By Andrea Myers
If you’re a member of the Stolen Generation or have a parent or grandparent that was, you may request and receive your records from the WA Government to help you understand their story and receive a Name Card like this.
Years later, you might decide to try and find some of the locations on the card… Half-Caste Girls Home, East Perth Girls Home. You find Perth Girls School and realise that’s not it, but it would have been a landmark as your Nanna was “decamping” from Cottesloe where she was in domestic service, awaiting her next position.
The real East Perth Girls Home was built in 1931, by the Aborigines Department as a hostel for young women to stay and receive training in domestic service. It was eventually named Bennett House and demolished overnight on Sunday 25 October 1998.
East Perth Girls Home was on Bennett Street on the edge of the “Prohibited Area” within the City of Perth declared on 9 March 1927, the same year she was sent to Moore River Native Settlement, under the Aborigines Act 1905, an area requiring a pass to enter into .
If you didnt have a permit you could be charged with being in a prohibited area without a permit and jailed and a lot of Aboriginal people were.
It is this fear that I can still feel nearly 100 years later as I re-trace some of her steps and those of other Aboriginal people through East Perth, past Wellington Park to where the East Perth Girls Home once stood.
It is this fear that meant she refused to remain in Northam even after she was married and declared “not a native under law” on 23 April 1945, as it white-man law probably seemed pretty arbitrary. If it could cause you to be sent thousands of kilometres away from home and not see your mum and sisters for 40 years what was to stop them changing their minds?
Decamp means to “leave a place suddenly or secretly.”
While no description of places of employment is given, no one leaves a happy place secretly or suddenly.
In 1935 it appears she was picked up by police and returned to EPGH.
This is where she returned to on holidays until she was declared not a native under law in 1940, when she was 21.
In 1998, Robert Bropho was alerted to the demolition in the early hours and arrived to find a pile of rubble, the pain of the site and its memories seemingly ignored felt throughout the Aboriginal communities, particularly by those impacted by past Government policies who spent time there.
Despite East Perth Primary School remaining, currently occupied by Central Desert Native Title Services, the site itself is not a heritage site at all and nothing remains to note the significance this site once had.
There is however, this bench, to reflect on the enormity of the impact of government policy on Aboriginal people’s lives.
