Reaching Through Time: Finding My Family's Stories

The phone rang unexpectedly late one night. 'Guess who our white ancestors were?' chuckled Uncle Gerry. 'They were slave traders! A couple of generations of slave traders!' With this startling revelation, Shauna wanted to find out more. She discovers her ancestor Robert Bostock arrived in Sydney in 1815 convicted of slave trading in Africa, and his grandson Augustus John married Bundjalung woman One My. Battling restrictions on access to government archives, Shauna pieces together her family's stories, from dispossession and frontier violence, to the Aborigines Protection Board's harsh regime on the reserves and surprising acts of kindness, to decades of activism. reveals the cataclysmic impact of colonisation on Aboriginal families, and how this ripples through to the present. It also shows how family research can bring a deeper understanding and healing of the wounds in our history. Shauna writes, 'I am a proud Aboriginal woman who has always wanted to make a stronger connection to my cultural heritage. I experienced an inner yearning to find out about my ancestors and what they experienced in life. This is the story of my journey.'