Until recently, film-maker Rachel Perkins had never heard the recording of her late Arrernte grandmother, Hetti, speaking about the massacre of her family. Police had shot them at Blackfellows Bones, north-east of Alice Springs, in the late 19th century.
But her father, the late Indigenous activist Charles Perkins, had told her about the slaughter. Hettie’s mother had been spared, but her neck was chained for another purpose. “My great-grandmother had been raped and chained to a tree,” Perkins says. “So, I knew that [much].”
