Barbara Cummings
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Barbara Cummings (1 January 1948 – 1 September 2019) was an Australian Nangiomeri woman and member of the Stolen Generations. She was brought up at the Retta Dixon Home in Darwin, Northern Territory.[1][2][3]
She became an activist, social worker, writer and advocate for members of the Stolen Generations and contributed to the development of the Bringing Them Home report which became the basis of the Australian Government's 2007 Apology to Australia's Indigenous peoples.[1][4][5]
Cummings was born at the Bagot Aboriginal Reserve in Darwin, which had previously been the site of the Kahlin Compound.[3] Her mother, Nellie, had been taken from her family in the Daly River and placed there some years before.[6] In 1948 Cummings also was taken from her mother and placed at the Retta Dixon Home, alongside her two brothers.[5]
In 1990 Cummings published her autobiography Take This Child (1990)[7] which was an account at her time at the Retta Dixon home and the harsh treatment, which included abuse and emotional deprivation, that the children received there.[2] She recalled been beaten regularly during her tie there and said of some of these beatings:[8]
I was a child of 10 or 11 and you don't beat a child with a cane that severe, or humiliate the child, to the severity where he or she crumbles
— Barbara Cummings, Institutional sexual, physical abuse compensation case to enter Commonwealth mediation, ABC News, 22 November 2016
This book told not only her story but the stories of the people around her and included numerous interviews with others in which she sought their account of what had happened and see if she had missed anything.[5] This book was used to inform the 1997 Bringing The Home Report which was published by the Australian Human Rights Commission.[9]
In her later life Cummings also worked to support victims who were testifying at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse and, from 2015, former Retta Dixon inmates makings applications for compensation through the National Redress Scheme.[2][8]
In 2019, a few months before her death, she was awarded with an honorary doctorate from Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education, alongside Rosalie Kunoth-Monks. for her contributions to the advancement of First Nations peoples. These were the first honorary doctorate awards conferred by the institute.[10][11]