For almost ten years, right-wing columnist Andrew Bolt has claimed the Stolen Generation is a myth. “Show me three of them?” was his common taunt, but it was a taunt that showed more about his ignorance and lazy journalism than the truth. The data shows thousands of people caught up in the system over many decades, mostly so-called “half-castes” whom the ill-guided theories of the time suggested were best kept away from the influence of their parents. They left hundreds of testaments scattered in the record.
One of those was from Aboriginal woman Roslyn Choikee. I learned her story today in Mount Isa city library. I had been there a few times before but never noticed a tray of books about Indigenous issues. I picked Jonathan Richards’ The Secret War, an important book about the Queensland Native Police I’d read before and one I hadn’t read before, Stuart Rintoul’s 1993 book “The Wailing – A National Black Oral History”.
It is as the title suggests, a collection of Indigenous testimony. Nearly all the narrators faced hardship of some kind but some stories were less clear cut than others, such as Roslyn Choikee. I was interested in her story because she was born in Cloncurry, near Mount Isa, and I typed out her testimony for an article for the paper.
Her story was simple but not straight forward. It was both terrifying – aged six, she was stolen from her parents – and satisfying – because she still had a happy childhood and a good life by the shores of Mission Bay, near Cairns. She became a happily married Christian on the coast, and never missed her home. It helped she landed in Yarrabah, which was established as a Christian mission for Aboriginal people in 1892. Many people like Roslyn were forced to go there. But it remains a beautiful spot nestled between the sea and the mountains. Seven decades later Roslyn was still there, aged 77, when in the sunshine of a July afternoon she told her story to Rintoul on a stone veranda at the Yarrabah home for the aged. Her happiness didn’t justify an appalling system but it showed the resilience of people to adapt to whatever life throws at them.
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Choikee: “I come from Cloncurry. I was taken away from my parents in 1920. I was six years old. I didn’t know what was happening when I came to Yarrabah. It was good schooling here. We used to go down to the beach and get shells. That’s how we learned to count, with shells or with seeds at that time. We had a good teacher. She was a dark girl, a big girl, a senior girl. We had senior room, intermediate room and junior room. When you came to Yarrabah, if you came big they would put you in the intermediate room and if you came small, like my age, you would go into the junior room.”
Rintoul: Do you remember what happened the day you were taken away?
“The policeman took us to the police station, me and some other girls. But the two girls who were with me there went to Cherbourg, and they’ve passed away now, those girls. They sent me here to Yarrabah. I liked Yarrabah: Yarrabah is a pretty place. I never got homesick here, because I found a lot of nice little girls the same age as my age.”
You didn’t miss your parents?
“Oh yes. Now and again I missed them, but here at Yarrabah we had too many mates. Go to school, come back, play.
“We were living on a reserve at Cloncurry – a little dark people’s reserve. That’s all right too. We used to go to Boulia to see the rodeo when I was a little girl. That’s where I saw buck-jumping. A bullock-wagon used to take us from Cloncurry to Boulia. That was a bridle track then. They say it’s a big bitumen road now.
“I won’t go back because there is nobody there now. My cousin’s son went back there two years ago to look around and there’s not one of our friends there, not one Aboriginal in the area that was there. They don’t know where they shifted them. We never heard nothing and they never heard about us.
“All the half-caste children were taken away at the time and sent to different missions. Some of them went to Barrambah (Cherbourg), Palm island, here. I was sent here to Yarrabah. My father was a white man and my mother was a dark woman, you see. They weren’t married. I didn’t know about marriage till I came to Yarrabah. They were good though. They helped them and they helped us children too. They took us to Boulia now and again. The white men used to just come around. I was too young to know what was happening when they would come around to visit us. We didn’t go to the town part at Cloncurry. We would just stay down where the Aboriginal reserve was. We had tents and humpies, no houses.
“I never heard nothing about my mother from the day I was taken away, no more. But when I came to Yarrabah I was happy here and I never thought of it anymore. I did think of my mother, but I wouldn’t go back to see if she was there or anything like that. When I came to Yarrabah we started going to school and at school we made mates, here and there, our own age. It was really good. We didn’t know how to talk much till we came here to Yarrabah. Till I came here, I didn’t know much. I didn’t know anything about the Lord. I’m a Christian now. I didn’t know nothing about it till I came to Yarrabah. That’s where we learned Christianity, at Yarrabah.
“My name was Daisy Sheridan. It was changed when I came here and was baptised. My godmother, Ciccy Thompson, gave me the name Roslyn Bell. Everyone who came here was baptised at St Alban’s Church. I knew that my name was Daisy, but that was all right. I had to change my name when I got married, to Choikee. Choikee is a traditional name of Aboriginal people around the Yarrabah area.
“The dormitory was really good. We had two matrons, Miss Ardley and Miss Newbury, when I first came. During the day we played. We never used to work much. Only we used to rake up, with our hands. We used to clean the yard, and when you grew up, coming on to full age, you did harder work. We went to school only up to grade five at that time. When we got to grade five we left school.
“Mr Dobar came up to Yarrabah one time. He was a white man who looked after the missions. He came to school and we had to stand up and spell ornithorhynchus (she spells it out) because he had left that with us to learn, and some didn’t know and some knew, and he say to them, ‘That’s a good girl’. Ornithorhynchus is a platypus. My granddaughter who goes to school in Brisbane reckons they learned that ‘ornithorhynchus’ in grade eight, but we learned that ‘ornithorhychus’ in grade five. That was the last year that we were in school.
“After grade five we worked and did fancy work. We used to sew fancy work, crochet around. Miss Hogan used to send us a big box of clothes for us to sew and do fancy work on. They got us ready to be wives. We had to learn to cook, we had to learn to wash, we had to learn to iron. Miss Hahn, the matron, would send us back anything that had grease on it. Boys went to school in the morning, the boys would go out one road down to church and we would go another road down to church. We didn’t go together all: we didn’t see each other. If we fell in love they’d come and talk to us in the yard, with matron. We’d get engaged then. That’s how I got engaged.”
How could you fall in love if you couldn’t talk to each other?
(She laughs.) “I don’t know. We’d look at each other in church and sometimes matron would see us. Oh she’d growl, ‘You mustn’t look over there where the boys are,’ she’d say. I didn’t care for boys while we were young, until we were going into the intermediate room, going onto thirteen and fourteen.
“My husband was Robert Choikee. He was one of the boys who came up and talked to us. They used to come up from the dormitory and sit on a big seat around the mango tree. There were about nine of us all sitting around, just yarning and having a joke of our own. That was all right. We’d sit there and matron would be on the veranda sitting down and when it was time for them to go she’d blow a whistle and they’d go then. They weren’t there long. But we never met alone at any time until we got married. We weren’t allowed. We were told not to do it.
“There was a song that we would sing in the dormitory at night, ‘Oh where is my wandering boy tonight?’ That’s a Christian song. That was the Virgin Mary singing that time when Jesus was in the temple and she couldn’t find him. They wanted to go to Jerusalem but she couldn’t find him, so she sang that song and we learned it. But Miss Hahn, our matron, though we were encouraging the boys around all the time. She would sing out, ‘Are you encouraging the boys again? Do you want the boys to sneak around?’ We’d stop that and start some other song, but if we went back to something to bring the boys back again, she’d start again. ‘Stop it now, stop it now, no encouraging the boys,’ she’d say. That was a good song.”
Combo Waterhole is a refreshing change even in the driest times, a pleasant place to camp by a billabong and wait while your billy boils. Situated 7km south of Kynuna, between Cloncurry and Winton, it is a short trip off the Landsborough Highway bitumen to some interpretative signs and a walking track to the waterhole, which in the wet season is one of many channels of the Diamantina River.
What little water there is kept in place by stone overshots installed on Dagworth Station in the 1890s. Teams of labourers used horses, drays and baskets to cart in stone and soil laid in tightly packed rows strengthened by keystones. The water has become a haven for wildlife thriving under the shade of coolibah trees.
It’s not known if 
Sarah Riley was a friend of Christina Macpherson, sister of station owner Bob Macpherson. Christina was a talented musician and at Dagworth Paterson heard her play on her zither a “catchy, whimsical, haunting tune that deserves words to keep it alive”. Christina was playing the Scottish tune 
The first legend was about shearers. One day Paterson and Bob Macpherson stopped at the Combo Waterhole where they found the remains of a recently slaughtered sheep killed by a swagman. The incident reminded Macpherson that a year earlier Dagworth had been through a bitter shearers’ strike (one of many in the 1890s). As Macpherson planned to start shearing with non-union labour, unionists used the cover of nightfall and gunfire to set the woolshed alight, killing 140 sheep. When police investigated the suicide of Samuel “French” Hoffmeister who shot himself at the strikers’ camp a day later, they found a burned letter linking him with the woolshed fire.
The second legend was of a trooper pursuing a man who killed an Aboriginal youth. The trooper stumbled on a swagman who thought police were looking for him because he’d killed a sheep for food. The swagman tried to escape but drowned in a waterhole. The name for Paterson’s new ditty came to him when he and Macpherson found a swagman on the road. Macpherson said “that’s what they call waltzing matilda”.
Yet that was the plan in a quick 24-hour shuttle from Brisbane with a 6am flight down and the same time back the following morning. I remembered when I was last here, around 1993 or 1994. After I moved from Melbourne to Brisbane in 1998, Adelaide was always just a little bit too far away and I lacked a good excuse to go there – until this week.
My destination was Adelaide Botanic Gardens but I got off the airport bus early for a walk to admire the solidity of the many stone buildings. I had arranged to meet an internet friend for coffee on North Terrace. I was pleased with the choice because not only were the Gardens nearby, so were the Museum, Art Gallery and State Library, all of which I hoped to visit that day. We had a lovely chat and I stayed a lot longer at the cafe than I anticipated.
I asked the Botanic Gardens would it still be in flower a week later and told them about my relationship to the plant. They said it would and they also knew about my blog post. They replied, “it was a nice piece and mentioned in our blog 
According to Mabberley’s Plant Book, puya leaves yield a fibre used for rot-resistant fishing nets and sheep and birds can get entangled in them. “The nutrients from which, as well as those from their droppings may be absorbed,” Mabberley’s said. Sheep-eaters or not, puya chilensis are impressive. There was no information near the plants other than a small sign nestled in the ground with the name. Puya chilensis is in the Bromeliaceae family, better known as bromeliads, and the equally spiky pineapple is the most famous example. The largest bromeliad is a puya though not a chilensis, I found out later in the day.
Puya chilensis grows in arid hillsides of the western Andes at altitudes up to 1200m. Some gardens report the flowering to be rare though others, Adelaide included, say they flower each year in the early spring months. In Chile the giant hummingbird pollinates the electric-yellow flowers with bright orange anthers and uses puya spikes for perching to reach the flowers. The leaves have ferociously sharp backward-pointing spines which trap animals. They die and their decaying bodies provide nutrients to the plants. Or so the story goes.
In Adelaide there were no dead animals nearby though the honeyeaters and bees were enjoying the copious nectar. The plant is flammable so regardless of sheep, farmers have a reason to fear it and cut it back. Its native habitat is also affected by oil and gas pipelines, high voltage power lines and fruit plantations. Around the Adelaide chilensis were planted smaller varieties of puya. Puya is a Mapuche Indian word meaning “point”. This one below is puya venusta, which flowers in red. Like chilensis it is found in central Chile. 
This next one is puya coerulea. This is a rare Chilean plant, known as the “pink torch” puya for its stunning flowering. It sends up a meter-long flower cluster that according to 
This one below is 
Having exhausted everything I wanted to do at the site it was time to ask the experts. I walked to the admin building where receptionist told me the gardeners were all in meetings. However if I came back at 1pm someone would talk. Happy with that, I left for lunch.
I came back at 1pm and as promised, the receptionist found me a gardener. The gardener didn’t mind me taping him but said he was not entitled to speak to media on behalf of the garden. For that reason I have not identified him or quoted him directly (apart from one instance which speaks to his character). He told me the puya clump was 40 to 60 years old and used to be four times bigger. It was moved 10 years ago when they rebuilt the Amazonian section. 
Woolly Days 