Moving Forward Together in Aboriginal Women's Health: - Theses ...

Moving Forward TogetherJanet KellyThe police didn’t like it when Aboriginal people stayed around Adelaide. Theykept trying to get Grandmother and her family out of town. The police arrestedthem for being ‘idle and disorderly’ and gave them twenty-four hours notice toleave, but a month later they were back again.Kaurna people were taken from Adelaide and shipped out to different missionssuch as Poonindie on Eyre Peninsula, Point Pearce to the north, or Raukkanin the south. They lost what was their land and many of them just roamedaround. Some went as far as Tasmania. Just a short time ago I received aletter from a woman saying that her father’s grandfather could remember thevery last of the Kaurna people being shoved onto trains at Semaphore andbeing taken away to live elsewhere. It is just like the Jews were shoved ontothe trains in Germany, Aboriginal people were taken away in the old box cars(Brodie & Gale 2002, pp. 9 - 11).Auntie Veronica goes on to explain how she chooses to live in the area aroundGlanville because it means so much to her. She tried living elsewhere but she justhad to come back to the Port. She describes getting a certain feeling when shewalks at Glanville, feeling the spirits and knowing this was Lartelare’s campsite. In1995 she made a claim for the land, dreaming of an Elder village or culturalinterpretation site there. A fire at the CSR factory had led to it being dismantled.Unfortunately the land was badly contaminated with arsenic and the clean up billwas estimated to be a million dollars (Brodie & Gale 2002). She continued to havediscussions with the Port Adelaide Council until she passed away in 2007. She saidthat she did not want to have the land for herself, but for her community, black andwhite.The roller coaster ride of land rightsAuntie Veronica’s journey is repeated in many times and places across Australia.There have been many attempts to address Indigenous land ownership in Australia,with limited success. The two most significant legal and political debates regardingland rights of Australian Aboriginal people in the last few decades are known as‘Mabo’ and ‘Wik’. These national court hearings have been watched closely bymany Indigenous peoples and their supporters, and are seen as an indication ofwhere Australia is situated in relation to colonisation practices and the return of40