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For some youth, fostered out, with records destroyed, there
is no possibility of ever establishing a personal Iife^history.
This aspect of identity is lost forever. These people do not
even have the reserve to look back to.
The felt need to construct a life-history is witnessed by
contemporary preoccupation with compiling genealogies which attempt
to establish the identity of individual Aborigines within a
group. It has been pointed out that the city Aboriginal people
look on Point Pearce or Point McLeay, white constructs, as home.
The tracing of genealogies, and relating these to ancient tribal
lands is of very recent origin, and an indication of the reality
of the search for an Aboriginal identity,
ft-
Nevertheless, the need to trace these genealogies speaks of
the lack of knowledge of kin in the sense in which it exists at
Strelley, where daily, again:and again, the small child is taught
his relationship to all those with whom he comes into contact.
On the whole, the people at Pt. Augusta are closer to their
origins.than the Adelaide Aboriginal people. They come into contact
continuously with people who have their roots in traditional society.
They are able, therefore, to relate their personal identity more
easily to those who are nearer to traditional Aboriginal culture, and
to see themselves as part of the history of the race.
For the Pt. Augusta people there are also those who were taken
away from their parents as children but who have re-established
links with their family through a personal, painful search.
Many of those interviewed had one ’full blood’ parent and knew
this parent. Even where people had been taken away as children
from their parents, and were educated and accepted in a white world,
they had later found their way back to the north, consciously and
unconsciously seeking their kin. Sometimes through coincidence,
4
sometimes after a traumatic search, they found their relatives again,
and re-established contact with them.