‘Never really heard of it’: the certificate of exemption and lost identity

From my earliest memories as a child in the late 1950s I recall asking my parents questions about my identity, in particular ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Where do we come from?’ I was curious about these issues, and about photographs showing that I was a blue-eyed blonde as a young child. Whenever I put these questions to my parents, my dark skinned brown-eyed mother and fair skinned blue-eyed father always gave me the same answer – ‘You are an Australian, Judi’. This answer, however, always left me wondering: ‘What did it mean to be an Australian?’, ‘What did an Australian look like?’, ‘Did I look like an Australian?’ and ‘Did my family look and behave like Australians?’ I knew that I was different to all my friends but I could not compare myself with them as none had parents with the same mixed heritage as mine.

Later, as a teenager I felt driven to find out more, when I came to realise that my mother’s heritage, which she denied, was Aboriginal. My father was of mixed European heritage.^[1]His sister, one of my favourite aunts, cautioned me about my personal journey to find my mother’s family. She asked: ‘Why not say you are Italian, and therefore save yourself the heartache?’ I wondered what she was really saying. Why did she think it was easier to claim Italian heritage rather than Aboriginal? At the time I was extremely upset to hear my aunt’s words, because it seemed that she wanted me to deny or erase the Aboriginal part of my mixed cultural heritage. Alternatively, perhaps it was because she did not want to be seen to have relatives with any Aboriginal heritage; then again it may have been something else.

Recently when my aunt was reflecting about the relationship between my mother and herself, she said, ‘I have known your mother for over 50 years and we have never had an argument’. Again, what was she really saying? Was it because they were really ‘soul sisters’ or was it that my mother chose not to say anything controversial and certainly nothing about the exemption certificate that had silently erased her parents’ Indigenous heritage and her own? Nevertheless, in recent years I have come to comprehend the ‘heartache’ my aunt spoke about, as my work and research has meant confronting the impacts of my elders renouncing their Indigenous heritage.

By the late 1970s and again in the mid 1980s, when I was working within the Aboriginal community, first at Queensland Health^[2] and later with the Aboriginal Health Service, I became increasingly aware that I had been cut off from my own kinship and homelands. I was constantly reminded of the fact that I did not know the answers to the questions Aboriginal people (Murris) were asking of me.^[3]‘Who is your family?’ and ‘Where do you come from?’ Many of the Murris I was working with were able to answer those important questions about their own biographies. Eventually, I found that the answers I was searching for had been lost, due to Queensland government legislation introduced in 1897.

After my grandfather passed away in 1980, my mother found his certificate of exemption while sorting through his belongings.^[4] This piece of paper presented me with questions about my grandfather’s biography. What was he doing with this certificate? What exactly was it? What did it mean? My curiosity was triggered by the discovery of this old document and inspired me to continue my personal journey of biographical research and discovery. It was during the early 1980s that I befriended an Aboriginal woman who was studying at TAFE in Brisbane. I decided to return to study the following year to enrol in the same welfare course for Indigenous people that she was undertaking. It was through this course that I started mixing with other Indigenous people for the first time, in the classroom, at community meetings and community social events. At that stage, I was like a sponge soaking up all the information I could to learn more about my Indigenous cultural background.

In the mid 1980s, to find out more about my Indigenous heritage, I made contact with various Queensland government departments via letter and telephone, even visiting some of them on a few occasions. Sadly, all my investigations failed to reveal anything about my Aboriginal heritage. At this time, access to government records and information was often restricted, especially to Indigenous people. Fortunately, Queensland’s Freedom of Information Act 1992 has changed this situation to a degree, and opened the way for further Indigenous research.

During the early 1990s I enrolled at the University of Queensland and graduated with a social work degree. In the late 1990s and early 2000s I worked as a social worker with ‘Link-Up’, an organisation that engaged in re-uniting Indigenous families who had been fragmented by Stolen Generation legislation.^[5] In time, I discovered that this work was subconsciously taking an emotional toll on me because, with each reunion I was involved with, I was always wondering if this family could perhaps be part of my family? Moreover, as I had been taught nothing of my Indigenous cultural and spiritual heritage, I felt lost and disconnected from my identity as an Aboriginal woman. This situation triggered a personal turning point in my life, re-directing me to resume my quest to discover my own lost identity. Taking up tertiary studies again in 2004 offered me an opportunity to further this quest, through researching the Queensland certificate of exemption and its impact on identity as my honours thesis topic.