Ken Wyatt is not known for anger. But when he read his family’s government files ...

Ken Wyatt reaches across the sitting room table for a thick folder, clearing a space between coffee cups and the crumbling remains of a cake. It is one of a dozen hefty family files brought down from his ­upstairs study for me to peruse. The files form a paper trail that spans the century leading up to Wyatt’s history-making role as the first Aboriginal person appointed minister responsible for Indigenous Australians.

Wyatt pulls out a letter dated 1916, in the personal file of his paternal great-grandfather, Thomas Boota. He reads out loud the request penned in cursive script by Boota for an exemption permit to enter a hotel and be served a drink. “I am a half-caste, married to a white woman,” Boota wrote, as a shorthand way of explaining his desire for equal treatment.

Wyatt pulls another sheaf of paper out of the same folder, a letter from Western Australia’s notorious Chief Protector of Aborigines, A. O. Neville, who tersely rejected Boota’s appeal. “I think as a rule the police are averse to certificates of exemption being granted to half-castes and personally, I share the same view.”

Neville was also the legal guardian of every Aboriginal child in WA up to the age of 16, later 21; he could order them removed at will from their families and place them in “native” institutions. Neville’s steely, obsessive mission to remove children was featured in Phillip Noyce’s celebrated 2002 film Rabbit-Proof Fence, but for Wyatt’s great-grandparents, grandparents, mother and even a sibling, the stolen generations were not celluloid drama but lived reality.

“What about that letter from your mother?” prompts Wyatt’s wife, Anna, who is making chutney in the kitchen of their Perth home, while offering clues to the content and location of each catalogued item. Wyatt fishes out an extraordinary missive by his mother Mona that reveals her fury when, in 1964, “a police constable just walked into my home without knocking and ordered [two white visitors] out”.

Written to the minister of native welfare, Mona’s scathing complaint letter began: “I am just writing these few lines to see if we are living in ‘Lil’ Rock [Arkansas] or Australia. I am a coloured woman with citizen rights … surely we can have who we wish at our home, or is it just we are coloured [and so] to be ruled by the police?”

Wyatt sits back. “You can see from her file that Mum was feisty, never afraid to tackle issues she felt were wrong,” he says, before handing me the next piece of correspondence. It records the internal notes about Mona sent between native welfare ­officers, and their disgust that a few white townsfolk had taken Mona’s side.

“There are far too many do-gooders continually advising the Wyatts that they are just downtrodden coloured unfortunates,” one officer wrote, “and in some cases these people are writing letters to this Department and using the Wyatt family as a lever to further their own spiritual causes.”

Ken and Anna Wyatt have now read every last page of dozens of his relatives’ native welfare files. They’ve been able to draw genealogy maps that reconnect parts of his family. They admit to being shocked by what they’ve read, despite their respective careers working in Aboriginal affairs – he as a federal cabinet minister, she as a long-time WA bureaucrat. The ­language used throughout the documents is part of it – grotesque words such as “quadroon”, “octaroon” and “half-caste” are scattered liberally.

For decades, Ken Wyatt had no idea of the ­extent of his Aboriginal family’s native welfare files beyond his mother’s and his own. “I knew other files existed, but there are special criteria for being able to access them,” he says.

“You had to apply to the then Department of Aboriginal Affairs to gain permission.” Like insect specimens in a museum drawer, the entire lives of Wyatt’s relatives were pinned down on paper to scrutinise and control; the earliest files date back to the 1890s and the latest to the end of the 1970s. Four generations of his family are recorded in hundreds of letters, reports and even receipts meticulously kept by WA’s native welfare department.

Only after his mother Mona died in 1992 did Wyatt, as the oldest of 10 siblings, become eligible to access her files. Until then, only Mona’s siblings could see them. The rules have since changed, but previously no exceptions were made for ­anyone accessing the thousands of native welfare files stacked up in the state archive. Not even for a senior public servant, as Wyatt was back then, nor for his wife, who would find herself working in the very department charged with giving access.

Eventually, he applied for all of his family’s files. A 2016 letter accompanied one batch of folders, signed by “Anna Wyatt, Director, Family History Records”. “Dear Ken,” wrote his wife, “Please find ­attached material relating to your application for family history records … Please be aware that some of the information you ­receive may be distressing or offensive in the way it is written which reflects the ­language and customs of the time at which it was written.”

Kenneth George Wyatt has carved out his own place in the nation’s history books. In 2010, he was the first Aboriginal person elected to the House of Representatives. In 2017, he cut a striking figure wearing a ­kangaroo skin cloak, or booka, when he was sworn in as Australia’s first Indigenous federal minister. He wore the cloak again in 2019, when he became the first Indigenous man to take on Aboriginal affairs as the federal minister under then prime minister Scott Morrison.

When I wrote about his political ascent, Wyatt drove me out to his home town of Corrigin, in the West Australian wheatbelt. We sat in the classroom where the “native boy” was rewarded with a fountain pen by his native welfare officer for good attendance each year. We walked streets where a petition was once gathered to evict the Wyatts, the town’s only Aboriginal family.

He shared with me how his mother Mona had been removed as a child to Roelands Native Mission Farm, two hours’ drive south of Perth. She’d returned there – an unwed mother – to give birth to Ken, marrying his father Don two months later. “If I was a bastard, I’ve been a lucky bastard in life,” he quipped to me cheerfully at the time.

Wyatt still feels lucky. After teacher training and stints in schools, he took on senior state government roles as director of Aboriginal education and later, health. By 2000, he’d received an Order of Australia and Centenary Medal for his work in Aboriginal health and education around the nation.

The peak of fulfilment for a seasoned public servant arrived later in 2022 when Wyatt, as minister for Indigenous Australians, delivered his own version of the national agreement on Closing the Gap. It was the ultimate consensus – Commonwealth, states and territories, local government and Aboriginal peak bodies all signing up as joint partners to tackle poor results in Aboriginal health and education and worsening ­statistics for prison rates and suicides.

“Even local governments signed off on it – in a crude sense it was a treaty,” he says proudly. “We got nearly a billion dollars in new money, embedded through every agency, and every state and territory minister had to commit and come back with new initiatives. That was under Morrison – I would give him credit for that.”

At nearly 72, Ken Wyatt has had time to confront the demons of his family’s past – and that contemplation has changed him.

Morrison’s bloodbath defeat in the 2022 election saw Wyatt tipped out of his Perth hills’ seat of Hasluck after four terms as a popular local member. In April 2023, after 30 years’ loyalty, Wyatt resigned in disgust from the Liberal Party; a day earlier, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton had announced the Liberals would back the “no” side of the Voice referendum campaign. Wyatt threw his wholehearted support behind the “yes” vote, ending up “disappointed beyond words”.

These days, Wyatt has time to think about what went wrong. And Australia’s highest Indigenous ­political achiever has surprising ideas for a new frontier in Aboriginal representation, of which more later.

Meanwhile, the sideboard in the Wyatts’ large home hints at other distractions: photos of a first grandchild born to Aaron, one of two boys from Wyatt’s first ­marriage; and images of Aaron’s ­musical ascent as one of Australia’s first Indigenous orchestral conductors. Wyatt and Anna proudly attended the all-Indigenous opera Wundig Wer Wilura during this year’s Perth Festival, conducted by Aaron Wyatt.

But, at nearly 72, Ken Wyatt has also had time to confront the demons of his family’s past, reading the weighty files that occupy floor space in his upstairs study. That contemplation has changed him; where once there was no hint of rancour about his tough ­upbringing, there’s a flinty edge today to some of his utterances. For the first time, he’s keen to share the content of his own native welfare files, despite previously choosing not to make political capital out of them.

Only once have they been publicly raised, by Morrison himself in his 2020 parliamentary speech on Closing the Gap. “In days that some in this chamber will remember,” Morrison said, “the government had absolute control over Aboriginal people’s lives: where they could live, where they could travel, who they could marry. Government files held details – often brutal in their brevity – that the people themselves were not allowed to know. I have one such file here with me from the Department of Native Welfare. File 1690/68: a file of the native welfare department. The file is for a boy, a ­teenager. In this file there are notes about funding for school uniforms. There is a memo to the Commissioner of Native Welfare about whether the boy should be ­provided pocket money of 75 cents a week. It was ­bureaucrats making decisions for what they paternally called ‘a good type of lad’.”

Morrison went on to criticise an era of governments “thinking they know better”. “Fortunately, that boy was bigger than the times, and I’m honoured that he now sits behind me as the Minister for Indigenous Australians.”

Ken Wyatt is a Yamatji-Noongar man whose Aboriginal father Don – an RAAF truck driver turned railway ganger – was part-Irish. But another extraordinary lineage has come to light in his family archives. He is descended from an Indian boy who stowed away on a ship from Madras in 1894 and ­disembarked at Geraldton, on WA’s Mid West coast, with his two brothers.

The boy adopted the name Joe Abdullah and later married Mary Griffin, described in her files as “a half-caste”. The couple found themselves living some distance north of Perth at New Norcia, a rural Aboriginal mission run by Spanish monks; their children, including Wyatt’s maternal grandfather Ben, would be duly registered in the parlance of the day as “quadroon” or “quarter-caste”.

Chief Protector Neville clearly kept a close eye on the family, especially their ­children. “Do they attend school and is their condition such that it would be advisable to have them removed to our Moore River ­[native] settlement?” he queried.

‘The cruel twist is that by becoming an ­honorary white, you were denied access to your natural family, your siblings, and your culture.’

Ken Wyatt

In 1941, Ben – who was officially classed as white enough to be a “non-native” – had to seek permission from the commissioner of native affairs to marry his Aboriginal ­fiancée Maisie, Wyatt’s maternal grandmother. Among the documents is a stern directive to Maisie from Native Affairs: “If at any time your ­intended husband is found living and associating with other ­natives, action may be taken to have him classed as a native, to which he strongly objects. You share some responsibility, therefore, in seeing that you both live apart from other natives.”

Wyatt winces slightly as I read the words out loud. “The cruel twist is that by becoming an ­honorary white, you were denied access to your natural family, your siblings, and your culture,” he explains.

The files record that the wedded couple waited years to receive their certificate of citizenship to the country they were born in – Ben in 1946, Maisie in 1949. When they had children, including Wyatt’s mother Mona, the children were removed to a rural mission. “Mum was four when she went into Roelands Mission. When I was four, I’d overhear Mum and her siblings talking about the mission days but if we kids got too close, they’d go quiet. I think her time there was quite tough – they’d often go barefoot and Mum would talk about rounding up cows on frosty mornings and then standing in the fresh cowpats just to warm their feet.

“We would never get a hug from Mum because they were never hugged as children,” he adds. “You were just part of a community in which parenting wasn’t modelled to them. There are letters I’ve seen where Mum’s father wrote several times asking for his kids to be released. The history of her life is in those files.”

Mona was sent out to work as a domestic help on farms. Filed receipts show she was paid 30 shillings a week by her employer, but he was instructed to ­withhold most of her wage and send it to the state for “safekeeping”. “I believe that the money held in trust was used to fund the department – Mum never got it,” says Wyatt.

If so, Mona and hundreds of Aboriginal domestic workers like her were footing the bill for the bureaucracy that controlled their lives. “People can’t grasp the fact of having their money taken by a government agency,” says Wyatt, spreading out a sheaf of letters Mona wrote asking to be sent money to buy underwear or a pair of shoes.

Native welfare tracked Mona’s marriage to Wyatt’s father and the arrival of their 10 children. In 1959, Mona tried to gain citizenship rights; it took three years. “When Mum applied, she did it so she could access what was available to other people and to enable a ­better journey for her kids into education.”

Wyatt’s own native welfare file (1690/68) is slim; he discovered that other volumes had been destroyed in the late 1960s, when the pride of officialdom in controlling thousands of Aboriginal lives was crumbling into disrepute.

“Norm Harris, an Aboriginal man I knew in the welfare ­office, told me that he was instructed to burn them. As they burnt each page, they could see names and details, like who the father of a kid was. Norm said he found it very hard to destroy factual records that had been kept by the state – they are people’s birthright.

“Norm and the others tried to hide some of the files under the building but one of the non-Indigenous officers saw them. They were made to go back in, pull them out and continue burning them in a 44-gallon drum.”

A paper mountain of evidence remains lodged in Western Australia’s archives; half the state’s Indigenous adults are, like Wyatt, documented members of the stolen generations or their descendants. According to Yokai, the WA stolen generations body, 6400 survivors were still alive when figures were last collated in 2018-19. In the week before tomorrow’s National Sorry Day, Yokai members were set to gather in the forecourt of WA’s Parliament House, their ­banners declaring that, during the life of the policy, one in every three Aboriginal children – the nation’s highest rate – was removed from blood relatives and put into one of 80 institutions across the state.

It grieves Wyatt that WA was the first state to make a formal apology to the stolen generations, in 1997, yet is likely to be the last to compensate them. The WA Labor government says it has given first priority to ­settling a longstanding claim for stolen wages; last year, it offered $16,500 to each of the thousands of ­eligible Aboriginal workers – many in the Kimberley pastoral industry – who were paid minimal or no wages at all because the native welfare department withheld up to 75 per cent of earnings. Yet every other state except Queensland has established compensation schemes for the stolen generations, including Tasmania (2006), South Australia (2015), NSW (2017) and Victoria (2021).

‘I’ve never forgotten how one survivor told me, “They’re just waiting for us to die.” ’

Ken Wyatt

And it was Wyatt himself, as federal minister, who ensured that the stolen generations were compensated in commonwealth jurisdictions. A one-off payment of $75,000 has been offered to people who were removed as children in the Northern Territory, Australian Capital Territory and Jervis Bay Territory. He describes Western Australia as “a wayward child” ­because of its refusal to embark on a scheme to pay out victims. “It’s disappointing and needs to be addressed.”

The WA government is “monitoring the progress of other schemes” before it acts, the state’s minister for Aboriginal affairs Tony Buti said last year. Wyatt finds the minister’s statement deeply ironic – Dr Buti wrote his doctoral thesis on the stolen generations, and even described the policy as “genocide”, in a submission he wrote to the 1997 Bringing Them Home inquiry into child removal when he was a legal aid lawyer.

Compensation is owed for the severing of family ­connection, says Wyatt. “My mother had two families – she had the mission kids, but then her own siblings that she didn’t catch up with until later in life because they were all in separate missions.” Many survivors die young, before they are old enough to even access their superannuation. “I’ve never forgotten,” says Wyatt, in that flinty-edged voice, “how one survivor told me, ‘They’re just waiting for us to die.’ ”

Wyatt says Morrison was right that most Australians don’t know how controlled the lives of Aboriginal people were – wages taken, marriages banned, citizenship rights denied. The yawning gap in comprehension emerges in even well-meaning gestures. Wyatt remembers Liberal MP Michaelia Cash, also from WA, greeting a group of Aboriginal women in a tough Perth suburb. “She said to this woman, ‘I empathise with you.’ The woman turned on her and snarled, ‘What would you f---ing know about what I’ve been through?’ ”

Ken Wyatt has a reputation as a man slow to anger. He was variously nicknamed Zen, Yoda, even the Scented Candle – by Morrison – for his habit of calming disputes. But last year, in April, Wyatt angrily dispatched a one-line email to WA Liberal headquarters: “I hereby cancel my membership.” It ended three decades of party membership; Anna Wyatt’s resignation soon followed.

A few hours after he sent that email, I sat waiting for him in a cafe in Kalamunda, a Perth hills’ suburb, where the genial local member used to hold Coffee with Ken mornings. As Wyatt entered, several locals came up to greet him. He was unusually florid-faced, furious that Peter Dutton had declared the Liberals would ­actively campaign against the Indigenous Voice to parliament.

Wyatt had always been strongly in favour. In October 2019, he had put before his Liberal colleagues a proposal “to legislate the Voice and to have it focus on local and regional committees. And then after 18 months, having shown the effectiveness of a regional Voice, I’d have stood up a national body. It would have consisted of members elected by regional and local voices, not by governments or Canberra elites as Dutton claimed. There wasn’t a ripple of dissent.”

After Wyatt’s political career abruptly ended in 2022, he joined the new Albanese government’s referendum working group to advance the proposals that emerged from the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart. Wyatt accepted the view that enshrining a Voice in the constitution was important, given the litany of legislated ­bodies that had been discarded. “Governments have abolished every advisory body ever created, even though some were very effective,” he says. “I can’t think of one that has lasted 50 years.”

But Wyatt soon sensed trouble. The Coalition’s “if you don’t know, vote no” strategy was undermining the “yes” campaign. “Three years ago, I had people in my electorate saying the Voice was a great concept. Then people started saying, ‘I don’t like this, I don’t know how this is going to work.’ ”

He believes a turning point in public opinion came when Uluru Dialogue co-chair Megan Davis began talking about the broad scope of the Voice’s advisory powers in relation to Indigenous issues. “She effectively said that the Voice would be involved in everything from defence to the Reserve Bank,” he says. “Up until then, people had seen the Voice as focusing on issues to do with Indigenous people and communities. When we got into other areas, people started to shift and the ‘no’ fear campaign gained traction.”

The tactic found fertile ground in WA, where the Farmers’ Federation was running a parallel campaign against new and stronger state Aboriginal cultural heritage laws. “People used the Cultural Heritage Act as a weapon in talking about ‘special conditions for a ­special race’, how it divided people and impeded ­development,” he says. “It took me straight back to the Mabo native title decision and the fear that ‘there goes our backyard’. And yet there was not a single backyard lost under Mabo.”

Wyatt’s optimism about a “yes” result evaporated as he toured his own state. “The best meeting I went to was in Margaret River, where the people were totally engaged and passionately in favour. Everywhere else I went in Western Australia they said, ‘This is too hard.’ I was committed to trying to shift opinion to the end – I even drove around to four polling booths. But I could tell we were pushing logs up a hill.”

On October 14, the “no” case resoundingly won. The “no” rate in WA was 63.5 per cent, higher than the ­national average of 60 per cent and the third highest after Queensland and South Australia. “I felt pissed off … You can’t describe degrees of disappointment,” he says. “When the Aboriginal leadership ­decided on a week of silence afterwards, that was to prevent those who felt pure anger from ­saying stuff we didn’t need to say.

The failure of the Voice referendum has seen Wyatt embrace a surprising new idea: to stand up an Aboriginal party for the Senate.

“But feeling bitter is wasted ­energy. You have to accept a setback and think, ‘How do we recover lost ground?’ It’s now becoming ­evident that governments have been spooked by the 60 per cent of people who voted no. They see it as a reason to not be too ambitious. A state minister told me the no vote ‘does impact on our thinking’. A public servant told me, ‘It’s hard to get stuff up because it could cost votes.’ Captains of industry told me they were worried about the impact of their stance on the Voice and shareholder backlash. We’ve even seen local governments saying, ‘Get rid of welcome to country ceremonies because there’ll be no blowback [to not having one] now.’ ”

Wyatt thinks the nation needs to “put a foot on the pedal” on Closing the Gap. He points to only four of 15 targets being on track, according to the 2023 Closing the Gap Annual Data Compilation Report. Others have deteriorated, resulting in more adults in prison, more children in out-of-home care and a rising rate of Indigenous suicide.

“Every word in the Closing the Gap agreement was signed off by national cabinet and by 51 Aboriginal peak bodies. Premiers took it to their own cabinets to sign off. So now every government has a responsibility to start acting on the targets.”

‘If you had an Indigenous-led party in the Senate, you could then set your own agenda. It would become an Indigenous voice, only it’s constitutional.’

Ken Wyatt

The failure of the referendum has seen Wyatt embrace a surprising new idea: to stand up an Aboriginal party for the Senate.

“It’s always been in the back of my mind,” he says,“because the Senate is where you can hold the ­balance of power and directly influence potential ­benefits. I observed the election of people like Brian Harradine, Pauline Hanson, Derryn Hinch, and saw the influence of Harradine in a hung Senate negotiating tremendous returns for Tasmania. I then formed the view that we should do the same in order to effect the change we need. Because history shows that both major parties have not done it.

“If you had an Indigenous-led party in the Senate, you could then set your own agenda. It would become an Indigenous voice, only it’s constitutional because it’s part of the parliamentary structure.”

A footnote in the family records has played a part in his thinking. Wyatt’s great-uncle George Abdullah –son of Ben and grandson of Indian-born Joe Abdullah – stood for the Senate in 1975. “He came within a ­handful of votes of winning a Senate seat and was the first West Australian Aboriginal to do so,” says Wyatt proudly. “Just imagine if we got a candidate up in every state. You could then be in the same position [of power] as the crossbench, and when government came for ­support, then we’d say, ‘We’re interested in supporting you provided you’re prepared to work with us on Closing the Gap, or reducing high incarceration rates with diversionary programs.’ It would develop a future that’s very different from what’s in my mother’s files.”

He rejects the argument that having a number of ­individual Indigenous politicians in federal parliament is enough. “When ­people say, ‘There are 11 Aboriginal voices in parliament, that’s enough’, let me tell you, that doesn’t work. Aboriginal politicians like me, a cabinet minister who ­aspired to achieving things, can’t do them because you are beholden to the party room or cabinet. If you don’t get their endorsement, your proposition doesn’t get up.” He mentions prominent Aboriginal names that he would love to have as candidates, but declines to publicly name them. Whether any are interested is not clear even to Wyatt. He wouldn’t personally stand: “I’m too old, and I have a wife who would kill me if I did,” he says, looking across at Anna, who nods vigorously.

So as he sorts through ministerial archive boxes that outnumber the family files, what does Ken Wyatt think he achieved in his parliamentary career?

“First, that I influenced a lot of federal members to work closely with their own [indigenous] communities in their ­electorates. There were substantially more references in speeches about Aboriginal people as a result.

“Second, the fact that I got everybody to sign off on the Closing the Gap strategy. And third, being elected into the House of Representatives opened the door for other people to put their hand up.” He was followed in 2016 by Linda Burney, the first Aboriginal woman to be elected to the House of Representatives, and, after his seat loss, by Dr Gordon Reid and Marion Scrymgour in 2022. They are the current House members; in the Senate, there are six Indigenous members.

As we clear tea cups and cake crumbs away and stack the files for their return to his study, Wyatt offers a final observation, flecked with ­indignation. “When I read through the files, I come away thinking we’ve been resilient against enormous pressure. But we’re still fighting for the right to determine our own futures. The Closing the Gap ­report shows few targets are on track, and our young people are still 24 times more likely to be in prison than non Indigenous kids.“

He wonders whether future compensation claims will emerge from Indigenous policies that are as ­futile today as those that were clamped around every facet of his mother’s life.

“I would be concerned that in 50 years’ time, we might have a legal firm that goes through every layer of the national Closing the Gap agreement and says, ‘You all agreed to this in a formal document signed off by Commonwealth and all state and territory cabinets. Yet 50 years later, there’s no improvement.’

“Then governments might face the very legal challenges they face now with profound compensation for the removal of children and stolen wages that we’ve seen already. It’s quite possible.”

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