‘Your father is my father’: June Oscar’s family secrets
June Oscar knew her family had a secret. But when she reached out to her white siblings, she had no idea what to expect.
June Oscar felt more nervous than at almost any time in her life as she picked up her phone and dialled the number written on a scrap of paper one day last November. The Aboriginal leader held her breath as it rang and a man she’d never met, Bill Skuthorp, answered. She introduced herself, told him she’d got his number from a mutual acquaintance and they chatted for a bit before Bill said: “What can I do for you, June?”
“’I’m not sure how you’re going to take this,” she said, “but your father is my father too.” There was a brief silence, then Bill’s response: “Where are you? Can I come and see you?”
That first conversation spanned a cultural chasm that, more than 50 years ago, divided a small black girl and a young white boy who were blood siblings. Bill would have only been about two when his father, Bob Skuthorp, drove baby June and her mother Mona off his land after his wife Pat had threatened to shoot them both.
Bill, now 56, had long sensed that he and his two white sisters might have half-siblings but his father, a pastoralist on Brooking Springs Station near Fitzroy Crossing in the Kimberley, had always denied it and his mother never raised it.
Both parents took any information they had with them to their graves. “I admit it was a huge shock when June rang,” says Bill, who runs an air-conditioning installation business in Perth.
But June had even more surprises in store.
“How many [Aboriginal siblings] are there?” Bill asked. “Three that I know of, a sister Selina and brother Kevin and me,” she replied. There was never a moment’s hesitation from Bill. “You mean I have an older brother? I’ve always wanted one.” As he thanked June for her courage in making the call that day, he signed off: “It’s better than winning the lottery.”
That June Oscar found it so difficult to make that call would surprise those familiar with the battle-hardened heroine of the Kimberley. A prominent indigenous leader and Order of Australia recipient, she is renowned for championing the rights of her Bunuba people. She’s crossed swords with her own kin in Fitzroy Crossing over grog bans that she and senior women fought to have introduced in 2007, following years of high rates of domestic violence and 50 funerals in 18 months, including 13 suicides (her own younger brother among them). She was there at the forefront of the next battle to save unborn children by encouraging women to stop drinking in pregnancy, reducing the region’s tragically high incidence of babies born with the Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder.
Through it all Oscar, 54, has remained stoic and unbending, while travelling around the world to make speaking engagements at the invitation of the UN and Buckingham Palace. Her Order of Australia in 2013 for services to her people was followed in May this year by the Desmond Tutu Reconciliation Fellowship award, previously won by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.
But the more Oscar fought for her people, the more she pondered the unreconciled part of her own family history - her father’s legacy. Who was she really? In a profile on Oscar two years ago in this magazine, a single paragraph about her “white side” was all she would permit. It read:
“Oscar’s biological father, who played no role in her life and whom she met only once as an adult, was a local white pastoralist whose wife threatened to shoot June and her mother.”
June’s mother Mona had worked as a domestic labourer for Bob Skuthorp on Brooking Springs Station. Everyone in close-knit Fitzroy Crossing knew Skuthorp had fathered Aboriginal children and people knew about little June, his illegitimate daughter, “but nobody dobbed on anyone else”.
“Somehow people never spoke about it, although an old Aboriginal man told me when I was about 12,” says June. “I remember I looked at myself and thought, ‘You are half-white’. But my whole world up to that point was my mother’s Bunuba world. It didn’t change who I was, and she never talked about him [Bob] to me. I respected the protocol that says you don’t ask intimate questions. And I didn’t want to re-traumatise mum.
“I suppose that’s the story of all of us children fathered by pastoralists or other white men. And there are many of us.”
June was only three weeks old when she and her mother were bundled off the station. An elderly woman had hidden them both when Bob’s wife Pat came looking for them. “His wife was not happy that he had fathered another child with an Aboriginal woman,” says Oscar, “so Bob drove us to the police station in Fitzroy Crossing, then the United Aborigines Mission, where we stayed until I was three.”
Bob’s lineage became clearer as June and Bill swapped notes. His two sons arrived first: Mona gave birth to June’s brother Kevin in 1957, before Bob married Pat and fathered Bill in 1960. The next year, Pat gave birth to their daughter Veronica,
and in 1962 Mona gave birth to June. Pat then had a third child, Rosemarie, while Bob’s third Aboriginal child, Selina, arrived five years later this time, the mother was another Aboriginal domestic worker and Mona’s best friend, Rita.
It was Rita who brought Oscar face-to-face with her father for the only time in her life. June was 19 and working as an orderly at Fitzroy Crossing hospital when Rita walked in and told her to come outside and meet someone. Sitting in a car outside was Bob Skuthorp. “This is Mona’s girl,” Rita told him. “He looked at me and I looked at him,” recalls Oscar. “I was rolling a cigarette and he said, ‘That’s no good, cigarettes’ll kill you’, then he went on talking to Rita.”
Oscar’s Aboriginal half-sister Selina had a similar one-off encounter with her biological father. “The thing is, we always knew,” Selina says matter-of-factly about her parentage. “And we always knew we had a white brother and two sisters.”
Brooking Springs Station lies in the heart of Bunuba country, near the famous tourist spot of Geikie Gorge. The spectacular limestone gorge country is where Mona and June often spend weekends camping and fishing. Unbeknown to them, Geikie Gorge was also where the white Skuthorp children made a pilgrimage to scatter Bob’s ashes after his death in 2012.
The three Skuthorp children - Bill, Veronica and Rosemarie - were born in a Perth hospital and brought back to the station in Pat’s arms.
“Each of us had an Aboriginal ‘mother’ to look after us as babies, and I had a lady who I knew as Jumbuck,” recalls Bill. “She had a heap of kids and I became one of them.
“I can remember Aboriginal people working on the station and not being paid. I remember them coming up to the house and getting flour, meat, sugar and salt.” Equal pay for Aboriginal pastoral workers would not arrive until 1968.
An inquisitive and trouble-prone boy, Bill was nicknamed Jurrguna (which means bowerbird) by the Aboriginal hands “because I used to pinch coins”. He learnt some Bunuba language, “and I probably actually played with my Aboriginal siblings without knowing it, which is really sad”.
Their father held the typical attitude of the era towards his Aboriginal employees - one of mild contempt. “He’d say to me if I didn’t eat with a knife and fork, I could go outside and eat with the blackfellas. Which I actually preferred, because they were allowed to eat with their hands.”
Oscar has different childhood memories, and happy ones. She, Mona and Kevin slept in a sandy river bed when they moved to Leopold Downs Station, where Mona again did domestic work - and where Kevin would years later return as manager. “I can still smell the black soil and how mum took three sheets of corrugated iron to make walls to shelter us,” recalls Oscar.
“We were safe. I remember playing down in the creek bed while my mother and other women and men worked up at the main manager’s house. We herded goats, we played out in the bush, we were taught to hunt and understand traditional life as Bunuba people. We didn’t really fully understand the issues of injustice and inequality; we were too busy being children.”
So what kind of a man was Bob Skuthorp? A glimpse into his knockabout life and times is found in a 1979 article in The Bulletin, written by advertising man John Singleton, who caught up with him at the Fitzroy Crossing races; Skuthorp doubled as “the worst race caller in the history of race calling”, wrote Singleton of his friend. “He is also a top bloke. He also doesn’t have many teeth.
Like, he’s having a chuck out of his Toyota one night and his bloody teeth fall out and the bloody Toyota runs over them which Bob thinks is hilarious and which probably is.”
It has been hard for Skuthorp’s white children to make sense of an invisible history long known to their Aboriginal siblings. “Kevin and June and Selina are just as much Dad’s blood as I am,” says Bill. “I’m probably disappointed that he wasn’t more of a father to them. At least I had a relationship, although a distant one, with my father.”
But Kevin has revealed that he and Bob had often crossed paths. Between them was the unspoken but firm understanding that they were father and son, although Kevin says he never felt he could broach the subject of his white half-siblings.
He learnt his vocation from his uncles and other indigenous men, but over the years Bob whom he describes as “one of the great cattlemen” - also gave him advice. “He told me how to build your herd up, how to work men, to respect everybody and treat them fair because you need to have a good crew ... He was a good old bloke and I’m proud to say he was my old man.”
The last time Kevin saw his father was in 1999, when Bob bought 1200 cattle from him to transport to a Pilbara station. Kevin would ring periodically but in later years the pair lost touch. Kevin recalls the last conversation he had with Bob, by then old and ill, in Perth. “He told me he was writing this book about his life. He said, ‘When you see the book come out, you know I’m finished’.”
Kevin only learnt of Bob’s death during a
chance encounter out bush last year with one of Bob’s pastoral mates. The man handed over Bill’s number, which Kevin - too shy to ring - handed on to sister June.
Kevin’s white half-sister Rosemarie McMinigal says she can now make sense of Bob’s bizarre behaviour when they were recording his life on a tape recorder. “We got to the bit where - I realise now - Kevin would have been born and Dad said, ‘Leave it with me, I’ll fill in the bits’. And he erased the tape.”
Rosemarie, 54, still feels tenderly towards the father who raised three young children alone after their mother, Pat, died at 32; the bushman who grieved when Brooking Springs was sold from under him and he was forced to leave; the battler whose trucking business failed and who found himself living in Perth in his later years, yearning to be back in the Kimberley. “He can’t defend himself,” she says, “so I don’t want it to come across that he was a racist.
“It’s like having two files in my brain,” she continues. “There’s dad and the deception. I love him to bits still; we are all flawed and so was he.
He was a good dad, bringing up three children alone. I just wish he had given June and Kevin and Selina some support, letting them know he was there. The thing I struggle with is how a town could keep a secret like that and we didn’t know.”
Bill remembers a strange episode when he took his ailing father for a weekly drive. “He told me he didn’t want me to put his death in the paper until after his cremation. I said, ‘Why’s that?’ He said it was too far for people to come from the Kimberley to attend a funeral. I said, ‘Isn’t that their choice?’ We had quite an argument about it. I said to him jokingly, ‘I haven’t got any brothers and sisters that I don’t know about, do I?’ He said, ‘Don’t be so bloody stupid’.”
Veronica Skuthorp, the third sibling (who was working a shift as a psych nurse at the time of our photo shoot) says it’s taken time for her to absorb the news. “Our dad lived a very full life - we didn’t know the whole of it. He was a chap who polarised people. I always thought he held racist views, but as a Justice of the Peace he talked about trying to make things fair. I’d like to think he was fair and kind, although he was in a position of power.
“It’s a really important story because I know we’re not the only ones,” adds Veronica, 55. “It happened right across Australia.”
Hours after making phone contact with Bill last November, June Oscar was in a Perth hotel lobby preparing to meet her brother face-to-face for the first time. Looking over the patrons, she picked him out as soon as he walked in. “I could see the resemblance,” recalls Oscar, laughing at what she describes as the “Skuthorp chin”. Bill recalls a similar recognition: “The moment I saw June I knew she was my sister. I walked straight across and said, ‘You’re June Oscar’. She was the spitting image of my sister Veronica, except dark.” The siblings swapped photographs and compared genetic traits: Doesn’t Rosemarie look just like Selina did as a child? And doesn’t Bill stand the same way, hand on hip, as Kevin?
In the months that followed, family members phoned each other and met up whenever the opportunity arose. “Bill sent me June’s photo and I realised I’d previously seen her on TV,” recalls Rosemarie. “I remember thinking then, ‘My goodness, what an amazingly strong woman!’” When June, Kevin and Selina went to Perth for a native title conference, Rosemarie presented them each with a photo of a youthful Bob Skuthorp. She gave Kevin their father’s signet ring, while June and Selina received a goblet each, part of a trophy set that Bob’s favourite horse won in 1966.
When Oscar gave a public speech in Perth a few months ago, it was the turn of Veronica to step forward from the crowd and hug her Aboriginal half-sister. Oscar is visibly thrilled by each new encounter. “I’m very, very fortunate to have siblings who want to know me but who love and respect my mother’s other children,” she says.
Oscar’s mother Mona, a very dignified lady, has never said a bad word against the man who drove her off the station. Bill hopes that one day he may get to ask her about the nature of their relationship. Meanwhile, his daughter Isabella, her fiance and her mother, Bill’s ex-wife Petrovia, became the first “family” to meet Mona on a visit to Fitzroy Crossing in April. “Mona welcomed us with open arms and was so kind,” says Isabella, a lawyer who plans to invite her extended new family to her wedding next year. “I could sense she was nervous; she said to June, ‘What do they want to talk to me for?’” “Mum was very happy to be there, and in her own way started building relationships,” observes Oscar. “I’ve asked her whether it was hard raising us alone and she said no. I’ve asked her if she felt threatened, and she said no. I don’t think she was even resentful. She just got on with raising us. It’s part of the bigger narrative of this country: the fact that, whether mutual and consenting or not, we as human beings have relationships - and children are the product of those unions.”
Historian Howard Pedersen, who knows Oscar well, says many families in the Kimberley have Aboriginal offspring - some acknowledge them, others never have. “So many Aboriginal people I know have unresolved relationships with settler families. June’s story is rare because of the characters involved. Her Skuthorp siblings have embraced her and all she represents. That says so much about them but also about her.”
At Fitzroy Crossing’s early learning centre Baya Gawiy, which Oscar helped establish, she watches as small children are told they can be “strong like the whip ray” that lives in the mighty Fitzroy River. Oscar suspects there are children at Baya Gawiy who know as little about their parentage as she did as a small child. Finding Bob Skuthorp’s children, her other family, has made her stronger as an adult, she says. “This experience of coming to know who I am, Bunuba and white Australian, is important to me as a human being. It answers so many questions I’ve carried around.”
When she asked her brother’s permission to tell this chapter of her story, Bill sent a message straight back. “Let’s not hide the truth,” he told her. “The truth has been hidden for too long. Let’s do it.”
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