Jun 10, 2026 · 58 min · 12 segments
Jonathan interviews Aunt Esme Bamblett about her long life of activism struggling for First Peoples' justice, and her involvement at the centre of contemporary processes of truth-telling and…
Esme BamblettGuest
Jonathan CornfordHostSo on this series we've been discussing the profound effects of colonisations upon First Nations people.
So can you share a little bit about what that's looked like in your family story, whether for your grandparents and parents and for you and your siblings? What do you think of when you think about the legacies of colonisation?
I actually think about all the negative things that have happened to our people.
And the reason we actually did that was because my grandmother, when she came back down to Victoria, She had to move six times to avoid the kids being taken away by the welfare.
But one of the places that we always ended up on was her place, which was the Cummeragunja Mission.
it's on the banks of the Murray out in New South Wales, but really it's a part of Victoria, that country.
So the missions were a result of the policy, the protection policy after the massacres and that came about because of this movement in England where they'd heard about the massacres and the Exeter Hall movement and they said it wasn't good enough, you can't be killing people like that.
And the government's answer, the colonial government's answer was to set up missions and put people on missions in which they did.
And we always call it smooth the dying pillow because they believe we die out.
Aboriginal people were destined to die out because of all the ideas that eventually the darker races would go.
And so it was, you know, smooth the dying pillow, put them on missions and reserves.
Eventually there were no Aboriginal people and there'll be no Aboriginal problem because they're going to die out.
So on this series we've been discussing the profound effects of colonisations upon First Nations people.
So can you share a little bit about what that's looked like in your family story, whether for your grandparents and parents and for you and your siblings? What do you think of when you think about the legacies of colonisation?
I actually think about all the negative things that have happened to our people.
And the reason we actually did that was because my grandmother, when she came back down to Victoria, She had to move six times to avoid the kids being taken away by the welfare.
But one of the places that we always ended up on was her place, which was the Cummeragunja Mission.
it's on the banks of the Murray out in New South Wales, but really it's a part of Victoria, that country.
So the missions were a result of the policy, the protection policy after the massacres and that came about because of this movement in England where they'd heard about the massacres and the Exeter Hall movement and they said it wasn't good enough, you can't be killing people like that.
And the government's answer, the colonial government's answer was to set up missions and put people on missions in which they did.
And we always call it smooth the dying pillow because they believe we die out.
Aboriginal people were destined to die out because of all the ideas that eventually the darker races would go.
And so it was, you know, smooth the dying pillow, put them on missions and reserves.
Eventually there were no Aboriginal people and there'll be no Aboriginal problem because they're going to die out.
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