Lynda Holden grew up running from social welfare. She knew how to keep perfectly still in the bush, holding her breath, pressed into hollow logs and wet leaves, as the white men parted bushes looking for Aboriginal children. And she knew that her family would be on the move at midnight. Daytime was too dangerous.
Both her parents had been removed from their families – part of the “Stolen Generations” – and they would spend the rest of their lives avoiding the authorities to keep their own children safe. Her father, she tells The Weekly, “wouldn’t accept any welfare payments because then they’d know where you were and they’d come looking for your children. So he had to work very hard to make sure that his eight children were fed, clothed, housed and got an education.”
In every new town, Lynda remembers sitting outside the school rooms, waiting for a white child to be sick so she could take their place.
“I was not required to go to school,” she writes in her memoir, This is Where You Have To Go. “I was Aboriginal. We could not be formally enrolled.”
Lynda was nine when she was finally formally enrolled. In spite of the years she had lost, by 13, the Dunghutti girl was top of her class. “My siblings and I never missed a day at school,” she says. “My parents drilled into us the importance of education.”
Her father, who was illiterate, eventually constructed their family home after watching builders and labourers at work, drawing diagrams of how they did it.
