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NEEDILUP
    The first children taken to the Carrolup Native Settlement from around Ongerup were Clem and Anna Miller, Lily and Fred Wynne, Fred Roberts. Would’ve been about 1914. They took ’em from Toompup; got Bonnie Jean Woods too. Their great-aunt was looking after them. Most of their mothers had died.
    Fred Roberts and Fred Wynne ran away from the settlement in 1916. People there got terrible treatment, and the black trackers who did all the bossing of the inmates were really brutal. They used and abused most of the young girls, and the real fair girls nearly all took husbands just to get away. Sometimes the girls ran away, but they tracked ’em down and brought ’em back.
    The old people lived in camps on the other side of the river, and the young boys and girls were locked up indormitories every night. People weren’t fed properly, and the young people had to work, but pay or money was never heard of. They buried people wrapped up in chaff bags, and a lot of them died when they shouldn’t have, because they didn’t get medical treatment. Nearly all the babies were born in the camps.
    The dead bodies were kept in the jail, a big mud and stone building with only one window with a thick wooden door and a big bolt and padlock. If you didn’t do what they ordered, they locked you up in there, with the bodies.
    My mother Nellie came with Maggie Williams, Daisy and May Dean. They were all taken from their mothers up in the Murchison area. My mother often told me how the girls were treated in Carrolup. She was unhappy and always afraid. They didn’t always understand the ways and laws of Aboriginal people down here. Another five cousins joined them a few weeks later, and that was better. Better for her, anyway.
    My mother was brought down from Carnarvon on a cattle boat. They kept them down in the bottom of the vessel and didn’t let ’em come up top. It was a rough trip and they all got sick. From Fremantle they took ’em to Balladonia Mission, and then a few weeks later took ’em all the way to Carrolup. The white people musta thought they were gunna try to run away back to where they come from.
    My mother did run away, but they caught her and made her marry my father, Fred Yiller Roberts. He had quite fair skin, they reckon. She was fifteen years old.
    She died in 1975. She never ever saw her mother again. Most of the children sent down from the north married, and not many of them ever went back to their own people.
    Different times now, they say.
    When they were little, my kiddies were asked if they wanted to go there for the holidays. You know, Community Welfare ran a holiday place down there for children. But even though they’ve changed the name to Marribank …
    Well, for the years they ran the Carrolup Settlement … well, just the name, it sickens you. They’ve changed the name, but none of us ever forgot that it was Carrolup. To us that was a concentration camp. And that was somewhere we had a fear of, and didn’t ever want to be sent.
    I remember Lionel Howard, who had been taken away from his own relations and didn’t know why as he hadn’t done anything bad. He came back to Borden, only to be caught again by the police and taken back to Carrolup.
    He used to tell us many years later of the treatment he received there, and of the food they were given to eat, and how they were locked up in the night and flogged by the black police whenever they spoke up for their rights. He had a special hatred for these black police, and I remember one time telling us he was glad they were all dead.
    Lionel was able to run away from Carrolup again and never ever let the police catch him after that. He was always very timid and frightened of the police and Native Affairs people.
    Well, there was a lot of people like that … There was a lotta reasons to be frightened, for us to be careful, you know, back when I was young.
    We moved around the Borden,