As a boy, Frank Malone thought what was done to him – and to those around him – was normal.
Normal that he needed a permit to travel 5km down the road to a neighbouring country town that, unlike his own, had shops. Normal that a siren would sound at 5pm every day, warning everyone off the street and into their yards.
Then he grew up.
After hanging up the boots as a player – he is now recognised across the district as rugby league royalty – Malone could not celebrate wins in the pub with white teammates. As a stockman, in the meatworks, working at the supermarket, he was paid in pittances.
“We thought we were living normal lives,” Malone says. “But it really wasn’t a normal life for me. When I look back, we had a different life. I never had that freedom.
“We were controlled.”
Malone, an elder in the Queensland community now known as Cherbourg, and an engagement officer at its school, was among the last generation to grow up, as he puts it, under “the Act”.
That is, the various guises of the Aboriginal Protection Act, under which the community was established in 1904 and which, in the words of another of the town’s elders, traditional owner and history keeper, Eric Law, gave to the white superintendent in Cherbourg “immense power” over its people – from the food they put in their mouths to the tongue they spoke.
Today, it may seem, the voices of people such as uncles Frank and Eric are still subject to the whims of the Queensland government.
Theirs were to be among the first heard by the truth-telling and healing inquiry which, in July, embarked on a three-year journey to produce an authoritative public record of the effects of colonisation in Queensland.
The inquiry chair, Joshua Creamer, wrote in the forward of its first report that documenting the stories of elders who had lived under restrictions on missions and reserves was of critical priority – before their evidence was “lost to the sands of time”.
His team had been working in Cherbourg for several weeks and was to hold a hearing here later this month.
That was until the LNP swept to power under David Crisafulli last month and the inquiry was shut down as part of the new government’s first orders of business.
But the people of Cherbourg will be controlled no longer.
The Wakka Wakka and Wangan man, traditional owner and Cherbourg mayor, Bruce Simpson, is busy planning a community-run truth-telling inquiry for the same 18 November date.
“Government doesn’t dictate our truth and doesn’t dictate our elders’ experience,” he says.
“And so we’re forging ahead”.
Mayor Simpson is hoping several hundred people will gather in less than a fortnight to hear from a group of maybe 20 elders whose stories will be recorded, with permission, and held in the local Ration Shed museum.
“They can retain them as part of our stories and our histories being preserved on Cherbourg,” he says. “For our people and our families, but for our young people as well”.
Law, also a Wakka Wakka traditional owner, will chair the hearing and give his own testimony. Law knows the Ration Shed well. He presides over the building in its current incarnation as a museum. As a boy, he lined up there for rations every Monday morning.
“It was all rubbish stuff,” he says. “A bit of meat. Some rice. Sago. It only lasted a family three or four days”.
Back then, Law, like everyone else, would also keep a watchful eye on the adjoining superintendent’s office.
“That man had power over you,” he says, pointing at the old office. “Immense power.
“He had to approve your marriage. He had the power to take your children off you – for no reason whatsoever. It was him, and him alone, who made that decision.
“He had the power to send you from here to Palm Island or Townsville for the rest of your days. No court. No nothing.
“He had that power.”
But despite the ritualised abuse, Law’s truth is that Cherbourg was “the best place for me”.
“You know, growing up here in Cherbourg, for me, was a joy,” he says.
Rations may not have lasted the week, but the men would fish and hunt and share the bounty, he says. He was surrounded by a loving family and a community made up of Wakka Wakka traditional owners and people of more than 50 tribal groups from the far reaches of the state who were forcibly brought here under the aegis of the Act.
Not all his contemporaries recall those days with fondness.
Wakka Wakka elder Fred Cobbo describes his childhood in Cherbourg with one word: “hatred”.
“I hated it,” he says. “Because I had no freedom”.
One of Cobbo’s strongest childhood memories dates to when he was about five. In his mind’s eye, Cobbo still sees the police, the superintendent and the government-appointed Aboriginal leaders, coming around to incarcerate his great-grandmother. Her crime? Teaching her grandchildren the language that was their birthright, the language spoken upon these lands since time immemorial.
“The priest hit her with the holy water and reckoned: ‘you shouldn’t be teaching the kids the devil language’,” Cobbo says. “Here’s an old lady who’s trying to keep her language alive and she kept saying: ‘this is your identity’ – but she’s getting carried away in a paddy wagon?”
His was a marked family, says Cobbo, his elders branded troublemakers and sent away to Woorabinda in central Queensland, Yarrabah in the far north and even Thursday Island in the Torres Strait.
“We were social justice warriors,” he says. “We actually stood up for education, health, better housing.”
So, like all his elder siblings, Cobbo “absconded” from his traditional lands as a boy, fleeing town to live between Brisbane and the Fraser Coast, finding shelter with relatives and Catholic church-run hostels.
Cobbo could not be held back. He defied expectations and earned a trade as an electrician, and later a university degree. Cobbo was instrumental in bringing Wakka Wakka language back into the Cherbourg school. He’s worked in education and social work. Now he plans on pursuing a master’s, perhaps a doctorate.
Still, Cobbo feels his story, and his family’s story, needs to be told.
“It’s a part of my healing,” he says. “It’s important”.
Cobbo and Malone may join Law in telling their stories in the community-run truth telling, as they had planned to do with the inquiry. Others may not.
Christina Collier-Bond is the station manager at Cherbourg Us Mob Radio. She also presents shows, including Yarn Up. A friendly Wakka Wakka and Waanyi women, Collier-Bond is comfortable and open to a chat. But there are big parts to her story that she is not willing to put on the public record. Parts of her story that she may have shared with an inquiry that, by all accounts, was putting in the time and bringing the people to create safe spaces for difficult stories to be told.
She says there are many stories that may have emerged from such a process, stories of stolen children, stolen wages and languages, stories of injustice that affect individuals – and ripple down generations – in different ways.
“That’s what this truth-telling inquiry was about,” she says. “Setting people free from the shackles of the past”.
