Dr. John A. King reflects on his family history and questions about Aboriginal ancestry, recounting stories from his Nanna, inconsistent birth records, and an investigator's findings. After 20 years in Texas, he plans to return to Australia to seek answers about his roots and possible links to the Stolen Generation.
Number 2. So it starts with my Nanna and this photo that she talked about that no one else in the family will talk about, which you can sort of understand for the times. So I started to do some research and it's very hard to do research on Aboriginal lineage or lineage even going back to the, you know, the First and Second Fleet. Now there's some documents, but there's not documents. And if you think about it, there were 2 fleets that came in full of criminals and military personnel, police, state. And then on the 3rd fleet, it was the horse sheep. And so, you know, these women must have had a hard time of it because these guys, there's a hell of a lot of pent-up rough folks involved in wanting to engage in bloody sexual activity. So it was a mess. But it makes no sense to believe that, and the documents prove differently, that there was interaction between the English and the Aboriginal women that lived in the Sydney area. Some of it was predatory rape, some of it was by consent, some of it was by arrangement. Some of it, if you can find the documents and you hear the story and you follow the family trees, Ended up in romantic relationships that then blossomed that were frowned upon by society. So there's this whole mix-match, and the thought that there's only 2.3% of Aboriginal blood within Australians is just, for me, is bullshit. You know, you've got to be wanting to still stick to a fucking White Australia policy if you believe those bloody numbers. The stats just don't work out, you know, but that's a different argument for someone else, you know, than me. So there's this sense of this Aboriginal thing looming, and I just wanted to do it. So we got an investigator and we started to ask those questions and we started to find and track back family trees. And in the family trees from one side that arrived on the Second Fleet and from the other side, there were immigrants. I don't know. It was never conclusive. And I ended up with more questions than I had answers that this investigator presented. But one of the questions they presented was challenging the birthing documents. There were 2 birthing documents. One was John Arthur King estate birth certificate, and the other one was a clinic document. The woman who raised me was in a women's asylum at the time for single mothers or for destitute women. And there's this other document. One document, the government document, says 29/09/63, John Arthur King. And the clinic document says 27/07/1963, John William. And so there's just these 2 documents that exist. And the investigator, when looking at it, asked the question about Stolen Generation. And I said, look, I don't know anything about that. I've That's not how— what I was raised to believe, that I was adopted. She said, well, look, the inconsistency in these documents points to the fact that there might have been, because it wasn't uncommon at the time if a woman was having some sort of prenatal depression to take a baby off an Aboriginal kid born around the same time. It was part of the Australian government's policy to eradicate the blackness out of our nation. How to deal with the Aboriginal polity, you know, fuck it out. 3 generations you go, because melatonin is a recessive gene in Aboriginals as opposed to Africans. So you birth this thing out. So by the 3rd generation, you end up with a blonde-haired, brown-eyed, olive-skinned kid, which was me. All the early photos were blonde kid, blonde-haired kid. Apparently I was a good-looking kid. And that's what led to the sexual abuse, etc., I suppose. So there was that series of documents. So here I am left with 2 questions. One question was Nana's story about the photos of Aboriginality coming down through the family tree and our Aboriginal roots. And the second one was a question about Stolen Generation. And these are two, I was going to say vastly different questions, but they're still questions around a similar theme, both denying a sense of where you belong and who you are and what your roots are and where a lot of your characteristics and your thinking and your thoughts and your passions and your ideas come from. And they all come down to this central denial or inability to be able to reconcile the fact that we in Australia We have a very black past, and that black past is not only a historical issue, but it's a colour issue. It's a melanin issue. There were black people in this country before the white people arrived. And instead of embracing that and seeing that, we're just still very uncomfortable with it. So these are parts of the things that I started to ask myself. And the only way that I could Reconcile it at some point was to have to take myself back to Australia. I've been in Texas now for 20 years. Was to take myself back. And I never thought I'd return to Australia because Australia wasn't pleasant memories for me. It's just not. There was nothing pleasant there. I love my time in the outback. My first degree is in agriculture. I look back and I love going walkabout. You know, as a sense, you know, we appropriated that term. But I'd love to get my feet on red dirt. For some reason, I just loved red dirt. Every blackfella I ever saw growing up, going through college, I just had this affinity and a connection with. I never understood until this last trip back. And, and so here I am. I'm 59 turning 60. In a couple of months, and I've got this series of questions, but I have to get from here to there. I have to take a leap and turn up and get some feet on country and ask some questions of people, and I don't know where to begin, and I don't know how to do it.
