AustLit

Georgina describes herself as 'a survivor in my own land of the holocaust that swept across the traditional lands of the Kaurna. I was born to mission-raised parents incarcerated in a reserve but I was one of the first Nunga babies to be born in a hospital'. At ten years of age, Georgina was sent by the school headmaster to the Salvation Army Girls' Home at Fullarton to be educated. 'But I was a rebel,' she says and was sent back to the mission. Back at Point Pearce she was expelled by Grade Five, and so she went to work with her dad who was a fisherman. She worked as a domestic servant, a nurse-aide and set up the '3As' in South Australia - the Aboriginal Advancement Activities. She married an Anglo-Burmese man and had four children. Georgina later studied at the Task Force, now a part of the University of South Australia.

Georgina is a poet, storyteller and an artist and continues volunteer political work. Over the years she has fought against development to protect the Dreaming track of the Song of Tjilbruke, along the coast of the Fleurieu Peninsula. She believes that the root of Aboriginal people's misery is 'our continuous spiritual deprivation as a result of the destruction of our sites and stories, song and dance, now being reconstructed as commodities for sale. When the first nation peoples are denied their spiritual life, our Mother Earth suffers, and our miseries reflect that.' Source: Tauondi Speaks from the Heart (1997).

Karl Telfer (q.v.) is one of Georgina Williams' children.