Mavis Ball was a born-and-bred Nyamal woman from Marble Bar. She was the eldest of four children, the only girl. Her younger brothers Harold, Eric and Les were all over 6 feet 4, and with Mum at 5 feet 11 (the same height as me) they were certainly a formidable family. She was born in Port Hedland in 1942 to Kitty and Murphy Ball. My maternal grandparents were highly respected in their home town of Marble Bar, more than 150 kilometres southeast of Port Hedland. Murphy and Kitty had been traditionally married by permission of the chief protector. In this generation of the government policy of ‘protectionism’, written approval from the chief protector was required for almost everything: from buying a pair of socks to getting married. It was an era of complete and utter control over the lives of Aboriginal people—the basis of which continues in much government policy today in its race-based restriction of human rights.
It was an era of complete and utter control over the lives of Aboriginal people.
Murphy was a taxi and truck driver, an extremely well-to-do occupation for a ‘full-blood’, according to the potted history that we, as a family, have only recently managed to glean from Native Welfare files. Murphy and Kitty were hard-working, and they modelled this for Mum and her three younger siblings. They worked hard because they wanted a better life for their kids, and they would die trying. Their efforts were, unknown to Mum, fuelled by a fear that the welfare would come calling for their children. Having greater opportunities, though, was also the false promise of the policy of protectionism—that if you ‘behaved’, if you ‘conducted’ yourself like a ‘white person’, you would be afforded more rights. These rights not only never came, but required denying who you were, your culture and all who continued to practise it—that being, your own family.
When Mum was nine years old, the welfare came calling. She remembers little of what happened other than being on a small plane with two people she didn’t know. They had told her parents that she was unwell and had to be taken to Port Hedland. But she was not unwell, and she didn’t understand why her parents had been told this. She remembers sitting on this plane and seeing her mum outside, crying and being held up by her aunties. As the plane took off, her mum fell to the ground. Aunties grabbed rocks from the ground to hit themselves with. This is sorry cutting. It happens in times of death. Mum had seen this happen during Sorry Time. But why were they doing this now? She began to cry. As the image of her mum became smaller and smaller in the plane’s little window, she did not know where she was going. She didn’t know if she would ever see her family again.
Her next memory is of being in a dorm and seeing two ‘white people’ pacing nervously. As she watched them, her eyelids became heavy. Her face was numb from tears. She slowly drifted off to sleep. ‘Mavis, wake up,’ whispered a voice she recognised, as strong arms wrapped around her in the dark to pick her up. ‘Sssh…’ The light from the hallway illuminated her dad’s face. Was this a dream? She felt a familiar kiss on her forehead and a hug she had known so many times—when she had fallen asleep around the campfire and her dad’s strong, loving arms had carried her to bed—and she knewit was not a dream.
Murphy Ball had found his way from Marble Bar to Port Hedland—all 187 kilometres, through mud and mangrove trees—to bring his daughter back. He then put her on his back and carried her all the way home, back through the mud, the mangroves and the oppressive heat. It sickens me how close my mum came to forced removal. Murphy Ball single-handedly changed the course of all our lives.
Love comes in many forms—it comes in hugs, it comes in ‘I love you’s—but it mostly comes in actions.
The actions of a father’s love had, generationally, saved us all.
It has taken a lifetime for Mum to share the pain and trauma of her early life, and even now it is only in small pieces. She would rarely hug us kids or say that she loved us. That sounds tough, but every single action she took told us consistently and reliably that we were loved. There are layers to my mum that she has never shared. I don’t blame her. Looking back now as an adult, I am in awe of her strength and resilience.
I understand now as a psychologist that Mum struggled with racial trauma and possibly complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD), in which memories can become distorted and consequently irreconcilable because of the age at which the trauma occurred. Mum’s understanding as a child of what had happened became normalised, which occurs when traumatic things become part of a ‘daily’ or ‘normal’ existence—as is common with other victims—but complicating and compounding this was the fact that this was racial trauma that was perpetrated on Aboriginal people by government legislation, and the abuse was then enabled and perpetuated by systems and individuals.
In these circumstances, when those who are supposed to protect are also the abusers, Indigenous people have no power or control over preventing the trauma. Children look to their parents to provide a safe haven. But when the parents are also powerless to stop these traumatic events from occurring, as Mum’s were, who can these kids go to for protection? As children we develop a sense of self based on our world being safe and predictable and on being told we are loved and loveable. Homes in which complex racial trauma is evident means that environments are modelled as unsafe by those around us. Love can feel overwhelming because there is fear and anxiety attached to it. Sigmund Freud referred to this as a reaction formation—a defence mechanism against fear or stress; that being, if I truly attach to a child who could realistically be ripped away from me, that would be intolerable.1 It is therefore better not to show love or affection because this will protect me from the pain of loss. In these complex circumstances, our biology is altered as our nervous system becomes armed to remain activated in anticipation of threats. For individuals who have experienced abuse, reconciling this takes energy and insight. It also cannot occur when trauma is continuing in their environment. The trauma of child removals is that they were as unpredictable as they were unstoppable.
This is an edited extract from Jilya: How one Indigenous woman from the remote Pilbara transformed psychology by Tracy Westerman, (UQP), available now at your local independent bookseller.
