Our State of Mind

by Quentin Beresford

  The house in which the children lived was a basic State Housing Commission dwelling, situated close to the beach and tucked up against a sand dune. Sandra and her elder sister, Barbara, recall having to sweep the floor every day because the sand blew in through the windows. The family had very little and the children slept on mattresses laid out on the floor. Doreen had no income other than that which Herbert sent her, no material possessions and was left alone with the children. She also had another child and was pregnant again. Even though their living conditions were poor, both Trish and Sandra remember playing down the beach every day and they do not remember being unhappy, although all the children missed their father terribly.

  The difficult living conditions for Doreen and her children reflected the racial divisions not just in northern mining communities but throughout the State. Whites received higher wages and were afforded greater opportunities relating to housing and jobs. Even though Trish and Sandra’s father was a hard-working man, he struggled to maintain a standard of living for his family that was ‘acceptable’ to the Welfare Department. This book challenges the mythology prevailing at the time, and subsequently, about ‘neglected’ Aboriginal children. It does so by placing the poor living conditions of most Aboriginal families—about which negative judgements concerning the condition of their children could be so readily made—within a social justice perspective. We argue that these families were poor because government, and the wider community, had intended this fate for them.

  The Child Welfare Department and the Roebourne police periodically called at the house and eventually expressed concern about the family’s living conditions. In 1958, a decision was taken to remove the four Hill children to Sister Kate’s Orphanage For Half Caste Children. For Sandra, the memories remain vivid:

  We were told to get in the car and we did. We trusted the policeman. I thought he was taking us for a ride. We were four small children, how could we know that this would be the last time we would see our mother? We were looking out of the back window and could see our mum as we drove off. She got smaller and smaller and I thought this is far enough away and told the policeman to take us back home. The little ones started to cry for Mum and we screamed at the policeman to stop the car. He didn’t until we reached Roebourne. I didn’t see my mother for another twenty-nine years. I will never forget the pain and the fear I experienced in that car on that day, it was absolutely devastating.

  The children were taken to the nearest police station, fed and later flown south to Perth where they were admitted to Sister Kate’s. The Department billed all these expenses to Herbert who had written to the Department assuring them that ‘he will not wilfully neglect his children’ and that he ‘does not want committal’. Worse was to follow. He was issued with an order to pay maintenance for his children—taken at a difficult moment in his life. The order for maintenance dragged him into a decade long battle with the Child Welfare Department which served to compound the injustice meted out to him by white society.

  At a pound per week per child, maintenance consumed one-third of his weekly salary of thirteen pounds. From the late 1950s he steadily fell into arrears and ran up a large debt with the Child Welfare Department. He wrote a number of letters to the Department seeking their understanding and requesting reductions in payments. The letters fell on deaf ears. In 1963 he was apprehended and imprisoned with debts to the Child Welfare Department of over one thousand pounds. He served twelve months in prison.

  Sent three thousand miles south to Sister Kate’s, the four Hill children saw their father briefly on three occasions over the next three years, but not their mother for nearly three decades. Such a draconian act demands the most thorough explanation of the motives behind the removal of thousands of children like Trish and Sandra. An essential part of the racial theory behind this policy was to culturally transform these children into whites—albeit, marginalised ones. Thus we have to examine the racial thinking about Aborigines and their culture. What did contemporaries find so disturbing in the Aboriginal make-up to cause this compulsion to wipe out Aboriginality in the children?

  Sandra and Trish’s experience in Sister Kate’s provides some early insights into this thinking. These were the ‘light coloured’ children destined to be assimilated into white society.

  In the Home Sandra and Trish were allocated different cottages. Each of the cottages had a ‘Mother’ and a ‘Father’ who were also raising their own children. Yet, the appearances of normal family life were contrived. To many of the Home’s children, the purpose of Sister Kate’s was to sever them from their backgrounds and crush their spirits as individuals. The daily routine, even for children as young as four or five, was run along Dickensian lines. The day began at 6 am and beds had to be made with ‘hospital corners’. Children were then allocated different jobs: ‘Most of the cottages had wooden floors so we had to polish wooden floors with rags on our knees and do every board in a long dormitory doing one board at a time. You had to wash your own sheets and underclothes, sweep and garden.’ Children then walked over to the dining room for breakfast at 7 am. As Trish recalls:

  If you hadn’t finished your jobs you missed out on breakfast. So a lot of kids went without a meal. I remember I did because I’m very stubborn. Each cottage had its own table and there was limited interaction with children from other cottages. I didn’t even think my siblings went to Sister Kate’s at one stage because I hadn’t seen them for so long.

  Sandra remembers the unceasing regimentation of the Home:

  Every function was systematically organised. It was like rounding up the cows. Every detail of our daily lives was done to a plan. It was a way of controlling kids. It disempowered us. It took away all our thought processes. You didn’t think of doing anything different because you would get the stick. We were put to bed every afternoon at 4.30; tucked up looking out at the daylight wishing we could be playing.

  Much of what happened to both Sandra and Trish constitutes child abuse by any standards. On one occasion, Trish was belted so severely her sisters found welt marks down the length of her back. Sandra was force fed because she wouldn’t eat the food which she found to be horrible. Numerous times her head was held back by her cottage ‘mother’ and food was shoved down her throat until it spilled out over her face and clothes. Clothing for the children was basic and limited; secondhand items given to the Home as charity. Children were allocated their clothes from stacks of boxes marked according to age. Children only wore shoes when white families took them out for weekend visits. Around the Home they went in bare feet, in winter as well. The cottage ‘Father’ sexually abused the girls. He liked to spank them over his knee while they were naked.

  School brought little relief. Children from Sister Kate’s attended the Queens Park primary, a State school conveniently located at the back of the Home. But for many it was a horrible experience. There was a stigma attached to being at Sister Kate’s in the minds of the non-Aboriginal children. Trish recalls: ‘I can remember being teased, picked on and belted because they knew where you came from.’

  Parents and relatives were discouraged from visiting. In 1941 Sister Kate had complained to the Commissioner for Native Affairs about the visits from relatives. She claimed not to mind visits from the mothers, but felt that the presence of other relatives was ‘unnecessary’ and that they ‘disturbed the children.’3 By the 1950s this attitude was extended to many of the parents themselves, although Sandra remembers a few visits from their father. Trish recalls feeling very confused throughout her time at the Home: ‘I didn’t the hell know what was going on and why I was there in the first place and what my parents had done that was so bad. You started to think that your parents did it because they didn’t want you.’ Sandra confirms that the staff went to great lengths to get across, almost on a daily basis, ‘that we were abandoned. We began to hate our parents because we thought they didn’t want us.’

  The opportunity the Home provided
for weekend visits with white families paved the way for their eventual release. Families wishing to sponsor weekend visits came into the cottages and looked the children over. Neither they nor the cottage ‘parents’ explained anything to the children about this process. The children were just told where they would be spending the weekend. Trish was sponsored by a wealthy family who, after several visits, became concerned about the ill-treatment she was receiving at the Home and arranged to foster her. A similar experience later happened to Sandra. The family which sponsored her on weekend visits became alarmed about the distress Sandra expressed when being driven back to Sister Kate’s. Both she and her older sister, Barbara, were fostered by a family of market gardeners. Fostering of children was encouraged; it was ‘a very white way’ to raise the children for eventual assimilation into society. It also helped relieve the government of the subsidies needed to run Sister Kate’s. Native Welfare contributed to the family for the upkeep of fostered children. In Trish’s case, in particular, her foster parents were thought to be ideal. The family was wealthy, and ‘this was seen as a positive because I would be given great opportunities.’

  However, the attitudes that underpinned the foster care of Aboriginal children in the 1950s and 60s meant that the so-called great opportunities often exposed children to a crippling experience. These attitudes were a refinement of racial theory which held that, under favourable circumstances, Aboriginal background would naturally give way to the superiority of European civilisation. Trish’s foster-parents were the very embodiment of this belief. Professional by background and by social habits, her foster-mother in particular, ‘honestly believed that she was doing me a great service in that she was going to train me to become a very well-adjusted young woman full of etiquette, full of very English behaviour.’

  Nothing was spared to effect the transition into someone able to succeed in a white world. She became a young lady attending the best of schools, supplemented by ballet and linguistics classes. Socialisation even extended to how to behave in the presence of Aboriginal people: ‘I can remember being told that if an Aboriginal person comes towards you when you are walking down the street you must cross the road. And I actually did it. I can’t believe that I did it, because I was so conditioned towards Aboriginal people as being very dirty and fearsome.’

  During the years that she was in foster care Herbert and Doreen continued to search for their children, although they had little way of knowing where they were. Herbert Hill continued to struggle to pay his maintenance debt and to seek the return of his children. His letters show how Aborigines were forced to account to the Child Welfare Department for every penny spent. By 1966 he had not seen his children for over nine years; the eldest two were approaching sixteen years of age, but he did not know where they were living. His son was still at Sister Kate’s. In May of that year Herbert wrote a letter to the Department, the tone of which gives some small insights into his feelings of being ground down by the years of financial impost and emotional loss. However, he never reneged on his commitment to his children. He began his letter:

  A note to say I am posting you part of the money, as I have been off work sick, and they [his firm] had a week’s holiday which I was not paid for as I was not here long enough. Could you tell me how I go about getting the money reduced, because I cannot afford it. [After expenses of rent, smokes and food] I am left with 12 pounds and I need 18 pound for underclothes and outer clothes and a little pocket money, so how can I get it reduced, to about 6-7 pounds a pay. I would like to know how to get my son home.

  This failure to take account of the human dimension of separating children from parents has left many with ongoing painful emotional struggles, the severity of which has its toll on their well-being. If the non-Aboriginal community is to develop a deeper understanding about the suffering endured by the stolen generations it must come to grips with the long-term impact inflicted by racial policies which removed children from their families, isolated them in institutions which used authoritarian methods to make them learn to be white, and fostered them to families where many suffered problems of identity and abuse. Sandra remembers that, while she came to love and respect her foster mother, she grew up feeling that she and her sister ‘were just the foster kids’. Her foster parents actively discouraged her from reading about Aborigines and at school she had to counter racially derogatory remarks by saying, ‘I’m not black, I’m white.’ As she explains: ‘It really hurt me when the other kids called me names. I kept telling them I was white because I wanted to be like them, accepted. I really started to believe that I was white. I resented my Aboriginality and spent much of my childhood trying to pretend it didn’t exist.’

  Those who administered this policy of removing children from their families gave little thought to subsequent reunions with families. For Sandra and Trish this has been a painful experience and has involved different levels of acceptance and understanding. By the time the first meeting was arranged, where both their parents were present, neither had seen each other for over twenty years. It was an occasion full of apprehension. As Sandra explains:

  Although I wanted to see my parents we had built up a lifetime of resentment for my mother. I questioned who this person was and even thought she might be an imposter. When I walked into this room and this lady looked exactly like my sister I knew she was our mum. We all talked for several hours about our lives and our families and, though I wanted to, I never asked Mum and Dad what happened to us and why. It was a bittersweet reunion. It was awkward and there was a level of detachment in me that was disconcerting but, it was and will always be, the most significant and the most cherished event in my entire adult life.

  For Trish reuniting with her parents has been harder. Even several years later, reunions with her mother were painful. On one occasion:

  I stayed inside almost like a child that was being terrorised, hiding behind the door. She got out of the car and I saw a very short, chunky little lady. I’m still hiding inside and Sandy says, ‘Come on out, and say hello to Mum,’ and I thought, ‘well I’m not going to call her Mum, she’s not my mother, what has she done for me.’ So I eventually went to the front porch and she walked up to me with open arms and as she embraced me it felt as if I had just fallen off a rock; no emotion, nothing, and my hands were flopping down by my thighs. I thought ‘why do you want to find me now, when I was stuck in that wretched place for so long as a little kid and you left me there.’ Mum kept her arm around me and walked inside with me. I was busting to ask her why she didn’t fight to keep us, why she didn’t run after the car, and why she didn’t come down and see us more regularly. But I couldn’t, and I never have asked her. She has just gone through so much herself and it wouldn’t be right.

  Meeting her father was also traumatic. On one occasion, he arrived from Bunbury with a suitcase wanting to stay but he left soon afterwards. The reconnection never took place and Trish did not see him again. He died in Collie a short time later of asbestosis. She now deeply regrets those hours that she did not spend with him. ‘He was just wonderful. He walked up the steps and said, “Oh, how are you love?”’ But Trish was overcome with panic. Succumbing to all the hurtful memories of the things Sister Kate’s told her about him she froze at the thought of what to say. The words would not come for all those questions she wanted to ask him. The sadness of such a moment is almost unimaginable. ‘I really believe that he was very hurt by it and I left very quickly because I did not want to face up to those things. I did not want to have feelings and be hurt again.’ The sense of loss is permanent. ‘I wanted so much to tell my father I loved him—but now it’s too late.’

  Stories such as this are still new to most Australians. They have a power that shocks and deeply unsettles those that hear them. This became clear to us when we first heard Trish Hill-Keddie give an outline of her childhood experiences at a seminar for social workers. The audience was stunned into respectful silence. It seemed possible to hear every
one in the room ask themselves the same question: how did this happen in Australia and within the lifetime of everyone present? This became our question too, and the motivation for this work. While it is difficult to speak of any individual being ‘representative’ of such a large group of adults removed as children, Trish Hill-Keddie and Sandra Hill’s story is certainly disturbingly common.

  1

  Fear Of The ‘Half-Caste’

  In 1937 delegates representing State and Commonwealth Aboriginal administrations met in Canberra to chart the future direction of Aboriginal affairs in Australia. It was the first national meeting of its kind, and described by delegates as ‘an epoch-making event.’ Significant political pressures had been behind its establishment. It was intended as a compromise to the calls for the Commonwealth to assume control of Aboriginal affairs from the States. Neither the States nor the Commonwealth supported such a transfer of power but agreement was reached on the desirability of holding periodic conferences.

  History has not recorded the full importance of this, the first such conference. Its principal resolution paved the way for the full-scale implementation of the policy of removing Aboriginal children from their families, schemes for which had been advocated since the turn of the century. This resolution set in train an Australia-wide government policy which lead to the removal of thousands of children like Trish Hill-Keddie, well into the 1960s.

  In a motion which, much later, would trouble the conscience of many Australians, delegates unanimously resolved that:

  the destiny of the natives of Aboriginal origin, but not of the full blood, lies in their ultimate absorption by the people of the Commonwealth, and it therefore recommends that all efforts be directed to this end.4