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Glen Morris: Living on the Reserve in Armidale 1950s/60s

Armidale. We moved there when I was about 6. Me younger brother was only a baby. I left there when I was roughly about 12.

The Reserve was out of town like all of the Aboriginal Reserves.

It was not far from the town dump, the town tip cause I remember we used to get all the building materials to build our own tin huts. We used to get the old tin and iron, we used to get to build our own huts. There was a big fire place, the chimney and then sort of like two separate rooms. One was sort of like a lounge and the other one was then partitioned off with either some old cloths. The main bedroom where my old Aunty and Uncle slept, and where we slept five of us.

There were five of us in one room. Dirt floors, we had a dirt floor. We used to sweep it with the old tea trees, cut the tee trees, bind it up into a broom and sweep it, water it down so there was no dust. There was one tap in the middle of the Reserve.

The hHouses had no water, there was no electricity we had the old fat lights. Filled a tin up with fat, cut the top of it, put a wick in and then paint the wick with the fat itself so that it burns. The one tap, like we had those big old 44 gallon kerosene tins and we used to make those into buckets and go down and fill them up, two or three, and we would have a big 44 gallon drum outside and fill the 44 gallon drum up, put a lid on it and then get the water out as you want it.

We had one big tub everyone shared and we took it in turns in the tub.

The toilets were out the back. Toilets were built but bit like a pit toilet and the hole went down as far as we could dig it. When it got filled up we sort of like it was covered over and moved it to a new location. Usually well away from the house but.

On the weekends after school we would go spud picking or pea picking and you get those big hessian bags so my aunt used to get them and cut them down to squares, then she would sew all those bags together and then get the old material from the tip, old shirts, old trousers any sort of old cloth boil it all up in a big boiler and cut that up into squares and sew together into a big “wagga”, like a quilt. It was quite a warm one.

We used to get rations from the police station, first it was the police station, me Aunt used to go down and they’d hand out the rations at the police station or coupons they’d give them. Then it changed from the police station to the post office and they used to then hand out the coupons.

The local store, they took the coupons, they’d give you so much worth of sugar, milk, tea all the basic stuff.

This was about the late 1950’s/1960’s. Meat was sort of a rarity. You would have mince as basic meat but I think we we would have rabbits.

We used to go out as kids and hunt rabbits and dig them out of burrows. We used to get about sometimes six or eight rabbits in a weekend.

We used to shoot a kangaroo and cut up into steaks and take it home. No nothing sort of like fancy really. We used to go pea picking I think we used to eat more peas than we put into the bloody buckets. The times on the mission it was like good times because as compared to today because there was no stress, no worries about rents, didn’t have to pay any rent.

Everyone looked after each other, the caring and sharing part of it. If you got into trouble your old Aunty would give you a hit with the strap or stick and we when you got home the other Aunty would belt you. It was doing things that we used to do we shouldn’t have been doing. But it was them looking after each other.

Me father came to Armidale with us but he had very little to do with us because he had various labouring jobs in Armidale in the building and construction and Newcastle working on the railway.

My Aunty basically looked after us and my Uncle. But he was a war veteran. He was a war veteran he was on the pension so he didn’t really have a lot of money that was coming into the family. This then forced me to get out when I left high school to work, to look after the younger sister and younger brother coming through.