“Let's Embrace As Sisters”

For June Oscar, reconciliation is not just a matter of politics, it’s about family. She tells Samantha Trenoweth about her very surprising family reunion and the personal tragedy that propelled her journey from the Kimberley to the corridors of power.

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June Oscar was still a babe in arms when her father, a white pastoralist called Bob Skuthorp, came knocking on her mother Mona’s door and told her to pack her things and go. As he drove June and Mona into town, he explained that his wife, Pat, had got wind of his philandering, and his new offspring, and was out looking for them.

Brooking Springs Station – 200,000 hectares of rich rolling grassland, wooded hills and towering cliffs on the Fitzroy River – is Bunuba country. After their land was stolen by European settlers, June’s family, like many Bunuba people, found work on the properties that sprung up across the Kimberley. When June was born, her mother lived in the “blacks’ camp” at Brooking Springs and worked at the homestead. June was the second of Mona’s children that the station owner had fathered. An older brother, Kevin, had been born five years earlier.

June has often been asked whether her father was a good man. She can’t say for sure. “It’s in the context of those times,” she begins carefully.

‘Cohabitation’ was a crime in Western Australia. Men were jailed for having relationships with Aboriginal women. So you have to look at it in its context, and I didn’t know him. My mother didn’t speak of him. When I was nine or 10, an old Aboriginal man said to me, ‘Your father is a white man’. That was the first I’d heard of him.”