Alice Nannup was taken from her Aboriginal family and set to work for little to no money. But she reckons she has had the last laugh.

In 1905 Western Australia legislated the Aborigines Act, which controlled the lives of Aboriginal people. The Act created an Aborigines Department headed by a Chief Protector of Aborigines. The Chief Protector was the ‘legal guardian of every’ Aboriginal person under 16 (Section 6) and had ‘general supervision … over all matters affecting the interests of’ Aborigines’ (Section 6.6). The Chief Protector could determine where Aboriginal people could live, their housing, freedom of movement, work, wages, and education, and controlled access to any income they earned.

Auber Octavius Neville was appointed Chief Protector in 1915, a position he held until 1940. He initiated the practice of taking Aboriginal children, especially those of mixed race, from their families in a policy now known as the Stolen Generations. This was part of a broader genocidal approach ‘to breed out the colour’, of merging Aboriginal people into the white community in order to ‘forget’ that there had ever been any Aboriginal people in Australia. His policies were also associated with a sharp uplift in poverty and a general decline in the health of Western Australia’s Indigenous people.

In the latter part of the 1980s, Stephen Kinnane and Lauren Marsh were meeting with elderly Aboriginal women and researching their experiences of living under the Aborigines Act. They were directed to talk to Alice Nannup, who was a friend of Kinnane’s grandmother, Jessie Argyle. They found her stories and recollections fascinating and spent the next three years interviewing, recording and transcribing, and then, under Alice’s editorial direction, producing this book. Alice’s totem is the pelican, hence the book’s title. But why do we need to know when the pelican laughed?

When the Pelican Laughed was first published in 1992. It was reprinted later the same year, and again in 1993, 1996 and 2000. This 2026 edition is the sixth printing, and it is my belief that it will be reprinted again and again. The book provides a clear account of the life of an Aboriginal woman in twentieth-century Australia, and is especially illuminating with respect to the first half of the century. It is also a testament to Alice Nannup’s strength of character and resilience.

Alice’s Aboriginal name was Wari, and she was born to Ngulyi on Pilbara Station in north-west Western Australia in 1911. Her father was an Englishman, Tom Bassett. Bassett was 47 and Ngulyi 15 when Wari was born. Alice, as Wari was called among whites, spent her childhood living near Bassett, but didn’t find out that he was her father until she was a teenager. As was the custom under Aboriginal law, Ngulyi was required to have an Aboriginal husband after Alice’s birth, and Alice lived with her mother and her husband.

Alice had a happy childhood. When she was about 12, a white couple applied to the Aborigines Department to take Alice south, ostensibly to provide her with an education. Her mother reluctantly agreed to this, believing it would be for Alice’s long-term benefit. Her father was distressed and followed her down south in order to maintain contact. Bassett’s attempts to meet her were refused on the orders of Protector Neville, who wanted to sever Alice’s contacts with her past.

They wanted me to have white people’s ways, but they denied me my father. How does that make any sense?

Alice spent the next eight to ten years working at the direction of the Aborigines Department in different locations for white families on farms and stations, in cities performing a variety of domestic duties, as well as helping with agricultural work. Working long hours with no days off, she was provided with poor food and living conditions and received low rates of pay, when she received any at all.

This was a period when the male basic wage hovered around 4 pounds 10 shillings a week (the rate for women was roughly half this). Alice had one job where she earned two shillings a week, but if she committed any misdemeanours, her pay would be donated to a charity. More generally, her pay was five shillings a week, with half paid as ‘pocket money’ and the other half put into an account held by the Aborigines Department. She also worked on two brief occasions as a domestic in Neville’s home, where she received 12 shillings and sixpence a week, five shillings in the hand and seven shillings and sixpence into her account with the department.

If Alice wanted to access the money in her account, she had to make an application to the department and explain what she wanted the money for, which had to be signed off by Neville. If the application was granted, a voucher would be issued to be used at approved establishments to ensure income wasn’t spent on frivolous items. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that in these years Alice Nannup was little more than a slave.

Alice married to escape the department. But this did not give her the ability to live independently. Neville directed Alice and her family to live on a reserve, though they did move away looking for work. The department did not inform her of the deaths of her mother, father and sister. Her father had left her 400 pounds in his will. She was not informed of this by the department; she found out from a friend.

Over the years different people tried to find that money for me, but they never had any luck. I’ve since found out that when this happened, if Aboriginal people received an inheritance, any money left to them became the property of the Aborigines Department. I don’t understand that, we are all human beings, we should have been entitled to it. I could have really used that money my father left me, and it would have made the world of difference to my family.

The second half of When the Pelican Laughed provides an account of events of Alice’s married life. She and her husband seem to be forever moving around Western Australia chasing work, trying to ensure that they were paid for the work they performed (which didn’t always happen) and finding accommodation for her family. It also relates events associated with her children, the ups and downs of family life, details of friendships and the kindness of strangers she experienced along the way. These positive accounts serve to undercut the racism she was forced to endure for most of her life. Throughout the book there is an undercurrent of cruelty, indifference and subtle and not-so-subtle racism.

One of Alice’s major strengths was that she was not intimidated by others and would stand up for herself when threatened by racial abuse. After an incident when she took on a group of children who had abused her kids at a picture show, she explained why she spoke out.

I said those things because I had to. I’d just had enough, I’d reached my limit. I’ve heard Aboriginal people called things all my life and I don’t want my kids to be treated like that. I wanted it all to stop and for us to be treated like human beings.

Alice Nannup spent the final years of her life in hospital, working with Lauren Marsh and Stephen Kinnane on finishing this book.

I think writing this book has been really good for me, like medicine of a different kind. In many ways it has given me a new lease of life, and I think it’s been important to get all my stories down into the one book. That way my family, and their family, and so on, will always have them … I had to tell those things because they are the truth, and part of doing this is the hope that people, young, old, black, white, will read this book and see how life was for people in my time.

The Aborigines Department, and its head Auber Octavius Neville, had wanted to create a society that would forget there had ever been any Aboriginal people in Australia. Lauren Marsh asked Alice to total her descendants:

Well I had thirteen kids, they had forty children between them, and their kids had forty-six. So altogether that makes ninety-nine. I have another great-grandchild due in February 1992 which will make it one hundred – and maybe I’ll get a telegram from the queen!

Now we know this was when the pelican laughed.

Alice Nannup with Lauren Marsh and Stephen Kinnane When the Pelican Laughed Fremantle Press 2026 PB 304pp $34.99

Braham Dabscheck is a Senior Fellow at the Melbourne Law School at the University of Melbourne who writes on industrial relations, sport and other things.

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