Autobiography details one man’s pension experience

When Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people gained access to government payments, it affected individuals in different ways. Jimmie Barker discussed his experience in his autobiography.

Barker was a Muruwari man from northern New South Wales. His autobiography was based on recordings he made about his life, his knowledge of Muruwari culture, and his research of the history of Brewarrina Mission and surrounding areas.

While most of the book is about his early life, this excerpt is about Barker’s later experiences getting government payments in the 1960s. As an older man, his reflections on Aboriginal people’s relationship to work, money and payments show his grief over the loss of Muruwari ways of life.

Experience of moving from work to a pension

Barker first got a government payment when his doctor said he wasn’t well enough to continue work. Barker had worked as a handyman at Brewarrina Hospital for 17 years. He recalled he was often unwell. Still, ‘it was a shock when the doctor told me that I was not well enough to continue with my job,’ he said.

His doctor suggested that he apply for Invalid Pension. Barker was reluctant, thinking he would work until he could get Old-age Pension instead. His doctor assured him that ‘there was no disgrace in taking the Invalid Pension when it was essential’.

Barker said it was hard to adjust to not working, saying ‘I think I had expected to work [at the hospital] for ever’. He said he felt ‘horribly lost and bewildered’ and found it ‘hard … doing nothing’. Over time, he focused on activities like fishing and opal mining.

Reflections about the impact of payments

Barker said he did not worry about money in general. ‘It is good to have enough is the main thing.’ But elsewhere in his reflections, he worried about the impact of pensions on other Aboriginal people at Brewarrina. ‘When the cheque arrives regularly, they do not try to work again,’ he said (Barker 1977:146).

These excerpts are one example of the differing perceptions of payments and how payments affected individuals. They show Barker’s reflections on his own pension, as well as how he thought payments affected other people in his community.

Other autobiographical pieces, for example activist Shirley Smith’s account, suggested that a lack of work opportunities meant that people could become stuck receiving payments and that this had a negative impact on them.