How one family started to reckon with their part in Australia’s dark past

By Ellen Fanning

Posted

February 06, 2021 05:00:59

It was time to face the difficult truth about my family who lived on stolen land.

I had been looking at the photo for about eight years.

Two dark-skinned Aboriginal women. A laughing girl and a stern-looking matriarch. Both dressed in starched white maid uniforms, like plantation workers from America’s Deep South.

But this was the deep north — Longreach, Queensland, a century ago.

And the photo…