Thirty-five years ago, March 1973, I first went to live in a remote Aboriginal community. I was accompanied by another Jesuit, Pat Mullins. We had been asked by the local Bishop to work at Balgo, an Aboriginal Mission south of Halls Creek. Our task was to look after the boys dormitory (pictured), where around 50 boys aged from five to 15 lived.
We were students at the time. Moving from Melbourne and the university of the early 1970s to a very remote part of the Kimberley proved a great shock. The weather always seemed to be hot, the facilities were basic (no air-conditioning or phones), the resources were few (only a small number of staff, mainly religious) and the roads were unsealed, rough and poorly maintained. What I particularly remember was a vast social and communication gap between the Mission staff and the 250 desert people who lived there. My ability to communicate with the people in Kukatja was as severely limited as their ability to communicate with me in English.
The few notes I took at that time remind me how much I felt out of place. The sounds, smells and isolation took time to accept. I recorded my initial confusion about the dormitories, and why 'we' needed to place nearly 100 children in them. At that time, the young men would stay in the boys dormitory until their late teens when they found jobs as stockmen on neighbouring cattle stations or in work around the Mission. The young women often stayed in the dormitories until they married.
While there were opportunities for oral communication between the children and their families, contact was strictly controlled and limited. Children could meet their parents and younger siblings in the 'playground', a large recreational space that lay between the two dormitories. However, the children always returned to the dormitories to sleep at night. It was from there that they went to school and it was here where they lived. They were not allowed to visit 'the camp' where their families lived, 200 metres away.
The girls experienced more family separation than the boys. They were only allowed to go down to visit their families on Christmas day. For the rest of the year both boys and girls remained under the care of those who ran the dormitories, removed from the daily care and affection of their parents and extended relations.
In April