Speaker after speaker at Mitchelton has come back to one place: Cherbourg, called Barambah until 1931, on Wakka Wakka Country about 170 kilometres north-west of Brisbane. Under Queensland’s 1897 Act, officials removed Aboriginal people there from every part of the state, Brisbane included, and the government kept files on their lives that the families did not see for decades. The people who grew up at Cherbourg have answered those files in their own words, at Mitchelton and before Queensland’s Truth-telling and Healing Inquiry.
Aunty Lesley Williams2021 · 2024
Uncle Valentine Brown14 July 2024
Marshall Saunders11 August 2024
Uncle Joe Kirk4 May 2025
Uncle David Wragge6 July 2025
Debbie West1 November 2026
A thematic set of ingredients to read, watch, hear, and explore, chosen to follow up a Truth-Telling session. Start with ten minutes below, then follow the four threads over the weeks ahead.
About Learning CompanionsThe Legacy of Cherbourg’s Boys Dormitory. Video: The Point, NITV, four minutes. Press play to watch it here.
NITV’s The Point visited Cherbourg for a series titled From Rations to Resilience. Watch this short report first, then spend six minutes with the Queensland Government’s own community history of Cherbourg. It records the first residents arriving in 1901, the dormitories built for girls in 1909 and for boys in 1910, and roughly 2,600 documented removals to the settlement between 1905 and 1971.
Notice who speaks in each. The video gives Cherbourg people the microphone; the community history draws on the government’s own files.
Read the Community History of CherbourgWhat can a government file tell you about a life, and what does only the person who lived it know?
Two of these speakers also gave evidence to Queensland’s Truth-telling and Healing Inquiry in September 2024, and the quotations below come from that testimony.
“We had to ask permission for everything in our lives.”
Aunty Lesley Williams names what the permits covered: whom and when to marry, language and culture, food, housing, work, schooling, wages, savings, and child endowment. Her family learned of the files kept on them only in the early 1990s. She went on to lead the Justice for Aboriginal Workers campaign.
Aunty Lesley Williams · Her testimony (PDF)“You never forget the day you’re taken away from your family.”
Uncle David Wragge, a Wakka Wakka man born at Cherbourg in 1958, entered the dormitory with his siblings in February 1967, at nine, and stayed six years. He told the Inquiry that people came to Cherbourg from across Queensland and beyond, many tribes on Wakka Wakka Country.
Uncle David Wragge · His testimony (PDF)On 11 August 2024 Marshall Saunders spoke at Mitchelton with Dormitory Boys Michael and David Wragge and Uncle Robert West. They described a settlement divided by a fence that nobody crossed without permission, and the ways the boys found to survive inside it. Half a century on, some of their stories are only now reaching the public.
Marshall Saunders and the Dormitory BoysUncle Valentine Brown arrived at Cherbourg in 1955 with his twin sister, his older sister, and his baby brother, and grew up apart from them. Uncle Joe Kirk, a Wakka Wakka Elder born and raised at Cherbourg, teaches First Nations history and bush medicine and writes children’s stories that keep culture alive.
Uncle Valentine Brown · Uncle Joe KirkTwo historians have brought Cherbourg’s records to Mitchelton as well: Lesley Synge on 3 August 2025, with Know Their Names, on the Barambah-Cherbourg stockmen at Rewan; and Dr Thom Blake on 5 July 2026, with A Dumping Ground: A History of the Cherbourg Settlement (UQP, 2001).
Each selection opens a different side of life under the Act: a childhood, a working life, a dormitory girl’s voice, and the law itself. Begin with whichever draws you in, and return to the others when a question sends you looking.
A Murri mother and her daughter tell the story of Aunty Lesley’s childhood at Cherbourg, her years of domestic work for wages the government held, and the long public campaign that won a reparations offer from Queensland in 2002.
The connection. The series has heard Aunty Lesley twice, online in 2021 and in the room in 2024. Read the book beside her Inquiry testimony and you meet one life told two ways: in a family’s memoir, and in evidence to the State.
What did the campaign for stolen wages ask of the people who led it?
Borrow or buy the book. Ruth Hegarty’s Is That You, Ruthie?, also on the reading list, tells the dormitory years from another Cherbourg childhood.
Five Aboriginal women, taken from their families as girls and put into unpaid domestic service, tell their own history in their own words.
The connection. Aunty Lesley trained in domestic science at Cherbourg so that officials could send her out to work as a domestic. The film shows the same system working across the country, and the cost to the women it used.
Who benefited from the women’s work, and who kept their pay?
Free with an SBS account in Australia. SBS rates it for mature themes.
Aunty Ruth Hegarty came to Barambah with her family in 1929. Officials separated her from her family at four, raised her in the girls’ dormitory, and sent her into domestic service at fourteen. She tells the whole life, through to the memoir that won the David Unaipon Award.
The connection. The Dormitory Boys told Mitchelton about the boys’ side of the fence. Aunty Ruth tells the girls’ side, in her own voice, unhurried.
What did the dormitory take from a child, and what did the children make for themselves?
The ABC advises that the conversation discusses abuse, family violence, and the Stolen Generations.
The Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897, scanned page by page. Read the preamble, which calls the law protection, then read the sections that let officials remove people to reserves and control where, and for whom, they worked.
The connection. Every permit Aunty Lesley describes traces back to these nine pages. Cherbourg, Palm Island, and Woorabinda all follow from them.
What does the word protection hide in this Act, and whom did the Act protect?
The scans reproduce the language of the officials who wrote the Act.
The government removed people to Barambah from Brisbane as well as from the rest of Queensland, and when Aunty Lesley’s birth mother travelled from Brisbane to visit her own children at Cherbourg, she needed permission from the Director of Native Affairs in Brisbane. Lesley Synge’s Know Their Names follows the paper trail to the officials in Brisbane’s Treasury Building who ran the system.
Brett Leavy showed Mitchelton the Country beneath the city. Cherbourg shows what the colony did to the people it moved off Country, and how much of that work happened in offices a short train ride from Mitchelton.
If you are Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander and your family lived under the Act, the Queensland Government’s Community and Personal Histories service helps you find their records at no cost, and Link-Up (Qld) helps families reconnect.
Aunty Lesley needed a Superintendent’s permit to go shopping in Murgon. Which of your own choices this week would have needed an official’s signature under the Act?
Keep a few notes, talk it through with a friend, or tell us what these voices opened up for you. The aim is to hear the people who lived under the Act as the authorities on their own lives.
Tell Us What You Took AwayEach learning companion asks the same question in a different place: who holds the authority to tell a First Nations story? Follow it from the Country beneath Brisbane, to the lives the State controlled, to the microphone, to the courts and prisons that decide First Nations women’s lives.
About this learning companion. Truth-Telling at Mitchelton prepared this learning companion in October 2026 to follow up the Cherbourg sessions held at Mitchelton since 2021. We chose the selections and wrote the questions. The quotations come from testimony given to Queensland’s Truth-telling and Healing Inquiry; the speaker summaries come from our speaker records.
Country and cultural knowledge. Cherbourg stands on Wakka Wakka Country. Meanings and authority belong to particular peoples and places. Public access to a recording, a record, or a website transfers no ownership of the knowledge within it.
Cultural advice. Linked works include the names, images, and voices of people who have died, and accounts of child removal, forced labour, and abuse. Follow the advice each publisher or platform provides. 13YARN, the national First Nations crisis support line, answers on 13 92 76, day and night.
Go further. Community history of Cherbourg · Inquiry document library · Recent Speakers
Prepared 9 October 2026. Every link was opened and checked on 9 October 2026; access to each player depends on its platform.