'Mugshots' before they were forced off Country are the only photos of Florence's grandparents

Government officials took the only photos Florence Onus has of her grandparents — "mugshots" taken before they were forced off Country and onto an Aboriginal reserve.WARNING: This story contains images of Indigenous people who have died, which have been provided by family for the purpose of truth-telling and healing. They request they should not be recorded or photographed.With those portraits are reports from the 1930s which list their physical measurements, including the "thickness" of their lips and "nose breadth", and whether they were "full-blood", "half-caste" or "quarter-caste".The Bindal and Birrrigubba elder and activist keeps these "remnants" as evidence of people who survived the massacres, and "the rape, the brutalisation of our men, women and children".Ms Onus was the fourth generation of her family to be taken away by the state.In 1938, her family was sent to a reserve at Woorabinda, inland from Rockhampton in central Queensland."I regard them as detention centres," Ms On...