A foot in each camp

Harry Bennett's early life reads like a mini-series
about stolen generations but after all this
time he bears no grudge

I was born west of Banka Banka Station. I've got two families, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal. My mother was an Aboriginal woman and she was married to an Aboriginal man; she was married in the Aboriginal way.
My white father's name is Jim Bennett. My grandmother on the European side had two names, she was married twice. First she was married to a man with the same name as me, Harry Bennett. She produced three children; two boys and a girl to him in Queensland. Their names were Jim Bennett, Patrick Bennett and Helen Bennett, so I eventually belonged to this crop.
She left Harry Bennett and picked up with Jack Bohning. She had five children to Jack, three boys and two girls.
She was Mrs Bennett first and had three children to him, one of them, Jim Bennett was my father, he was the eldest in the family. When he was a young man, a bit fresh, he started getting around with my Aboriginal mother. So I have an Aboriginal mother and a white father.
At that time if you were an Aboriginal man and you were caught with a white girl, the Aboriginal man would go to jail for maybe 10 years. But if the white man got caught with a dark one, it was seven years jail for playing around with an Aboriginal woman.
When Mrs Bennett picked up with Jack Bohning, who was German, it was early in the pioneering days when they came over to the Northern Territory.
Jim Bennett, Mrs Bohning's son, who is my white father, was born in 1895, he was sneaking around with my Aboriginal mother and I'm the result. When my mother got big when she was carrying me, she and my Aboriginal step-father cleared out into the desert country, to no man's land and that's how I came to be born west of Bank Banka Station.
She came into Seven Mile which was called Tennant Creek then, we refer to it as the Old Telegraph station today. They knew who my father was, so when my mother was getting big, Jim cleared out in case the policeman got him and put him away for seven years.
He nicked off up in the Territory.
In the meantime, Mrs Bohning, my grandmother, was telling my mother that when she gave birth to me, to knock me on the head, kill me you know, because she didn't want her family to be disgraced with her son being a father to a black baby.
My mother had sense enough not to kill me because the Aboriginal people wanted this little coloured baby that was born in the desert country. So she had sense enough to take me with her to seven mile and that's where I grew up.
But they knew (my white side of the family) when I was supposed to be born, they worked it out that I would have been born around the 5th of May.
When my mother and step father brought me back to Seven Mile, they were worried that the troopers and welfare people would come looking for me and that if they found me they would take me away from my family.
When the troopers did come looking for me at seven mile, my mother would bury me in the sand, which was warm and soft. Only my head would be sticking out and they would surround me with shrubs and bushes so I wouldn't be seen. Because my father was white, I looked fairer than the rest of my family, so my mother would cover me with kangaroo fat and charcoal to make me appear darker, so I wouldn't be recognised. If I started to cry when the troopers came to look for me where my family was, the elders in our family would sit in a circle around where I was buried and start singing and clapping so that my crying would be drowned out and the troopers and welfare wouldn't discover that I was there.
The old nomadic Aboriginal people used to roam the desert year in, year out from west. A Dreamtime story that I was told about the Nomadic people was that wherever they would roam, they were followed by possums. The possums were like the dreamtime spirits' ways of providing a food source, even throughout the drought times following the nomads wherever they went. But when the nomadic people all died out, so did the possums, meaning the dreamtime spirits had also.
I remember there were always lots of possums around, but they disappeared as the old nomadic people did.
The old Aboriginal nomads came and collected our clan, my mother and my Aboriginal step father and we went out bush, I was about 5 or 6 then. It was a whole tribe who'd come from the west to pick us up. When this happened years ago the nomads would go around and pick all the other clans like ours and all head out bush together. We roamed around the desert as a clan for about two or three years, never coming back into the Telegraph line.
The old tribe that we were with decided to go to Newcastle Waters for the annual corroboree. My mother's European name is Priscilla and when we got there the Policeman knew who she was and who I was too. The policeman gave my mother a job as a house maid at the police station and they gave my stepfather a job as a yard man, cutting wood. They did that to try and keep us there and track me down because they thought I was wild like the wild Aboriginal people, because I was mixed. I grew up with the Aboriginal people and knew my places.
So the policeman's wife started dressing me in all these European clothes. My mother had to go to work from the camp and every morning I had to go with her and my stepfather, that was the rule. The police were worried that I might run off into the bush. Mrs Bohning was worried then, because I was growing up fast and she was the one who was putting the police onto my mother to take me away from her.
The policeman who my mother and father were working for had an old ute, one of the first cars that came out, this was in the early 20's. He used to take me with him and his Aboriginal tracker to Birdum, which is now called Larrimah, to help him do the mail.
About the third time that I went with the policeman to Birdum, in about 1928 or 29, when I was 10 or 11 years old, I woke up to what was going to happen to me. When they opened the train door and I looked inside to see that the train was crammed with nomadic Aboriginal people, all with shackles around their necks and ankles, I knew that was the end of me and that I would never return home again.
I went off with them for that third trip and that was the end of me. They put me on the train and another policeman was waiting there to take me to Darwin. The policeman's name that had taken me away from Newcastle Waters was Jock Reed, an old Irishman. They took me to Darwin and of course I was lost then, I didn't know what was going on or what was happening.
I remember the last time I saw my mother was when she was running after the train, wailing and crying out for me, along with all the other mothers whose children were being taken away. When the mothers would chase the train, they would cut their heads with rocks, bleeding for their children because they knew they would probably never see them again.
People in towns where the trains would leave from knew that there were children being taken away because they could hear the wailing of the mothers.
The coloured girls and boys were already separated when I got to Darwin, they had drafted them all. The girls were sent to the islands, some went to Croker Island or Groote Eylandt and they sent the boys down to Pine Creek. I just happened to get there the day after they had drafted them and from there they took me down to Pine Creek where I joined the rest of the coloured boys.
In about 1930-31 they sent a truck from Alice Springs to meet all the prisoners (children) coming down on the train to Birdum. The old guy that picked us up had a truck, like you pick up cattle with, except this time he was using it to pick up child prisoners! His name was Sam Irvine. So they sent a truck up from Alice Springs to pick up all the coloured boys from the train at Birdum.
We spent a week travelling through Tennant Creek, it was a long time. We finished up at The Bungalow, in Alice Springs, that's where they mixed up all the boys and girls again. What I couldn't understand was that they separated all the boys from the Top End and sent us down to Alice Springs and mixed us up again with the girls. Why didn't they just keep us up there?
When we came down to Alice Springs I was just frozen, real cold. I was wearing just one night shirt and a jacket. We were bare foot with bald heads, it was terrible. In Alice Springs they tried to teach us the European way, I suppose their idea was to make us forget about our people and try to integrate us with the white people.
But they didn't give us that chance because they kept us separate all the time and we weren't allowed to mix up with the white kids. But we still snuck around with them, we had a lot of white kid friends.
I would have been about 11 or 12 when I went to Alice Springs, but I didn't stay there too long, I left school in about 1934 when I was 16. While I was in Alice Springs my family was still roaming around out bush. The nomadic people in those days had to roam around on foot, no vehicle or nothing.
You might wonder if I was scared when I was taken from my family at Newcastle Waters to The Bungalow?
Too right I was! Because I was taken away from home, I didn't know what was happening or what was going on. I blocked out all my feelings for my people because I found it easier, I didn't have to grieve then, if I ignored my feelings. Despite this, I had no feeling for white people because they weren't kind enough to us like my people were. We lived in little shacks at The Bungalow, sometimes there would be up to 20 or 30 of us crammed into these shacks with only a bucket to use for going to the toilet. We were like sardines in a can and in winter we would freeze.
I don't know why the Superintendent or Manager, who managed the half cast kids at The Bungalow, took to me so much, but the result I got from that is that I'm now deaf.
He Flogged the shit out of me all the time and for what, I don't know. I couldn't make out why this bloke was getting into me like that all the time. "Is this the way you learn white fella way?", I thought to myself. I ran away a couple of times from there but I couldn't get a lift back, I didn't know how to get a lift back to Tennant Creek because there was no transport. There was an old lady who used to feed me behind the hill, we also used to sneak off sometimes to hunt for witchety grubs to supplement for our meagre diet.
The boss bloke that looked after the coloured kids, his name was Wally Freeman and he had a wife and two white daughters and to us kids, we were all the same. We were all one family more or less, they were our friends, the white kids, colour didn't make any difference because we didn't know any different.
When we were in The Bungalow we would keep our language alive by secretly talking to each other when the white supervisors weren't around. We all spoke Walpiri, Waramungu and other languages to each other. I was the one that was getting the hidings all the time for things like speaking our own language, I got more of a hiding from the Superintendent with a bare hand than a strap.
Anyhow, instead of them sending me to hospital to get my ears cleaned out from the hidings, I suffered. Pus would come out and blood would be weeping out of my ears. Anyhow, he didn't last too long because he got caught playing around with the black girls there and he fathered three kids to them, which he shouldn't have done. So they kicked him out.
In about 1934, I left The Bungalow, I don't how it happened but Tennant Creek as a town had just started then and what I can't make out up to this day is why, one day, this white man came looking for me. I had never seen him before, but this man came and asked for a little coloured boy named Harry Bennett. So he was asking everyone, "Where's Harry Bennett?, I want to take him back home to be my house boy". He wanted to me to work for him, just like a negro slave for a married couple, just like in those stories you hear about, I was one of them.
Tennant Creek had just started then and this man was a chief steam engineer, there was no diesel or gasoline around in those days. He worked at the mine which nowadays is called Peko. So I was a house boy then, looking after his wife, cleaning the house and washing all the clothes, you name it I did it!
But I started thinking that I shouldn't be doing this job. I put up with him till the war broke out and I knew then what I had to do. I began thinking that Mrs Bohning, my white grandmother had got this man to find me and bring me to Tennant Creek. She used to come here trying to get onto me, she was still angry that I was her grandson and that I was black, she wanted to see what I looked like. But I never ever went close to her, I kept about a hundred yards away from her all the time. I didn't have a feeling for her or my white father, I had more of a feeling for my Aboriginal step father because he reared me, looked after and fed me.
So when the war broke out the man who I was working for bought the butcher shop and that's where I did a bit of an apprenticeship.
When the war broke in 1939, Harry broke too! I got the first truck from here to Alice Springs and from there to Daly Waters. I got a job there with the army, I travelled around and worked.
In all that time though, I worked for nothing, never got a dollar. So I don't know where all that money went! Anyway here I am today.
Getting back to the Bohning side, Mrs Bohning wanted to see me badly, but something kept telling me to have nothing to do with her. Now the other thing was that Jim Bennett, my white father had two sons, myself and my brother Sonny, but to two different women and me and Sonny look alike.
What I can't understand though is why they named me Harry Bennett. An anthropologist is collecting all these stories, but how I came to be named Harry Bennett I don't know, because that was also my white grandfather's name. Maybe Jim Bennett had some control over what I would be named but no one really knows to this day why I was given the name Bennett.
A story of Mrs Bohning (my European grandmother) that my white father told me years later:
Her maiden name was Esta Jenkin, the Jenkin family came from Ginsey in N.S.W, the Jenkin's came out to Australia with the first convicts. There are nine women in the Jenkin's family including Esta and two boys. I met one of those boys and four of her sisters, I was like their little black sheep, they were proud of my colour!
Esta came out to this country in the pioneer days. Jim, my white father had to be the horse tailor and a drover when they travelled from Camooweal right through to the Barkly Tablelands. They looked around for places to live and had befriended my Aboriginal clan in Helen Springs, the Aboriginal name is Nyan Nyan. So they made friends with the clan, including my Aboriginal mother and step father. They named Helen Springs after Mrs Bohning's daughter, Helen Bennett. She died on the Queensland/Northern Territory border, I've seen her grave there. Esta had five children to Jack Bohning- Eddie, Jack, Elsie, Mick and Bill Bohning , so they are her second family. My white father recognised me years later and explained to me why he hadn't been with me, he would've liked to have seen me grow up, he said. He knew that he had a little pickaninny around somewhere in this country. He had had to clear away, run away in case the policeman locked him up and chained him like a dog. It was after the war, in 1938 when I was 20 years old that I saw him again. He said to me, "Do you know me?" I said "I don't think so" but I knew him alright, I never ever made myself known to him, as to who I was, whether I was his son or not. The fact that he had left my mother wasn't really an issue anymore because she was now married to an Aboriginal man, my stepfather. My dad was 31 when he sired me, he was in his sixties when I met him later on. It was a bit hard, I do think about him now because people that knew him and people that I talked to would say I was just like him. I came back here just before the War when I was travelling round to find my old stepfather, but he had passed away at Renner Springs.
Now, the Bohnings then knew who I was and that my step brother also belonged to my father, but I never made myself known to them. On my father's side they were Scotch and Esta Bohning, my Grandmother was Irish, redhead with freckles. So all the family knew who I was but the only one I ever got close to was Mick Bohning. He ended up marrying a coloured woman and even today there are a lot of Bohnings who live down in Alice Springs, the white side of the Bohnings. There are only five of us older Aboriginal people who are in blood line with that old grandmother of ours, Esta. She hated the fact that all her boys had affairs with Aboriginal women, but they defied her.
The original pioneering Bohnings and Bennetts have now all passed away. Now I'm the eldest first cousin to all the black and white ones left.
There are only three of us coloured ones left now though, the other three passed away. The first son of Esta's fathered three coloured children. I'm the eldest cousin to the Bohnings today and they reckon they know me, we are proud of one another you know! We're not like the old grandmother! If she was still alive today she would have turned her back on us, but the Bohnings and the Bennetts get on well now.
There is no use in continually holding grudges against people, to whom we feel are responsible for what happened to the stolen children. We have to get on with our lives, acknowledge what happened and move on.