Our State of Mind

by Quentin Beresford

  It seems apparent with these people of European–Aboriginal origin that like breeds like—two half-bloods will produce children of similar blood and not of quarter blood as many people think—and therefore it requires the admixture of further white blood to alter the ratio and produce the quadroon … the more they mix with us the more like us they become, and the less likelihood of reversion to the aboriginal type.51

  For Neville, ‘the question of marriage’ was ‘of paramount importance.’ As Commissioner for Native Affairs he had the power to dictate his vision for genetic extermination. Time and again, he explained to readers of Australia’s Coloured Minority, he was asked by white men, wishing to marry a ‘coloured’ girl, whether their children would be black. As the law imposed upon him the responsibility ‘of approving or objecting to the proposed marriage’, his answer was vital. Marriages between women of European-Aboriginal descent were clearly approved because: ‘the children would be lighter than the mother, and if they later married whites and had children these would be lighter still, and that in the third or fourth generation no sign of native origin whatever would be apparent.’

  These ideas had the status of official policy in Western Australia by the mid 1930s. Moseley, in his 1935 report to government, provides telling confirmation: ‘If this scheme of breeding out the colour is really effective, and if these people [Aborigines] assist in the policy by choosing the appropriate partners, well and good.’52 Neville advocated the key parts of this long-range plan to the 1937 Conference, but not in all their lurid details. It is not clear from the minutes of the Conference the extent to which other delegates shared his belief in breeding out Aboriginality through intermarriage. The Queensland delegate, for example, reiterated the determination with which his State ‘rigidly restricted’ marriage between whites and blacks, giving every encouragement ‘to marriage of cross breed aborigines amongst their own race.’53 Therefore, delegates could read into absorption one of two meanings: that Aboriginal children should be taken from their parents and raised as whites to mix as non-Aborigines in the general community; or, the term could be used as Neville intended it: children should be removed from their parents and brought up as whites for release into the general community where they would be encouraged to marry whites and, through procreation, further weaken the genetic strain of Aboriginality. Neville’s was by far the more controversial of the two interpretations but both were outcomes of widely held racial beliefs and both involved draconian intervention to break up Aboriginal families. Professor Cleland seemed apprised of the full implications of Neville’s motion for absorption:

  there can only be one satisfactory solution to the half-caste problem, and that is the ultimate absorption of these persons into the white population. I think that this will not necessarily lead in any way to deterioration of type, inasmuch as racial intermixtures seem, in most cases to lead to increased virility.

  Neville never found cause to retreat from his views about race. He continued to head the Department of Native Affairs until his retirement in 1940. Throughout this time he stuck rigidly to his plan. A telling correspondence in 1939 between Neville and the Director of Gnowangerup Mission, H W Wright, shows the extent of his commitment. Wright wrote to Neville questioning his policy:

  In reference to the light coloured children which you saw here, these are all offsprings of fair and legally married parents and if these folk are keen on sending their children to school and are trying to live as independent, law abiding citizens, I felt it would be unwise to break up their families.54

  Wright was one of very few whites—missionaries, departmental officials, or ordinary members of the public—to uphold the rights of Aboriginal families. Not surprisingly, it failed to move Neville who replied:

  their parents may be married, but my impression was that some of the children were the offspring of white fathers. Even if the children belong to legally married parents, I feel that it would be wrong to allow light-coloured children to grow up as white natives. They must be given an opportunity in life … I have no wish to break up families, but other aspects must be considered besides sentiment. We must go on weeding out the light-coloured children.55

  Neville took great satisfaction in his powers under the 1936 Native Administration Act to personally remove children from their parents and in watching them fulfil his expectations for them. He was a virtual dictator over Aborigines. He told readers in his 1947 book that many ‘half-caste’ young women with children fathered by white men came to see him ‘to discuss the disposal of their children.’ Neville wasted no time in telling these mothers the fate of their children: ‘I explained to them that separation was inevitable for their children’s sake.’ He convinced himself that memories of their mothers ‘faded quickly from their minds.’ He kept a watchful eye on these children. They attended school and mixed as white children. However they would never be able to meet their real parents later in life because, by this time, ‘both would realise the position sufficiently well to avoid any adverse consequences from it.’ This was as close as Neville could bring himself to acknowledging that forced removal carried long-term emotional damage. In his mind, the national need was more pressing. As he reminded readers in Australia’s Coloured Minority, ‘Should there pass another fifty years of social ostracism for these people, our descendants will see a new race evolve and one they may well blame us for bequeathing them.’56

  Neville left his legacy of racial practices firmly embedded within the Department of Native Affairs. In 1943 his successor, F I Bray, wrote to the Victorian Aboriginal Group outlining the Department’s racial guidelines for removing children from their families:

  Although some half-castes are tribal in character, we usually endeavour to treat them as non-tribal, and when we discover a half-caste who is the offspring of a full-blood mother, or a quarter caste child who is the off-spring of a half-caste mother, we usually segregate them into native institutions or missions.57

  Issues of race and colour continued to dominate departmental policy as the following letter from Commissioner Bray to a government officer stationed in the North-West clearly indicates. He began by expressing his refusal to the request from one Aboriginal man for the release of his son from Sister Kate’s:

  James is a near white boy. He is being reared as a white boy at Sister Kate’s Home, and in due course he will be placed out in employment, and will live as a white person. It would be detrimental to his future welfare to permit him to return to his mother who lives in association with natives. If this were agreed to it would undo all the good work in rearing James to white standard.58

  The passage of the 1936 Native Administration Act in a country without a Bill of Rights which might have offered some protection to the minority Aboriginal population, conferred the aura of legality around the policy of removing Aboriginal children from their families. The use of the law in this way lasted until the early 1950s when a system of removing Aboriginal children under the Child Welfare Act was instituted. Thus, the period between 1936 and 1950 represented unchecked power to dismantle Aboriginal family life. The law was clearly discriminatory because it did not apply equally to everyone. It was specific to one race only. The extent of this discrimination is revealed when the practice of removing Aboriginal children is contrasted with practices relating to white children who were the responsibility of the Child Welfare Department. The Child Welfare Department’s 1946 Annual Report loudly proclaimed the sensitivity of its policy towards children who came under its notice. ‘The Departmental officers’, it explained, ‘have been able to effect improvements in the best interests of the children, without removal. Every effort is made to prevent broken homes and to preserve the parental tie.’ Yet, the breaking up of Aboriginal homes was instituted by law.

  Further, the 1936 Act contravened the legally accepted notion of due process in public administration. Victims of State policies have the right to be heard, to be represented and to appeal decisions
. Aborigines were conferred with no such rights under the 1936 Act. This opened the way to the practice of the indiscriminate rounding up of children which forms the tragic central theme of many Aborigines’ personal testimonies. A 1946 journal entry from the work diary of a Department of Native Affairs Inspector shows this process of indiscriminate removal at work:

  Proceeded to Mount Wellard and picked up a quadroon girl Amy, daughter of half-caste … and unknown white man and her brother or half brother, Fred. Amy is aged about 15 or 16 years and Fred about 11 years. The former definitely quadroon and the latter doubtful, might be half caste. Great difficulty was experienced in removing these children and it was only through the firmness of Sergt. McGeay that it was possible and even then the mother had to be taken also to accompany them to Roeburne.59

  This was not an isolated incident. Indiscriminate removal of children is recalled by Frank Gare who began his career in the Department of Native Affairs in 1946. He explained in an interview:

  Police would go around on their patrols and go to a bush camp and find two or three lighter looking children … they just used to go and pick them up. When I went up to Carnarvon in 1949 I read a police manual which told police officers what to do. In a section under natives it said that if a police officer finds light caste children in a native camp they are to pick them up and send them to the nearest mission or, failing that, down to Sister Kate’s in Perth. They just picked them up and took them away. It was all done at the request of Neville to the Police Department.

  These acts contravene international law, including the 1946 United Nations declaration against genocide and the 1948 Declaration on Human Rights. The specifics of these acts, as they applied to the practice of removing Aboriginal children from their families, is discussed in chapter eight.

  However, issues of international illegality did not appear to concern those who devised and implemented the policy of removal. The 1930s were the high point of the racial thinking which had seeped into mainstream attitudes. Similar racially inspired schemes were being implemented in other parts of the colonial world. In Canada, the 1930s witnessed a high point in the expansion of the residential school system, whereby native children from across the country were forcibly removed from their communities and placed in schools to be educated in white civilisation. They were to be exposed to a ‘curriculum aimed at radical cultural change … the “savage” child would surely be remade into the “civilised adult”.’ This scheme, too, was motivated by the ultimate ideal to ‘kill the Indian in the child’ so that ‘all the Indian there is in the race should be dead.’60

  The 1930s also witnessed the first awful stirrings of Nazi racial policies against the Jews and the Gypsies. The parallels between these groups and Aborigines cannot be ignored even though the ghastly death camps of the Holocaust have tended to mask them. Both schemes were the product of racial ideas which justified the division of humanity into ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ racial groups; a division which was used to justify schemes to inflict suffering on these so-called ‘inferior’ groups.

  While few public objections were raised against proposals to remove Aboriginal children and institutionalise them, agreement was not unanimous. When the 1936 Native Administration Bill was discussed in the House of Assembly, A A Coverley, Member for Kimberly and a long-time critic of Neville in Parliament, seized on the expanded powers it gave the Commissioner to criticise the injustices the measure would inflict on Aboriginal parents. These people, he said,

  should be allowed to see [their children] and talk with them and go back [to their communities] and say how well they are cared for. That would do something good and ease the minds of the aboriginal people who have to lose their half-caste children. These people do not understand. They have not any idea where their children are taken and whether they are dead or alive.61

  Over the next three decades, isolated voices were raised against this scheme by some influential people, including several parliamentarians. However, this alternative voice was never sufficiently strong to dent the prevailing view.

  Planners behind the policy—such as Neville and Sister Kate—have left to contemporary society the problem of interpreting their work. Were they, as many people seem to think, merely well-meaning individuals who should not be judged by today’s standards? From their own perspective they had perceived a pressing social problem, defined it by the values of their own day, and resolved to find a solution. In adopting absorption, they were applying the thinking about race that had seeped into the Western conscience. By this reasoning, the early architects of Australia’s racial policies have received the lesser judgement of misguided philanthropists. However, it should never be forgotten that, in its initial form, Neville’s was a plan to annihilate a race by planned, genetic extinction. This was racial thinking at its most gruesome. When can this ever be excused?

  2

  Creating The Poverty Of Aboriginal Children

  Following the end of the Second World War, important changes occurred to the policy of removing Aboriginal children from their families. International forces compelled government officials to re-shape the reasoning behind its continuation. The defeat of the Nazis and the world-wide denunciation of their horrific crimes against humanity forced politicians and scientists to publicly distance themselves from a belief in racial policies. As one recent historian of racism has commented, ‘after the death camps and the Holocaust it became nigh on impossible openly to espouse belief in racial superiority’.62 The Western Australian Commissioner of Native Affairs in his Annual Report for 1945 conceded that ‘today it is considered that any human being is entitled to consideration irrespective of the colour of his skin’.63

  Thus, white Australians’ vision for ‘breeding out’ Aborigines had to be rethought. The official policy now became known as assimilation. To white elites this meant ‘educating and training the natives in order to fit them into our own economic and social life.’64 The situation for Aboriginal children hardly changed. A central plank of assimilation remained the removal of children from their families and their placement in missions and foster homes. Here it was expected they would be fitted into the lower end of the white social structure ‘under conditions similar to our own’. In other words, they were no longer to live as Aborigines.65 The planning behind this cultural transformation continued to be motivated more by fear of Aborigines than by any genuine humanitarian concern for the children.

  The adoption of assimilation also brought changes to the means by which children were removed. The old practice of indiscriminate rounding up had become unacceptable. The broader changes in racial thinking made it necessary to find ‘non-racial’ justifications and ‘legal’ mechanisms for the practice to continue. Thus, the unacceptable living standards of Aboriginal families was emphasised. Henceforth, Aboriginal parents would be punished with the forced removal of their children for failing to rear them according to white standards. The Commissioner, in his 1945 Annual Report, added an important qualifier to the new standard of racial tolerance: acceptance of an Aborigine depended upon their preparedness ‘to live under civilised conditions’.66 The Department of Native Affairs together with the Child Welfare Department became the arbiters of the new standards within the judicial framework of the Children’s Court. However, the attitudes behind assimilation and the use of the courts to decide the fate of Aboriginal children opened up a number of troubling issues.

  In the post-war era when these changes were being planned, Aborigines were still widely regarded as racially inferior and a potential threat to social stability. Removing them, for whatever reasons, carried the benefit of stripping away their culture. In the immediate post-war period, few questioned whether Aborigines desired to be offered this opportunity to become like whites. In 1957 social activist and progressive, Jessie Street, raised one of the few voices of dissent against this racial planning. After an exhaustive tour of Aboriginal settlements around Australia she wrote a report in wh
ich she questioned the appropriateness of assimilation on cultural grounds. ‘Is there any evidence at the present time’, she asked, ‘that Aborigines, with very few exceptions, wish to live as whites?’ She worried about the loss of Aboriginal culture and especially their communal way of life which, she argued, was incompatible with the competitive individualism of white society. Moreover, the Aboriginal concept of ‘success’ was, she felt, too different and unlikely to be valued: ‘Among the aborigines the material success of the individual means more of everything for the tribal community … but it is regarded by many uninformed whites as further evidence of the lack of a sense of responsibility on the part of blacks instead of evidence of their innate generosity.’67

  Jessie Street’s comments exposed the extent of the cultural change which assimilation sought to impose on the Aboriginal population. Children were to bear the brunt of this cultural transformation, the need for which continued to be justified in racial terms. Those living in the southern part of the State, the ‘half-castes’ as contemporaries categorised them, remained the key target group. Contemporaries continued to worry that the children would pick up the cultural values of their black parents if they remained with them. As Neville had recognised, ‘Seldom were the lighter coloured children treated other than as natives.’68

  Assimilation, as it came to be understood in the post-war years, was first detailed in the 1948 parliamentary Report on Survey of Native Affairs, conducted by Western Australian magistrate, F E A Bateman. His report showed how the new policy was driven by long-standing racial attitudes and fears. Most of Bateman’s views, and those of others who supported them, were a reworking of pre-war attitudes and prejudices towards Aborigines. However, it is important to see them in their new context to emphasise the point that the foundations of assimilation were laid in racial theory.