THE PLACE THAT HAD NO HEART: A MEMOiR BY TONY HAROLD NICHOLAS

Book Design for The Place That Had No Heart

Edited by Dr Lily Hibberd (UNSW)
Cover by Tony Harold Nicholas
Published by Parramatta Female Factory Precinct NSW
Softcover/eBook, 118 pp, 2019
ISBN: 9780646804415

Tony Harold Nicholas is of Widi-Noongar—English descent and is an artist, writer and activist. Tony was a resident of Parramatta Girls Home in the early 1960s. His maternal grandfather was a Widi man of the Yamatji people. His great, great, great grandmother, Jane Farralty, was sentenced to Transportation in 1806 and held at Parramatta Female Factory until her pardon in 1835. Both Tony’s mother and sister were residents of Parramatta Girls Training School. 

Tony’s memoir tells one of far too many stories about the institutionalisation of Aboriginal, non-Aboriginal women, and children in Australia. This book reveals an entwined history of a long line of institutionalised mothers and generations of children taken from their homes, children who were then blamed and punished for the unjust actions and often violent crimes of the state. This is a history in Tony’s family that goes back to the first days of the British occupation of the Australian continent.

Since joining Parragirls Memory Project, Tony has supported many women to reconnect to their past. Tony produces writing, archival research and drawings, and is an established latch-hook artist (as seen in the detail on the book’s cover). Tony’s vision for Parramatta Girls Home is that it will become a museum so that people might understand what it is was like for the many generations of women and children who passed through that place.

Visit Parramatta Female Factory Precinct and The Memory Project.