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My family’s reckoning
It was time to face the difficult truth about my family who lived on stolen land
I had been looking at the photo for about eight years.
- Ellen Fanning
- ABC
Two dark-skinned Aboriginal women. A laughing girl and a stern-looking matriarch. Both dressed in starched white maid uniforms, like plantation workers from America’s Deep South.
But this was the deep north — Longreach, Queensland, a century ago.
And the photo was in my late grandmother’s ancient, black, leather-bound photo album, which I discovered in 2012.
Who were these Aboriginal women? Why was their portrait on the very first page?
Did my great…