Know Their Names
the Queensland Government’s Aboriginal Workers and the system that exploited them
Men. Horses. The new nation of Australia. Truth-telling.
“Naming is a sacred and respectful act of love. May the names and contributions of the Aboriginal trackers of Rewan never be forgotten.
... a work of compassionate, engaged labour history ...
All of us will be the better for having read it.”
‘My body may be tethered in Brisbane, the state capital of Queensland, but in truth I’ve been out of town in the Central Highlands where the winters are cold and the summer sun parches the earth until storms break and create a frenzy of floodwater. I’ve had my feet planted out there in long grass, peering over the barbed wire fence of a horse-breeding stud called Rewan Station, a stud that no longer exists but which on occasion captured—not only the national imagination—but the approval of a future British king. For three intense years I’ve been gazing over that fence and what I’ve learnt has moved and changed me—it might do the same for you.’
This is a story of the Aboriginal workers who bred the horses for Queensland Police 1909–1934. Corporal Rob, a man with a dramatic past, Prince Albert, mentor to all, Boolboora-Leo Freeman, horse-breaker extraordinaire. They are but four of the remarkable stockmen who bred horses on Rewan Station (or ranch) in the early C20th. Under orders from the Apartheid system that governed them, they supplied the steeds the police needed. Drawing on archival records, photographs, police memoirs, fieldwork and more, Know Their Names counters the erasure of the Indigenous peoples of Australia from mainstream Australian history.
Available from the author and
Brisbane bookshops eg Museum of Brisbane, BooksStones the Library Shop.
Rationshed Museum, and more.
For bulk orders & signed copies, contact the author directly. Available on Amazon Kindle soon.
‘If you buy just one work of Queensland history this year, make it this one!’
This indie work is published by Zing Stories and supported by editing and design volunteers who believed this is a story that must be told. Available on Amazon Kindle.
Reader comments
‘Fascinating and of great importance.’
‘A work of the heart. A beautiful thing.’
‘Would have helped with the Truth-Telling and Healing Inquiry in Queensland, had the newly-elected government not legislated to abandon it.’
‘You write history so well!’
‘Absorbing, moving, profound.’
‘A king hit to what the great anthropologist WEH Stanner described as the Great Australian Silence and the national Cult of Forgetfulness.’