My election as chairperson of the board of Queanbeyan Hospital upset a few people … The board wasn’t to meet again until February 1983, due to the Xmas break. That left me two months to prepare myself for the big test. Being a small community, news travels fast. People I thought would be happy with my new appointment now presented a complete turnabout. Some showed outright rudeness, ignoring me. Some were disgusted I would even consider myself capable of performing the duties of chairperson. Others urged me to resign. To avoid further abuse I found myself walking the back streets and staying home. Just when I thought calm had arrived, I received a letter from my predecessor. My first reaction on reading it was shock. I read it many times before the words sank in. Before the letter arrived, I was under tremendous pressure to resign. Now I was angry. This man had such a nerve to send me what was an awful letter. Little did he realise his words would have the opposite effect of what he intended. I would now do the job and do it well, in fact better than any of my white male predecessors.
I received support from my husband and family. They along with the black community are very proud of me. The four women voting for me on the board were supportive, as well as some women outside, members of the women’s movement. Although I strongly appreciated their support, I knew that the order in which I had it was as woman, then as black, then the democratic vote, while I at all times am black first, woman second, then the democratic vote.
This was the first time a black Australian had held the position of chairperson of a hospital board. In the past, our only position in any hospital was as patients (if we were allowed in) or domestic staff, cleaning the floors and treated very much like the trash we cleaned. It’s a jump from the floors to the head of the table. I consider my appointment a great advancement for the Aboriginal cause and hope many will follow my lesson, learnt through this ordeal: that opinion has not changed. It’s still very clear that if you’re black and don’t rock the boat, you might be suffered, as a token. I am not a token, and won’t be.
Over the years the Catholic church has funded me as a delegate to their Justice and Peace conferences. I was with our renowned Mum Shirl [Smith] visiting the Sisters of Justice Mercy Convent in Canberra when asked to represent them at a seminar in Perth, Western Australia. I thought about being bogged down with religion and nearly decided not to go. I need not have worried. No one tried to convert me and I came home with lots of new-found knowledge. I presume I’m invited to the conferences for my provocative viewpoint; I know it is not for my religious background.
At the Western Australian conference I saw at first hand just how badly blacks are treated in that state. We were to spend a day visiting organisations such as St Vincent de Paul and the Salvation Army, half-way houses. I had no interest in seeing these places and went to as many Aboriginal organisations as I could. My days there showed me a lot. I visited the Aboriginal Legal Service office and from there, Bob Riley was my guide for the remainder of the time. The Perth Children’s Court had sixteen courts in session at once and mainly all Aboriginal kids. Their treatment was appalling. It seemed common practice for police to lock them into lockers and bash the outside with bats.
We went to a settlement roughly 5 kilometres from inner-city Perth. Five vans had been donated by a mining company – with one tiolet, one washing tub, one shower and one light to service all the families living in the vans. That visit above all was upsetting. The babies were sick. The adults showed such loss it is difficult to describe. They are terrorised by police. The young women are raped; bashings are common. Just a little way through the scrub was a park area where the practising Klansmen bashed Aborigines to the point of death. I was devastated with what I saw. I met a woman about forty years old, who thought I could do something. If only I could. It was hard for her to understand I was there for my own interest, and was not connected to a higher power, or its messenger.
After visiting Western Australia, I think we over here in the eastern states of Australia don’t have any problems at all. To see such apathy about the destruction of Aboriginal culture was so clear in WA, even more so than in the Northern Territory or South Australia. Although bad throughout the country, that destruction showed dramatically in Western Australia.
Later, for a conference in Alice Springs the one memory that stays with me is that the locals consider us of the quarter-caste or half-caste to be white. A strange ffeeling for me – then I knew what it felt to be of no race at all. It is a sad day when blacks reject you because of your percentage of white blood, however small.
In some ways I have adopted the women’s movement and in some ways the movement has adopted me. This has been to my advantage on occasions, but I dare say it works both ways, and the advantage has been reciprocated. I appreciated the support of feminists through the hospital board episode, and their continuing solidarity. But it helps the feminist movement to have me to promote to the position.
Though I know some strong and caring feminists, I have some negative thoughts also. Thinking about the way the women’s movement operates, having worked with women’s refuges, it seems to me that the obvious good of having refuges is often spoiled by ‘feminist’ power plays and double-dealing. Amongst the enlightened and liberated women of the ‘movement’, there continue to be patronisers and those who would use Aboriginals for their own purposes …
I am determined to help bring about a more sharing and equitable society; agitation by women and blacks has led the way to achieving the goal. The knowledge and skills I am devloping in the white world will be useful when it is time for me to return to working with black Australians. I am learning skills through feminist friends, too. Still, I believe that black Australia’s main concern, women or men, is racism, not sexism.
Born in 1954 in Cobram, Victoria, in November 1954, Elizabeth Williams has worked consistently in the area of health and childcare. In 1980 the New South Wales Minister for Health appointed her to the board of Queanbeyan Hospital and in 1982 she was elected chairperson of the board. At the time of writing she was working as health care worker and director of family daycare with the Queanbeyan City Council: Queanbeyan is located in New South Wales, nextdoor to Canberra, ACT, the capital of Australia, and acts as a ‘dormitory town’ for public servants working in the ACT (Australian Capital Territory).
This is an extract from ‘Aboriginal First, Woman Second’ published in Different Lives – Reflections of the Women’s Movement and Visions of its Future, Penguin Australia, Melbourne, Australia, 1987, Jocelynne A. Scutt, ed.
