When family ties become unravelled
Bree Sturges grew up believing she was a proud Maori in Australia until her family’s big lie was revealed. Amanda Saxton reports.
GROWING up in the port city of Fremantle in Western Australia, Bree Sturges always felt proud to say she was Ma¯ori.
‘‘People responded so positively – it was something exotic for them, and I thought it was pretty cool to be different,’’ she says.
But last year, about to turn 30 and spurred by curiosity about her roots, as she and her cat prepared to move across the ditch, she tracked down some long-lost relatives to find out who exactly was the fullblooded Ma¯ori woman ancestor that accounted for their olive skin.
But that Ma¯ori never existed – instead, she discovered Nancy Gamble. Nancy was born in 1844 to an Aboriginal woman and a white man. Her mother had been kidnapped by sealers from Port Phillip, Victoria, and her father was a seaman. She married a convict-turnedshepherd at age 14, and before dying of cholera gave birth to 10 children: one of whom was Sturges’ great-greatgrandfather.
‘‘Dad used to show us pictures of great-nana Sturges, and fair enough – back then I’d be like ‘yep, she’s Ma¯ori’. But now it’s more like, ‘what were we thinking? She’s clearly Aborigine’.’’
Sturges started poring over Australian history and says she found the process therapeutic, ‘‘as someone who’s always struggled with belonging and identity’’.
Her dad, however, hung up the phone in fury when she told him about their family’s real roots.
Academics agree the Sturgeses are far from Australia’s only fake Ma¯ori family. Professor Lynette Russell of Monash University says the phenomenon was ‘‘much more common than people realise’’ and was often a survival mechanism for Aborigines. For the first 70-odd years of the 20th century, it was government policy to seize halfcaste Aboriginal children from families in a bid stamp out the race and culture. Desperate parents would claim Ma¯ori blood – or another swarthy ethnicity – to stop their kids joining the Stolen Generations.
Gavin Sturges’ reasons for shunning his Aboriginal genes were different to his predecessors’, yet were more connected to the Stolen Generations than he might have been comfortable admitting, says Sturges.
‘‘I don’t want to say my dad’s racist,’’ she explains tentatively, ‘‘but I guess if you’re uneducated about the past and have only had bad dealings with Aborigines… it kind of makes sense.’’
Professor Len Collard is a chief investigator with the University of Western Australia’s School of Indigenous Studies and – like Sturges – encourages people to look to the beginning of Australia’s colonisation to find the origins of Aboriginal stigma.
‘‘The Ma¯ori had their maraes, a commonly understood language, and a hierarchical structure Europeans could make sense of – but nomadic Aborigines had none of that,’’ he explained.
‘‘So the Europeans made the Treaty of Waitangi with the Ma¯ori, but decided they wouldn’t even treat Aborigines like human beings; they’d round us up, and create special laws to control us.’’
Emphasising the countries’ differences in race relations, New Zealand had Ma¯ori MPs by 1868 while Australia didn’t get its first Aboriginal MPuntil more than a century later.
Sturges understands why her ancestor opted for Ma¯ori-dom; she feels their decision probably helped her avoid the fate of the glue sniffers she side-stepped on the streets of Fremantle. However, she also feels like she’s lost something by not growing up Aborigine.
‘‘There were so many years that I could have been exploring the culture more, delving in and doing something good instead of being part of the problem.’’
Sturges and her cat still moved to New Zealand and now live on the edge of Auckland’s Waitakere Ranges – most of what she’s learned about her family’s past has happened online, from here.
She wants to return to Australia eventually but reckons living in New Zealand has made coming to terms with her Aboriginal genes easier.
‘‘It’s ironic, even a bit sad, but I feel freer to talk about being Aborigine here than back in Australia,’’ she says.
‘‘I love that Ma¯ori culture is so celebrated here. If you want to learn the language you can – and you should! Aborigines don’t have any of that.’’
‘ What were we thinking? She’s clearly Aborigine.’ BREE STURGES ABOVE