AustLit

'This extraordinary and heartfelt story chronicles the lives of the Rodriguez family of Debesa Station in the West Kimberley; their livelihood through difficult times, love of family, place and culture, and the challenges of day-to-day living on a small sheep station amid huge pastoral properties.

'Spanning four generations from the 1880s when the author’s maternal great-grandfather, Indian deckhand, Jimmy Casim, met and lived with Nigena woman, Lucy Muninga on Yeeda Station near Derby, Debesa centres on the unlikely partnership of Cindy’s parents: Frank Rodriguez, once a Benedictine novice monk from Spain, and Katie Fraser, who had been a novitiate in a very different sort of abbey – a convent for ‘black’ women at Beagle Bay Mission, 130 kilometres north of Broome.

'Together, Frank and Katie Rodriguez established Debesa, where Cindy and her three siblings grew up with the rich cultural heritage of their Spanish, Nigena and English ancestors.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'Faces swollen and sticky with tears and dust, they clung to one another.' 

Jimmy Casim was a teenager when he came to Australia in the 1880s. He was a deckhand on an Indian cargo vessel, of which his uncle was the bosun (Fraser: 2003). At that time, ships from the subcontinent delivered teams of Afghan cameleers and their camels to Australian ports for the 'opening up' of the inland. They were heady days when his uncle's ship made several trips a year back and forth from Karachi to Fremantle (State Records Office). Jimmy became ill on one of those voyages so with his uncle's encouragement to seek help he 'jumped ship' only to remain the Western Australia for the rest of his life (Fraser: 2013; Goodall et al. 57). Like others from his part of the world the young seafarer merged into a life of indentured labour, and he merged with Aboriginal peoples. Jimmy Casim was my maternal great-grandfather.'  (Introduction)

'This thesis enlarges understanding of Australian social history through a biographical study of a mixed-descent multicultural Catholic family in the north of Australia. It highlights a new dimension of the historical multiculturalism of the West Kimberley community while revealing the experiences of a hidden segment of Aboriginal society whose lives were not continuously subject to police or welfare surveillance, nor dominated by conflict and animosity. It also adds to the corpus of life story writing by Indigenous authors.'  (Introduction)