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Wendy Brady:
"At one stage there was a European man who was receiving a
flogging for some, you know, particular act that he'd carried
out. And she intervened. And she did say - you know, this
was where a whole crowd of military around - and she said
it was unfair that the way this punishment was being meted
out. Because he was tied up and so on. And she said 'This
is wrong.' you know, 'Stop this'. And I thought that that
took an awful amount of courage. But also for me it's significant
because she was saying for the clan groups of the Sydney area
that's not the way that you carried out a punishment. And
it was unequal treatment basically to her.
And I think the other thing that really comes
to mind with her is when she approached Governor Phillip and
asked him if she could have her baby in Government House.
Because Bennelong had brought him into the kinship group by
calling him 'father uncle', and he said no and thought that
she just wanted to go somewhere safe to have her baby, and
said go to the hospital. Now, you know, she wouldn't do that,
of course. And he didn't understand what she was trying to
do. And for her, because the clan groups of the Sydney area
had been so, you know, diminished in numbers by the effects
of disease and so on, that she wanted to have her baby there
because he was a 'father uncle' and also because it meant
that that child would have responsibility for that particular
area. And she was trying to re-establish that connection and
also to establish a way of bringing in under the kinship system
a particular European who she saw as having some power."
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