When light-skinned means coloured

Nine Aboriginal people are part of a Federal Court class action started by Aboriginal woman Pat Eatock against (Melbourne) Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt over articles and blogs on Aboriginal identity. After writing about so-called light-skinned people of mixed heritage who identify as Aboriginal, he has been accused of racial discrimination.

Bolt has given evidence that he was being tried for exercising his right to free speech, and for raising topics that were "little discussed" because of intimidation.

Years ago I met Pat Eatock and interviewed her with student Samantha Weir for an oral history project. She spoke about her life including her early days and her involvement in the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra. I'm telling you now, she goes way back!

Whatever you think of the matter, the discussion in court reminded me about how being light-skinned doesn't make it any easier for Aboriginal people.

Here's a story, told to me a few years back by Vincent Wenberg, a member of the Stolen Generations. One day he showed me a photo, one of those you often find in albums of the 1940s - a snapshot of a man and woman, sometimes with children, walking down the main street.

They're usually wearing their best clothes, gloves and hat and possibly carrying a parcel or two.

They've been in town shopping and some anonymous photographer has snapped them, then sold them the photo.

This one depicts a soldier, complete with slouch hat and a cigarette in his mouth, holding the hand of a little boy, wearing shorts, long sleeved white shirt and a tie and panama hat.

Next to him is a slim, pretty Aboriginal woman clutching a purse and wearing a cotton dress and flowered hat.

The man is Private John Wenberg, who was then with the Second AIF based in Tamworth.

His skin is dark, because Wenberg explains, he was English but with possibly some African blood.

The woman is his wife, Lily Wenberg, nee Mercy, and Vince's mother, a Bundjalong woman from the northern rivers region of NSW. The boy is Vince's younger brother, Johnnie.

On the back, in black fountain pen, Lily has written, "father and mother and son John Wenberg 1940".

Johnnie never had the opportunity to display this photo in an album.

Like Vince and another brother, Gus, Johnnie was a member of the Stolen Generations.

The three boys were taken from their parents and spent the war years in the Kinchela Boys Home near Kempsey on the NSW mid north coast.

While there, Johnnie's complaints of stomach aches were ignored until it was too late. He was taken to hospital where he died of appendicitis. He was seven years old.

"The people in the home didn't let Gus and me go to see him in hospital," Vince remembers.

"If he'd seen us or had his mother there to comfort him he would have been happier."

After the funeral service the brothers and the other boys from the home were made to march through the main street of Kempsey.

From on top of the hill, remarks such as "Blacks go home!" were yelled at them. In the meantime, the Welfare Board wrote to Mr Wenberg asking for the details of the Mutual Life and Citizens Association insurance policy he had taken out for Johnnie, in the hope that it would cover the funeral costs.

The Wenberg girls - Rita, Adelaide, Amy, Pat, Valerie and Dorothy - were also removed from their parents and taken to Cootamundra and to Bomaderry Children's Home.

According to the Bringing Them Home report, the Aborigines Protection (later known as

Welfare) Board's main aim was to rescue Aboriginal children from what were considered neglectful family lives, and to assimilate them into the wider community as menial workers.

Yet of the estimated 400 boys who went through Kinchela between 1924 and 1970, many became alcoholics and homeless, unable to identify as either white or black.

In contrast, Vincent gained a job with the Railways in Sydney after his four years at the home and worked there until his retirement.

But he is still bitter about the policies that took him there.

He asks how the Welfare Board could claim to have been protecting Aboriginal children from neglectful parents, when his sister Dorothy, then around 18 months, died in the Bomaderry Childrens Home when her head became caught between the bars of her cot.

Pat was deemed uncontrollable by the authorities and received shock treatment in Callan Park, the Sydney psychiatric institution.

When her younger sister, Valerie, went to visit her she was upset to find her wearing a straight jacket. Not long afterwards Pat died. She was 18.

Valerie, herself, has distressing memories of the Cootamundra home and life as a domestic on farms, including a series of sexual assaults. She was the first member of the Stolen Generations to win monetary compensation for her treatment, winning $35,000 from the NSW Victims Compensation Tribunal in 2002.

While the Wenberg boys kept in contact with their sisters by visiting them at Cootamundra after they left Kinchela, what became of Lily and John, the parents?

Vincent opens the concertina files holding the official documents of his life that he has collected, urged on by his children. He discovered that he was born out of wedlock when Lily was 16 and that his real father was Wally Randall. He has also discovered many new half brothers and sisters.

He shows me the letters that for many years John and Lily continued to write to the Board, begging that their children be returned.

One letter from Lily, written in 1948, suggests "I think it time he (Vincent) came home now. Will you let me know. I think it time he was home now."

A letter written to Lily by the Acting Secretary of the Welfare Board in 1947 insists that Vincent must stay under its care until he is 14 and points out that "you and your husband badly neglected your children". Vincent denies this.

In 1948, the year Vincent was released from the home as a 14-year-old to find work on farms and in the bush, Lily died of pulmonary tuberculosis. She was buried in the Methodist Cemetery at Bellingen. She was 34 years old.

*The Wenbergs are mentioned in the book I wrote with Ollie Smith, Raging Partners: Two Worlds, One Friendship (Magabala Books, 2000). I met Vince while working for the Sorry Day Committee several years ago, when the issue of an apology to the Stolen Generations first arose, but I was well acquainted with his sisters and nephew before that.