Hetty Perkins (1905 ?-1979)
Hetty Perkins was fourteen when her father died and her mother lost the work she had found on the Winnecke goldfields in Central Australia. Hetty and some friends found work in the hotel at Arltunga, 90 kilometres ENE of Alice Springs. The hotel cook, also Aboriginal, had been brought up by a Chinese woman ‘and she can cook!’ as Hetty recalled.
Hetty Perkins became a keen student as she learned the skills that best guaranteed employment. Hetty joined her friends, who worked as domestics in the hotel, on their days off, mustering and watering cattle as the girls doubled as stockriders for their white employer. Their pay was ‘a couple of bob and lollies’.
Hetty Perkins had her first child while working at the Arltunga hotel. She later moved in with Jim Turner and lived on his cattle station, where their children were born. Jim Turner’s service in the second World War disrupted their relationship, to Hetty’s distress. She had other partnerships and was the mother of eleven children. She married ‘in the bush sense’, always keeping her own name.
Hetty always worked and supported her children. In 1940 she took a job as cook at the ‘Half Caste’ Institution in Alice Springs, living on Telegraph Station reserve. The children attended school on the reserve including Charles, who was later sent to Adelaide to attend technical college.
Image source: Part of: Howard, Bruce, 1936- Sheilas, a tribute to Australian women collection nla.pic-vn4227503
Hetty next moved to Jay Creek Settlement, where once again she looked after many children as well as her own. She had lived through a period when massacres of Aboriginal people occurred in the Territory and blacks were kept out of the towns. She earned her living, and the respect of employers, with her cooking skills but she remained cautious towards Europeans and urged Aboriginal kids to keep out of the way of whites.
In the 1970s Hetty Perkins’ son Charles became the first Aboriginal person to hold a senior public service appointment when he became head of the federal Department of Aboriginal Affairs. Her grandson, Neville Perkins, was a member of the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly.
The daughter of an Aranda mother known as Nellie and Harry Perkins, a European who worked on the construction of the Oodnadatta-Alice Springs railway line, Hetty Perkins had grown up on the Winnecke and Arltunga goldfields in Central Australia. Hetty Perkins’s date of birth was estimated as around 1905 partly because she recalled seeing ‘the star with the long tail’ as a young child – Halley’s Comet making a dramatic appearance in April 1910.
Hetty Perkins died in December 1979. The Hetty Perkins Hostel for elderly Aboriginal people in Alice Springs is named for her.
Lenore Coltheart
Australian Women's History Forum 