Beyond Sorry
Clip 2: A short man that smoked a pipe
3 min 2 sec
Taken from the documentary Beyond Sorry (2003)
Original title classification not known – this clip chosen to be G
Availability of the complete title
Please be aware that this clip may contain the names, images and voices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who may now be deceased.
Curator’s clip description
Aggie Abbott recalls that when her family heard that her sister had a little white child, they travelled by camel from Ross River to see her. A re-enactment shows a young Zita running through the scrub. Zita, now in her sixties, walks through landscape, and recalls getting bush tucker with her family, and in voice-over Aggie Abbott describes how the family hunted kangaroo. Aggie and Zita both say that being half-caste did not affect how their families treated them. Aggie Abbott describes the ‘short man that smoked a pipe’, who came on social pretext but who would identify and report the children to the authorities. Soon after, a truck from Arltunga would come to collect the children.
Curator’s notes
The most aggrieved aspect of the testimony of Aunty Aggie Abbott is how the taking of Aboriginal children was neither a spontaneous or arbitrary act, but one in which great energy, resources and planning was invested, as represented by the man with the pipe who always had one eye on the children. Both Zita Wallace and Aggie Abbott’s testimony of how as ‘half-caste’ children they were not treated any differently by their families, pin points the notion of difference as it relates to skin colour being very much a concept imposed on Indigenous families and communities.
Romaine Moreton, curator
have teachers’ notes.
