If Everyone Cared Enough: Her Voice Reclaimed

by Margaret Tucker

Margaret Lilardia Tucker MBE (affectionately known as Aunty Marge) was a significant Aboriginal activist and one of the first Aboriginal women to publish for mainstream audiences. If Everyone Cared (1977) was a landmark publication.
In that first edition, her tone and draft content were significantly altered to placate non-Indigenous readers who were substantially unfamiliar with Aboriginal cultures and ignorant about the outcomes of settler invasion from a First Nations perspective. This meant changes to her tone and content to avoid confusing or offending non-Indigenous readers, and the altering of her original Aboriginal storytelling voice.
In this new edition, we publish Margaret’s story as she wrote it. Drawing on the handwritten manuscript held in the collections of the National Library of Australia, If Everyone Cared Enough reclaims Aunty Marge’s original words, reinstating what was previously omitted.
Her autobiography begins with happy early memories — swimming and fishing, listening and learning — and then follows the story after the abrupt end to her childhood when she was sent to the Cootamundra Domestic Training Home for Aboriginal Girls. The horror of the training, the cruelty of her first employer, the loneliness, homesickness and heartache she felt are related clearly. In 1932 she became the treasurer of one of the country’s first Aboriginal organisations — the Victorian Aborigines League. Awarded an MBE in 1968, she would continue fighting for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander rights and opportunities for the rest of her life.
This nationally important title shares the story of a brave, dedicated woman and her perseverance through a life of hardship towards the achievement of recognition for herself and her people.

260 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 30, 2024

Reviews

[Pat · Rating 5 out of 5]

A moving memoir by Wiradjuri and Yorta Yorta Aunty Margaret Tucker. Tucker writes about her memories of her elders, growing up on country in the early 1900s, being a member of the Stolen Generations, and her later life in Melbourne as an activist.
The original edition published in 1977 was heavily edited to apparently fit a non-Indigenous audience and this recent edition draws largely from her unedited manuscript.

[Rivulet027 · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of those books where the introduction and afteward is important. The introduction explains how the original book by the same name was edited down and how this made it lose much of the author's attempt to emulate the oral traditions she grew up with. The afterward is a note by the author's granddaughter.

This audiography follows the author from her young childhood to her adulthood. Perhaps most heartbreaking is her, her sister, and a classmate being pulled from school when the author is thirteen to be sent to a domestic labor training school. The only reason she gets to say goodbye to her mother is because her teacher sends classmates to get her mother and then stalls. Then of course she's mistreated at the school she's sent to and then in her first assignment (to the point that she becomes so hopeless she ingests rat poision). She also talks about how little she got to reconnect with her family during those years. This is ultimately a women sharing her sense of self-preservation and how she tried to live the best life she could with the circumstances before her. I enjoyed the stories of her childhood and how she reconnected with her family.