-
Name
-
Murrin Bridge Aboriginal Station, Murrin Bridge Mission
-
Type of carceral site
-
Reserve, Station, or Mission
-
Dates of use
-
1949 – 1967
-
Quote
-
Bare red ground sweeps all distance. Little pockets of black-green trees remain still and burning. To the south an offshoot of the Lachlan is almost dried up. There are water tanks instead. Dead land. Crops seem much more important than people, than rape. A small church flakes off its old salmon skin, revealing the ashen wood beneath. The windows have no shutters, some doorwarys have no doors, and every house is exactly the same, like someone's idea of fancy concentration camps.
Novel, Fiction.
Winch, Tara June. Swallow the Air. University of Queensland Press, 2016 [2006], p. 136.
-
It's no good, this entire place is gone, no spirit left here [...] Nobody go to the river no more [...] Poor old people ere got round up ere from the tank, where lots of our people were killed from them sickness, that's these people, Wiradjuri and my people - Nygampaa. Back in '47 government made this place and shifted plents of station blacks out ere, that's what they call us, station blacks. Bloody Catholics runs the places, bloody run places into the ground. You know some of our people, they been taken into the church and them priests have their way, ya know bad spirit in them, and they took it out on the little fellas. Who's gunna speak up for em little fellas? Other people don't understand, when that bad spirit happens to family, it stays in the family, when we born we got all our past people's pain too. It doesn't just go away like they think it does.'
Novel, Fiction.
Winch, Tara June. Swallow the Air. University of Queensland Press, 2016 [2006], pp. 138-139
-
Authority
-
Roman Catholic Sacred Heart Missionaries; Aborigines Welfare Board (NSW, 1940-1969)
-
Archives and sources
-
Nichol, R. M. Growing up Indigenous: Developing Effective Pedagogy for Education and Development. BRILL, 2011.
-
Contact
-
Niamh
-
identifier
-
SITE-MB