The Wenbergs

Vince Wenberg:

Vince Keith Wenberg was born in 1932, 28^th of April, in Uligandi Island near Maclean.

He doesn’t exactly know, where his mother is from, but he thinks she’s from the Bundjalung tribe, while she comes from the Cabbage Tree Island. She left Uligandi Island and got married with Wenberg, and took his name, and they used to live up at Grafton.

His mother used to take them places and fishing. She was very thoughtful and took the to shows.

Heres a shot video about him:

http://stolengenerationstestimonies.com/index.php/testimonies/1000.html

Rita Wenberg:

Rita Wenberg was put into Cootamundra Girls Home in 1943, when she was only 3 years old. She grew up in the Girls home, which was owned by the government. The home held many religious people, and had different people coming up and preaching to them.

The days she spent in the home, being abused was a natural thing. She would get into trouble often, because she tore her dress and ended up having to wear a potato bag dress for a week. The worst case she’s experienced, when it comes to being abused, was being whipped with a wire.

She says, that the biggest pain about being taken away from her family, is not knowing, who you really are.  And when she finally went home and met her real family is, that they don’t feel like real family to her.

Being raised among white people gives you the thought of you being white. This leads her to having trouble interfering with aboriginals. Because she has trouble communicating with the aboriginals, while they think she talks like a whitefella. She doesn’t feel like she belongs among neither the white and the aboriginals. She feels like, she’s in the middle, like she doesn’t belong in a special place.

Heres a shot video about her:

http://stolengenerationstestimonies.com/index.php/testimonies/993.html

The Story of Lowitja

Lowitja O´Donoghue was born in 1932 in an aboriginal community. She never knew her father, who was white, and when she was two years old, she was taken away from her mother, who she didn’t see for 33 years. She struggled a long time to win an admission to a training hospital, and all of the hard work paid of. She was the first black nurse in South Australia and in 1976 she was awarded an Order of Australia, she was the first Aboriginal woman to win the award. She has won a few other awards after this, and in 1984 she was made the Australian of the year. In 1990 she founded the Aboriginal an Torres Strait Islander Comission. After this she changed her name to Lowitja O´Donoghue.

Heres a short video about her life

http://fadlmedia.s3.amazonaws.com/austbiog/clips/odonrem_pr.mp4

When you ask her what has kept her going, she replies: 'Despite my Christian education when I was young, I'm not a church goer. But like most Aboriginals I feel in harmony with the land. There is a spirituality which flows from that and I draw on it when the going gets hard. It helps me to overcome despair in the same way, I suppose, as their faith helps practising Christians in the crises of their lives.' When I asked who had most influenced her life and her thinking. Lois' reply was swift 'Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Tutu. They have always been a source of inspiration to me. I asked Lois how she thought individual white Australians could best participate in the reconciliation  process. 'I think', she said, 'that there's a basic goodness in the Australian community. I believe there is a widespread and genuine wish and willingness to come to grips with the process of reconciliation. One way of helping is for as many people as possible to join study groups - to study history and learn what Aboriginals have gone through and how the were dispossessed.'