June Injie

Portrait of June Injie: I was born at a place called Boolaloo on the Nanutarra Road, nearby to Duck Creek and Mount Stuart. My brother’s born on Mount Stuart. Our grandad gave us our names, we’re named after two hills, a brother and a sister. We wasn’t long in one place because of the jobs, we had to move a lot, you know? Mum and dad and nana, they’d pack that old truck up and my grandfather would bring his horse. Horse, food, beds, old tent. When we’d get to the station they would give us an area where we could live. We’d have to stay about half a kilometre away from the station. We’d stay there for a couple of months, depends on the job. In those days the cattle was still a bit wild, and they caused a lot of stampedes and a funny thing, my two cousins, a brother and sister, were playing away from the camp, and when we yelled to them to run, they saw the cattle coming towards them, they just wrapped themselves in this calico and they’re layin’ down in the cattle stampede. I don’t know how it never trampled them. In Mount Stuart, we saw the mushroom cloud, the black smoke from the Montebello Island Atomic testing, that came out to where we was. It was the orders from the queen’s mother, and the French. And that’s where I got my chronic illness from, it was those bombs. They did two atomic testings over in Onslow and we was told to block off any areas with blankets. But we thought that if we’d wash ‘em afterwards they wouldn’t affect us. And we thought it looked like a cyclone coming, you know? Mum told us not to go out and look, but because we had the old windows we can feel and see the smoke coming through around the house. We got those big red sores on our legs. Well, we had a good life, but no government people came out to the station to warn us about those things.