Aboriginal Victorians by Richard Broome

Author:Richard Broome
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2024-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

Framlingham youths, 1944. Back row, L–R: Walter Austin, Sid Austin, Henry Alberts. Front row, L–R: Roy Rose (father of Lionel), Chris Austin. (Courtesy Amy and Robert Lowe, Warrnambool)

The Framlingham community battles evictions

By 1950, 86 people resided in 14 houses at Framlingham, 38 of them children, most taught by John Sharp at the reserve school. Noel Couzens and his brothers, sons of Nicholas Couzens, now share-farming at Panmure, rode their bikes ten kilometres each way to attend the Framlingham School. The school was a vital link that Aboriginal people off the reserve maintained with the ‘Fram’ community. Community was also sustained by the Mathiesons who conducted religious services there until 1954. The reserve’s families were sustained by the men’s contract wood-cutting for the Forestry Commission, basket-making by the women, and pension and child endowment payments. Several white female activists who visited in 1950 thought ‘the women at Framlingham seemed abler than the men’.51

A new crisis arose at ‘Fram’ in late 1949. Doris Austin and her three children, moved into a vacant reserve house from a hut in the forest, but were ordered off by Constable Rowe. Austin’s brother and aunt wrote to the Board asking: ‘Are they to camp in hollow logs and carry their swags about with their children behind them?’52 A similar thing happened in August 1950. Peter and Phyllis Dunnolly and family, who had left to work in another district, returned after six months and paid £9 rental owing. Dunnolly then requested that his sister-in-law, Ella Austin, and her five children be allowed to live in their house. This was denied. Phyllis wrote to her aunt Mary Clarke and asked her to seek help from Doris Blackburn, President of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, to stop them ‘robbing us poor black people, they took our pines [trees] away and one house and now they want to take another’. In a second letter Phyllis claimed Constable Rowe had refused a further rent payment, saying the house was to be sold, and again appealed for her aunt to seek help.53

A Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom deputation assisted by Helen Baillie, a white activist, gathered facts at Framlingham and lobbied the government. The Board and Chief Secretary denied there would be any evictions, but stated the Framlingham houses were built for emergency accommodation in the Depression and were never to be transferred. They were to be sold when the original occupiers left or fell behind in their rent.54 The Dunnolly house was sold and Ella Austin and family faced eviction. A public outcry forced a Board back-down in December 1950. A public meeting was sponsored by the League in February 1951 at the Australian Church in Melbourne, at which white women activists for Aboriginal people spoke, notably Helen Baillie, Cora Gilsenan and Anna Vroland.

Mary Clarke of Framlingham, a granddaughter of Louisa Briggs and thus a descendant of Tasmanian Aboriginal people (but not Truganini’s great-grand-daughter as she claimed), also spoke.55 This was a supreme effort for her,

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