Edie Yiramba had been born shortly after the turn of the century – she was not sure which year exactly – in the Kuranda area of far North Queensland. At the age of fourteen she’d given birth to her first child, and her second had been born two years later. Edie had loved her children, a son and a daughter, but the white administration considering her little more than a child herself, in her mid-teens and with no husband, deemed her immoral and incompetent as a mother. Her children were taken from her, she was separated from her adult family, and in 1920 she was sent to Palm Island.

An idyllic setting forty-five miles north of Townsville on the Great Barrier Reef, Palm Island had been the choice of Queensland’s Chief Protector of Aborigines in 1916. He had considered the remoteness of the place highly suitable as a reformatory for individuals who needed to be punished. Here, those Aborigines who threatened to cause trouble could be successfully isolated.

By the time Edie arrived in 1920, Palm Island was rapidly on the way to becoming the largest Aboriginal settlement in Queensland. Throughout the state, people were being removed from their tribal groups and sent to Palm Island, and often for the most innocuous and incomprehensible of reasons. Included in the infringements that led to this penalty was: being ‘disruptive’, falling pregnant to a white man, and being of ‘mixed blood’.

Despite the administration’s insistent use of the term ‘Palm Island Mission’, Aboriginal people used another term. They referred to the place as a ‘penal settlement’, and they were right.

Over time the population on Palm Island grew, but only because of the large numbers sent there. In actual fact, the death rate on the island was higher than the birth rate, due to the squalor and deprivation that prevailed. People were constantly hungry. Rations were never generous, and for those who didn’t line up for parade or work allocation, the punishment meted out was always the denial of food.

Segregation in all forms was strictly observed. On arrival, children were separated from their parents and then segregated by gender. There were men’s and women’s dormitories, and boys’ and girls’ dormitories, and all Aborigines were forbidden entry to those zones deemed ‘white’. All Palm Island Aborigines were furthermore forbidden to speak their own languages.

It was no doubt the mutual hardship they suffered that bonded the people of Palm Island, but the denial of their various tribal languages without doubt sealed that bond. Palm Islanders invariably referred to themselves as Bwgcolman people. And they said it with pride.

‘I’m Bwgcolman,’ they’d declare – many tribes – one people – a true statement of solidarity.