Auntie Rita

Rita Higgins was stolen from her country as a child in the 1920s, and taken to what is now Cherbourg Aboriginal Reserve. She remembers her first meeting with a whiteman - a trooper who, with other whitemen, forced her people into cattle trucks before driving them south. The Cherbourg years were ones of imprisonment, under the so-called Aborigines Protection Act. 'We had to stay in one place now, while the whitemen could roam free.' There was happiness, though, in those years.
From that time, and also from the years as a single mother in Brisbane in the 1960s, there came a desire to make something better for herself, her family, and Aboriginal people. The '60s ushered in important days in Aboriginal politics - the 1967 Referendum, the Freedom Ride, the rise of Aboriginal political organisations - and these years as well as contemporary Aboriginal activism are seen here through Rita's eyes.
Rita Higgins told her memories to her daughter Jackie, and some of their conversation is in this book. We witness their intimacy, their similarities and their differences, the 'fighting with their tongues'. Two voices, two views on a shared life.