In June Mrs Mantatjarra Wilson talked on ABC’s Lateline, with tears streaming down her cheeks of her sadness for her grandchildren, and their children. The Josephite Sisters working with Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) mothers and grandmothers already had plans in place to meet with the women on the APY lands in the western desert of South Australia to talk about ‘child protection in place’. The sadness and shame among their Aboriginal friends at the direction of the debate after the Lateline program made this meeting more urgent. The Sisters knew the wisdom of the women elders and wanted their voice to be heard.
So it was that at the end of July a group of four Josephites, Michele Madigan, Kenise Neil, Helen Duke and Joan Healy, together with a very experienced child protection consultant Professor Dorothy Scott, gathered on the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands at Umuwa to listen and to learn from Aboriginal mothers and grandmothers who were deeply concerned about the protection of their ‘young ones’.
Mrs Waniwa (“Auntie Lucy”) Lester, a senior Anangu woman, acted as interpreter and cultural consultant, and Dr Irene Watson, an Aboriginal academic, gently facilitated the conversation. More than a dozen Anangu mothers and grandmothers participated in the discussions, which were wide-ranging and touched on such issues of child protection as poverty, poor housing, family violence and substance misuse. Some women spoke in their own language, others in English. Some attended on one day, others two days. They spoke of their worries and hopes.
The talking began with Waniwa referring to a traditional Anangu story, the theme of which was the importance of children carrying with them the spirit of their mother, and how life itself depended on this story being carried forward, and not being discarded and replaced by that which was new and not of the mother.
In response to the question “how can Anangu grow up children strong?”, deep pain was expressed about the loss of particular children and how families had wept with sorrow. One grandmother spoke with intense anguish when recounting how her young grandchild had asked on the telephone, “Grandmother, where are you?"
The women said that Anangu who are taken away “feel like strangers in own country when they return… children taken away call other people ‘mum’—wrong way—not true—names of some people who were taken away not true now… we all want to stay in land to