, because it happened at night and I would have disappeared.

While I was in the Navy eventually everything changed. In the Navy things were different: you had a few privileges, like you were allowed to go to the pub. Back where I came from you were not allowed to go to the pub. I suppose the thing was that if you’re good enough to serve your country you’re good enough to go to the pub and have a few drinks.

off you’re nothing, you’re nobody. I just ignore it. This is something you have to put up with every day. You learn to put up with things like this. It not only happened to me it happened to everybody who was black. You just have to put up with something like this. That’s how it is; it’s a dream that will never come true. You can’t change things like this because it happens every day, every moment of your life. Those things about discrimination and stuff like this it happens every day, every day. It’s been with me for so long and I am immune to things like this. I know how to approach it. I know how to get rid of it and stuff like this doesn’t affect me.

I put in 20 years and when they asked me to stay on I said, ‘No, I’ve had enough.’ And that was it. Twenty years was good enough for me and so I left. After I finished with the Navy I drove a taxi for a couple of years, and after that I went to university and I completed my degree I did Social Science and I went and worked at the Rozelle Psychiatric Hospital. After that I worked at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, and then I retired.

I just went in and did my service to the country and I thought it was the right thing to do. We went and sacrificed our lives for them. When you serve your country, you’re doing something for your country. But after we got back, after we got out of the Navy or the Army, we never got respected. As for the whites, the whites got respected more than the blacks. The blacks never got respected, even if we’d served.

It happened to me a couple of times where I had to argue my point, to actually get into places like an RSL club. I’d tell them, ‘I served the country and I am legally entitled to go into the RSL club and even some of the pubs.’ They’d tell me, ‘You’re not allowed in the pubs,’ and I say, ‘Why? When I have my uniform on you let me in the pub. Now I haven’t got my uniform on you reckon I am no good?’

When they look at you and you’re in the uniform they look after you. But as soon as you take your uniform

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Photo Credit: 2016 Portrait from the ‘Generations of Knowledge Sharing the Spirt of the ANZACS’ Project as conceived and commissioned by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders on Campus, Western Sydney University. Portrait co-created by Uncle Villington Lui and Photographer Robert Cameriere.

UNCLE

JOHN KINSELA WIRADJURI AND JAWOYN GUNNER (RETIRED), ROYAL AUSTRALIAN ARTILLERY 1970–71 CORPORAL (RETIRED), ARMY RESERVE COMMANDO UNIT 1978–84 VIETNAM WAR VETERAN

‘You know, when you’re getting shot at, your mates next to you, you don’t care what colour they are.’

To me, being Australian doesn’t matter what culture you’re from, you’re just proud to be Australian. You know, it wasn’t such a big thing being in the military. My brother, he signed up and I got called up in ’69. I had two uncles that went to Korea. I’ve got a nephew that’s been to Afghanistan and East Timor, and he’s a volunteer, he’s a Regular Army.

I think the reason Aboriginals join the military, going back to World War I, is just the pride of living here, you know. You went to defend the country. When you hear what’s happening over there you don’t want it to come to your own back door. It doesn’t matter who you are, or what background you are, we’re all Australians. We’re a multicultural country now.

What upsets me is when ANZAC Day comes around and everybody is talking about ‘Invasion Day’ and everything.

ANZACs means Australian and New Zealand Army Corps and it’s got nothing to do with ‘Invasion Day’ and they put that in the same boat with what happened when white settlers first came to Australia.

Photo Credit: 2016 Portrait from the ‘Generations of Knowledge Sharing the Spirt of the ANZACS’ Project as conceived and commissioned by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders on Campus, Western Sydney University. Portrait co-created by Uncle John Kinsela and Photographer Robert Cameriere.

I was born in Surry Hills and most of my younger life was spent in Redfern. My dad, he is from Condobolin, and he’s a Wiradjuri man. My mum, she was born in Adelaide and her mother was from the Jawoyn tribe up in the Northern Territory. Just before she died she was recognised as descended from the Jawoyn tribe because her mother was a Lost Generation child brought up in Adelaide.

My mother’s father was white, a second generation Englishman. His father actually went to the First World War. My mother’s sister was dark, but my mother was kind of fair and she kind of took after her father. We always identified as Aboriginal.

A little incident happened to me years ago when I went to Nowra. Down Nowra was a big population of Aboriginal people and there were two cousins, one was black and one was white, because there was a mixed marriage in the family. I nearly got into a blue because I commented on how dark he was. They were going to have a go at me because they thought I was white, and here I am trying to tell them that my grandmother was darker than him. Sometimes, being Aboriginal you identify as Aboriginal but some people, white people’s perceptions of Aboriginals is, ‘Oh, you’re not dark enough.’ Back in the ’70s I used to have a moustache and some people thought I was Italian.

My earliest recollection, as a young child, was us living in Newtown. There were nine of us, all living in the same house. We lived there with the grandmother and her husband, and some of the other relations, so being brought up as an Aboriginal you might get a whole family in one room.

After a few years there we moved to Nowra because Dad had relations that lived there. We didn’t have electricity, we didn’t have water; Mum used to do the washing down

the creek. We did have a fridge, which was fairly modern in them days. It was a kerosene-run fridge. We had a radio which was battery operated. We had a wood stove and Mum used to bake dinners on that, and we had an open fire.

All of us used to get around the open fire in the winter, just before we went to school. One of the sisters got too close to the fire and she ended up getting 90% of her body burned and she had to be rushed to Sydney. Back then they didn’t have the freeways that they have now, and that’s one of the reasons we moved back to Sydney.

We stayed with Mum’s sister, and at that time she had six kids, so there were six of hers plus our nine. Then Dad lost his job and Mum ended up at the Salvation Army Home out at La Perouse. Dad went to live with one of his relations. The eldest of our boys and girls ended up in a boys’ home and a girls’ home. The girls went to Mittagong and the boys went to Bowral, and we were there for 12 months. In the boys’ home it was mostly homeless boys or single parents. The guy who ran the place was a bit brutal – if anybody did anything wrong he would give them a backhander. I saw him kick one boy down the stairs one time.

After 12 months Dad got a job and we got a house in Redfern, and this was where all my fond memories are from. It was only a three bedroom house and Dad built a little cubbyhole down the back where me and my brother slept. We had electricity; we actually got a TV. Me and my brother joined the Scouts and my sisters joined the Girl Guides. During my time in the Scouts I achieved the Queen's Scout Award and I got the Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award. In 1968, when the Duke visited Australia, I actually got my award off him.

During the week I had nothing else to do and I got a bit restless so I joined the Police Boys Club. Looking around the club I saw there was wrestling upstairs and I got all excited because that’s what I wanted to do. So I said, ‘Oh, how do I start?’ and he said, ‘Come next Tuesday because we have a wrestling tournament and we’ll enter you.’

I said, ‘I haven’t wrestled.’ And he said, ‘It doesn’t matter, just bring a pair of shorts and shoes.’ So I had my first wrestle, and I won two, then I ended up getting beaten

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by the guy who was State Champion. But he only ever beat me once. Within three years of me taking up wrestling I won selection to go to the Mexico Olympics.

Growing up as an Aboriginal person in Redfern, back in the ’60s, wasn’t like Redfern today. It was a safe community because of the football, the South Sydney Football Club, and there were Aboriginal football players around. We associated with Aboriginals through the Aboriginal Foundation set up by Charlie Perkins, which was in George Street. My mother had a job there as a welfare officer. We ended up getting a house in Balmain at the time I got selected to go to the Mexico Olympics, but Redfern is where all my fondest memories are, of being in the Boy Scouts and going to wrestling at Leichhardt Police Boys Club.

I left school at 14 and the main reason was having so many kids in the family at the time. My first job was with Flemings which was like IGA or Woolworths. I ended up getting a job where my dad worked, in a sock factory making hosiery. Eventually I got an apprenticeship there as a knitting mechanic, and I went to TAFE for three years and I got a certificate. It was at that time that I got selected to go to the Olympics.

When I was selected for Mexico I was 19 and I was the first Aboriginal wrestler to represent Australia. We were lucky to have the wrestling training venue in the Olympic village. I used to go up to the main gate and all these people, the Mexican locals, would be asking for our autographs. I felt like a star. It’s an experience that I will never forget. We were only a team of three so we actually trained with some of the other countries.

I trained with the Koreans, Pakistanis, Canadians and wrestled an American, who won the silver medal. When you wrestle these guys you’re way out of your depth.

One of my wrestles was with an Italian. Now, the Italian was European Champion in 1968, and he came fourth, and the other three guys that beat him came from Asia and America. I gained a lot of experience and a lot of friendships.

The Black Power Salute, now that was broadcast everywhere. Because I was Aboriginal I kind of admire what they did, but the backlash that they copped, you know? They weren’t allowed to represent their country ever again.

What you’ve got to remember is the ideal for the Olympics – it’s not to win, it’s to compete. Politics shouldn’t come into it. Being Aboriginal you’re proud of who you are and where you come from.

After the Mexico Olympics I went to the Australian Wrestling Championships in Melbourne and I got beaten, I came second. I was one of the lucky ones who got selected and in 1969 I was conscripted and had to go through a medical, which was done in the city, and then I got my marching orders to form up in Marrickville.

They had buses that took us to Kapooka, near Wagga, for our basic training. Near the completion of training we had a choice of what unit to go in and I chose Artillery because I was told the Physical Training Instructors course was done at the School of Artillery in Manly, and one of the reasons I wanted to be in Sydney was to train for the 1970 Commonwealth Games which were in Edinburgh, Scotland.

When we put down our job allocations I was told there were no vacancies for PTIs and they weren’t running a course. Instead, they were asking for volunteers for Vietnam and 90% of the class put their hands up, so I put my hand up and I got selected to go to Vietnam. We were sent out to Canungra. Now Canungra is a four-week training program and it’s probably some of the hardest training you will ever do in the Army. Everywhere you went you either marched or you ran, it was just one whole learning process.

The story got around that I went to the Olympics and everybody asked me what I did at the Olympics, and I used to say I was a wrestler. Back in those days they had professional wrestling and one of them was called Killer Kowalski, so I got the nickname ‘Killer’ Everywhere I went people would start calling out ‘Killer!’

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When we got orders to go to Vietnam we went to South Head out at Watsons Bay and we spent a night there, and then they took us by bus to Mascot. We got to Tan Son Nhat airport, Saigon, and there was a smell about Vietnam that filled your nostrils and didn’t leave you until you left the country. I think it was just to do with the vegetation and the heat.

When we left Tan Son Nhat we flew straight to Nui Dat and I was sent to 106 Battery 4 Field Regiment. We had facilities in Nui Dat but the guns were actually out at the Horseshoe. All the guns were pointed out towards the Long Hai hills. Now the Long Hai were a mountain peak where the Viet Cong had a stronghold, and they had tunnels. For the whole eight months I spent in Vietnam they used to send B-52s to bomb the Long Hai. We were forever sending artillery shells there. Artillery was on standby 24 hours, so as soon as you got on the gun you were in action for 24 hours.

When the guns go off all the vibration goes forward, so anything that is in front of the guns gets all the vibration.

In the Horseshoe we were down the front and the American guns were above us, so every time they fired over to the Long Hai all their vibration used to come over us. Even if you weren’t on duty, your mattress would go a couple of inches off the ground.

One of my fond memories was getting a visit from Arthur Tunstall. Now Arthur Tunstall was the boxing manager for the Mexico Olympics and he found out I was in Vietnam so I got special permission to leave the guns and they took me back to a Nui Dat and he came to see me for a day.

After eight months in Vietnam I still had about six months to go of my two year service, so when I came back to Australia I ended up doing a physical training instructors course at Manly, and I failed. I was probably the fittest athlete there but where I lacked was in education, having to leave school at 14. A lot of that stuff was a little bit over my head so they sent me back to Townsville, then I got out of the Army. I got a job as a courier, and I was a driver right up until I retired.

In February 1972 I won selection to go to the Munich Olympics. I came seventh. I wrestled with an Italian in one of the second-last rounds that I had. If I had beaten the Italian I would’ve come third, at least third or fourth. Being out of the sport for two years, not even stepping on a mat, I thought that was a very good accomplishment – only 12 months training after Vietnam and I came seventh.

We were fortunate to have our competition on the first four days, then on the fifth day I was sitting in the village having some drinks with some friends. The next minute I hear this bang! Bang! Bang! And I thought – I was in Vietnam the year before and I knew the sound of weapons – and so I thought, ‘No, not here!’ The next day the manager came around and he said there was a massacre. The Israeli Olympic team was taken hostage and some of the guys killed were actually wrestlers, you know. What sticks in my mind is my manager.

He was good friends with the Israeli wrestling coach that got killed.

I was a volunteer for the 2000 Olympics and I was talking to the Israeli wrestling team manager, and I asked what their facilities were like at the Olympic village. He said, ‘Oh, we’re surrounded by barbed wire and we’ve got guards, you know.’ This is the extent that the Olympics have gone to.

The Vietnam War was a very publicised war, they had cameras everywhere. You heard of things like the My Lai massacre and people kind of put that on you, that you are a child killer. So when I came back I was reluctant to tell anybody that I was a Vietnam veteran.

There was an incident that happened to me. I won some tickets to go to a Russian ballet and I happened to wear one of my Olympic blazers. I thought, you know, it was a formal function. Well these protesters out the front saw the Returned Serviceman’s badge on my lapel, they didn’t see the Australian Coat of Arms or the Munich Olympic symbols underneath. All they saw was Returned Serviceman’s badge and they were having a go at me, that it’s an insult, for me to go and see the Russians.

Discrimination in the military? You know, when you’re getting shot at, your mate next to you, you don’t care what colour they are. You know, it’s like a family.

Unfortunately the stories I heard about my uncle Reg Saunders, when he got out of the military, he wasn’t allowed to have a drink with the boys at the pub.

There was discrimination. One time somebody asked me what nationality I was and I said, ‘I am Aboriginal,’ and they said, ‘Oh, you don’t look it.’ I said that all my life I’ve identified as being Aboriginal and I am proud of who I am, when people say I don’t look Aboriginal. But other Aboriginal people can see my Aboriginality.

In World War I Aboriginal people weren’t allowed to sign up. Military people in World War I were selected by the doctor’s recommendation that they were actually white enough to go into the military. They sent black trackers to the Boer War and afterwards, because of the White Australia Policy, they weren’t allowed back in the country, they were left there.

I am a proud Aussie. I’ve not only fought under the Australian flag, I’ve represented the Australian flag twice. To me being Australian, it doesn’t matter what culture you’re from, you’re just proud to be Australian.

You know, it wasn’t such a big thing being in the military.

My brother, he signed up and I got called up. I had two uncles that went to Korea. I’ve got a nephew that’s been to Afghanistan and East Timor and he’s a volunteer, he’s a Regular Army.

All the way from World War I it was just the pride of living here, you know. You went to defend the country. When I came back from Vietnam, in the RSLs you had the World War I and the World War II veterans and their opinion of the Vietnam War was that it wasn’t really a war. Yet it’s the longest lasting war the Australian government has been involved in, except for Afghanistan now.

I think the reason Aboriginals join the military is that when you hear what’s happening over there you don’t want it to come to your own back door. It doesn’t matter who you are, or which background you are, we’re all Australians.

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What upsets me is when ANZAC Day comes around and everybody is talking about ‘Invasion Day’. ANZACs means Australian and New Zealand Army Corps and it’s got nothing to do with ‘Invasion Day’ but they put that in the same boat with what happened when white settlers first came to Australia.

We’re a multi-cultural country now. I’ve been to a war, I’ve seen the horrors. I’ve been to an Olympics where all the countries come together. And I’ve seen what happened in Munich with the massacre.

At the moment I work with the Attorney General. I do Circle Sentencing which is to keep our people out of the penal system and I do the breaking barriers fitness for Aboriginal kids at Emerton and I’m still involved with the wrestling at Mount Druitt PCYC. There are three young fellas that I coached at Hornsby: one of them went to the Sydney 2000 Olympics, and all three of them are now wrestling coaches. I am happily married, I’ve got three kids and seven grandchildren. I’ve still got a son and a daughter living at home – I can’t get rid of them.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people serving in the military usually enjoyed the same conditions as everyone else.

For many, it was the first time in their lives that they had experienced equal treatment and individual respect.

Sadly, upon their return to civilian life, many also found they were treated with the same prejudice and discrimination as before.

LEST WE FORGET

Aunty Mae Robinson Elder on Campus Honorary Doctorate of Letters (Western Sydney University 2011) Photo courtesy of Ms Sally Tsoutas Western Sydney University Photographer.

WESTERN SYDNEY

UNIVERSITY Western Sydney University has a longstanding commitment to its Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities; indeed, this was one of the founding concerns of the University.

We recognise that having dynamic, purposeful and respectful relationships with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities is a key building block of success. It underpins our institutional philosophy, which is ‘Securing Success’.

The Elders on Campus program provides advice and expertise to the University. The Generations of Knowledge project builds on that history to collect stories from the Elders that speak to the University’s establishment and development, with a focus on Elders whose tracks cross the University’s campuses.

Photo Credit: Too Dark to See Documentary Photographer Robert Cameriere.

The Generations of Knowledge project has been approved by the Western Sydney University Human Research Ethics Committee and, in addition, we choose to comply with the stringent research guidelines laid down by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS).

We at Western Sydney University recognise and wish to place on the public record that Aboriginal clans of the regions in which we are located have had an indelible influence in the development and outworking of the University as a tertiary education institution. Western Sydney University campuses rest on the traditional lands of the Darug, Tharawal, Gundungurra and Wiradjuri peoples.

‘Generations of Knowledge’ is an extensive, multifaceted project, the heart of which is to acknowledge the role that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders, leaders and achievers past and present have had in terms of their influence on the development of Western Sydney University as a significant institution in Greater Western Sydney. The project was conceived by Elders on Campus and an imprimatur given to the Office of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Employment and Engagement to execute the project with their ongoing guidance. Western Sydney University as a learning institution, cognisant of the wrongs committed against Australia’s First Peoples, is committed to proper acknowledgement of the cultural knowledge and intellectual property contributed by First Peoples to this and other projects undertaken by the University.

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Photo Credit: Too Dark to See Documentary Photographer Robert Cameriere.

A NOTE ON THE

SOURCES The Australian War Memorial, Canberra for providing historic images and film footage from their collection The Australian National Maritime Museum for allowing us to film on HMAS Vampire and HMAS Onslow Historical background research and statistics were provided by the following sources: Australian War Memorial official website – www.awm.gov.au/encyclopedia/war_casualties/ Australian Government Department of Veterans’ Affairs subsite – ‘Australians at War www.australiansatwar.gov.au and www.dva.gov.au/site-help/links-other-web-sites Australian War Memorial War History site – ‘Indigenous service in Australia’s armed forces in peace and war: an overview by Dr Chris Clark' www.awm.gov.au/media/releases/indigenous-military-service-recognised/ Additional sources for background information and verification were found at the Australian War Memorial site – War History: Indigenous service in Australia's armed forces in peace and war www.awm.gov.au/indigenous-service/report-introduction/ Colonial period, 1788–1901 Sudan, March–June 1885 South African War (Boer War), 1899–1902 China (Boxer Rebellion), 1900–01 First World War, 1914–18 Second World War, 1939–45 Occupation of Japan, 1946–51 Korean War, 1950–53 Malayan Emergency, 1950–60 Indonesian Confrontation, 1963–66 Vietnam War, 1962–75 Iraq: the First Gulf War, 1990–91 Afghanistan, 2001–present Iraq: the Second Gulf War, 2003–09 Peace keeping, 1947–present

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If you are interested in sourcing further information about the Generations of Knowledge ‘Sharing the Spirits Of Our ANZACS’ Exhibition please go online to www.westernsydney.edu.au/spiritofouranzacs The website features the stories, lives and people in the Too Dark To See Film and publication including the e-version of this book.

You can also contact Western Sydney University Office of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Employment and Engagement Phone 02 9678 7587 Email success@westernsydney.edu.au www.westernsydney.edu.au

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Photo Credit: Too Dark to See Documentary Photographer Robert Cameriere.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Biographies and Portraits: The Co-Creators Uncle John Kinsela Uncle Rob Bryant Uncle David Williams Uncle Villington Lui Uncle Vic Simon Uncle Cliff Daylight Uncle Harry Allie Professor Lisa Jackson-Pulver AM Uncle Charlie Mundine Uncle Norm Newlin We would like to acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders who have contributed to the advancement of Aboriginal affairs in the development of Western Sydney University We would like to acknowledge all Chancellors, Deputy Chancellors, Vice-Chancellors, Deputy Vice-Chancellors and Provosts for their contributions to the advancement of Aboriginal affairs in the development of Western Sydney University.

Western Sydney University Aboriginal Elder in Residence, Badanami Centre for Indigenous Education Aunty Jean South

Western Sydney University Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Employment and Engagement Advisory Board and Elders on Campus Uncle Daryl Wright Aunty Djapirri Mununggirritj Aunty Edna Watson Aunty Fran Bodkin Uncle Greg Simms Uncle Harry Allie Uncle Ivan Wellington Aunty Matilda House Aunty Mae Robinson Aunty Margaret Weir Aunty Noeline Briggs-Smith OAM Uncle Norm Newlin Aunty Norma Shelley OAM Aunty Pearl Wymarra Uncle Rex Sorby Aunty Sandra Lee Uncle Steve Williams Aunty Thelma Quartey Uncle Wes Marne Aunty Zona Wilkinson Western Sydney University Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Employment Strategy Consultative Committee Western Sydney University Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community

Western Sydney University Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Senior Staff Badanami Centre for Indigenous Education Schools Engagement Unit Indigenous Outreach Men’s Health Information and Resource Centre Student Recruitment Unit The College

Terri Keating, Administration Assistant, Office of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Employment and Engagement Library Michael Gonzalez, University Librarian Whitlam Institute Eric Sidoti, Director Office of the Vice-President (People and Advancement) Office of Marketing and Communications

Project Team Western Sydney University Office of the DVC & Vice-President (Academic) Office of the Pro Vice-Chancellor Engagement and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Leadership Alison Anderson, Project Officer, Office of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Employment and Engagement

Scott Brewer, Projects & Executive Officer, Centre for Western Sydney The Words and Thoughts Project Team Alex Dobrochodow – Creative Director and contributor Paul Berry – Director of Photography David London – Cameraman, film compilation and narration Tobias Brittan – Sound recordist

Daniel Blake, iMedia and Design

Photographer

Baden Chant, iMedia and Design Manager

Robert Cameriere co-created portraits with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Veterans as well as men and women who currently serve.

Natalie Dawson, Web Coordinator Michelle Dickson, Public Relations Coordinator Charlotte Farina, Art Direction, Graphic Design

Zeita Davis, Executive Officer

Shannon Jorda, Print Relationship Coordinator

Yvonne Gatt, Engagement Facilitator

Carolyn Massingham, Marketing and Communications Officer

Trudy Healey, Project Officer, Office of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Employment and Engagement

Mark Smith, Senior Media Officer

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Office of the DVC & Vice-President (Research and Development)

Sally Tsoutas, University Photographer

The King's School Dr Tim Hawkes OAM, Headmaster of The King's School Commanding Officer, Captain Rob Hilliard, The King's School Cadet Corps Free Radical Enterprises Lisa D Sampson

AUNTY

MATILDA HOUSE For the young ones that are coming up, you're going to be our leaders, you're being trained and you've been put there to do the right thing by the future for all Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islander people. The education that you are receiving will always make sure that you can deal with it, the pain of the past, what others had to go through; in such a way that you make sure that it never happens again.

Photo courtesy of Ms Sally Tsoutas, Western Sydney University Photographer.

THE FUTURE IS UPON US Buttressing the Seven Pillars: Identity • Trust • Communication • Memory and History • Importance of Law and Lore • Reconciliation • Achievement This work has been created with the support of a grant received from the Commonwealth Department of Veterans’ Affairs as part of a national celebration of the Centenary of ANZACs and their proud history.

INDEX A Aboriginal Foundation 96 Aboriginal place declarations 71 Aboriginal Protection Act 46 Aboriginal Protection Board 64 Aboriginal Welfare Board 52 AFL 55 Allie, Uncle Harry 9, 44–49 ANZAC Day 95, 99 ‘Australia’ (poem) 77 B Baryulgil (NSW) 52 Bell, Michael 13 Bellwood (NSW) 80 Biloela (Q’ld) 70 Black Power Salute 98 black trackers 99 Boer War 22, 99 Borneo 35 Boy Scouts 96 Bryant, Uncle Rob 78–83 Bundjalung 51, 64 C Charters Towers (Q’ld) 45 Concord Hospital 86 conscription see National Service Construction Corps 45 Corrective Services, NSW 55 country: Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal beliefs 55, 58–61, 64,

67, 71, 74 Cudjula 45 D Daylight, Uncle Cliff 68–71 De Havilland, Scott 58 Department of Defence 39 Department of Veterans’ Affairs 111 discrimination see racism 102 E enlistment numbers F First World War Forster (NSW)

Photo courtesy of Ms Sally Tsoutas Western Sydney University Photographer.

13 23–25, 99 86

G Gubbi Gubbi 69 Gumbaynggirr 79 H HMAS Leeuwin 70 Holt, Harold 85, 86

I Invasion Day 95, 99 Israeli Olympic team massacre 99 J Jackson–Pulver, Professor Lisa 56–61 Jawoyn 96 K Kinchela Boys Home Kinsela, Uncle John Korean War

64 94–99 33, 76

L Link Up Lui, Uncle Villington

55 90–93

racism university entrance Raudonikis, Tommy Redfern (NSW) Ridgeway, Uncle Jim Rockhampton (Q’ld) Royal Australian Air Force

92, 93 67 96 74 70 57–58, 79–80 Royal Australian Army 51–55, 73–77, 80, 85, 95–99 Royal Australian Navy 63, 69, 91 RSL 93

M Malayan Emergency 34 migrants 58, 67, 92 movies 64 Mundine, Uncle Charlie 50–55 Mundine, Uncle Roy (’Zeke’), OAM 11 Murray Island 92

S Saunders, Uncle Reg 99 Second World War 28–29, 58 Simon, Uncle Vic 84–89 Soldiers Point (NSW) 74 South Sydney Football Club 96 St Vincents, Redfern 80 stolen generations 52, 55 Sydney County Council 88

N Nambucca Heads (NSW) 80 National Service 37, 49, 54, 66, 74, 76 Newlin, Uncle Norm 72–77 Nowra (NSW) 96 nursing 58

T TAFE Tea Gardens (NSW) Thursday Island Torres Strait Islands Tunstall, Arthur

O Oakley, Gary 12 Olympic Games (Mexico, 1968) 96, 98 Olympic Games (Munich, 1972) 99 Olympic Games (Sydney, 2000) 99

V Vietnam War

P Palm Island 46 Peace Keeping 38 pearling industry 92 Perkins, Charlie 96 Philip, Duke of Edinburgh 96 police 46 Police Boys Club 96 Port Stephens (NSW) 74 Post Office 49 public health 61 R racism and fear of identifying 52 military selection 99 in RSL 93 at school 64, 70, 74 for Torres Strait Islanders 92

77 74 92 92 98

37, 55, 67, 69–71, 79, 80, 85, 91, 92 95 Battle of Long Tan 86 Long Hai bombing 98 opposition to 99

W Wakka Wakka 70 Walbanga 80 Western Sydney University 104 White Australia policy 52, 92, 99 Williams, Uncle Allen 64 Williams, Uncle Ben 64 Williams, Uncle David 10, 62–67 Wilson, Uncle Charlie 80 Wiradjuri 58, 96 Wittenoom (WA) 77 women 29, 46, 64 Worimi 74 writing 77

Photo courtesy of Ms Sally Tsoutas Western Sydney University Photographer.