My Family Tree

dhulumay@yahoo.com.au
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The Sydney Morning Herald.
February 16, 2008

A weeping nation began to recalibrate its past the day its leader said sorry. Debra Jopson reports.

Elly Chatfield was 38 when she and her father, Cornelius, from the Gamilaroi people of northern NSW, saw each other for the first time since she had been taken by state authorities from their Moree home as a toddler.

At the beginning of their reunion weekend he said he wanted her to say when the two days were over if there was anything she remembered about him.

She could recall just one memory. "There was nothing of my mum at all".

"It's the actual shape of your hair; the silhouette of your head. It's odd," she told him.

"He said: 'It's not odd. You were only 14 months old and I used to put my head over your cot and look at you,"' Chatfield recalled this week.

"It's my only memory of my dad and I didn't have it until I saw him. If I hadn't met him, right to this day, I wouldn't have anything."

The rest of us have memory piled on memory of our parents from our childhoods. But those who were taken have nothing, or only scraps.

Meeting Cornelius 10 years ago and looking through her files in state archives have allowed Chatfield to rethink the past. Fostered by a white family in Merrylands, she says as a child she "felt like a piece of garbage" because welfare workers told her her parents did not want her.

But it was not true. Her files revealed they had written to the authorities beseeching them to let them see their children - or at least get reports on them. They were refused.

These experiences made Chatfield recalibrate her memory. The past was not as she thought.

A similar recalibration occurred across Australia this week on a grand scale, as the nation heard the word sorry from its leader for its treatment of the stolen generations. With it came an explosion of emotion that touched indigenous and other Australians alike.

The recognition of wrongs led to pride, relief, forgiveness and what Chatfield describes as a "haunting sadness" for the past and the people who missed that great day.

For some, it also brought fresh trauma. "It has the capacity to make or break some people's lives," says CHATFIELD, who gives healing workshops for members of the stolen generations and teaches others about the Aboriginal cultural heritage she has reclaimed for herself.

The president of the Australian Psychological Society, Amanda Gordon, who watched the apology at Martin Place, believes some people may now know an ugly truth they had not imagined before; that the story of the stolen generations was not just a journalistic contrivance, as had been asserted for so many years.

"There were tears everywhere. Tears of joy. Tears of excitement. I was laughing with someone later at all the people like me, being traumatised like I was. I didn't really think that I was significantly traumatised but I was really aware of how much weeping was going on.

"It's incredibly traumatic … I have a very strong view that we should know this stuff. The problem is some people haven't known it before, so they are quite distressed at the discovery that it really did go on."

But there is joy, too.

Chatfield was uplifted by the 1000 people who crowded into a Katoomba hotel with her to watch the televised apology and the strangers who came up to hug her and say their own spontaneous sorries. She even now has a tentative trust in politicians, having grown up believing they destroyed her family.
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http://www.sustainablebluemountains.net.au/imagesDB/resources/AboriginalHandbook.pdf
Aboriginal Blue Mountains - A Guide to the Community in the Blue Mountains.
Artwork by Elly Chatfield 2006.

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