Unwitting soldiers: the working life of Matron Hiscocks at the Cootamundra Girls Home, NSW

Abstract

Some months ago, I sat watching the television news in London as four young Australian surfers from Perth, the place I grew up, described their experiences of surviving, and helping others survive, the 12 October 2002 bombing of a nightclub in Bali. They reminded me, with a jolt of tender recognition, of my younger brother. Wide laconic accents, faces taut from emotion held in check, inarticulate but palpable love and friendship. I watched, and I thought how much their age and the ordinary things they were saying about their extraordinary acts of bravery resonated with young men from other eras and other wars-these young men on the television, unwitting soldiers in a war that has no boundaries. I continued to watch, with growing discomfort, as the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, came on the television after them and said the bombing ought not to change Australians from the 'happy, freedom-loving people' they are. While I relished, with the nostalgia of an Australian overseas, this depiction of my country-people, I was reminded of the stultifying hypocrisy that currently pervades much of Australian political life. Howard presented a naïve national picture of a cheerful band of battlers, a picture that, ironically, continues to exclude the first Australian people who battled against enormous odds to maintain families, communities, and spirit under the pressures of colonialism and systematic government policies to disperse and assimilate. I, like everyone, was shocked and hurt for my fellow Australians and for the 40 Balinese and the Japanese and Turkish tourists who died in the attack. But equally, I was galvanised to argue that while bombs and the lives they destroy have an undeniable urgency, the furor around them can blind us to the many, less sensationalist ways that lives have been, and continue to be, irrevocably changed and in some cases destroyed. This article, in part, urges us to remember that while fresh grieving began in Australia after the bomb in Bali, and a barrage of new wounds have since been opened in the world, old wounds and deep grieving for other matters still remain to be addressed compassionately and responsibly within Australia. Perhaps in some ways it is easier to be rightly shocked and angry at overseas events than it is to continue to engage with the nuances and complexities of much longer-standing, unresolved and deeply painful domestic issues.

Introduction: ‘Ngapartji Ngapartji: In Turn, In Turn’— Ego-histoire and Australian Indigenous Studies

“…Part of a family who migrated from Britain to Western Australia in the late 1970s, her upbringing had involved a process of exile, re-invention and assimilation. Anna was curious about how her experiences fuelled her enduring interest in the processes of attempted assimilation of Indigenous Australians (Cole 2000;Cole 2003a;Cole 2003b) and, more recently, how her father's institutionalisation from the age of seven as a child in Britain had fed her long-standing commitment to documenting the processes that led to the institutionalisation of Indigenous children in Australia (Cole 1994;Cole 2005;Cole 2009 This project has drawn on many intellectual currents and, in part, on the trajectory of 'new imperial histories'. In the introduction to her book, Empire in Question, Antoinette Burton writes, 'I foreground my whiteness, my gender and my class position within the North American academy not as any kind of disclaimer, but as recognition of my own accountability and the ways in which it is shaped, without being fully determined, by the situations I occupy' (Burton 2011, p. 37).…”