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And the clock struck thirteen : The life and thoughts of Kaurna elder Uncle Lewis Yerloburka O'Brien

by Lewis Yerloburka O'Brien, Mary-Anne Gale

This biography follows the life of Kaurna elder Lewis O'Brien, tracing his lineage from Kudnarto and his career in the South Australian education system. It documents his work to improve high school completion rates for Aboriginal students.

Accession 9781862547308 ISBN 9781862547308 Publisher Wakefield Press

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Topics and Themes

1. **Indigenous Identity & Belonging**
The book's central preoccupation is O'Brien's lifelong tension of feeling, as the back cover puts it, "white on the outside but Aboriginal on the inside." This struggle for self-definition — in a society that both denied and constrained Aboriginal identity — drives the memoir's emotional and intellectual core.

It asks: what does it mean to claim an identity that dominant society refuses to recognise?

Connect to books about: mixed-race identity, Indigenous self-determination, belonging and otherness, postcolonial subjectivity.

2. **The Stolen Generations & Colonial Policy**
O'Brien was born in 1930 and came of age during the era of the Stolen Generations, when government policy actively pursued the assimilation of Aboriginal people into European society. The book gives a personal, ground-level account of how these policies shaped lives in South Australia.

Connect to books about: Stolen Generations, Aboriginal protection acts, assimilation policy, Australian colonial history.

3. **Aboriginal Autobiography & Life Writing**
The book is an as-told-to autobiography — O'Brien's life story conveyed through interviews with researcher Mary-Anne Gale — making it a key example of collaborative Indigenous life writing. It raises questions about voice, mediation, and who gets to tell whose story.

Connect to books about: Indigenous autobiography, collaborative biography, oral history as literature, life writing and testimony.

4. **Kaurna People, Country & Culture**
The story is deeply rooted in the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains, tracing family history back to O'Brien's great-great-grandmother Kudnarto — the first Aboriginal woman to marry a white man in South Australia — and through the displacement of the Kaurna from Poonindie to Point Pearce. It documents a specific people's cultural continuity and disruption.

Connect to books about: Kaurna history, South Australian Aboriginal peoples, country and connection to land, First Nations cultural survival.

5. **Colonisation, Power & Resistance**
The book draws implicit parallels between the Chief Protectors of Aborigines and totalitarian structures of control, showing how institutional power was wielded over Aboriginal lives. O'Brien's life-long activism and community work represent a sustained form of quiet resistance.

Connect to books about: settler colonialism, Aboriginal political activism, institutional racism, Indigenous rights movements in Australia.

6. **Ancestry, Genealogy & Intergenerational Memory**
The narrative begins well before O'Brien's own birth, tracing family lines and ancestral history across generations. The importance of knowing one's ancestry — and the pain of having it disrupted — is a thread running through the whole book.

Connect to books about: Aboriginal genealogy and family history, intergenerational trauma, memory and heritage, diaspora and roots.

7. **Education, Community Leadership & Elder Wisdom**
O'Brien spent decades as an Aboriginal Education Liaison Officer, significantly improving Indigenous school completion rates, before being recognised as a prominent Kaurna elder — meaning, in his own tradition, a teacher and imparter of wisdom. The book reflects on what it means to serve and lead one's community.

Connect to books about: Indigenous education, community leadership, mentorship, Aboriginal elders and knowledge holders.

8. **Collaborative & Cross-Cultural Storytelling**
The book is the product of a sustained collaboration between an Aboriginal elder and a non-Indigenous academic researcher, raising questions about the ethics and dynamics of cross-cultural knowledge production, translation, and representation.

Connect to books about: ethics of representation, cross-cultural research methodologies, Aboriginal voices in academia, oral tradition and the written word.

And the clock struck thirteen : The life and thoughts of Kaurna elder Uncle Lewis Yerloburka O'Brien

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