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Marjorie awaits her back pay, 62 years late

By Debra Jopson

5 February 2004 - All Marjorie Woodrow ever got back from the NSW Government trust fund holding four years' worth of her wages was £5.

"It was for the material for my wedding dress," said Mrs Woodrow, one of more than 11,000 former state wards who could be owed a total of up to $69 million by the Government.

Now 80, Mrs Woodrow says the Premier, Bob Carr, knows about her quest to regain the "stolen wages" never paid to her when she worked as a domestic servant from the age of 14 to 18.

Mr Carr wrote a foreword to her book Long Time Coming Home, about her life as a member of the stolen generations, which he launched at Parliament House 2 years ago.

"Stories like Marjorie's are finally being told; Australians are finally listening. With goodwill and commitment, we may be on the verge of a new beginning," he wrote in the foreword.

Mrs Woodrow was under the impression that he had read her book thoroughly. However, perhaps he missed an old newspaper cutting in it headed: "Aboriginal state wards 'used as slave labour"' in which Mrs Woodrow said: "I think the Government should be made to give the money back to us."

Mrs Woodrow only learnt this week through a story which first appeared in the National Indigenous Times newspaper that, in the same year Mr Carr launched her book, his cabinet was set to consider a minute from the then minister for community services, Faye Lo Po, proposing the unpaid wages be paid, with interest, to up to 11,500 NSW Aborigines.

But that secret proposal was dropped, meaning further delays in any payout to Mrs Woodrow.

Struggling to live on an age pension in her Central Coast flat which she rents for $130 a week, Mrs Woodrow said all she ever wanted was to have her own house, and the £80 in her account when she stopped being a state ward could have helped her buy one.

Documents she obtained from state archives reveal the Office of the Protector of Aborigines specified that her wages for keeping house on a series of properties were to be paid to her with interest. If they had, she said, it might have saved the first of her eight children from being raised in the tent she and her husband lived in for seven years.

The NSW Government needed to pay far more than the initial $4000 per person which the Queensland Government offered Aborigines whose trust funds had similarly disappeared.

"I want them to be honest and sit down and talk to all the people they think they owe. If it's too much money, why not give us a house or a car?" she said.

She and others are prepared to take legal action through the Public Interest Advocacy Centre, which is preparing a case.

"We are determined to show the Government we have had enough as Aboriginal people and we want to explain to ordinary people we did not live on welfare all our lives," she said.

Source: Sydney Morning Herald

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