Davis Family Truth-Telling or Misinformation?
Our grandfather Fred Davis was a proud Aboriginal man. My grandmother Elizabeth Ober was a South Sea Islander woman. She was taken and brought here from Vanuatu. They would basically kidnap people and brought them here to work in the sugar cane industry.
- Lucy Davis (sister to Professor Megan Davis, speaking on the ABC’s Australian Story 30 Jun 2023
Part of my family came to Australia via the practice of "blackbirding" – that is, the kidnapping and enslaving of South Pacific Islanders to work on plantations, especially in Queensland.
- Professor Megan Davis, The Guardian, 16 May 2014
Professor Megan Davis is Pro Vice-Chancellor Indigenous UNSW and a Professor of Law, UNSW Law. She was elected by the UN Human Rights Council to UNEMRIP in 2017, and she also currently serves as a United Nations expert with the UN Human Rights Council's Expert Mechanism on the rights of Indigenous peoples based in UN Geneva. She has had extensive experience as an international lawyer at the UN and participated in the drafting of the UNDRIP from 1999-2004 and is a former UN Fellow of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva. She is the Balnaves Chair for Constitutional Law at UNSW.
In 2015 she was appointed by the Prime Minister to the Referendum Council and designed the deliberative constitutional dialogue process the Council undertook. In 2011, Megan was also appointed to the Prime Minister's Expert Panel on the Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples in the Constitution and continues to be involved in legal discussions on the constitutional issues relating to the Voice referendum model.
What Professor Davis says with regard to Indigenous peoples and Constitutional Law is a big-deal and she is to be listened to. That is why she was named in the 2017 Australian Financial Review annual power list and was awarded the overall winner in 2018’s Women of Influence. She was ranked number 7 on the Cultural power list for her work on constitutional reform and delivering the Uluru Statement From the Heart, of which she was one of the main architects.
Megan Davis (left), Pat Anderson and Noel Pearson, with the Uluru Statement from the Heart, at the closing ceremony of the Indigenous Constitutional Convention in June 2019. James Croucher/Newspix
However, during our Dark Emu Exposed investigation into the ancestry claims of Megan Davis, our researchers were surprised to find that both Megan Davis and her sister Lucy believed that,
‘part of [their] family came to Australia via the practice of "blackbirding" – that is, the kidnapping and enslaving of South Pacific Islanders to work on plantations, especially in Queensland.’
In particular, Lucy Davis stated during the ABC’s Australian Story documentary on the family that specifically,
“my grandmother Elizabeth Ober was a South Sea Islander woman. She was taken and brought here from Vanuatu. They would basically kidnap people and brought them here to work in the sugar cane industry.” - See video below at 02:18
Given that Professor Megan Davis is one of Australia’s leading and most respected constitutional lawyers, these claims must be correct, mustn’t they?
Constitutional lawyers delve deep into the archives and libraries to collect the facts so that they can accurately engage in ‘Truth-Telling’, to a level acceptable in a court of law, don’t they?
Well, it appears that in this case, Professor Davis and her sister Lucy may be mistaken in their belief that their grandmother Elizabeth Ober was ‘kidnapped’ in Vanuatu, enslaved in Queensland and forced to spend her days working in the sugar cane industry.
Research by Dark Emu Exposed appears to show that Megan and Lucy Davis are spreading ‘misinformation’ regarding their grandmother Elizabeth Ober. If they are doing this consciously or perhaps inadvertently, only they would know.
In fact, Elizabeth Ober was not “taken and brought here [to Queensland] from Vanuatu.” She was not, “basically kidnapped … to work in the sugar cane industry.”
Instead, the Births, Deaths & Marriages records of Queensland show that she was actually born in Queensland, on 1 November 1891 (See QLDBDM# 1891/C/8961, Figure 1).
She was not born in Vanuatu, but instead grew up with her parents in Queensland until her marriage to John Malary on 22 February 1911, as confirmed in the Queensland Births, Deaths & Marriages Records, QLDBDM# 1911/C/2220 (See Figure 2).
Figure 1 - Birth Extract of Queensland Births, Deaths & Marriages Records for Elizabeth Ober (nee Woolangarty)
Figure 2 - Marriage Extract of Queensland Births, Deaths & Marriages Records for Elizabeth (Lizzie) Ober and John Malany
We know from other research that Elizabeth’s parents were both South Sea Islanders from Vanuatu - her father Booty (aka Robert Ober) was from Aoba Island, and her mother, Wallangartie (aka Mary Marlo) was from Malao on Sanma [details to be explained in a later post on this website].
Thus, Megan and Lucy Davis’s grandmother Elizabeth Ober, and their great-grandparents, Robert Ober (Booty) & Mary Marlo (Wallangartie), were all of 100% indigenous Ni-Vanuatu ancestry, although Elizabeth was a born Queenslander as well.
This allows us to allege that this branch of Megan and Lucy’s family tree looks like that shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3 - An Alleged Branch off the Megan & Lucy Davis Family Tree. Includes alleged estimates of the relative Aboriginal, South Sea islander and British ancestries of each of the family members. Sources - Publicly available records and subject to disclaimer Note 2 below
Why Does Truth-Telling Matter?
It is very disappointing to us ordinary Australians, faced as we are this year by having to make a tough referendum decision regarding the installation of a race-based Chapter into our constitution, that it appears that one of the leading proponents of the YES campaign is seemingly mistaken about her own family’s place in our history.
Some viewers of the ABC documentary may be led to believe that the claims by Megan and Lucy Davis, that their grandmother Elizabeth Ober was kidnapped in Vanuatu and enslaved in Queensland, are true.
We believe that this misinformation is used by the producers of the ABC documentary to mislead the viewers into necessarily believing that colonial and pre-Federated Australia was a racist country, where ‘people-of-colour’ in general, and Elizabeth Ober in particular, were treated as ‘slaves.’
We believe that the ABC is showing uncritical bias, without sufficient fact-checking or counter-balancing commentary, in favour of the YES Campaign, by producing a program that contains pro-YES errors. Given the professional tone of the program, viewers would be expected to believe that the program is a ‘documentary’ and as such, all statements in it are factual.
Clearly Megan and Lucy Davis’s grandmother Elizabeth Ober could not have been ‘kidnapped from Vanuatu’ given that she was born in Queensland, as her birth record shows, and she grew up with her parents in Queensland until her marriage at age 20, as confirmed by her Queensland marriage record.
In our opinion, the Davis’s and the ABC are engaging in misinformation that leads their readers and viewers to believe something that is not true.
A complaint has been lodged via the ABC on-line Complaints System - read our complaint here.
We will keep our readers informed of the ABC response, if any.
Note 2 - Disclaimer: This genealogical work has been undertaken in good faith and is based on the publicly available records. However, it cannot account for events which may result in Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander (TSI) ancestry entering into the family line, such as via a private or unrecorded adoption of an Aboriginal TSI or child into the family, or a relationship out of wedlock between a family member and an Aboriginal person that produced a child of Aboriginal or TSI descent who was then incorporated into the family without record, or with a record that did not disclose the Aboriginality or TSI-descent of that child.
