This was published 7 years ago
Meet Aboriginal activist Millie Ingram: the "little black girl" who stood up for herself
Refusing to accept being sacked as a teenager led to a lifetime of Aboriginal activism. Amanda Hooton meets a quiet achiever.
By Amanda Hooton
Millie Ingram is making instant coffee at the Wyanga Aboriginal aged care centre in Sydney. She's 76, so theoretically she should fit right in here, but she doesn't – despite the fact her sister co-founded the centre and she was its CEO for nine years – because she looks about 45. She has wonderful skin and great hair and long-fingered, graceful hands.
When I first saw her, she was doing a Welcome to Country address at an event starring feminist icon Gloria Steinem, still legendarily beautiful at 82, and various other serious, and seriously glamorous, women. But for my money, standing on stage in her modest black pant suit, Aunty Millie (as she likes to be known) eclipsed them all.
"We're all custodians now"Credit: Nic Walker
I wanted to meet her because, as well as possessing the secret of eternal youth, her Welcome to Country was completely out of the ordinary. I wasn't the only one to think so: Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore thanked her directly.
"We do welcomes, as you know, Millie, at every single event we do," she said to her.
"And that has to be the most powerful we've ever had. So thank you."
Sitting down at a white plastic table, I tell Aunty Millie her speech made me, as a white Australian, feel welcome and included, rather than (as I usually do) guilty and excluded. She looks modestly pleased. (She really is modest. She gave the Welcome to Country address at Gough Whitlam's memorial service – Australia's most significant state occasion in recent years – but she never mentions it in our discussion.)
"That's what I was hoping for," she says. "The idea is to help people understand a small, really good part of Aboriginal culture – that we want you to be safe here. I certainly don't want to put the guilt complex on anyone."
But she does, she admits, try to send a political message. She does at least one speech a week, and writes each one individually.
At the Steinem event, she highlighted the 1990-91 murders of three Aboriginal children in northern NSW's Bowraville, and the 2011 murder of Indigenous woman Lynette Daley at a NSW beach, both horrific crimes in which no convictions have been made. "I'm not going to try and get into your world and tell you how to live it," she said. "But this is my world, and the atrocities are mind-blowing."
Her own childhood (she is from Wiradjuri country, and grew up on the Erambie Mission near Cowra, NSW) was full of familial love and systemic injustice – her father denied work as a shearer; her "dear old grandfather" told "not to do those dances, not to talk that language"; food being withheld from her family by the mission manager; her beloved mother losing a baby girl, Millie's sister, as part of the stolen generations.
"My mum was my inspiration," she says. "She was a real lady. So dignified. She always talked to people, not at them. But she was a fighter."
Mrs Ingram got food to the mission and the manager sacked – "Yes Mum, yes!" Aunty Millie says, clenching one elegant hand into a fist – and she got her daughter back after 13 years of struggle. "But she never really came back to us: she never called Mum 'Mum' in all her life."
We're all custodians now. We all contributed to making Australia what it is, including us Aboriginals, despite what anybody says. Now we've all got to make things better.
Aunty Millie herself came to Sydney in 1958 as a teenager to work in a chocolate factory. "It was a good job: seven pounds a week. I spent a pound on secretarial school at night. Then I took two sick days and got the sack. And I said, 'Well, I'm not accepting that.' I couldn't believe I was fronting up to the floor manager. I don't think she could, either: this little black girl from the mission. But Dad had told me to join a union, and they supported me, and I got my job back." Even now, she looks surprised. "So that was my first push."
In the almost 60 years since, she's become a quiet but significant advocate for Aboriginal rights. She was assistant secretary in the Department of Aboriginal Affairs for 13 years, and was on the NSW Aboriginal Land Council for four, where she was the only woman. Most recently, in the wake of the abuses at the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre in the NT, she has been invited to sit on the Corrective Services NSW Aboriginal Advisory Council.
As we finish our coffees, she shows me a photo on her phone of a tiny girl with pale skin and blonde hair: her great-granddaughter. "How white is she?" She laughs. "She had to take a flag to preschool the other day. The little blondie with the Aboriginal flag."
"We're all custodians now," she concludes. "We all contributed to making Australia what it is, including us Aboriginals, despite what anybody says. Now we've all got to make things better." She smiles suddenly – the shy smile of a teenager, not a great-grandmother – and stands, collecting my cup as well as her own. "And if anyone has a problem with that from my mob, they can talk to me."