The Yoorrook Justice Commission has completed its second block of Wurrek Tyerrang, or hearings, including a harrowing account from a member of the Stolen Generations.
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Uncle Larry Walsh is a Nirai Bulluk man, of the Daung Whurrung, who was stolen from Mooroopna at the age of two while his mother was in hospital giving birth to his brother.
Through that process of being taken, at only two years of age, Uncle Larry appeared in Mooroopna Children’s Court on May 24, 1956. He told the commission the offence listed was “child in need of care and protection” and that has given him a criminal record, which has impacted the rest of his life, and the life of his family.
His two sisters were also taken under the Act, one older than him, one younger.
The family dislocation created by his removal was emphasised as Uncle Larry began his testimony to the commission on May 20, opening with an appeal to the brother he’s never met.
“Alan, I'm nearly 70. You are already 70. It's time we met,” he said.
“I always wanted to know who you are and what you look like and what your family is. I've never had that opportunity in the last 69 years.
“If you hear this or your children are hearing this, I will ask Yoorrook, you folk, to pass on my contacts,” Uncle Larry said.
The appeal is indicative of the theme running through Uncle Larry’s testimony, which was a story of personal and cultural removal, trauma and mistreatment, and the continued quest to restore family, and connection to culture and Country.
“You see, my mother was in the hospital at the time. My father had left with my older brother, the one I've never met,” Uncle Larry said.
“This is (sic) things I find out later. He had left. My mother was in hospital, and so myself and two of my sisters ended up before the Magistrates’ Court sentenced with a criminal conviction at two and a half, ‘in need of care and protection’, and given a criminal conviction.“
Taken, despite he and his sisters being cared for by his grandmother and aunty.
Uncle Larry said the conviction, however unworthy, would influence the course of his life.
Uncle Larry told the commission that before he was even 10 that note on his record had brought him to the attention of police, recalling an interaction while walking along a street.
He said the officers had stopped him and asked if he’d been in any trouble and he replied that he had not, but to his surprise, they returned after checking.
“They came back, threw me in the back of a divvy, called me a liar and I had criminal convictions and took me up to the cop shop to give me a beating,” he said.
“They didn't even read how old I was when I got the criminal conviction. I just, and at, you know, I'm eight, and they are taking me up (to) the cop shop (and) giving me a beating for being a criminal.
“I actually started — at 10 or 11, because the truth was I was getting picked up and beaten and questioned for things that were being done that I had no involvement.
“So I thought, well, I'm going to get beat up for not doing them, I might as well do them. And let's be honest, if you are in my situation, you're being accused and beaten up for things you haven't done, what is your reaction going to be?”
At that stage, Uncle Larry didn’t understand that he’d been given a criminal record simply for being taken away from his mother.
Uncle Larry’s daughter Isobel Paipadjerook Morphy-Walsh gave evidence alongside her father, pointing out how his experiences had passed on intergenerational trauma to her.
“We always knew, one of the stories that had always travelled down before we got the documents was that my mother's — my dad's mum — was giving birth to his brother and that's why the three of them were back in the humpy, with an aunt,” she said.
“So, you know, our fear of hospitals, which we have and we discuss a little bit later on (in our statement) and then, you know, it's reinforced by a whole bunch of other things, but it actually even stems from this basic moment where, you know, the basis of my father's first interaction with the medical system is knowledge that it can be used to take either himself or his mother away.”
Ms Morphy-Walsh said it had been difficult to get access to her father’s records, and when they had, the records often had large sections redacted.
“So, you know, my dad's complete file picture isn't there, and I am, at this point, incredibly suspicious of why, because everything that we have found so far basically shows to me that the state knew exactly what they were doing and — well, not that what they were doing, but they knew exactly the homes and the scenarios that they were placing him into,” she said.
Uncle Larry told the hearing he was passed through care and foster homes, enduring beatings by adults and peers, leading him into a cycle of physical clashes.
“Look, in plain simple terms I never wanted to fight, but if I was going to fight you got hurt,” he said.
“Then I would be left alone for a couple of weeks because nobody else wanted to risk being hurt. So I broke someone's arm in football or I did something that hurt a couple of people. A few punches were a few weeks of no trouble.”
He said the education system reinforced to him a sense of confrontation, and to others his worthlessness.
“From primary school onward, we were savages and we were thieves and we were only good at football and boxing or thieving. Well, thank you very much, I don't like what you're teaching about me. Because you're causing me fights in schools,” he said.
“You schools are causing me fights because you're saying I'm a primitive savage who will steal or bash you. You're saying to me and to all these kids that I am a savage. You're saying to me, and all these kids are repeating it, that I — and they may not have used the word bastard, but the kids did. Oh, you know, I was an orphan.”
The mistreatment led to substance abuse and homelessness, but also made Uncle Larry more determined to seek and reveal the truth, eventually taking on leadership roles within some of Australia’s most significant First Nations campaigns.
“Up until 30, I would have been a terrible leader. You know, too much anger, too much hate, too much rage. And if no-one else was helping me to control it, I had to learn to control it myself,” he said.
“So I couldn't accept in my own heart the leadership role until I could actually control myself.”
Uncle Larry has since become a leader among his family group and for a homeless cohort known as Parkies, among others, including during the National Inquiry Into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children From Their Families, which led to the Bringing Them Home report.
“They had no-one to speak for them. So I did,” he said
“It hurt like hell. Because no-one else was going to talk for them. They were my mates. They were brothers. They were sisters. They didn't make it. Someone had to talk for them. So I chose to forgo talking about myself because they were, they helped, they backed, they, at the risk of raising their own pain, supported.
“Some just didn't survive their own nightmares.”
Uncle Larry has also campaigned against black deaths in custody, motivated by the loss of community members, including a brother in a police cell.
Uncle Larry carries both physical and mental scars from his challenging life. His daughter, Ms Morphy-Walsh, has inherited some of the mental harm.
“I have complex post-traumatic stress disorder. My father has post-traumatic stress syndrome,” she said.
“They handle us differently because I'm in a — they handle our treatment differently because I'm in a sexually violent trauma healing program and my father is — currently there's no sort of equivalent for Stolen Generations so they're putting him in with the army vets and treating him the way they would an army vet.”
She told the commission the families’ negative experiences had led her to avoid basic services such as hospitals.
“It's gotten to the point where now because I am so traumatised by that experience, I don't want to present unless it's too late,” she said.
“I nearly had a miscarriage that was — well, I did have a miscarriage that was nearly too late because I was so reluctant to present.”
Ms Morphy-Walsh raised the example of a recent bout of ill health for her father as an example of why First Nations people can be reluctant to access services.
“So she (the doctor) advised us, as soon as he had an attack, to present to the emergency and she forwarded ahead the file to Bendigo Health Hospital Emergency so they knew what was going on,” she said.
“When we got there, three days later, when Dad did have an immediate pancreatitis attack, we were asked 15 times in emergency, my father and I, if he was an alcoholic.”
Ms Morphy-Walsh also outlined an experience she and her father had when her sister was detained by police.
She told the commission the police had refused to deal with her father over the handling of her sister’s case, leading to him calling her for help.
“He was sitting like such a good little boy, like — sorry, this is going to make me cry — that eight-year-old little boy, that you saw, is who I saw sitting in that police station,” she said.
“And he had been sitting there for three hours while the police refused — and he was my sister's next of kin at the time and lived with her. I didn't live with her and I was 23. And they refused to give her to him and refused to charge her.”
Uncle Larry told the Yoorrook commission that First Nations people were experiencing ongoing trauma that stemmed from colonisation.
“I believe that we have, all of us, the last eight generations, has suffered some form of mental or emotional, whether it be inherited by the parents being the first generation being locked up, because we were used to being free, to the way people were moved around from mission to mission to reserve, to break down families,” he said.
“While we need to fix the Stolen Gens (Generations) and the deaths in custody, we need to take a longer, harder long-term look at the effects of colonisation much better than we do.
“For instance, can you imagine living free, roaming your land, then being put in chains and moved to somewhere else's country that you didn't belong to? So you had no right of say, no right of doing something without the consent of the local people, who were also being forced in the same position as you.”
Uncle Larry said efforts so far to reconnect First Nations Australians with their land have been inadequate.
“I should not have to argue that my inheritance, the whole Nirai Bulluk area, the whole of the creation of the Goulburn River, the whole of the creation of the King River and a couple of other rivers is part of my culture and my heritage, but, more important, it's one word the white fellas won't use with us — my inheritance,” he said.
“Passed down from my ancestors all the way through to me and to my children.
“It's just that we are not using the right word because they are training us to go ‘heritage’ instead of ‘inheritance’. Inheritance has a different legal meaning to heritage. And I'm sick and tired of us being fooled by scaly-backed devil dodgers. If you want a translation of that one?”
Uncle Larry emphasised that he did not think true recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders’ ownership of the land was a threat to non-First Nations people.
“I, as an Aboriginal, and the ones that have joined me on this, we're not about to shoot your heritage down. We will acknowledge that part of your heritage is also part of ours,” he said.
Ms Morphy-Walsh said the pain of Stolen Generations stories such as her father’s was not the whole story.
“When I was reflecting on this whole process, this whole process just makes me feel so angry, sad and weary, but ... I'm able to see resilience in action through my father,” she said.
“You know, especially through understanding intimately his story. This is resilience in action.”
However, Ms Morphy-Walsh said the loss her grandmother felt from having her children taken away, the impacts on those children and the generations that followed, was ever present.
“So she died before all of her kids really realised that she fought for them,” Ms Morphy-Walsh said.
“She died before she realised that her kids had fought for her as kids as well.
“You know, she died before any of that pain was actually, actually resolved, and I, you know, I feel for her.
“I feel for — you know, I don't have — I didn't have a relationship with my nan, it's sad. It's sad for her too.”
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