MIDDLE Swan’s Barbara Kikit Rose (Kickett) said she was “blissfully happy” as a child living on a Doodlakine reserve near Kellerberrin with her family.
Sharing her story with the Gazette last week she recalled fond memories of hunting for rabbits or goanna and said it was still a healing place where she often returned and had buried her eldest son.
“We might have eaten one meal a day but I tell you what, we were blissfully happy because we were in the bush,” she said.
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READ NOW“I go back all the time, it’s a magnet and it’s our healing place.”
Mrs Kikit Rose, now 67, attended People Who Care’s (PWC) Naidoc event at the Guildford Leisure Centre last Monday.
It included dreamtime painting, stolen generation stories and traditional bush tucker for clients from PWC and Hall & Prior.
“At PWC we talk about our stuff and let them get issues off their chest if they need to because we’re there for each other and we are a big family,” she said.
“We do a lot of talking there and its what we do, when we were in our own communities back home and sitting around a camp fire, that camp fire was out healing place… our parents and grandparents knew that because that smoke is the healing for our people.”
She was taken to the Roelands mission at the age of seven only returning home each year for Christmas.
“I got into trouble quite a bit; I don’t think white people could really understand that there are Aboriginal people who are very intelligent,” she said.
She said they were given a subject by their teacher each day which she would finish early and then had to sit and wait for the others to catch up.
“One day I started humming very quietly to keep myself awake and the teacher came back in the class and he said ‘stand up who’s singing’,” she said.
“I’m looking around to see who’s standing up and he pointed straight at me and shouted ‘you, stand up’, so I stood up, and he said ‘now, start singing’.
“I was one child that was very intelligent and I told him, ‘you said stand up who’s singing’ and quickly added ‘I was humming and there’s a difference’, oh my goodness me I got the biggest flogging of my life.
“Both my little skinny legs were blue, black and purple when he finished beating me. He thought he was going to make me cry, I just stood there and grit my teeth and the other students were just standing back gobsmacked.”
She gathered her things and took off back to her room to tend to her legs but was instead further reprimanded with a cane to her hands.
Her legs still burning with pain, she then had to shower and got ready for work in the kitchen.
“That’s all you ever did on the mission was work really and there was only little time for play,” she said.
“We used to get up pitch-black in the winter time and walk around on the gravel with no shoes on and it was frozen, the grass was frozen, and we’d walk on the gravel which was just as bad.
“And they never let you wear your shoes and yet they were all rugged up in their big boots and coats and jackets. It still shocks me today because for me, being Christian is being a giving person.”
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