Unwitting soldiers: the working life of Matron Hiscocks at the Cootamundra Girls Home, NSW

Abstract

Some months ago, I sat watching the television news in London as four young Australian surfers from Perth, the place I grew up, described their experiences of surviving, and helping others survive, the 12 October 2002 bombing of a nightclub in Bali. They reminded me, with a jolt of tender recognition, of my younger brother. Wide laconic accents, faces taut from emotion held in check, inarticulate but palpable love and friendship. I watched, and I thought how much their age and the ordinary things they were saying about their extraordinary acts of bravery resonated with young men from other eras and other wars — these young men on the television, unwitting soldiers in a war that has no boundaries. I continued to watch, with growing discomfort, as the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, came on the television after them and said the bombing ought not to change Australians from the ‘happy, freedom-loving people’ they are. While I relished, with the nostalgia of an Australian overseas, this depiction of my country-people, I was reminded of the stultifying hypocrisy that currently pervades much of Australian political life. Howard presented a naive national picture of a cheerful band of battlers, a picture that, ironically, continues to exclude the first Australian people who battled against enormous odds to maintain families, communities, and spirit under the pressures of colonialism and systematic government policies to disperse and assimilate.