Many Aboriginal families in Australia have white ancestors on the family tree, but few have two generations of slave traders.

Bostock starts this account of finding her family’s stories with a startling phone call from a paternal uncle, who had just heard about the slave traders from a non-Indigenous Bostock family member.

The author’s great-great-grandfather, Augustus John Bostock, who had married a Tweed district Aboriginal woman, was the grandson of an Englishman transported to Australia for having been a slave trader, as was his father before him.

That information set this former primary school teacher on a search for her family history, one that would result in a PhD in Aboriginal History from the Australian National University.

Most of that history is centred on the Northern Rivers area of NSW, from Grafton to the Queensland border, and Bostock pays tribute to the white historians, such as Henry Reynolds, who two decades ago shone a spotlight on Indigenous history, asking the question so many white Australians have since asked: Why weren’t we told? With such a wealth of information available from her research, it is a pity there is no index, although the reader will be grateful for the extensive family tree provided.

In her interesting and talented family on her mother’s side she has Sam Anderson, a talented Aboriginal cricketer, who caught out Don Bradman for a duck when he played in a team visiting the region in 1928. Two paternal uncles became involved in filmmaking; a maternal aunt wrote five books; and Bostock’s own father, in his later years, became an actor.

By researching the family, Bostock also confronted the managed reserve system which degraded, abused and humiliated Aboriginal people for 90 years after 1870, but she found some striking instances of her people who defied the removal of children, as well as shining examples of non-Indigenous kindness and support.

To access records held by Aboriginal Affairs NSW she had to prove direct genealogical lineage to every person whose file she wished to access, an application that ran to 27 pages. She wonders if non-Indigenous researchers face the same kind of restrictions on accessing non-Indigenous archival material.

It is her belief that qualified historians, regardless of race, should have access to all of the archives, to investigate the history of the Aboriginal Protection/Welfare Boards and the subsequent government department. This would end what anthropologist W E H Stammer once called the ‘Great Australian Silence’ on how the Aboriginal experience of colonisation and white settlement had been left out of the national narrative.

Reaching Through Time is a fascinating book, written with an historian’s even-handedness, acknowledging the highs and lows of one Aboriginal family’s experience for five generations.

Reviewed by Jennifer Somerville

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A former primary school teacher, Shauna Bostock’s curiosity about her ancestors took her all the way to a PhD in Aboriginal history.