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About the author

Cheryl Leavy

Cheryl Leavy writes non-fiction, poetry and children’s literature. Her first children’s book, Yanga Mother, was published by UQP in 2024. She has been awarded...

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Home as a weapon of cultural destruction

Non-fictionIt was simply expected that Aboriginal people would accept the values and behaviour of the dominant European culture. The Welfare Board insisted that Aboriginal people not only earn an independent living but show the Board they could save money in a bank account. They had to demonstrate that they were avoiding contact with other Aboriginal people and refusing to participate in community-oriented activities, such as sharing resources with kinsfolk and travelling to visit their relatives and home Country. Over and over again, the Board’s reports criticised Aboriginal people for being among their own kind and clinging together in groups. To achieve their assimilation aims, the Welfare Board implemented a crude ‘carrot and stick’ incentive in an attempt to modify Aboriginal behaviour: if Aboriginal people could convince the Welfare Officers that they had cut themselves off entirely from their culture, family and land, they would be rewarded with an ‘Exemption Certificate’.

Safe as houses

IntroductionSometimes, if I can’t get to sleep, I imagine I’m back in the house where I grew up... I like to go back there in my mind’s eye, conjuring the slightly crooked hallway, the doors that never neatly fit their frames, the tiny kitchen with its overwhelmingly wheaten spectrum of 1980s browns. Like handwriting on old foolscap, the more specific details have long faded with time, but the feeling remains: that ineffable sense of calm and familiarity that I associate with being home.

Bellend

Poetry ‘Nice little bell, buddy,’ snipes some guy holding space in the bike lane as I nearly swipe him on my way to the shops. Low and...