Rhonda Collard-Spratt is a voice for the mission children of Australia’s Stolen Generations. Rhonda is an engaging performer, an Aboriginal dancer, singer-songwriter, poet, artist, and storyteller. She has worked in women’s prisons around suicide prevention, helping them reconnect with their Aboriginality. During her childhood at Carnarvon Native Mission in remote Western Australia (run by Churches of Christ), Rhonda experienced neglect and physical abuse. She met her mother for five minutes there when she was 12 years old. They never regained that close mother-daughter bond.
Jacki Ferro is a community development worker, writer and editor based in Brisbane. Since the 1990s, Jacki has run cross-cultural, unifying projects that promote self-determination, community education and social justice. As Community Relations Officer at Ipswich in 2000, Jacki instigated the Link Up! Multicultural Festival and the first Sorry Day March. Qualified in public relations, social planning, and writing, editing and publishing, in 2013 Jacki began co-writing and editing memoirs of inspirational, brave people.
Alice’s Daughter: Lost Mission Child: (Available on Amazon: $34.99, and Kindle: $22.27): Rhonda’s story describes shocking events in her life, while coating them with hope for a brighter future. In 1954, aged three, Rhonda Spratt was taken from her Aboriginal family and placed on Carnarvon Native Mission, Western Australia. At sixteen, Rhonda was sent to Fremantle, where she lived with three white foster families and encountered severe racial violence and sexual assault on the streets. Rhonda’s ex-husband, Senior Sargent Jerry Collard, was one of the first two Aboriginal policemen in Western Australia. Rhonda’s father died in custody in Broome prison in 1983. His case was part of the “National Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody” in 1990. Rhonda met her father in his coffin. Rhonda was terrorized by the Perth police Tactical Response Group in 1991; she was then acting in a play based on police-Aboriginal relations, Munjong, written by Aboriginal playwright, Dr. Richard Walley. The incident drew much media attention and led to a police inquiry. Rhonda suffered post-traumatic stress from this incident and others from her childhood. In 1994, Rhonda’s marriage failed due in large part to her inability to show emotion from a lack of care in childhood. That year, she moved to Queensland, where she still lives in Ipswich. Here she has done much healing: healing camps through Linkup Aboriginal Corporation (an organization for Stolen Generation survivors); and government-funded arts courses led her to do an arts degree at Griffith University, which reconnected her with her Aboriginal spirituality. In February 2008, Rhonda attended the national Apology to Australia’s Indigenous peoples by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in Canberra. In 2015, Rhonda’s sister Debbie’s remote Aboriginal community, Djarindjin, was threatened with closure by the WA government.
From Texas
Interview with Rhonda Collard-Spratt and Jacki Ferro, Aboriginal Memoirists
With: Anna Faktorovich, Ph.D
Rhonda Collard-Spratt
Jacki Ferro
Anna Faktorovich, Ph.D