About Meghan Markle

 Hayley Millar Baker

One morning I invited my mum on a drive to pick up some frames for an exhibition I was working on. Along the way we somehow got onto the topic, and into a fight, about

Meghan Markle ... It went something along the lines of this:

Mum: How dare Meghan go into the Royals, knowing what the Royals are about, and try to disrupt that?

Me: The Royals—are you serious? Do you know what time we live in? Do you know what they have overseen in Australia?

We didn’t speak the entire way home.

There is a whole backstory that explains why my mum thinks the way she thinks ... She was born in the early 60s, into a long line of Aboriginal women. Her Mum’s Grandmother—my Nan’s Nan (Nanna) — was sent away at 13 years old to be a black slave to white families in Melbourne. Enslaved people had to do eight years of service (the same as in America) to earn a license to enter ‘the new society’, also known as White society, and move off the Aboriginal missions and stations. No one wanted to move off the missions because that’s where their families were, but there was never a choice in the matter.

After her ‘service’, Nanna traveled five hours back to the mission at Lake Condah to be with her family. When she arrived, the mission wouldn’t let her back in. ‘You have your license now, go and be in society’, they said. Society was a little coastal town called Portland, which was the first point of colonisation in Victoria. Segregation and violent racism was so bad. And, being a black woman, Nanna couldn’t get a job. So she begged the mission for work in exchange for rations to feed her children.

After an incident involving her husband’s imprisonment, Nanna lived alone in a tent with her five children, in the bush not too far from the mission. At the time, tuberculosis was wiping Aboriginal people out, and Nanna was told she could work for rations on the mission by cleaning the houses. When her family members or friends died from TB, she was the one who had to go in and bleach the houses for the next residents. Eventually, she caught tuberculosis herself and died at 31 when her children were still small. One of those children was my Great-Nan.

In my Aboriginal family history, there were so many deaths at the hands of white people. Until my Nan’s mother—since colonisation—nobody in my direct line lived even close to half the life expectancy of today. The segregation, the fear of having lighter skin (courtesy of ‘breeding out’ policies), the alcoholism—all these messed up, complicated, fearful layers built up, forcing my family into living however they could to protect themselves and their babies.

Growing up in the 60s—peak time for assimilation policy—my mum knew nothing else but to be ‘Australian’. She wrecked herself attempting to meet the standards of her white Airforce father. She was the first in our family to get a proper education—a degree at university. She became a journalist and ran our town newspaper where we lived in Werribee. And flash forward to now, and us sitting in the car arguing about Meghan Markle. As much as she was educated (by white systems), she had so much unlearning to do.

That day in the car was a turning point for her. The first step on a path back toward the truth—that ‘Australia’ doesn’t exist, it cannot co-exist with our truth, even if ‘Australia’ says we are ‘one’. ‘Australia’ is no more than a colonising word for the land that our family has been occupying for 2000 generations. So now, instead of getting worked up, we’re breaking down generations of colonial brainwashing and throwing it out the window. It has taken us a few years now, but mum is getting there.