Keitha Dunstan

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

Professor 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 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.”

Professor Dunstan was the first in her family to go to university, graduating with a Bachelor of Commerce, a Master of Accounting, and a PhD in the field of Commerce. She has held senior academic positions at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand and is a former Commissioner of the NZ Securities Commission. Her sister Lorelle Holland, a senior nurse, has also entered academia as an Associate Lecturer in Nursing at the University of Queensland. “I’ve certainly received the benefit from the socio-economic bridge that education provides,” Professor Dunstan says. “I haven’t faced any prejudice or persecution because of my Aboriginal heritage but I don’t know what would have happened if I had more clearly identified earlier in my life. For a long time, I felt a lot of guilt because not openly embracing my ancestry may have helped me succeed in my career. That’s part of the reason I want to be confidently vocal now - because I feel like I’m in a position to do so. I can use my privilege to provide voice to my people.”

Professor Dunstan’s time in New Zealand opened her eyes to how a country can reconcile with its First Nations People. “In New Zealand you are aware at all times that you –are in a bilingual environment where Maori culture is valued and respected. It was warm and embracing,” she says. “I think Australia is at a really important stage where we can seriously talk about what true reconciliation would look like. There is growing awareness in the community about what has been stolen from Indigenous Australians. This is the right time to be really visible and to do what we can to make sure that we close the gap, because most Australian Indigenous people are still in dire circumstances.”

Although Professor Dunstan and her four sisters have been able to research their ancestry, they regret they will never be able to fully connect to Mandandanji culture.

“We haven’t had the advantage of knowing our mob and having community elders teaching us,” she says. But returning to Australia and the Gold Coast has made Professor Dunstan feel part of a greater Indigenous community. “What has really helped me is having close links with the elders of the Aboriginal community on the Gold Coast. The Kombumerri people, the people of the broader Yugambeh language group and the Indigenous students and staff at Bond, they’ve all been very welcoming and supportive of me. Even though I didn’t grow up on country and I wasn’t brought up in the culture of my ancestors, I have a spiritual link which was very easily reignited by meeting with others who are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. And that is quite wonderful.”

“SHE SAID, ‘IF THEY FIND OUT THAT YOU’RE ABORIGINAL, YOU’LL LOSE YOUR JOBS’.”

The matriarchs: left to right, Professor Dunstan’s Aunt Helen Bellville, Grandmother Gladys Fisher, Aunt Lyn Reynolds and Mother Desley Ball, circa 2000.

From left to right, Professor Dunstan’s father Ben Ball, Keitha, sister Lorelle Holland (front) mother Desley Ball holding sister Nicole Taylor, sister Natalie Dean (front) and sister Michelle Burkin, circa 1973. Professor Dunstan’s Great-Great Grand Aunt Jane Weribone, circa 1910.