[1] Their son John Francis "Jack" McGinness (aka Kingulawuy[3]), activist and the Northern Territory's and Australia's first elected Aboriginal union leader in 1955, holding the position of NAWU president over three stints until 1963,[4][5] was Kathy's father.
[1] Her mother was Kingarli (died 1954),[6][7] later called Polly Wakelin, a Gurindji woman who was removed from Wave Hill Station to Kahlin Compound, making her one of the Stolen Generation.
[13] In 2018, she was one of a panel of three at a presentation of the film Buffalo Legends, about a "a group of men who knocked down the barriers of racism on the sporting field"and helped to forge multiculturalism in Darwin.
[21] They later played support gigs for Harry Secombe, Charlie Pride and Tina Turner,[17] and toured to Tamworth, New South Wales, where they earned the Australasian Buskers Award; Alice Springs (where they performed for the Pope; and to Melbourne and Sydney.
[6][7] A 26-minute documentary film about Mills and her family, entitled Arafura Pearl, was made by Indigenous filmmaker Steven McGregor and released in 2003 by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation as part of their "Message Stick" series.
[27] Mills also features in Blown Away (2014), a documentary film directed by Danielle MacLean about Cyclone Tracy, which caused extensive damage to Darwin in 1974.
The film shows previously unrecorded responses by Indigenous Darwinians to the disaster, and Mills relates how she and her family survived by cramming into a tiny storeroom underneath their house.
[30] Mills was renowned for her fantastic memory, for both songs and historical and cultural information, which could then be passed down, and she worked hard to contribute to the community of Darwin and Aboriginal people everywhere.