A survivor of the stolen generation has described what it was like to be ripped from her family as part of a confronting exhibition at the Australian Museum.
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Wiradjuri woman Fay Moseley is one of the elders showcased in Unsettled, which the museum describes as its "most important" exhibition in its 194 year history.
"This exhibition is about the truth: the massacres, the deaths in custodies, the stolen generations, everything that was denied came out in the exhibition and it made people really feel unsettled," Aunty Fay said.
"If people get down and really understand the Aboriginal culture, there's a lot to be learned and a lot to be shared, so if we can come together because of this exhibition it would have done its job."
It contains first-hand accounts, historical documents, Indigenous artifacts, artworks, and a map which lays out where, when, and how Aboriginal people were brutally massacred around the country.
Aunty Fay has contributed several paintings that depict her own unsettling experiences as a stolen generation child who was taken from her Leeton home in southern NSW at the age of 10.
One of the paintings is entitled One Way Ticket to Hell, which shows the moment when she and her five siblings were forced onto a train by government workers and taken to Cootamundra, nearly 200-km away.
She was then placed in the Cootamundra Domestic Training Home for Aboriginal Girls where she would endure abuse and racial denigration at the hands of her instructors, who told her that her parents did not want her back.
One particularly vivid memory she holds onto is being punished with solitary confinement by being locked up in a morgue where coffins and corpses had been kept.
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Her memories as a scared child were captured through her painting Memories of the Morgue, which is another artwork included in the exhibition.
After more than four years at the home she would be sent to work as an unpaid domestic worker at several of the local farms, where she would make repeated attempts to escape.
She would not receive a cent for her labour until 27 years later, when the government agreed to pay former domestic workers like her for the wages they should have been receiving.
Despite discrimination and hardship in her early life she managed to get qualified as a nurse and go on to work at hospitals and aged care homes around the country.
Through grit and determination she even managed to support a family of her own, but says that the intergenerational scars continue to cut deep for her children.
"They had everything I didn't have because worked seven days a week, just to make sure they didn't come and take my kids."
- Aunty Fay
"They had everything I didn't have because worked seven days a week, just to make sure they didn't come and take my kids," Aunty Fay said.
"Even though I worked and gave them everything, I didn't give them me because I didn't know how to. I didn't have any parents to teach me what to do as a parent."
She hopes the exhibition at the Australian Museum in Sydney will make some small steps towards healing the wounds of the past by ensuring future generations can know the "true history" that their parents and grandparents managed to overcome.
Aunty Fay said there is still a long way to go on that front, but says she is steadily regaining those connections to her history, her past, and her family that she lost all those years ago.
In 2019 she reunited with her niece, Aunty Gail Manderson, who was also disconnected from her culture and family at a young age.
"I lost dad when I was seven and a half, mum when I was 17 and a half, step-father brought me up and then kicked me out of home," Aunty Gail said.
"After that, I couldn't show my feelings to anybody because I was afraid that if I showed them they were going to leave me.
"Now I'm very out-spoken. What I say is what I mean, and if you don't like it - hit the road, Jack."
Aunty Gail has regained some of those connections to heritage and family, but she continues to search for her unknown father from Narrandera, NSW.
Her memories from her past continue to pain her, but Aunty Gail describes herself a "survivor" who will carry on regardless.
She said she was proud of her Aunty Fay for confronting the past head-on and telling the whole, unvarnished truth about Australia's history.
The exhibition has already attracted harsh criticism from columnist Andrew Bolt, who is a vocal stolen generations denier.
The reaction was not unexpected for Aunty Gail, who said such attitudes only reinforced the need for people like Aunty Fay to continue telling their stories.
"It's about telling the true history of Australia."
- Aunty Gail
"It's about telling the true history of Australia," Aunty Gail said.
Kenji Sato
Kenji Sato is a handsome journalist at The Daily Advertiser who enjoys writing flattering bios about himself in the third person. He can be contacted by email at kenji.sato@dailyadvertiser.com.au or by mobile on 0448 927 612.
Kenji Sato is a handsome journalist at The Daily Advertiser who enjoys writing flattering bios about himself in the third person. He can be contacted by email at kenji.sato@dailyadvertiser.com.au or by mobile on 0448 927 612.
