AUSTRALIA’S FIRST INDIGENOUS DOCTOR, THEN CHILD PSYCHIATRIST, ROYAL COMMISSIONER, CHILDREN’S BOOK AUTHOR, ARTIST… HELEN MILROY’S LIFE IS A TALE OF ACHIEVEMENT

After a heartbreaking week of bearing witness to the historic abuse of children in Australia’s institutions, royal commissioner Helen Milroy would get on a plane for the five-hour flight back home to Perth. Her head would be reeling as she settled into her business class seat, but the trained psychiatrist in her had a way to calm her thoughts.

Somewhere mid-flight, she would mentally transport herself into “an alternative world where everything can be good”.

And so Tales from the Bush Mob was born, a series of children’s stories that Milroy wrote and illustrated on her travels using only an iPad and her imagination. “You can’t paint when you’re on a plane every week, so I found a way to use digital platforms,” she explains. First came the cheeky Willy Wagtail, who rallies around the other Bush Mob animals. “She brings everyone together when they are challenged by a bushfire, and she’s the only one who can get them all to safety. She gets burnt and Crow rescues her. So Bush Mob is formed to keep each other safe.”

The analogy with Milroy’s own vocation as one of the nation’s most experienced child psychiatrists is not hard to spot, including that Willy Wagtail “takes the trouble to learn everyone’s language and story”. It also ties in with her approach to one of the hardest things she has ever done. From 2013 to 2017, she sat as one of six commissioners on the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. “It was thousands of stories, profoundly disturbing but incredibly inspiring. And absolutely intense for the whole five years.”

The stories Milroy heard were of children failed by adults at every turn, in institutional settings from churches to children’s homes, schools and sporting groups across Australia. Milroy knew her own mental health must stay robust if she were to do her job. “I thought, ‘What can I do as a counterpoint?’ Hence I’ve written a lot more stories and illustrations because I want children to feel really good when they look at the pictures and read the stories.” The children’s books have done well, and so have Milroy’s colourful paintings, some of which are in private and public collections.

Others emerge in a different realm, illustrating psychiatric principles in teaching materials.

At 62, Milroy is a serial overachiever, although she wouldn’t dream of putting it that way. She is the first Indigenous person to become an Australian Football League commissioner, and the second to sit on the National Mental Health Commission. She was awarded Indigenous Doctor of the Year in 2018, and won the Australian Mental Health prize in 2020. This year, she fitted her duties as WA Australian of the Year with her daytime job as professor of Child Psychiatry at Perth Children’s Hospital and the University of Western Australia.

Milroy was the first Indigenous person in Australia ever to graduate as a doctor, a national milestone achieved barely 40 years ago. “I know, it’s incredible, isn’t it?” she says, grimacing slightly as we sit on her back porch while flocks of galahs fly in to feed under giant jarrah trees. “I graduated in the early 80s but in New Zealand they had Maori doctors from much earlier on, even in the early 1900s I think. When we checked the records we couldn’t find anyone earlier than me. Perhaps they didn’t 
keep good records or wouldn’t necessarily have identified Indigenous graduates. But I was on Abstudy and that was an identifier.” 

Milroy grew up in a family that, back in the 1960s, tried hard to disguise the fact they were Aboriginal. She is the youngest of five children who were told by their mother Gladys and grandmother Daisy to say they were Indian if they were ever asked about their colouring. The kids noticed how wary the two matriarchs were of authority, especially after the death of their father Bill, a difficult man with ill health and a drinking problem. Her brother David remembers that period. “Helen was two when dad died, I was four,” he says. “We used to have welfare coming around and I can remember we’d all go quiet. Nan would peek through the window and if she didn’t know them, she wouldn’t answer the door.”

It was David and Helen’s eldest sister, the author Sally Morgan, who turned a family secret into a national literary classic. Published in 1987, My Place was one of the first accounts of Stolen Generations policies that tore Aboriginal families apart, even those living in Perth’s inner suburbs.

It turned out that Gladys had been removed from her mother Daisy Corunna and placed in a Perth orphanage from the age of two until her mid-teens. Daisy’s own story would eventually emerge too, a tale of servitude as a Palyku woman on a Pilbara pastoral station owned by a white Perth family with high-society credentials. A stark, simply told story of generational dispossession and denial, My Place became a bestseller. 

Gladys, now 93, found the glare of public curiosity sudden and uncomfortable, including questions about how and why the “Indian” ruse came about. In one interview, Gladys described a visit by a “welfare lady” who inspected every corner of the family’s tiny house – two bedrooms, one sleep-out shared with Daisy and the kids.

The woman was furious that toddler Helen shared a bed with her mother. “I just agreed with everything she said,” Gladys recalled. “I didn’t want her to have any excuse to take the children off me.” It was this hovering threat that made Gladys and Daisy decide they would tell the children not to admit to being Aboriginal. “I suppose, looking back now, it seems awful that we deprived them of that heritage, but we thought we were doing the right thing at the time.”

David Milroy says the family’s experience in My Place “was in some ways part of the hidden history of Aboriginal people, of abuse. There’s a dark history that is still kept under the carpet.” In the way siblings can have different childhood recollections, Helen says she knew about her Aboriginal heritage from an early age. She prefers to talk about the extraordinary efforts her mother made as a single wage earner.

“It was a matter of survival. There was Sal, Jill, Bill, David and me. Mum took any job she could, as a cleaner, a florist, and she eventually ended up with her own business. For someone like mum, who was Stolen Generation, no one saw any benefit in those children getting a good education.

But she wasn’t going to see us go without.” Milroy also remembers a childhood infused with warmth that radiated from her Nan Daisy, who “basically raised” her. “Nan was the most beautiful, sweet and kind woman I’ve ever known and she taught me things.” Perhaps her own career path was also influenced by Daisy’s storytelling and healing ways. “Healing was part of the family if you look at traditional society, and I was always interested in people’s stories.”

She laughs when I ask her if she was a studious child. “I learnt as much at home as at school.

School was a bit boring, and if you were clever and you could cram, you could almost learn the curriculum in a few days. When I was about 10 I said I was going to be a brain surgeon. I probably didn’t know what it was… I think I’m a psychological brain surgeon so I’ve probably achieved my childhood goal. I remember going to one of the guidance officers at school and they said, ‘You’re just going to get married and have kids’. Because I was a girl, I was Aboriginal, whatever. I remember being quite offended and thinking, ‘Well, what would you know?’ They didn’t expect women to achieve back then and they certainly didn’t expect Aboriginal people to achieve. Well, I did get married and have kids, but I also became a doctor!” 

Milroy studied science at the University of Western Australia before transferring to medicine.

She married in 1984 after her intern year, went to Sydney and had the first of two children. Returning home, she worked part-time with a kindly Fremantle GP who understood her desire to spend time with her daughters Jessyca and Rebecca.

Then a hospital needed a forensic medical officer in their child protection unit. “It was doing examinations to see what happened to the child, take their story and give evidence in court. It was a really tricky area – there wasn’t a lot of training or even understanding of what to do with kids who had disclosed something or had concerning behaviours.” Milroy realised that few services existed to treat widespread trauma among children.

“There’s a misunderstanding that trauma only happens to disadvantaged groups, but it can happen to anyone in childhood. I thought the best thing for me to do was go back and retrain as a child psychiatrist and devote my career to children being able to recover well.”

Meanwhile, she was a key figure in setting up the Australian Indigenous Doctors Association to support its medical students and doctors. “If I look back now I think, ‘My God, look how many Aboriginal doctors we have!’ I was part of that and I’m really proud. We had people saying we couldn’t do it, we shouldn’t do it. How dare they?”

One medical graduate is her own daughter Rebecca, who topped her year.

Meanwhile, Milroy’s calm, can-do demeanour drew invitations to join committees and help write policy frameworks in her field. Former social justice commissioner Tom Calma says her con tribution to his first Closing the Gap campaign was invaluable and it has had an enduring impact. “From the start, Helen got involved and helped us understand a lot more about the impact of intergenerational trauma. She’s a very humble person and totally committed to helping others.

She’ll sit down and explain, from the highest-level academics to members of the community.”

Calma says the Milroys are “an unbelievable family, still in touch with their cultural roots in the Pilbara. [Sally Morgan’s] My Place was important writing that gave people an insight into living in more than one world, as many Indigenous people have to. And Helen is a pathfinder for Aboriginal people in medicine and psychiatry.” 

Milroy says that in the course of her work she became disturbed by the unsuitability of some aspects of psychiatric practice in an Indigenous context. “You can completely misdiagnose someone if you don’t understand the cultural origins and influences on their illness. For instance, Aboriginal people will often have a lot of auditory and visual phenomena, they see and hear ancestors. Everything’s animate, you can sing to the moon and talk to the stars.

“In a psychiatric interview you may say, ‘Do you hear voices or see things that aren’t there?’ If someone says yes, that could be rated as hallucinations or psychosis. But if it’s a cultural phenomenon and yet you’re diagnosed as psychotic, you could end up down a pathway you don’t want to be. I found this really troubling, so I went to the training authority and said, ‘There’s nothing in the curriculum on Aboriginal mental health’. They said, ‘Well, you write it’. So I did.

“I went back and recast everything I’d learnt through a cultural lens. I thought, ‘How are things expressed from an Aboriginal cultural frame of reference?’ It was through painting, through story or narrative, and concept first before you break it down into evidence.”

She bought herself some canvases and paints – “I hadn’t been a painter before’’ – and waited for the images to come. “I painted them all, wrote the narrative, then the framework which I called The Dance of Life.” A series of six paintings illustrate her curriculum, which has been used in several states across Australia. The final Dance of Life painting is now displayed at the Western Aust ralian Museum. 

And then, just as Milroy was looking around for new ways to tackle Australia’s broader mental health problems, she received a call from “someone in the Prime Minister’s office”. Was she interested in putting her name forward as a royal commissioner into historic child abuse? “I had heard extremely traumatic stories for more than 20 years. I thought, ‘This is like my very odd career path culminating in this point.’ So I had no hesitation in saying yes.” Yet even Milroy was shocked by what she heard, knowing that repeated exposure to trauma can erode a child’s health and wellbeing. “The worst thing was the denials and the coverups. To think that we could turn away from children and let them suffer…” she says, shaking her head. “Honestly, when you hear some stories, they don’t leave you.”

“Bearing witness was important,” Milroy told a conference of social workers late last year. “I thought I was good at listening, I found out I wasn’t. As a clinician you’re only listening with half a brain. You must be fully present and listening to the story.”

Milroy also witnessed intergenerational trauma of the very kind that had afflicted her own relatives.

It could ripple through five generations, from a girl placed in the same mission where her mother and grandmother had suffered abuse.

“Her child and grandchild might have been removed under contemporary child protection practices, so you can have five generations represented in one story. Do we know how to deal with that?”, she asked the social workers rhetorically.

Her life became utterly consumed by the commission.

No social media and a low public profile were advised. “We commissioners tried to stay out of the limelight as much as possible because it wasn’t about us. You could easily become a hermit, not see anybody because it’s so overwhelming.”

David Milroy, a musician and playwright who has written and directed numerous plays on Indigenous themes, says he worried about his sister during the long years of the royal commission.

“Through my own work with Stolen Generations I was very aware of what she was dealing with...

But we’re a very close family – it’s not uncommon for all of us to get together. When you think about how it could have gone, we’ve done well.”

Milroy says regular debriefing sessions with a psychiatrist colleague were “absolutely essential”. 

She also took up body combat; “I discovered I really love punching and the boxing circuits I did at the gym to get out the anger and rage at injustice.”

Then there were unforeseen family events, both serious and lighthearted. Gladys soon discovered her own talent for writing books, joining the ranks of her published offspring and several of their children. But it was Gladys’ foray into more racy adult writing that caused Helen a few amusing moments during a dark time. On one of her visits home, Milroy found herself waiting with her mother in the busy intensive care ward of a Perth hospital after Gladys was admitted with chest pains. “Mum had written a fantasy novel and so, to distract her, I offered to read her novel to her out loud, off the iPad,” she recalls. “But then I got to the orgy scene. I said, ‘Mum, I can’t read this!’ and she said, ‘Oh, don’t be silly, it’ll be all right.’ With a bit of a red face I managed to read through it, but it was an ordeal.” 

In the years since the royal commission, Milroy has noted some progress. Many organisations are “saying they’ve done things differently as a result or had a successful prosecution”. In Indigenous affairs, she says, progress lies in strong Aboriginal organisations emerging in areas such as mental health and suicide, all governed and controlled by Indigenous experts. “We don’t want to be done to, we want to be in control of our own lives. It’s fundamentally changed the way we do business and it’s a step forward.”

Some things haven’t changed, though. “We’re going backwards in child protection, for example.

We still do not prioritise children in this country, we prioritise greed and wealth over children. We haven’t tackled racism, or what it takes to have constitutional reform or a treaty. Australia Day, for example – why don’t we just get on and resolve it? Why would you want to celebrate a day that celebrates genocide?”

“I hark back to the time of the national apology.

There had been a lot of misinformation around land rights, that people were going to steal your backyard if you apologised. It hampered us from doing the right thing morally. Eventually [Kevin] Rudd just did it, and what happened? None of the stuff that was predicted.

“But what we have had in Australia is reconciliation without the truth. One thing I learnt from the royal commission is that without truth- telling, people can’t move forward.” Would she ever take on another royal commission role? Milroy smiles.

“I think I have only one in me – particularly if it takes five years.” ●