Kath Apma Penangke Travis went to the United Aborigines Mission office day after day for months on end, in the hope of finding someone who could locate records about her mother. The “office” was a dingy ground-floor unit in an industrial area of the Melbourne suburb of Williamstown. It was the UAM’s only known location, but there was never anyone there.
Travis, an Arrernte woman, is the third generation of her family to have been forcibly removed during the stolen generations by UAM missionaries.
In its heyday the UAM was one of the largest missions in Australia. Established in New South Wales in 1895, it ran institutions in three states, including Colebrook in South Australia, where Travis’s mother, Kwementjaye, was taken at the age of three weeks. Kwementjaye lived at Colebrook until she was 26. When she fell pregnant in 1965, the UAM removed her newborn. Kath was adopted and luckily raised in a loving non-Indigenous family. They did not meet again for 20 years.
One day in 2017, when Travis turned up at the unit, the door was open. A man was there, and he let her in.
“It was a two-bedroom unit, set up like an office,” Travis says. “So the front area might have been like the lounge area. He had his desk, filing cabinet and printer there. And then he went into one of the rooms and he came out with the admissions register record of my mum.”
She says she wasn’t allowed fully inside but could see two rooms “just full of boxes, and shelves of papers, boxes and files. At that point, I was thinking, ‘this is all of the UAM records’.”
She felt excited. She says the man was able to find her mother’s record within minutes.
“I basically told him her name, that she was at Colebrook in this period, and he went in and got her register out. He was able to show me her admission card, which said what day she was admitted, what day she was discharged and her mum’s name,” Travis says.
“He let me take photos of some things. I was trying to get as much information for as many people that I knew, really quickly. He let me use his printer, photocopy a couple of things. And so at this point, I’m thinking: this is good.”
Travis, who is a researcher at Victoria University, says she had a fleeting concern that the records were handed over so freely, “because I could have been anybody off the street”, but didn’t want to spoil her chance of gaining access to the files.
“As a historian, I’ve ventured into many archival repositories, where you request access to a specific thing that gets brought down to you. This from the outset seemed a really odd process, an unkind process,” she says.
It was the only time she was allowed into the UAM archive.
“He never let me back in. I spoke to him, I sought him out again in the same way, just kept going there. He wouldn’t let me in,” Travis says. “I felt desperate, I felt I needed to act really quickly to make sure we got those records. Even if I had got the little bit of information that assisted my mum to understand part of her story, other people hadn’t had that access.”
The UAM wound up its operations in 2020, the unit was sold and the whereabouts of all those boxes Travis says she saw are in dispute.
‘Decades of people’s information’
Another institution run by the UAM was the Aboriginal children’s home at Bomaderry in NSW.
Adelaide Wenberg was four when she and her eight brothers and sisters were taken away from her Bundjalung family by the NSW Aboriginal Protection Board.
She remembers they came one day in 1943 and took all nine of them from their parents, John and Lily Wenberg. The family were never together again.
Wenberg’s brother and baby sister died in the homes they were taken to. Now 85, she has spent her life wondering what happened to them.
She and two older sisters were sent to the Cootamundra domestic training home for Aboriginal girls. The three younger sisters were taken to Bomaderry, where her youngest sister, Dorothy, died at 20 months after “getting her head tangled in the rails of the cot”, as the nuns told Wenberg years later.
Her three brothers were taken to the notoriously brutal Kinchela boys’ home on the north coast of NSW. Beatings, hunger, cruelty and abuse were a daily reality.
In 1944, her brother John and some other boys were caught eating green fruit and the matron gave them a laxative. Later that night, John complained of a sore stomach. The boy was left for hours before being rushed to Kempsey hospital, where he died of a ruptured appendix.
The Wenberg siblings never received any further details about John, though brothers Gus and Vince remembered attending his funeral, where they were briefly allowed to see their father.
“Nobody will ever truly understand what went on in those homes,” Adelaide Wenberg says.
Allegations have been raised about at least seven institutions – three in NSW and four in Western Australia – where Aboriginal children may have died in suspicious circumstances, or of neglect, illness and malnutrition, some of them possibly buried in “clandestine” or unmarked graves.
UAM record-keepers made reference over time to babies and children dying in their care.
In 1933, the Bomaderry missionaries received a baby in “a very weak condition”. The infant lasted seven weeks. The matron wrote in a missionary journal: “We loved him dearly, but on January 13th God took him. Although missing his sweet little presence, we know it is better so.”
Wenberg’s baby sister died at Bomaderry in 1944. The Wenbergs are not sure where, or if, Dorothy was buried. But a memorial plaque for the unmarked graves of Aboriginal children at the Kempsey cemetery has her name on it, alongside her brother John.
It is almost impossible for the Wenbergs – or anyone else – to find out further information about the Aboriginal babies and toddlers who were sent to Bomaderry.
UAM records about Bomaderry have been in dispute since the mission officially deregistered as a charity in 2020.
A spokesperson for UAM told Guardian Australia the organisation had handed over all of its records.
Two boxes relating to Bomaderry were handed to the NSW government, while material relating to Colebrook was sent to the South Australian state library.
“Prior to its deregistration the company sought to assist with all enquiries made by former residents and all records at the time of deregistration have been entrusted to the above-named for safekeeping,” the spokesperson said in an email.
They said there were no other records and that the UAM had supplied all it had to the relevant authorities.
The NSW government strongly disputes this claim.
Aboriginal Affairs NSW (AANSW) says the UAM has “provided no documentation that is of substantial use or benefit to any of the survivors or their families”.
An AANSW spokesperson said it had been sent only “what appears to be a transcription” of Bomaderry admission records.
“The records are incomplete, with the majority of UAM records still held privately and inaccessible for survivors. Aboriginal Affairs does not hold further UAM records,” the spokesperson said.
“The records that survivors know were created, and want access to, are items such as the matron’s diary, medical records and other indicators of everyday life. Survivors wonder things like, ‘Did I have whooping cough as a child? What was my first day of school like?’
“These are the questions that survivors have and those records, which have still not been provided, hold the answers.”
When asked for a further response to the NSW government’s claims, the UAM spokesperson said they were “not aware of any other records held by any organisation or individual”.
They said the records held in the Williamstown unit were destroyed in 2020 by a plumbing disaster.
“During the second extended lockdown period in Melbourne, in 2020, the property suffered extensive flooding damage by sewerage water caused by plumbing work undertaken on a neighbouring property,” the UAM spokesperson said via email.
“The lockdown restriction meant that I was not able to visit the property. However, given that some 6-8 weeks elapsed before we were made aware, a serious health and safety issue was advised, and consequently the insurance cleanup meant that all non-metallic materials in the property were destroyed. At least one other unit in the block was similarly affected.”
Immediate and ongoing access to records was a key recommendation of the Bringing Them Home report in 1997. Concerns were raised then that records needed to be immediately secured. Missionaries told the inquiry some records had been already been destroyed by fire or other disasters.
“There is a very significant risk that these records will be destroyed or will disintegrate for want of appropriate storage,” the stolen generations support group Link-Up (NSW) told the inquiry.
Travis says she cannot believe the UAM records were allowed to be lost or destroyed.
“I can’t even imagine how it would only be two boxes, considering the length of time that Bomaderry was operating,” she says. “Colebrook operated for decades – my mum was admitted in 43. It was in operation beforehand. It’s years and years, decades of people’s information.
“How can we heal if we don’t have access to those stories? And who’s got the right? The fact that some old bloke just can have people’s stories in his bloody shed in boxes, or in an industrial unit, and won’t let people in to get access to their stories, it blows my mind … We need to free those stories up, free us up,” she says.
“My mum said to me when she died, ‘I don’t want no church, nothing Christian’, because she said there was nothing Christian about her upbringing. There was nothing Christian about them not feeding her at Colebrook for three days. There was nothing Christian about them then and there’s nothing Christian about them now.”
