Johnny James & Other Verses

It was very hard growing up in the mission, because when you get to five years of age you get taken away from your parents and put in the dormitory – they had a dormitory for the girls and for the boys – small boys, middle-sized boys and the big boys – and you never go back to see your parents, you only get to see them from afar, that’s all. . . They actually have a lot of boys from the Kimberley sent to the mission. There were about 40 or 50 of all us on one dormitory. But I found it was very good, like no grudge. Everything we were taught, we were doing the right thing. Like there was only two things we used to do: If you’re not praying, you’re working. If you’re not working, you’re praying. That’s how it was.

My mother did not want to leave my father and she asked to be interned with him and that meant that my brothers and sister were interned also at Tatura. . . She was a very strong lady and. . . once going through all that trauma, which I blame the authorities for, that. . . once she had me in Tatura, Victoria, she. . . broke down and had mental problems, and the authorities, because her husband was taken away from her even down there and put into not the internment camp but put into Cowra – Cowra was where all the nationalists were, with the Italians and Greeks and all that. And then she was still in Tatura, Victoria so that placed more stress and anxiety on her that she had a mental breakdown and she never ever overcame that, even when the war was over. The four of us. . . the four kids, were taken away from her while she went to a mental hospital in South Australia and we were on our own in Balaclava, which is a racecourse, in those days, in South Australia in one of those shacks where they keep horses, and we had to share that with other Aboriginal families. . .