FUT URE GENERATIO N S
Pride and prejudice PROFESSOR KEITHA DUNSTAN UNCOVERS A FAMILY SECRET AND A PASSION FOR ADVANCING FIRST NATIONS CAUSES by Ken Robinson Pictured: Professor Keitha Dunstan
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rofessor Keitha Dunstan remembers flipping through an old family photo album and coming across an unfamiliar face. “Who’s the little Aboriginal lady?” a young Keitha asked her mother. “That’s your great-grandmother,” came the reply, “but don’t tell your grandmother.” The 12-year-old was puzzled. How could her grandmother not know her own mother was Indigenous? “I knew all my relatives in Roma were quite dark-skinned but as a child I just thought people who lived in the country were very suntanned,” says the Provost of Bond University. “They were all bush people and I never thought anything of it.” So began a decades-long awakening for Professor Dunstan - a Mandandanji woman and the revelation of a difficult family history ultimately capped by great success. “It wasn’t that my grandmother was ashamed of her Aboriginal heritage,” Professor Dunstan says. “She thought she was doing the right thing by shielding us because she had lived a life of prejudice and persecution. I remember very clearly her insisting that we not be open about our heritage. She said, ‘If they find out that you’re
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Aboriginal, you’ll lose your jobs. Don’t make things hard for your families, your kids’.” Although Professor Dunstan’s grandmother relented towards the end of her life, it was only after she died at the age of 99 years and 11 months that Bond University’s most senior academic felt fully free to explore her family history. The Mandandanji people’s homeland is crossed by the Maranoa and Balonne rivers in south-central Queensland where the towns of Roma, Surat and Mitchell are today. The original inhabitants put up some of the fiercest resistance to British settlement in the mid-1850s, leading to harsh reprisals by authorities and settlers, including massacres. “My ancestors were involved in the Roma land wars and, unfortunately, some of the significant atrocities that happened out west in which a lot of Aboriginals were killed,” Professor Dunstan says. “My third Great-Grandfather was a witness in a major court case over one of those massacres.” In 1911 Professor Dunstan’s great-great grandmother was separated from her children including a daughter, the little lady in the photo album, and removed to the Taroom
Aboriginal settlement on the northern extremity of Mandandanji land. It was the time of the Aboriginal Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897 which effectively made all Aboriginal people wards of the state and allowed Queensland authorities to dictate where they could work, live and who they could marry. “My great-grandmother was separated from her mother as a child and was estranged from her extended family for much of her life,” Professor Dunstan says. “Eventually she applied for an exemption from the Protection Act to avoid being sent to an Aboriginal settlement, as her mother had been, and so that she could get married. Her exemption was issued on the condition that she not associate with other Aboriginals, so she was actually prohibited from knowing her family. The impact of this is still felt by us as descendants … we are just very separated from our culture and country. As a young adult I didn’t have a sense of how I could identify as an Aboriginal or how I could become more involved because we were cut off from the past.”
