I recently met a young woman named Simone McDonald who was born in Ballarat in 2000. Simone is now aged 23. Her great, great, great, great grandmother was born in 1863 near Healesville at the then newly establish Coranderrk Mission. She was a Taungurung woman who was known as Natte. In 1881, at the age of 18, Natte gave birth to a daughter, Elspeth, to a local Scottish labourer who had access to the mission families.
Elspeth grew up on the mission and in 1901, aged 20, gave birth to a daughter, who she named Lora, to an Italian fruit grower named Enzo who had very deep brown eyes. Enzo later enlisted in the Australia army in 1914 and was killed in Gallipoli. In 1919, at age 18, Lora was given permission by the Aboriginal Reserves Board to marry a local Canadian labourer, Pete, with whom she had two children, the eldest being Bessie, born in 1920. Pete was a violent drunk who beat her and eventually deserted her in 1922 and returned to Canada. Lora was then taken in by a local Welsh farmer and eventually had four more children with him. Sadly, the farmer died in an agricultural accident in 1927, and unfortunately Lora could not look after all six children by herself. In the end she gave the oldest four children to ‘the welfare’ to bring them up, keeping the youngest two in Healesville. The four children were moved to the Ballarat Orphanage in 1928 where Lora eventually lost contact with them all. Lora died in Healesville in 1943 aged 42, never seeing her four children again.
Lora’s eldest daughter Bessie knew nothing of her past. She married a man of Irish descent and in 1943, then aged 23, gave birth to a boy, George, who grew up in Ballarat. At age 18 George joined the Army, and three years later, from September 1964 to February 1965, served in Vietnam, returning to Australia with undiagnosed Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from the awful scenes he’d witnessed there.
In 1969, aged 26, George was medically discharged from the army and returned to Ballarat where he married Joyce, a Scottish woman descended from the early Ballarat gold miners. George and Joyce had two children, a son, Charles, born in 1972 and a daughter, Alison, born in 1974. Sadly, George and Joyce had a rocky marriage plagued by his ongoing undiagnosed PTSD-induced alcoholism. George suffered from depression for the rest of his life, committing suicide in 1979 aged just 36.
George’s daughter Alison, who was only five when her father died, eventually married a Scottish descent plumber in Ballarat named Ian McDonald in 1996 at age 22. In 1998 Alison gave birth to a son, Alex, and later in 2000 gave birth to Simone. Simone had deep brown eyes, very red hair, was very fair-skinned with her face being spattered with freckles (which she hated), all most likely inherited from her similar Scottish-descent father, grandmother or great, great, great, great grandfather.
Simone’s mother Alison was very close to her Scottish-descent mother Joyce. Over time they became interested in their family history so began searching the family records. It was there they discovered their Aboriginal descent and heritage, eventually tracing the family lineage back to Natte in 1863 at Coranderrk. Simone assumed that her deep brown eyes were from her Aboriginal heritage, omitting to notice (and perhaps not even knowing) that her Italian great, great, great, grandfather also had very deep brown eyes.
Simone was so touched by the discovery of her Aboriginal roots that she immediately took steps to make contact with the still extant Coranderrk community where she was immediately accepted and began to identify as Aboriginal. In 2019, after completing secondary school at Ballarat High, Simone moved to Melbourne to complete a 4-year social work degree at Monash University, where she read all the revisionist textbooks and learnt all about how unjustly ‘her people’ had been treated by ‘colonisation’.
Simone also realised that the ongoing depression she suffered was most likely from ‘intergenerational trauma’ from her great grandmother Bessie being one of the ‘stolen generation’ in 1926, without realising that no-one in her family was ever ‘stolen’, but willingly yet grudgingly handed over to ‘the welfare’ for their own wellbeing because in those days her widowed great grandmother Bessie had not the means to support her six children. Indeed, Simone also failed to notice that her own grandfather George had struggled with mental health issues from his undiagnosed PTSD from the Vietnam War. How easily things can be attributed to that which seems obvious or ideologically convenient, without ever knowing or acknowledging the deeper truths.
As a consequence of being ‘Aboriginal’, during 2019-2022 Simone went on to lead the university Aboriginal student’s rights committee. She did not have to pay university fees or medical bills, and had many other areas of her life subsidised. Simone was amazed that over time she lost friends at university who seemed resentful of her ‘Aboriginal’ identity and status. Simone soon realised they were just privileged white racists.
Having been rejected locally, Simone resolved to go Central Australia to work with ‘her people’, but, as a red-headed, pale-skinned and heavily-freckled young white woman, was surprised at the lack of a warm welcome when she arrived in Alice Springs claiming to be Aboriginal. Nevertheless, Simone landed a job with an Aboriginal organisation working to prevent domestic violence within Aboriginal communities. Simone now focuses her work on intergenerational trauma caused by colonisation, and takes a ‘feminist approach’ to ‘toxic masculinity’ which she believes to be the source of all violence against women. Now Simone, who as an Aboriginal woman believes her family has suffered from the stolen generations and colonisation, hopes to soon be promoted as the CEO of her organisation.
Is Simone Aboriginal? No, of course she is not. Indeed, she is more Scottish than Aboriginal. In fact, Simone is a sixth generation 1/64th part (or ‘distant descent’) Aboriginal, with closer ties to her Scottish, Irish and Italian-descent forebears, and of course we know nothing of the heritage of her Canadian great, great, grandfather who disappeared back to Canada in 1926. Is Simone in any way ‘disadvantaged’ and in need of any kind of additional support? No, of course she is not. She is a descendent of unremarkable moderately-well-off average middle-class white Australian families.
But now I must make a confession: the story of Simone McDonald is not a true story, but it very easily could be. It is made up of vignettes taken from many real people and many real situations. Over time however, as the generations increase, people will become less ‘Aboriginal’ as the gene pool becomes increasingly diffuse, and given the irrational ‘one drop’ policy, they will still be able to identify as ‘Aboriginal’ forever, and continue to claim the ever increasing benefits and status open only to them. Demographically, this will eventually become an absurd and meaningless situation.
It appears that the concept of Aboriginal ‘self-identification’, when combined with generous financial, employment and other status benefits, is a short-sighted and divisive policy that is guaranteed to foster resentment and animosity within the rest of Australian society.
How is this situation to be resolved? When combined with the also increasing incidence of people with no Aboriginal descent at all now choosing to ‘identify’ as ‘Aboriginal’, a friend of mine who works in an Aboriginal organisation in Victoria acknowledges that Aboriginal people themselves are seeing these two issues as ever-increasing problems. As time goes by, more people become less ‘Aboriginal’, but they are all still able to identify as such. Indeed, where will it all end?
1 comment
Interesting read and a very good example of Aboriginal Identity gone wrong