& so we are ‘slave-owners’

Abstract

In May 1934, Ming was thrilled to be introduced to a real flesh-and-blood ‘little Missus’. She was at a fund-raising bridge party for the Sane Democracy Association, a right-wing, anti-Communist group. An elderly woman, Mrs Tenny, had previously lived in the Northern Territory — ‘the only white woman for hundreds of miles’. Having ‘at once asked [her] about my beloved Aborigines’ and expecting an equally fond rejoinder, Ming was shocked by Mrs Tenny’s response. Mrs Tenny’s husband had been the manager of a Bovril meat works, and she told Ming that ‘we always had them working on our Stations …. We had a string of Stations from the Territory to Adelaide & they worked for us in hundreds’.