ABSTRACT
Ted Egan’s song, The Drover’s Boy, epitomises the role so many Aboriginal women played in developing the pastoral industry in Australia. Let me tell you the story of one such drover’s boy.
When the drover first came to this pastoral station in northern Australia he was given a girl, a gin as he called her. The girl was a young traditional Aboriginal who in time gave birth to a baby girl who was, in those days, labelled a half-caste because of her mixed parentage. Eventually the drover moved on and left his ‘boy’ behind. She was then, in customary style, given a man from her own group and they settled on a cattle station, where he worked as a stockman. They had a son, a ‘full blood’ Aboriginal, and her daughter remembers a happy childhood playing with her young brother in the camp near the station homestead. But that happy and secure childhood was shattered when she became one of some 100,000 children taken, or rather kidnapped, because they were deemed to be of lighter colour than their mothers.
