When the white policeman lifted him up high on to his camel, on that November day in 1938, the laughing little fella thought he was going for a ride. But the journey-sometimes on the camel, sometimes carried on the hip of an aunt-lasted three weeks and covered 300 miles, from Tempe Station in the central Australian desert as far as Alice Springs. His aunts, and the other adults in the party, were in chains. It was all they wore, being naked. They were suspected of killing and eating a bullock that wasn't theirs. He, six or seven and with pale-brown skin, because his blood-mother Tanguawa had slept with the white owner of the cattle station where she was a housemaid, was being taken away in accordance with government policy. That policy, in force from 1910 to 1970, decreed that all aboriginal half-castes should be placed in institutions to civilise and Christianise them. His family had usually smeared him with mud to make his skin darker, so he wouldn't stand out. But on that fateful day of the camel he had taken a dip in a water hole and washed it off.
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