I belong to a large extended family. Many members of our family have been active in Aboriginal affairs, going back to grandfather William Cooper, whose name is wellknown within the Aboriginal community in Victoria. Grandfather Cooper died in the late 1930s or early 1940s, the year before or the year after I was born. The stories of his activism have come down not only through my family, but through the Aboriginal community generally. He was one of the people who established the Aborigines League, members of which later on established the Aborigines Advancement League. The Aborigines Advancement League is historically one of the major organisations in Victoria to have dealt with Aboriginal issues. Today, the Aborigines Advancement League Incorporated is situated in Thornbury, one of the northern suburbs of Melbourne.
I was raised by an aunt and uncle. It is not unusual in the Aboriginal community for this to happen. Many of us have been raised by various members of our families, particularly grandparents or aunts and uncles. As for activism, it was not so much that I learned about it through talking about it. You were in it. It was a way of life, part of your everyday life.
In the early 1940s Mum (my aunty) was active in mainstream communities working on behalf of Aboriginal people. My mother was an active member of the Save the Children Fund. As well, education committees were set up at the time, and also committees working to provide housing for our people, on which she was active.
I was born in Mooroopna, then, shortly after, we moved across to Cummerangunja, the main mission reserve in the area near Shepparton. (Most of our people, the Yorta Yorta people, come from the reserve.) When I was three or four we moved back to Mooroopna and lived on the flats between Mooroopna and Shepparton. A large number of Aboriginal people lived there, many of whom came across from Barmah, Echuca and other areas for the fruit picking season. After fruit picking came the tomato picking season, and there was also a tobacco factory in the area; my Dad worked there for a time.
Mum’s involvement with the Save the Children Fund meant she helped set up a preschool or kindergarten for the kids living on the flats. A band of people from the Save the Children Fund came regularly to bring toys and other items, and everyone sat around under the trees. I sometimes accompanied my mother, because to me it was fun, but I know a great deal of hard work went into running the Save the Children Fund.
Later on, simply because I was there, like everyone else I became involved as a matter of course. There were no demonstrations in the early 1940s, so I was not involved in this way, but there were some bad times which required the community to be activist. People were forced to come out of the flats and into the town or into other fringe camps around the state. My aunt and uncle were one of the first families, along with the Briggs family and uncle Lyn Cooper, who lived in the town. On a gradual basis, through the work being done in Melbourne by those who are now our elders, people gradually moved up into Mooroopna to a little village called Rumbalara. It was established as a transitional village. A lot of the people didn’t want to move into Rumbalara, but as soon as they moved out of the places down on the flats, the council came along bulldozing the houses. This meant the people had nowhere to go. Either everyone accepted going into Rumbalara or moved on. From Rumbalara, one by one the families moved into housing commission homes in Mooroopna or Shepparton.
My great-greatgrandmother is the matriarch of many of the families coming from Cummerangunja. I am descended from the Coopers and Atkinsons: my greatgrandfather was John Atkinson, my greatgrandmother was Bess Murray, and my grandmother was Kitty Atkinson and grandfather Ernie Clements. That is the Aboriginal side of my family. My father was not an Aboriginal person but I was brought up as in an Aboriginal community and didn’t really know my father, although I know who he was. My mother, Lilly Charles, married Stan Charles and my mother’s cousin, Amy Cooper, was the aunt who brought me up. She married Henry Charles, Stan Charles’ brother, so we are all related somewhere. It was from the age of five or six that I was raised by my aunt and uncle, Amy and Henry Charles, whom I call Mum and Dad.
It was mainly through the Save the Children Fund that I received encouragement outside my family. The fund contributed to the cost of my school uniforms and books. If I went away on school camps or other excursions the fund made the necessary payment. Many Koori children from those days would very likely say the same thing: the Save the Children Fund was instrumental in our gaining an education.
Because of the way things were, most of the family didn’t go much further in their education than Grade 7 – that was the final year of primary school. It was an achievement for Koori kids at that time if any of us arrived at high school, particularly if one did one or two years. If a Koori child went to Form 3 or Form 4, that was a huge achievement. I went to Form 4, ‘intermediate’ in those days. The choice that was open to girls was to go into the professional course, or into the commercial stream. Being in the professional course meant a student could go on to Year 12, then to university, with the likelihood of becoming a doctor or a lawyer or working in another professional field. The commercial course was for those who wanted to be secretaries or work in administration. I wanted to be a nurse, but the family put a veto on that, because three or four members of the family had been to nursing training and they were not treated well: they suffered racism. Also at the time Mum worked in the hospital in the children’s ward as a cleaner. She didn’t think it was the best area for me to go into.
My family wanted me to work in a bank, and in those days a child’s parents had a great deal of say in which the child’s career would be. In the general community, a child went into the family’s or parents’ business, or worked in grocery stores or banks or whatever other businesses were in town. There were also the orchards and the army.
A young person was lucky if she or he managed to go into a job in the town. It was in the 1950s and early 1960s that the move began of the younger people away from the small country towns where they grew up, into the larger towns or into the cities. This move was necessary in order to gain employment.
I took the commercial stream at school. When I completed Form 4, my Mum dragged me around to almost every bank in town. Thank goodness there weren’t any vacancies! Next we went off to the government employment service (it wasn’t called the Commonwealth Employment Service – CES – at the time). I put my name on the list and was referred to an engineering firm, W Konigs. They manufactured orchard equipment and machinery for farming. I was the junior typist.
After I had worked at Konigs for some nine months, Pastor Doug Nichols (who later became governor of South Australia) visited the family. He was looking for someone with office skills to work in the office they were setting up in Melbourne, to work toward establishing a hostel for young women …
Daphne Milward (c) 1996
Born on 30 March 1940 at Mooroopna, near Shepparton in the north east of Victoria, Australia on the Goulburn River, Daphne Milward attended Mooroopna State School and Shepparton High School. She worked for many years with the Aborigines Advancement League and remains a member of the organisation.
This is an extract from ‘Descended from a Matriarch’ inLiving Generously – Women Mentoring Women, Artemis Publishing, Melbourne, Australia, 1996 (Jocelynne A. Scutt, ed.).
