Mervyn Street’s parents were paid in rocks instead of wages. He led a fight for his people – and won $180m

Mervyn Street at Louisa Downs station in Western Australia. His parents were paid in ‘black pennies’ – rocks marked with numbers denoting what rations they were entitled to. Photograph: Lachie Carracher

As a child in the 1950s, growing up on a cattle station in the dusty red Kimberley, Mervyn Street remembers finding a rock in his mother’s kitchen, with numerical markings on one side. This, he would learn, was a “black penny”.

“My dad had, on the back of the penny, three ones – 1, 1, 1 – I didn’t know what that meant,” he recalls now, wearing a worn bush hat and sitting at Mangkaja Arts Centre near his home in the Muludja community, east of Fitzroy Crossing. The numbers, his father told him, were ration entitlements for flour, tea and sugar.