been like to feed a big family and keep the house running back in those days: you know it must have been hard for them. And as I said, the Welfare – from what Shirl tells me – the welfare used to be down once every week and have complaints; people would ring up and say, Them Moffatt’s are runnin’ around like blacks again, and all of this business. Dennis laughed remembering the fires they would light out the back of the house and all the kids running wild, ‘I don’t blame them for ringing up and saying, Them Moffatt’s are at it again’. But he did blame the authorities for overlooking the love that held them together and only seeing overcrowding and neglect.
Family ties Dennis told me what he knew of his family’s backstory. He thought Mimmy was from Thursday Island in the Torres Strait, though he couldn’t pinpoint how he came to know that. As far as he knew his grandfather was a roustabout and Mimmy worked on an outstation. ‘From the stories Mimmy used to tell me, her and my father’s father ran away together and they came and settled in Crookwell and that’s where Dadda was born’. Dennis used the language of blood quantum that was current in that era to talk about his Aboriginal heritage, even though for him community connection was what defined his identity. ‘Dadda was quarter cast Aboriginal, his father was half cast Aboriginal’. Mimmy moved with Dadda down to the city where they moved between Redfern, La Perouse, Herne Bay, and Newtown. Dennis was a proud Indigenous man, but the strength he drew from his identity wasn’t always matched by acceptance. In the orphanage they told him he wasn’t Aboriginal but he insisted he knew who he was even at that young age. When he got out his older sister, Shirl, refused to speak about their heritage: ‘she knew more about things than I knew and she used to say to me all the time, Dennis, leave
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