We Come From Somewhere ... My Anaiwan Ancestors, Cultural Survival and the Responsibility That Drives My Advocacy
- Brian AJ Newman LLB
- 4 hours ago
- 10 min read
By Brian AJ Newman
There is a phrase at the heart of Sue Pickrell’s account of my ancestor Granny Duval: “She must have come from somewhere.”
For Aboriginal families, those words carry a meaning far greater than genealogy. They concern identity, Country, kinship and the relationships connecting one generation to another. They challenge the silence of incomplete colonial records and the false suggestion that a person without a neatly documented European history somehow appeared from nowhere.
My ancestors did not come from nowhere, I come from them.
Our family history reaches through the Anaiwan people of the New England region of New South Wales. It reaches through Country around Armidale, Walcha, Uralla, Ingleba, Nundle and Hanging Rock—the area sometimes described by Anaiwan Elder Steve Widders as the “snow country.”
The historical record identifies Milbona, a Wiradjuri woman, and Corumba, a Ngarigo man, at the beginning of the family line known to us. Their daughter Maryann, remembered in our broader family history as Mary Quinn or Lulu became an Anaiwan woman of lower New England.
Maryann was born into an ancient culture but lived through a period when that culture was being attacked by colonisation. Country was invaded and occupied. Aboriginal law and authority were disregarded. Traditional sources of food were destroyed or restricted.
Languages were suppressed, families were dispersed, and Aboriginal people were forced to survive within institutions created by those who had taken their lands.
Maryann’s daughter was Mary Elizabeth Quinn. She married James Duval and became known throughout the family and community as Granny Duval. She was an Anaiwan woman, mother, grandmother and matriarch whose life became part of the continuing story of the Aboriginal families of Nundle, Hanging Rock and the surrounding New England Country.
From Granny Duval, the family line continued through Margaret, who married into the Bristow family. It continued through the Whitfield family and through Rita Alma Whitfield. It then passed to my father, Brian Alfred Newman, and from him to me, Brian AJ Newman.
It continues through my four daughters.
They are not the beginning of a new identity. They are the continuation of an ancient one.
The Strength of the Blak Matriarchs
The story of my Anaiwan ancestors is, above all, a story of survival.
The women in this history endured the taking of Country, the disruption of language, the destruction of traditional authority and the imposition of institutions that rarely recognised Aboriginal humanity. They raised families while living between Aboriginal culture and a settler society determined to control almost every aspect of Aboriginal life.
Granny Duval has been described as one of the great Blak Matriarchs of the New England region. These women did much more than keep their families physically alive. They preserved identity, knowledge, kinship and belonging when so much around them was being deliberately dismantled.
They carried culture when cultural practices were suppressed. They maintained families when government officials threatened to remove children. They remembered relationships when written records ignored or misrepresented them. They created continuity in the face of organised disruption.
Research concerning Granny Duval records that, following the death of her husband, she lived near Ben Halls Creek with seven of her children. The family account suggests that the children were kept out of sight to protect them from welfare officials searching for Aboriginal children to remove from their mothers.
That history cannot be separated from the broader machinery of white supremacy operating throughout colonial and post-Federation Australia. Aboriginal people were not merely subjected to isolated instances of prejudice. They were governed through systems that treated European culture, authority and identity as superior while Aboriginal people were controlled, displaced, exploited and denied fundamental rights.
The massacres committed against Aboriginal communities were among the most violent manifestations of that ideology. Yet the violence did not end when the shooting stopped. It continued through protection legislation, removals, segregation, missions, reserves, restrictions on movement and employment, the destruction of language, and the surveillance of Aboriginal families.
Government institutions treated Aboriginal families as problems to be managed rather than human beings entitled to dignity, autonomy and protection. Children could be removed. Names could be changed. Identities could be obscured. Aboriginality could be denied or recorded according to the administrative convenience of those exercising power.
Our family also carries the confronting account that Lulu was first incarcerated when she was only seven years old. Whether every detail of such an early event can now be reconstructed through surviving colonial records or not, its presence in our family history reflects a broader and undeniable truth: Blak childhood was not protected by the institutions imposed upon our people.
A seven-year-old child should have been surrounded by family, culture and safety. Instead, Aboriginal children were too often confronted by confinement, control and punishment.
When I think about that child, I do not see a distant historical figure. I see my ancestor. I see someone whose endurance travelled through generations before reaching me and my children.
When Survival Required Invisibility
The story of the Colleano family demonstrates the extraordinary lengths to which Aboriginal people sometimes had to go to survive this oppression.
The Colleanos were an Aboriginal acrobatic and circus family whose remarkable history was explored in the SBS and NITV documentary The Colleano Heart. The family’s story began with the marriage of Irish boxer Cornelius “Con” Sullivan and Vittorine “Julia” Robinson, a Bundjalung woman from Narrabri. Their children, together with a cousin, formed a circus troupe and adopted the Italian-sounding surname Colleano.
They became internationally famous. They performed throughout Australia and later across Britain, Europe and the United States. Con Colleano became known as the “Wizard of the Wire” for performing a forward somersault on the high wire. The family entertained enormous audiences and attracted admirers ranging from Charlie Chaplin to powerful European political figures.
Yet behind that success was an extraordinary act of cultural concealment.
The Colleanos hid their Aboriginal heritage because openly identifying as Aboriginal exposed them to the control of protection authorities, restrictions on movement, interference with their livelihood and the possible removal of their children. At different times, they presented themselves as Italian, Spanish, Arab or Hawaiian.
They did not conceal their Aboriginality because they were ashamed of who they were. They concealed it because Australia had made openly living as Aboriginal dangerous.
Yaegl filmmaker Pauline Clague described them as part of a “hidden generation” Aboriginal families who lived during the period between the massacres and the tightening control of the Aboriginal Protection Board. While some children were physically removed and became part of the Stolen Generations, other Aboriginal families survived by hiding themselves from the institutions that might otherwise have separated, confined or controlled them.
The Colleanos’ international success did not free them from racism. It required them to perform an identity acceptable to white society while keeping their true heritage protected within the family. Their extraordinary physical performances took place alongside an equally extraordinary social performance: maintaining a public identity that allowed an Aboriginal family to move, work and remain together.
The documentary reveals that some later American descendants did not know they possessed Aboriginal heritage. That loss of knowledge was one of the intergenerational costs of survival through concealment.
The family’s story is now being reclaimed as a story of Blak courage, creativity and excellence. It is not merely the story of a circus family. It is evidence of the lengths to which our people were forced to go to survive the institutions of white Australia.
SBS NITV’s account of the Colleano family records how they concealed their Bundjalung heritage and adopted different identities while building a world-renowned circus career.
Their story gives meaning to the silence found in many Aboriginal family histories.
Some ancestors were omitted from official records because officials did not consider their names important. Some were classified inaccurately. Some families avoided government attention. Others described themselves in ways that protected their children from removal or their livelihoods from interference.
What might appear from the outside to be a loss or denial of identity was often a deliberate strategy of survival.
The Colleanos did not cease to be Aboriginal when they called themselves Spanish or Arab.
Their Aboriginal identity remained within them even when it could not safely be declared.
The same principle applies across our history. Aboriginality is not extinguished because an ancestor was forced into silence. Connection is not destroyed because a family had to hide. Identity does not disappear because white institutions failed—or refused—to record it accurately.
Connection Is More Than a Document
Colonial recordkeeping was never neutral.
Aboriginal people were frequently described by racial labels rather than their proper names.
Family relationships were misunderstood. Country was reduced to property. Complex systems of kinship were forced into narrow European categories.
For Aboriginal families, connection was never confined to a certificate, government register or family tree.
Connection lived in the knowledge of who belonged to whom. It lived in the respectful use of names such as Auntie, Uncle and Granny. It lived in stories passed between generations and
in the understanding that family extends beyond lines drawn on paper.
The absence of a document does not mean the absence of a person.
A gap in a colonial record does not sever thousands of years of belonging.
A period of silence does not mean that identity was surrendered.
Our ancestors existed before officials attempted to catalogue them. They belonged to Country before governments drew boundaries across it. They had families, responsibilities, languages, laws and systems of care before colonial institutions claimed authority over their lives.
My connection to my Anaiwan ancestors is therefore not simply a matter of looking backwards. It is a living responsibility.
I remain connected when I speak their names.
I remain connected when I acknowledge the violence and oppression they endured.
I remain connected when I ensure that my four daughters understand where they come from.
I remain connected when I refuse to allow the dignity of vulnerable people to be ignored.
Most importantly, I remain connected through the work I have chosen to do.
Advocacy as an Inherited Responsibility
My commitment to employment and human rights advocacy is not merely a profession. It is part of the obligation I feel towards the people who came before me.
My ancestors lived in a time when decisions were routinely made about Aboriginal people without listening to them. Their labour was exploited. Their families were threatened. Their voices were dismissed. Their rights were rarely recognised by the systems exercising power over them.
Those patterns have not disappeared entirely. They now appear in different forms.
I see them when a worker is dismissed without being properly heard.
I see them when an injured employee is treated as an inconvenience.
I see them when a person experiencing sexual harassment, racial discrimination or bullying is made to feel responsible for the conduct committed against them.
I see them when a vulnerable person is confronted by an organisation with far greater resources and institutional power.
I see them when institutions protect their reputations more fiercely than they protect the people within them.
I see them whenever authority is exercised without humanity, accountability or fairness.
My advocacy is driven by a determination that people should not have to face those systems alone.
I hold a Bachelor of Laws and qualifications across justice administration, government investigations, workplace health and safety, human resources, investigative services and other professional disciplines. I am also undertaking postgraduate studies in international law.
I pursued education because knowledge can expose the structures through which power is exercised and provide the means to challenge injustice effectively.
But qualifications alone do not create an advocate.
Advocacy requires the courage to stand beside someone when it would be easier to remain silent. It requires listening carefully to people who have been ignored. It requires persistence when an organisation hopes that delay, complexity, financial pressure or intimidation will cause a person to abandon their complaint.
I do not define myself as a lawyer, nor do I intend to seek admission to legal practice. I am proud to be a professional employment and human rights advocate. My purpose is to stand with workers and people whose dignity has been challenged, to help them understand the processes confronting them and to ensure that their voices are placed before decision-makers clearly and fearlessly.
Every time I enter a conciliation, prepare a submission, challenge an unfair process or stand beside a person confronting a powerful institution, I carry something of my ancestors with me.
I carry the strength of the women who held their families together.
I carry the endurance of those who survived dispossession, massacres and exclusion.
I carry the memory of Aboriginal children who encountered confinement when they should have known freedom.
I carry the ingenuity of families such as the Colleanos, who transformed themselves in the eyes of white society so they could remain together and survive.
I carry the quiet authority of Granny Duval, who raised and protected her family through circumstances designed to make Aboriginal continuity almost impossible.
Honour Through Action
Honouring my ancestors cannot be limited to words spoken on significant occasions. Honour must be expressed through action.
I honour them by refusing to remain silent when injustice occurs.
I honour them by helping people tell their stories accurately and with dignity.
I honour them by challenging institutions when they forget that policies, procedures and employment decisions affect real human beings.
I honour them by pursuing education and demonstrating to my children that perseverance, knowledge and service can be used to confront injustice.
I honour them by ensuring that my four daughters understand that their Anaiwan identity did not begin with me. It came through generations of women and men who survived, adapted, protected one another and refused to disappear.
They carry a history that reaches through their grandfather, Brian Alfred Newman; through Rita Alma Whitfield and Margaret Bristow; through Granny Duval and Mary Quinn; and back to Milbona and Corumba.
The records may be incomplete, but our connection is not.
The language may have been gravely damaged, but the identity remains.
Some families may have been forced into silence, but silence was not surrender.
Some were required to hide, but hiding was not disappearance.
The institutions of white supremacy attempted to control, classify, assimilate and erase Aboriginal families. Yet we are still here.
That is why I advocate.
I advocate because dignity matters. I advocate because fairness cannot be reserved for those with wealth, status or institutional power. I advocate because nobody should be silenced simply because they stand alone.
I advocate because my ancestors survived systems that did not recognise their equality, and I cannot honour that survival by turning away when I encounter injustice in my own time.
Granny Duval did come from somewhere, and so did Lulu.
So did the Colleano family, even when survival required them to conceal where they came from.
So did every ancestor whose name was omitted from the official record but remembered by family, community and Country.
I come from them.
My four daughters come after me.
Our history is not only a story of what was done to our people. It is a story of what our people preserved: family, identity, strength, ingenuity, love, responsibility and the determination to continue.
My advocacy is one expression of that continuation.
It is how I carry their strength into the present.
It is how I speak when others are silenced.
It is how I honour them.
Brian AJ Newman, LLB
Anaiwan, Wiradjuri and Ngarigo Decendant
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