It was a way of addressing unfinished business, and building a “bridge between my ancestors who witnessed colonisation – and my life today as an urban Aboriginal woman”. She began with the goal of tracing her four Aboriginal grandparents’ family lines as far back as she could in Australia’s written historical record. I am not discrediting these milestones, but they’re isolated little milestones on the timeline of history.” What you do know about the history of Aboriginal people are cherrypicked: Mabo and stolen generation. “What do you know about missions and reserves?” she asks. After a tough lecture on Aboriginal segregation and the indenture of teenagers, she was struck by the realisation that few Australians know the true history of Aboriginal people in this country. And by releasing them from their binding, reaching in and pulling my ancestors out, it is like reaching through time to bring them in front of you.”īostock thinks back to being a mature-age student studying to be a primary school teacher in 2003. “When you go to the archives, sometimes they are bound together and tied up with cotton tape. “As soon as I started doing my family history, the heavens opened up.”Įrased from history, dispossessed, forgotten – her ancestors came alive in the archives as if they had been waiting for someone to find them there, to tell their stories. She felt her ancestors close by as she researched her book. When she was finishing her book, Bostock found herself in ‘a very peaceful place’. Rising spectrally above the towns and villages of the New South Wales northern rivers, the sacred mountain and its powerful presence dominate the landscape. “Now I had a starting point.” ‘I felt it was my calling’Īs she turns off the M1 and sees the great heft of Wollumbin Mt Warning, Bostock breathes in, exhales and feels a sense of peace. Finding One My was a big moment for Bostock she actually had a name for one of her Aboriginal ancestors. His grandson Augustus John Bostock would travel north from Sydney and at the age of 27 marry One My, AKA Clara Wolumbin, of the Wollumbin people – Bostock’s great-great-grandmother. In the colony he would be pardoned and become wealthy and respectable. Robert Bostock Jr would be found guilty under the Slave Trade Felony Act and transported to Australia in 1815 for a term of 14 years. His son Robert had followed his footsteps at a time when slavery was being abolished and criminalised. In the mid-1700s, Capt Robert Bostock transported African captives in terrible conditions and sold them in ports across the world. His life had already been documented by an avid amateur genealogist and a professional historian. Her white ancestor, she would soon find out, was not only a slave trader but a convict – one of two slave traders sent to Australia for the crime. But finding out about her slave trader ancestors from the mid-1700s turned out to be easier than accessing the records for her ancestors who had lived under the Aborigines Protection Board in the early part of last century.
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