Mervyn Street’s parents were paid in rocks instead of wages. He led a fight for his people – and won $180m

The Gooniyandi artist’s new show, Stolen Wages, chronicles the lives of Aboriginal mustering workers, like himself and his father – who was never paid in his lifetime

As a child in the 1950s, growing up on a cattle station in the dusty red Kimberley, Mervyn Street remembers finding a rock in his mother’s kitchen, with numerical markings on one side. This, he would learn, was a “black penny”.

“My dad had, on the back of the penny, three ones – 1, 1, 1 – I didn’t know what that meant,” he recalls now, wearing a worn bush hat and sitting at Mangkaja Arts Centre near his home in Muludja community, east of Fitzroy Crossing. The numbers, his father told him, were ration entitlements for flour, tea and sugar.

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