ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS

The Perkins women are the doyennes of the Australian arts and Aboriginal rights communities. Now they've come together for the first time with The Weekly to share a very personal, multi-generational family story.

- SAMANTHA TRENOWETH

Two little girls run across the lawn in front of Old Parliament House in Canberra. It's the summer of 1974, back in the days when it was the only parliament house. They're groovy kids, dressed in denim jeans and stripy tees. Hetti, nine, and Rachel, four, play tag with their brother, Adam, six, while their father takes a meeting at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy.

Another memory. Three years later. Hetti is playing lifesavers with a neighbour in Lake Burley Griffin. Little does she know the neighbour truly cannot swim, and in his clutching and flailing almost drowns her. The last thing she thinks as she struggles gasping to the surface is, “What would Rachel and Adam do without me?”

Then, as now, the Perkins sisters had an unbreakable bond.

“She is my big sister, friend, confidante,” Rachel tells The Weekly. “If I ever lost her, I don’t know what I’d do.”

“Growing up in Canberra,” Hetti says, “Rachel, Adam and I felt a bit outsiderish, and we stuck together.”

Their father, Dr Charles Perkins AO, was an Aboriginal rights advocate and the first Indigenous head of the Department of Aboriginal Affairs.

“Charles Perkins is to the Aboriginal population in Australia what Martin Luther King Jr. was to the black people in the United States,” the founder of the Wayside Chapel, Rev Tedd Noffs, wrote at the time. “The raising of the national consciousness on the Aboriginal question began with ... the Freedom Rides.”

Hetti was born in 1965, the same year that her father led the Freedom Ride. Her mum, Eileen, was pregnant when Charles and a busload of fellow students drove west, desegregating pubs and public pools across regional NSW by picketing and sometimes simply walking through their doors.