Truth-Telling in Wynnum with Valerie Howell

VALERIE HOWELL researched and wrote Jessie, We Hear You Crying (2024) — part family memoir, part archival reconstruction.

Her compelling work starts with an official intervention in 1906 Dalby, Queensland: Jessie, age seven, was removed from her Aboriginal mother Clara and institutionalised at Rhyndarra in Yeronga.

From there, Howell tracks what families often inherit: silence, missing pages, and a sense that identity was taken—not lost. She uses historical records and reports, interwoven with family memory, to reconstruct a life that policy and systems tried to re-label, and erase.

Valerie Howell’s framing of her grandmother’s story aligns Jessie’s experience with themes that recur “far too often” in this nation’s history—cruelty, prejudice, and the long tail of institutional power over Indigenous lives.