I was born in Darwin. My mother is from the west coast of the Northern Territory, the Daly River, and my father from Broome on the west coast of Western Australia. Broome is built on the land of the Yaoro and Bardi people. I am descendent of the Yaoro people and probably also the Bardi. My skin name is Na’amitji, which is the female version of Namatjira, so Albert Namatjira [the artist] is my brother.

Like the South Sea Islanders kidnappened to work  in Australian sugar cane fields (‘Blackbirding’) Asians were shanghaied, sold, and brought to Australia to work in the pearl-diving industry. My great-grandfather was brought to Australia from a little village called Vigan in the far north of the Philippines. My father is of Filippino, England and Aboriginal descent.

One of my cousin’s father is Japanese, interned during the Second World War. My Aunti Lina, married to Matsumato, a Japanes man, was interned with her children. Dad’s brother, Pinky Corpus, was allowed by the Australian authorities to be responible for them, as their chaperone or monitor. Little did they know he was also part Japanese. Through my mother I am part Japanese, part Irish and part Aboriginal, and I have four Aboriginal ancestral groups going right down to the Gurinji people, who were in the walk-out against Lord Vesty during the 1960s.

My parents dumped me. I cannot claim I was one of the stolen kids. I went to Darwin Primary School, annd then Nightcliff. When I began, there was only one government school, ‘normal’ school. There was a Catholic school down the road, and then there was an Aboriginal school on the Bagor reserve compound, the other side of the barbed-wire fence from the mission. While I was learning fractions, the Reserve School girls in the same grade were years behind.

The institution in which I was raised was run initially along an age and gender dormitory system overseen by a kind, unmarried white woman, Miss Shankleton (Laelie). In the early 1960s the Home moved into a new compound which had a cottage system in which each individual cottage was run autonomously although coming under the general jurisdiction of the male (married) superintendent.

I lived at the mission. The savage white couple in charge of my cottage belted me constantly. Every time I had a migraine headache I was accused of trying to get out of work, although I wasn’t. Brought up in that system from birth, we took pride in our chores. I got sick and tired of running away to my parents and their relatives, and being brought back to the mission home by police. It never dawned on me to run away to welfare. Later I went to the former superintendent of the home, who organised through  welfare for me to be placed elsewhere, so I went to school in New South Wales.

I had an older brother who was adopted. My younger brother was in the institution with me. My mother was stolen when she was six-years-old. With the Second World War, the Methodist Overseas Mission brought everyone from Croker Island to Otway in southern New South Wales near Wollongong. There, my mother was impregnated at 10. The Methodist mission people put up her age. She lived out the rest of her life assuming an increased age. She tried to tell me she was 19 when she had me but she  was only 15. She had my older brother when she was 11.

I attended Parramatta High School. I didn’t like it, though probably created a lot of the problems myself. I was stupid. I got so angry and just bashed, instead of trying to reason. A whitefella, Phillip, got hit bya softball bat, his nose swelling enormously. He sat on a suitcase with his legs wide open, making light of his predicament: ‘Louise, I’ve got a nose like you. I’ve got an Aboriginal nose.’ I went bang, smash, ‘I haven’t got a big nose.’ Conscious of coming from a society of many nationalities in all colours and shapes, I was constantly reminded I was different. Some friends would say, in winter, when everyone was wearing stockings, gloves and beret: ‘Gee, you wouldn’t know that you were brown from behind.’ Constantly telling me that I was not quite one of them, they seemed preoccupied with colour. I reacted violently.

By the end of first term I had bashed up everyone bashable. Everybody else ran away. I came home with my school books and ripped right through them all with my biro, screaming, ranting and raving and demanding to go home. My foster father asked if I would like to try another school. No, but I didn’t want to return to the violence of Retta Dixon Homes. My foster father encouraged me. I went to Greystanes. Half the teachers were Jews, including the principal. The other half were white Australians. I got on with all the Jews, and with very few of the others.I still fought and argued with teachers but began to settle down.

I had all the encouragement possible – so much so that I felt I was cocktail Black. The emphasis was that it was great I was in high school: there was only one other Aboriginal in high school in New South Wales going for  the Intermediate Certificate. The school psychologist came to look me over. At Nightcliff Primary School I had come within the top five in grade seven. When I went south I became quite dumb, just scraping through. It wasn’t until university, getting distinctions for almost every assignment I lazily submitted, that I realised how difficult it was at 14, changing from a child into a woman, gonig from a town of 13,000 people to  a town where the white people were all crazy – I mean, had you heard of the Beatles? Then there was the Viet Nam war, and learning new concepts like time. Before, at the mission, at school, everything was delivered, and it just happened.

I tried for the School Certificate and failed, so went to work in the Commonwealth Bank clearing department. I wanted to be a teller out there with the public. Not many women were working as tellers at the time. My concept of a bank was the local branch down the road where they knew the local people, and I had visions of eventually working in the Comnonwealth Bank in Darwin. In Sydney, they reallycouldn’t place me in a branch because being an Aboriginal I might offend the customers. But in the clearing department I had a wonderful boss, Alison Reid. Most of the women were fantastic.

The clearing branch was tucked away from the average businessman in the street (as they were in those days). Workers who had physical and mental impairments were not able to become permanent members. I was, because I didn’t have any disabilities, although as an Aboriginal my permanency could have been contested.

My supervisor fought for equal rights for women in the bank. Alison Reid supervised 100 or so women. A bloke on our floor, who had never ever received a promotion, was earning more than she.

Alison was in the union. We got along well, not just because I was Black. She said if you were an Australian you should be paid for the work you do, and just because you were a woman you shouldn’t receive three-quarters of the pay. When I joined in 1966, they had just started allowing married women to continue working for the Commonwealth bank;  during my time they also allowed pregnant women to continue. Alison fought for all that.

Louise Liddy-Corpus (c) 1992

Born in Darwin, Australia, in 1949, Louise Liddy-Corpus has worked in public relations and journalism, and inequal opporutnity. She has spirit ancestros, but her main Dreaming is a particular waterfall in Nangiumerri lands. She wirtes: ‘I am a waterfall. I was a waterfall bfore I came into the human form, and when I die I will go back to the waterfall.’

This is an extract from ‘Taking Control Now’ in Breaking Through – Women, Work and Careers, Artemis Publishing, Melbourne, Australia, 1992 (Jocelynne A. Scutt, ed.).