Foster Father & Son
or
Slave Master & Slave

A Researched Account of Australia’s Shared History

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Acknowledgement of Country

The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples of Australia are recognised as Australia’s First Peoples. The First Peoples language groups are known as the First Nations of Australia. The First Nations People are accepted as the Traditional Custodians and Owners of the lands, waterways, and skies of their country.

Davina acknowledges Turrubal, Jager, Kabi Kabi (Gubbi Gubbi) and Waka (Wakka Wakka) the countries on which she lived until leaving Brisbane and the Pine Rivers District. While living in Gladstone she lived on the country of the Bailai, Gurang, Gooreng Gooreng and Taribelang Bunda. Living in Melbourne Davina is on Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung and Bunurong Boon Wurrung country.

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The beauty of the Great Barrier Reef and the mystery of Uluru captivates the world, making Australia a must visit tourist destination. It’s history, however, particularly the time of first contact between Aboriginal people and the British is not well known. Either by Australian’s or those interested from similar societies, such as Canada, the United States and Aotearoa/New Zealand.

The period of first contact was named ‘shared history’ by the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation (the Council). Shared History became the fourth of eight key issues to be addressed by the Council’s work in the 1990s. Our author Davina supported the work of the Council. However, Davina has also found that the shared history of Australia often divides opinion. Especially when little facts are known and understood. Each event needs to be put into context, from both sides. With the Aboriginal side often not being heard, let alone known or understood.

Always knowing and claiming her Aboriginality, Davina is the granddaughter of one of the two men whose lives are highlighted in this must-read book. Her research which she initially thought of as ‘family research’ began in the 1970s. When as a teenager studying Australian History at the North Brisbane College of Advanced Education, she asked herself; ‘Where is my Ancestral Country?’

Decades later as the research became a PhD thesis, she soon found herself exploring the answers to questions such as: ‘How did some Aboriginal people at the end of the 19th century come to be living with the colonisers?’ ‘Why were Aboriginal children, moved from one coloniser household to another?’

Davina in conducting her research was not simply undertaking family research, but she has researched and written about Australia’s shared history. It is research that has highlighted some of the secrets of Australia’s shared history. In its own way the book is truth-telling which has started many conversations that would otherwise never have taken place. It is relevant to answering today’s questions about recognition, and treaty. It must be read by all interested in Australia’s future.

Author Biography

Davina B Woods PhD was born in Brisbane and raised at Deep Water Bend. She attended Bald Hills State Primary School, followed by Pine Rivers District State High. She enrolled at Kedron Park Teachers College which while she was there transformed into the North Brisbane College of Advanced Education.

While on maternity leave in 1984 Davina received a letter from the Queensland Education Department (QED). It resulted in her becoming one of the five teachers, who were also Aboriginal, being employed as the inaugural Aboriginal and Torre Strait Islander Education Unit of the QED. Undertaking external studies Davina completed a Bachelor of Education, a Graduation Certificate in Aboriginal Studies, and a Master of Arts.

Leaving QED in 1990 Davina became the Federal Aboriginal Education Officer of the Australian Education Union. Later employed at a Melbourne University, she completed a Graduate Diploma in Tertiary Education and her PhD for which she received the Most Outstanding Research Student award, 2018.

As a writer Davina had her first article Why Aboriginal Studies published in the QED professional journal QUEST in 1986. In 2000 she had her first chapter published in the Professor Mary Ann Bin-Sallik edited book Aboriginal women by degrees: their stories of the journey towards academic achievement. It was the first of several book chapters Davina was requested to write and has had published.

In 2006 her poem Urban Songlines won her the Victorian Indigenous Art Cultural Heritage Award. The fact that the judging was performed by members of the First Nations community of Victoria, made the award extra special. Davina has also had her essay Being Educated published in the prestigious literary journal Meanjin Spring 2023.

Davina has two children who proudly acknowledge their Kuku-Djungan/Kuku-Yalanji heritage. Currently she has five grandchildren and is hoping for more.

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What Readers Think

Research into one family’s story specifically reveals so much more about complexity in Australia’s history generally.
Maureen RyanEmeritus Professor, Victoria University, Australia
Davina Woods is one of our community’s leading voices in pioneering our understanding that true social progress isn’t possible without a full understanding and acknowledgment of our shared history. Her new book, Foster Father and Son, or Slave Master and Slave, is a great example of how the best explorations of the broad sweep of history often start at a personal level, with a search for understanding and meaning. Anyone interested in today’s questions about recognition, reconciliation and truth-telling needs to start learning about the shared history of Australia that has, for many people, remained untold. Davina’s book is a great step towards getting that to change.
Andrew DowlingAuthor of Godless Pilgrim and Poleh, Poleh and founder of Wipeoutloneliness.org
In 1984, I was appointed coordinator of the Queensland Education Department's inaugural Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education Unit. The role allowed me to work with a small group of Aboriginal educators, rare in those days. Davina did not fit the visual, aural or oral stereotype the education system and broader society could have expected. Her passion and determination for the educator role meant she did not pull any punches. Davina and I have stayed in contact through the 40 years since. Her passion and determination continue to be front and centre. Over the years, I have realised that for Davina, her Aboriginality is the core of her life purpose, along with her children and extended family. For this research work, accompanying her on visits to Aboriginal community networks in Far North Queensland’s Mareeba and Mossman Gorge settings, I saw how important it was for her to be situated in her family’s Country. Country and the stories of Country and its people are such a rich resource. The truth-telling work in unpacking her family’s history involved heart and spirit. We stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before and look to better futures for those who come. I congratulate her on her tenacity, which has seen her present her findings in this debut book, Foster Father and Son OR Slave Master and Slave. Davina’s family’s story exposes little-known aspects of our shared history across Queensland and Australia.
Joann SchmiderMamu traditional custodian, Dyirbal language nation, Wet Tropics Rainforest Country GAICD; Grad Cert. Soc Admin, Indigenous Research, Research Methods; Bed. Dip T (Prim); Cert IV TAE, Indigenous Leadership, Community Culture, Local Government; PhD candidate
I am extremely pleased to see and read this fantastic story. Davina’s skill in describing people and places and events is wonderful. She takes you on this journey with her family and intertwines the landscape of what Australia was like and the treatment of the First Peoples, including the courageous members of her direct family. Though at times the words and actions described are hard to read and bear, it is extremely important that our true history is recorded. More families should be encouraged to write their family’s true history so that collectively our songlines are recorded until the end of time. A great read Davina and congratulations to you and your family and ancestors who I know would be extremely proud of your literary achievement.
Deborah EvansProud Gunditjmara & Bunjalung woman
Truth-telling is intricate, arduous and deeply personal. With generosity and great clarity, Davina B Woods offers us a family history spanning time immemorial. This book offers oral histories of Creation, culture and place, drawing on colonial records and contemporary reflections, to bring us closer to Grandfather Gus. The more we start to see through his eyes, the closer we come to the Australian reckoning whose work we must all engage. Grandfather’s legacy of great pride in culture and identity is a gift that Davina carries with care, and I thank her wholeheartedly for the meticulous and sensitive work of this book.
Esther AnatolitisEditor, Meanjin
I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners, the Gubbi Gubbi people whose land I live and work.
It is a strong individual that determines what histories get told, and often, only the victors. Having known Davina since high school, her First Nations status was always an inherit part of her person, and it is an individual acknowledgement that she be congratulated on her documentation of her family histories. Through her family lens, she reflects both personal and broader atrocities and events that were perpetrated against all First Nations peoples in the wake of European invasion and colonisation.
I was born of a pioneer family whose Australian story began with a dairy farm in Lawton not far from the reaches of Deep-Water Bend on the Pine River. Davina’s writings create a document of systemic bias and racism on all aspects of colonisation and First Nations contact. When we first met in high school my knowledge of First Nations culture was gained through two Aunts – one who worked for the Aboriginal Inland Mission (AIM, 1974) and the other for Jacaranda Press (1975), both of whom advocated for acknowledgement of First Nations’ proper recognition in the political landscape.
In high school and after, Davina’s perspective echoed the continuance of a lived history while publicly ‘WE’ ignored the truth-telling, and it is now after a lifetime, that she is uncovering and revealing her family’s histories and legacies. In these writings are the stories of strength, survival and wisdom against the odds of massacre, war and hardship.
R Peter BrayKallangur, QLD, personal testimonial (Deceased 14 November 2023)
I have known Davina since going to the Bald Hills Primary School in the 1960s. We were childhood friends, and our mums were tennis ladies playing together every Thursday at the local tennis court. We both joined in various local youth groups and played at each other’s house. I loved going to Davina’s place at Deep Water Bend with its marvellous lush garden; we always knew that her grandfather was Gus Davies. We lost touch in our teenage years, but we rekindled our friendship again as adults years later in the 1990s and have stayed friends since. There is something extra special about childhood friendships. I still live not far from Deep Water Bend and I’m very much looking forward to reading Davina’s account of her grandfather’s story.
Elizabeth YarhamFGIA FCIS
With gratitude and humility, I read the stories Dr Davina B. Woods has shared of compounding historical and ongoing injustices. Dr Woods writes evocatively, offering vivid images that compel and unsettle readers like myself, a six-generation daughter of faces of clay. Dr Woods writing unfolds personal and shared histories, garnished with contemporary commentary, to offer new first-person accounts of outrage and abuse. Language can be used as a weapon and a cloak – pacification means extermination, protection means the loss of country and self – both in the past and in the present. This timely and significant book offers readers a way of seeing and understanding that is rarely afforded. Dr Woods is to be congratulated for every aspect of this endeavour from conceptualisation to completion. Even if I do not own these histories, I can understand more and behave better because of them. I cannot recommend this work highly enough.
Professor Jane SouthcottSchool of Education, Culture and Society, Faculty of Education, Associate Chair, Monash University Human Research Ethics Committee (MUHREC)
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