STOLEN

Marjorie Woodrow’s voice has the soft, thin velvety quality that most 79 year-old women’s voices have. It reminds a person of date scones and worn cushions, old vinyl furniture and hand embroidered doilies.

The velvet and vinyl allusions end at her voice. Inside she made of something else. I’ve heard that steel is the strongest of metals and thus seems fitting to be inserted here as a simile.

Marjorie is living, fighting evidence of Australia’s history of black slavery. Over a hundred years after the American civil war had ended and all American citizens were receiving wages, Aboriginal people were being forced to work for nothing all over Australia.

“We had it... we had a hard lot that wasn’t easy. We never had no holidays or no weekends off. It was seven days a week and you had to work.”

Marjorie, one of the oldest members of the stolen generations in NSW, is standing up and talking out about a great many things. ‘The Stolen Generation’ is now a well-known phrase in the Australian vocabulary. A less known phrase is ‘The Stolen Wages’ although the two issues are insidiously linked.

The 1897 Aboriginal Protection Act allowed the governments to declare any Aboriginal person a ward of state and thus control every aspect of their life. From 1900 up to the 1980’s governments around Australia controlled the wages and savings of Aboriginal people in Protection Board Trust Accounts.

Marjorie was born in Carowra Tank in Central New South Wales. Her mother, of the previously stolen generation was only a young teenager when she was raped by her employer while working as an unpaid domestic servant on a rural property.

At the age of two Marjorie was taken from her mother and placed in a mission in Cootamundra. Like most young aboriginal girls she was taught to be a domestic servant.

At the age of thirteen she was sent to her first job. She was told that she would receive her wages in bulk when she turned 21. Until then, as a ward of the state, her money would be held in a Protection Board Trust Account.

Marjorie worked on three properties in between the ages of 13 and 21. She worked hard both as a domestic servant and a farm worker; she suffered abuse and did not even receive her five shillings pocket money. When she reached the age of 21 there was no money there.

“Our people never got no money. They were working slaves... we were slaves.”

The money had been, placed into long-term investment, spent on government projects or embezzled. Files were missing or, as was Marjorie’s case, records were fraudulently changed. Basically thousands of people’s thousands of dollars of wages had been stolen. It has yet to be recovered by any of the workers

ANTAR (Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation) estimates that the money owed is in between one and three billion dollars. Marjorie is owed $250,000, once inflation and government investment is taken into account.

Professor Anna Haebich, Director of the Centre for Public Culture and Ideas at Griffith University explains that by “denying generations of Aboriginal people the right to decent and productive work, proper wages, sufficient services and adequate welfare, governments laid the basis for an Aboriginal underclass without sufficient land, property, capital, economic skills or employment prospects.”

Haebich describes this condition as “consequential poverty”, an inevitable poverty given the discriminatory practices and legislation practiced by Australian state and federal governments.

Marjorie is not looking for anything more than her stolen wages to be returned, recognition of the slavery she endured.

“I strongly feel that nothing will solve our problem until they pay... what we earned because we worked so hard for it and I think that’s part... our biggest part of our healing because it’s something that we lost that could of gave us some sort of advantage to be successful in our life... that was really taken away from us for good.”

The Queensland state government has offered victims of either $2000 or $4000 and once the money is taken claimants lose all legal rights to make further claims. All advocate groups have described the Beattie Government’s offer as insulting.

The New South Wales Government has not made a much better offer. The Iemma Government has set up a panel to sort through the claims. The panel will look at evidence and if claimants have no files kept on them, which is the case for many of the victims, their claims will not be looked at. The Panel, however, will also take five years to process all the claimants, but with time being of the essence five years is simply too long. The claimants are now elderly and with a sad cynicism born of their hardship they recognise that the longer the process is drawn out, the less money will have to be paid out.

“They promised things to us that they never ever gave to us”, says Marjorie, “ They’ve said it will take five years time. They’re hoping some of us will die. I probably won’t be here in five years time. We don’t have time to wait.”

To find out more about the stolen wages campaign you can visit the ANTAR website at - www.antar.org.au or the European Network for Indigenous Australian Rights website at www.eniar.org. ENIAR has a template letter to Premier Iemma, which only needs to be printed, signed and sent or you can write your own letter and send it to.

Premier Morris Iemma

Premier, Minister for the Arts, and Minister for Citizenship

Level 40 Governor Macquarie Tower

1 Farrer Place

Sydney

NSW 2000

                                                        by Liesel Rickarby