Freda Glynn

After Topsy's mother was killed, around 1919, Ron Purvis Sr persuaded the NT police commissioner Robert Stott to put Topsy in to the "Half-caste Institution Alice Springs" (The Bungalow, then at the Alice Springs Telegraph Station), although she was not technically "half-caste", on condition that Purvis employed her on Wood Green Station as soon as she had completed her schooling there, which he did.

[4] Following the bombing of Darwin in February 1942, there were military orders to evacuate The Bungalow, so Topsy went to find work on a farm in New South Wales with her girls.

[9][c] Glynn and her family were returned to Alice Springs in 1949, when she was 10 years old, and they lived at St Mary's Hostel,[3] under the care of Sister Eileen Heath.

[8] St Mary's was run by the Australian Board of Missions, and provided accommodation and schooling for Aboriginal children who had been either placed there by their parents or by the Director of Native Affairs.

[12] After leaving school, in 1956, Glynn worked at Trish Collier's photographic studio in the darkroom; she was one of the first Aboriginal girls in Alice Springs to get a job other than as a domestic or cleaner.

[16] In 2002 Glynn played Grandma Nina in the short drama film Shit Skin, about a young man who takes his grandmother back to her childhood community, in order to reconnect with her surviving family.

Freda Glynn showed her offspring and many others that (in Erica's words) "you can't tell anyone else's story"; Australia needs Indigenous storytellers, and CAAMA had enabled many of them to pursue their careers.

[7] Rona Glynn-Mcdonald, founder of not-for-profit Common Ground,[23] which works to expand and disseminate knowledge, cultures and stories of Indigenous Australians,[24] is another granddaughter.