Georgina Williams

White people don't have walking rights on this land, they don't understand the way Aboriginal people organise their systems.

The force of the impact of white settlement took us out in 25 years; we were almost all gone. Those who were left were shipped out to Poonandie, then Point Pearce, then Raukkin. The Government then shut it all down, even though they promised the missionaries they wouldn't and the weaker we got the stronger they got.

In the very early days of settlement, when white and black married, they gave them land. Our land was Skillogolee (Clare). That's Kudnarto country, she was a northern Kaurna woman. My father is a southern Kaurna from Mullawirraburka near Rankine. He was a senior man around Aldinga, the area that's right down the Fleurieu Peninsula and across to the Lake Alexandrina. White people don't have walking rights on this land, they don't understand the way Aboriginal people organise their systems. The white anthropologists still don't have that right, but the State isn't interested in that history, it's not their history. They want to make their 200 years bigger than 100,000 years.

Our family shouldn't have been locked up on the mission, because our ancestors (Kudnato and Tom Adams) were the first Aboriginal and white people to be legally married and Tom Adams was a British Citizen. They locked us up as Aboriginals when we were all British subjects; we should have been free British citizens. They put us under the Protection Act, and we lived under Reverend Hale at the mission, and married and had kids there. But we weren't supposed to be there. Our story wasn't the same as the others. People who lived on the mission couldn't leave without an exemption. Once they had one, they couldn't come back and live on the mission, but we could come and go freely.

Georgina Williams