When Phyllis Pitchford was about 11 she took a trip to Flinders Island with her father, uncle and cousin. Being young children Phyllis and her friend wanted to go to the store and get some sweets.
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With the permission of their fathers the two girls walked down the road from the port in search of a corner store.
"We were walking along the road and these two young men were coming," Phyllis said.
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"As they were walking past us they were giving us a strange look and I started to feel a bit scared. Then one of them said 'oh what we could do in bed with those little black girls'."
That was the first time Phyllis had encountered racism. Although she was born on Flinders Island she had grown up on Cape Barren Island.
"When you think about Cape Barren we were pretty protected. But, then you think was it for the good or [not]," she said.
Now in her 80s Phyllis looks back on her childhood fondly. She described Cape Barren Island as lovely and detailed how children of all ages would be taught in the same classroom.
"Growing up and going to school there was no conflict between the kids. We were all different skin colour, some were darker and some were fairer, but we never thought about anything like that. We were all just a bunch of kids and we were happy kids," she said.
As a teenager she moved to Launceston, where she completed high school. She noticed the difference between school on Cape Barren Island and school in Launceston. But, she loved studying.
Straight after high school Phyllis got married. "I got married too young actually but don't regret it now," she said. "Then when my marriage broke up, I was living on Flinders then, I moved down the North-West Coast."
Phyllis raised her five children and then later in life decided to go back to university to study. She studied biology, geography and geology for about two years before her brother passed away in prison.
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Phyllis said the death made her quit university because she couldn't concentrate on studying.
"I was told he was put in jail for his own protection. They saw and walked upon things they shouldn't of seen or things they shouldn't have heard. It was while he was in there that he passed away.
"It was a horrible horrible feeling. It froze me, I think is the best way I can say it. I started thinking, 'why are we put here for this?'"
While Phyllis has faced a lot of adversity in her life, she has continued to support her community.
In 2013 she received the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island High Education Advisory Council Award for Elders and Leaders in Higher Education.
The award paid homage to her two decades plus of service to the community.
She said for a large part of her life relations between Indigenous people and non-Indigenous people were not improving.
"They didn't for a long, long time. [I] went [out] one night for dinner [at Lady Barron on Flinders] ... when you were doing business with anyone you were a person [but] when you were out you were a b--ng or a black fella or an abo," Phyllis said.
"Not from everybody but you'd get it from these old ones and they'd pretend to be your friend. You'd almost feel like they were stabbing you in the back.
"There was this one woman who lived on the hill and she used to count the time the Aboriginal vehicle went from Lady Baron to Whitemark. She'd say 'ah there they go again, there go the black fellas.' It was sickening but it got to a stage where we didn't worry about it."
Phyllis said relations were slowly getting better.
"We're gradually making progress and I think that is wonderful. We could get better recognition but there's not all that common lingo out there now ... and that is a good thing."
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