“ Lois was a constant presence in the kids lives and Mum and Dad were amazing. If I hadn’t have been a Nurse I may not have coped but I thought OK, 4 hourly feeds, boom! boom! boom! I knew the logic behind feeding a baby and then it was just giving love, and she was so gorgeous. When Emily was three her Mother, my twin was murdered. That was such a difficult time and Bill (Bill Hunter) left me. The Police here just said…She’s gone walkabout, you’re worrying for nothing. My younger brother had gone and reported her missing but we have a big mistrust of authority, particularly Police so they didn’t take it seriously. I was very fortunate compared to a lot of other people who have lost family, Bill’s agent was Harry. M. Miller so I rang Harry and indicated to the Police that we were going to do a media release. They didn’t want that. That shifted things a great deal. My sister had asked me, Please, please raise my daughter.
I was fortunate to meet someone. His name is Stephen Field and he’s a Builder. I adore him and we’ve been together for 25 years now… I never thought I would, I’d given up and having said I was never having children…never say never. When I was 41 I had my first biological child. I already had Emily and Charlie but then I had Jack in September. A year later in October I gave birth to my daughter Sarah. Here’s me, I’m a Registered Nurse you don’t fall pregnant when you’re breast feeding. What a fallacy that was, it happens. Those children were made with such pure love. They are 23 and 24 this year. Jack and Sarah were born into the internet era so like most of their generation, they have a very big global picture of the world. It’s interesting, the shift in the world that we have to do. Are we placating? Human beings are human beings, can we stop labelling? We tried to stop labelling in the 80s. I treat people as human beings but this is the world our children now have to navigate. You wanna get real? It was going to be about generosity and kindness so let’s just shift and talk about what happened so we can just move on because we are an incredible nation and all the bigots who’ve probably never left their bloody state. When you travel the world, you realise what we’ve got. We are amazing and we don’t recognise it. Get a real life on a universal scale, go and see poverty, go and see Cabbage Tree Island and you’ll change your thinking, in your own home town. These are the dark conversations I have with my kids but I can’t have them out there so I try and base everything I do on the way that I was reared with that kinship system. The foundation is about strength, kindness, generosity and forgiveness and just move on.
They never found who murdered my sister. They did have a homicide detective squad come to Lismore and the approach was totally different. They were lovely however it comes back to resources. People say there’s violence in every community but shit, we have violence. I just don’t think they were connecting dots. So many people contacted the authorities with information but nothing was ever followed up. They never called us and we were made to feel like a nuisance whenever we called to see if they had any updates. There was no compassion. My mother at her age lost her husband, then her daughter. We have so many deaths and we go to so many funerals. They don’t care, it’s one less black fella to deal with. The guys from Sydney were compassionate. There’s no links being made and there’s so many missing women and young men in this region.
It’s been a difficult time. Some days are good, some days are not so good, dealing with the kids trauma too. Whoever did this, I would hate to see it happen to another family. It’s where you do learn your inner strength I guess. I started learning that inner strength when Lois had that car accident. I do feel like I’ve lost …I think it’s because we’re twins. A limb is missing. We’d go out and she would always insist we wore the same clothes. She was a strange one. She’d be chatting up guys and then when she realised she wasn’t attracted to them, they’d come and ask her if she’d like another drink. She’d say, I’m sorry, do I know you? You must have been talking to my sister (laughs).
We always heard these stories about our Boxers and I can remember my Uncle Fletcher. When we were in Sydney we’d go to his house and all the boys would be there boxing. When you go back through our history, we were called the Roberts fighting family of Lismore. Every tournament, bantam weight, feather weight, etc., We had champions from the 1800s. Most people didn’t understand that Aboriginals never got paid and that they were living on rations in missions. Depending on the mission manager was how kindly you were treated so that’s why a lot of the traditions have continued like going to get turtles, fishing, netting, harvesting, those lines had to continue to substitute the rations to feed the family. Boxing was also an opportunity. Under the Aborigine’s protection act, if you worked for a local farmer or if you were taken to work as a domestic servant in a rich white lady’s house, you didn’t get paid. The Protection Board took your pay so you can imagine the millions, they never got paid. People are now going stolen wages. People didn’t want to do those jobs because they knew they wouldn’t get paid and to everyone else it looked like they were getting paid. Boxing was with the circus and the touring circuit so if you got a boxing tent you got hard, cold cash that you could send back to your family. There was an extraordinary work ethic. If you worked the railways, you got cash and because we had such skill for it, boxing became a great earner to get people out of poverty.
My cousin Frank who we called Francis because there were so many Frank Roberts, It was Frank Francis Roberts. When my Dad died Francis could take on the name Frank. He had sheer talent. Boxers worked for years to get on an Olympic team but it was only 18 months and he was up there. To get selected as the first Aboriginal to actually sign a contract with an Olympic team was huge. The year he went there was Torres Strait Islander guy in Basketball and one other person but the reality is Frank was the first to be signed.
My Uncle Fletcher who has the most extraordinary love story. We called him Uncle Bluey because he had the most beautiful blue eyes. He and Dad were very close. Dad was close to all his brothers and sisters. Every day Uncle Fletcher would come home and he and Dad would sit on the front porch and discuss the world. They were Philosophers and their big thing was shifting your thinking. I remember I came home with a badge ‘All the way with L.B.J’. Every weekend there’d be a march Dad would take us to during the Vietnam War. They were trying to shift your thinking from the norm. He ripped that badge off me and said…Do you realise, they are the enemy? They would be looking at long visions of reconnecting. Dad could see that language and the fear of speaking it, people getting locked up, kids being taken. He started to do silent, underground language continuance. He set up the Koori Mail. He set up an organisation called the Bundjalung Tribal Society in the 70s. He got funding to buy houses across Lismore with the deal of rent to buy. 35 people now own their homes in Lismore through that. He also set up an alcohol rehab centre called Namatjira Haven and bought 80 acres for a farm. These things still resonate today. He was a very deep thinker and thought in the long term.
Gary Foley wrote this book. It was all the transcripts of the Tent Embassy. They had a podium and Gough Whitlam was there, Gordon Briscoe was the MC. Dad was sitting beside Gough and when they introduced Dad, they said ‘This is possibly the most loved Aboriginal in NSW, oh actually, let’s make that the country.’ Dad’s quite political and he says, we need to be counted and we need to have a seat at the table, but he ends with, I’m not asking any of you black fellas to be a better Australian citizen, I am asking you to remember your forefathers and be a better Aboriginal and carry yourself and your philosophy of your Aboriginality before anything else. He really instigated the… Be better and remember your Great Grandfather’s language and stories. He was literally saying to people Warrior up! And get your culture. Gary sent me that book and I was like OMG, it’s in a book, it’s real. We talked about this for years but no-one believed it but now, there it is, from the transcript. Dad was very gentle and very humble. I have scrapbooks full of Dad’s history. His big thing was do not big-note, do not talk about yourself, you are here to be in service to your people. That is why you’re a Bundjalung woman, Widjabul Wia-bal. It’s why you got an education, perhaps your cousin didn’t but they have a different education so work with them. Uncle Fletcher and Dad would read the clouds, there’s sand dust below the Gum tree so we need to go harvest Witchetty Grubs. Before they did anything else, they read country.
Uncle Fletcher observed people and observed Francis and saw his talent and knew he had to get this kid out of here. He gets him a great coach in Sydney for proper training for Francis to go to the Olympics. The pressure that must have been on him, the same as the pressure on Evonne Goolagong, Cathy Freeman or any of them to be political to get out and tell them about our people but they are focussed on winning that Gold. Uncle Fletcher recognised young men and the situations in small country towns, that there were bigger horizons. He took not only Francis but his cousins as well and they all became great Boxers.
We are doing a bigger play next year with a proper boxing tent but to get people interested and to start to understand why boxing was in a family like ours, the necessity out of poverty, the push for education, the way that Cubawee and the response from local Council that it was such an eyesore, we’ll just pretend it doesn’t exist and things like that are in this play next month. So when they come and see that celebratory boxing tent production, they will have a bit more depth of what it’s about and the thinking at the time.”