My school days were the horror of my life. Big blanks hide memories too painful to recall.

I

can remember

when I

went to school

who had come

from afar

I can remember

when I

went to school

I used to race

to the cafe place

to be first

at the counter

to be served first

was the prize

in the end

I gave up

the chase

for no matter

how many times

I won

that race

I was always

served last

in that

cafe place.

In the mid 1960s and early 1970s it seemed the world was in revolt – the French student demonstrations in Paris, the American blacks in revolt with Watts ‘Burn, baby, burn’, the anti-Viet Nam war moratorium marches, demonstrations overseas and here in Australia. I was part of it all. I wanted a change in my life too.

It took me half my lifetime to realise I was entitled to my mother’s mother’s mother’s country, I was entitled to my mother’s mother’s mother’s language, my mother’s mother’s mother’s history, and the laws that belong to that country. The greatest sadness in my life is the realisation that I will never have any of those things. Those things are rightfully mine, I am entitled to them, but I will never have them. Both my father’s father’s fathers’ country and my mother’s mother’s mother’s country have some of the richest coalfields in the world, and I know I will never have any title to that land, I or my brothers or sisters will never own (in white terms of reference) any of the land rightfully belonging to us.

If you are born black in this country, from the instant of birth you are invoved in the black struggle whether you wish to acknowledge it or not. So I have been involved all my life in struggle. During the 1970s I became more involved, more active in the black movement.

Tribal council happened in Brisbane, on a national scale, in those days of the early 1970s. Lots of anger, lots of energy, lots of movement. I went to countless meetings, all the conferences, all the protest marches. Aboriginal people knew (know) what’s wrong with the world, and I was going to help change it overnight. I even thought I could do it by myself, and tried very hard, but I didn’t have enough strength, enough energy, enough time.

I can remember a group pf us breaking into an office, regularly, to print our leaflets, notices, newsletters simply because we had no money and no other way to get our stuff printed. I was the ‘cockatoo’; also I was the only one with a car.

I had to listen more, to other voices, other struggles. When the anti-Springbock protest took off in this country, I was right in there, shoulder to shoulder with the whites. This created a bigger struggle for me, because here were whites protesting about the oppression of black people in another country, yet not out in the streets protesting about the oppression of black peopole in their own country. Small groups gathered all over Brisbane discussing tactics to impede the games. I went to a small group meeting with my red-haired, blue-eyed friend, who jumped up and said ‘Let’s throw broken bottles and bent nails on the field.’ The horrified silence following this suggestion was broken by a shocked whisper, ‘But that’s violence!’ I was stunned. Looking around at the room full of white people I hated them all. How could they sit up there in their white skins and be shocked by the suggestion of use of violence, when it is they, white people, the colonisers who have brought violence into the lives of Aboriginal people in this country?

I didn’t want to go on scrubbing floors, cooking, cleaning, and when Aboriginal study grants became available in the early 1970s, I went back to school to educate myself to play a better part for the black movement.

While I was studying for matriculation in 1972, the Aboriginal Embassy in Canberra was brought down by the McMahon Liberal government. The day it happened my sister, my brothers, my cousins and myself saw it on the 6 o’clock television news. We cried. By 7 o’clock we had collected enough petrol money to take us to Canberra. There were five – my brother Len, our cousin Tiga and his then wife Laurel, and a friend Donna, and myself. We stopped at Newcastle airforce base to speak with my brohter Charlie, who was then a member of the force, to learn he had gone on a one-man strike in protest at the government’s action. His superior officers didn’t know how to handle the situation, so when he said he was leaving the base to carry his protest to Canberra, I think they were glad to see him go. The Embassy was part of our history. Today I am pleased and humble to have been a part of it.

Women’s Liberation voices grew louder, they were heard more clearly, their messages straighter. I listened, got it straight in my head but not my heart;  there was something wrong. A good woman wrote a book about women in Australia. I thought it was great until I bought the book, and looked and looked for something on Aboriginal women, and found about two lines mentioning us. Then it began finally to dawn on me that when white women speak of women’s liberation, they speak only of white women’s liberation, and rightly so. But they don’t make it clear. They talk and write as if they are speaking for all women. Maybe eventually we will reach that stage. We haven’t got there yet. We shouldn’t act as if we have.

I do not say the 1960s and 1970s increased activities of the women’s liberation movement had no effect on me. They did. I had to look at the position of women in society – that is, the position of Aboriginal women and white women. Arguments between black women and white women about women’s oppression did not always have a meeting place. At times a great deal of hostility was expressed by black women towards white women in the women’s liberation movement. This told me just how much black women have been conditioned by white society. Colonialism in Australia was brought about by violence. It introduced into the minds of Aboriginal people the concept of the native. Before the colonisers, there were no natives;  later Aboriginal people were defined only in relation to white people, Aboriginal women were defined as against white women – they were compared and contrasted with them, dividing them. Aboriginal society and its values were so foreign to white settlers that many myths and misconceptions developed. Through the writings of Aboriginal people themselves, a clearer picture will emerge to project Aboriginal women’s order of priorities and values, which will play an important part in our own liberation, whether we be black or white.

Lilla Watson (c) 1987

Lilla Watson is an activist and intellectual, an artist and academic, a writer and a poet.Born in Queensland, Australia, she lived in various country towns and in the capital, Brisbane, thenceforth. In 1979 she was appointed tutor in the Department of Social Work in the University of Queensland, the first Aboriginal to be appointed by that university. She conducted research and fieldwork  in relation to problems faced by Aboriginal people in Queensland, and became the first Australian academic to be appointed to a tenured position in the university system, based upon her skills, expertise and knowledge acquired through her lived experience and her research and fieldwork, rather than formal university qualifications. One recognition of her significance in the Australian polity was the invitation in 1980 as an ‘Australian leader’ to attend the Australia’s Future conference hosted in Melbourne by Australian Frontiers.

This is an extract from ‘Sister, Black is the Colour of My Soul’ published in Different Lives – Reflections of the Women’s Movement and Visions of Its Future published by Penguin Books Australia, Melbourne, Australia, in 1987, Jocelynne A. Scutt, ed.