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The Black Communist: The Contested Memory of Margaret Tucker
[Margaret Tucker] began an active life campaigning for citizen rights for her people. In 1939 she organised concert parties to raise funds for the Cumeroogunga strikers. Because of her activism she was named `the black Communist.'(1)
Margaret Tucker's If Everyone Cared,(2) the first published autobiography by an Aboriginal woman, appeared in 1977. Like other foundational Aboriginal women writers, such as Oodgeroo (Kath Walker) and Monica Clare, Tucker had been a member of or was a fellow traveller with the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). In this paper I will examine the public memory of Margaret Tucker, her reputed involvement with the CPA and the representation of this affiliation in If Everyone Cared. I argue, with reference to the original hand-written manuscript of the autobiography, that signs of her Communist affiliation were stripped of meaning during the editorial process. The style of editorial intervention that transformed the manuscript illustrates the ideological underpinning of a cross cultural collaboration such as that undertaken by Margaret Tucker with her white friend and editor Jean Hughes. Such editorial mediation of Aboriginal writing calls into question the assumed autonomy of the authorial figure, revealing the influence of a conventionally invisible editorial process. My analysis shows how the editorial removal of key indicators of Tucker's Communist involvement reflects the anti-Communist stance of a religious organisation called Moral Re-Armament (MRA). It also speaks of changing perceptions of the struggle for Aboriginal rights.
If Everyone Cared documents incidents of forced removal and indentured servitude, understood now as the experiences of `the stolen generations.' Twelve of its sixteen chapters concentrate on Tucker's happy childhood with her family in the Murray-Murrumbidgee River basin of south-western New South Wales; the consequences of separation and incarceration at Cootamundra Training Home for Aboriginal Girls; and Tucker's experiences of abuse and exploitation at the hands of her employers. The remaining four chapters deal with the personal outcomes of these experiences in her adult life.
Margaret Tucker moved to Melbourne in 1925 when she was released from her service contract with the NSW Aborigines Protection Board. The onset of the Depression in the 1930s brought great hardship to Aboriginal communities and saw the politicisation of many Aboriginal people who, like Tucker, struggled...