The infantilisation of Indigenous Australians: a problem for democracy
Creative Works ResearchOnline@JCU[Extract] I GREW UP in the 1990s, the daughter of a white Australian and a Torres Strait Islander. I was raised on my mother’s stories of the Cairns Esplanade, her doctor father and English migrant mother. I learned the stories of genera- tions of my British ancestors, as far back as the Battle of Hastings, who over the centuries would emigrate to Massachusetts, to Ohio, to Bermuda via the White House, to the Victorian goldfields, to Fitzroy in Melbourne, and to Sydney, where my grandfather was born. I grew up on stories of British settlers, of dispossessors, of those who wielded colonial power and benefited from it. And I was raised on my father’s stories, too. Stories of water, of fishing and of islands. Especially of the island that is ours, the one we don’t live on anymore, Naghir. I listened to the stories of how multiple generations of my Islander family navigated the arrival of the missionaries and the government to access education, to find work, to keep fishing, to stay free.
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