Our State of Mind

by Quentin Beresford

  Middleton foreshadowed one of two approaches: either, the introduction of amending legislation to give his Department power ‘to take children away in such circumstances and put them into institutions’, or the utilisation of existing legislation to do the same. In fact, Middleton would have been aware that the practice of removing children to missions for reasons of non-school attendance had been occurring in country districts since at least 1945.113 The Department’s determination to pursue this policy was cruelly ironic. Many, if not most, schools did not welcome Aboriginal children, but it was the parents and their children who were to be punished for their failure to attend. It was not until the early 1950s that full responsibility for the education of Aboriginal children was accepted by the Education Department. Even then community hostility remained. Alan Kickett clearly remembers, as a young Aborigine growing up at Roelands Mission, an incident at Bunbury High School in the mid 1950s. He described in interview the attitude of the school’s head master at the beginning of one year when the bus carrying the mission children arrived at the school. He tried to prevent the children from attending the school saying ‘the school was for whites only’.

  Similar discrimination faced Aborigines granted citizenship rights. In 1944, the State Labor Government succeeded in passing a Bill through Parliament allowing Aborigines to apply for citizenship. Previously, the rights extended to Aborigines had been limited to the granting of a certificate of exemption under the Native Administration Act; that is, they were no longer bound by the repressive provisions of the Act. Even this limited freedom carried strict racial guidelines. Aborigines granted exemption were barred from associating with other Aborigines who had not been given this status, including members of their own families.114

  The State Government was eventually forced to concede legal status to a limited number of Aborigines. To those living settled lives and holding down responsible jobs, as well as to the four hundred who had enlisted for war service, the Government was prepared to grant full citizenship. However, the privilege demanded a harsh concession from Aboriginal people. In granting citizenship, the State’s parliamentarians insisted it should contribute to the process of eradicating Aboriginal culture. To be granted citizenship an Aborigine needed to be able to satisfy a magistrate that ‘he has adopted the manners and habits of civilised life.’ A stringent test applied. An applicant needed to provide evidence that ‘he has ceased from observing his tribal habits for at least two years and has lived since in accordance with the standards of the white race.’115 This tight restriction, it was argued, would ‘open up more clearly the transitional path from native circumstances to white standards’.116 Or, as Hugh Leslie, Member of the House of Assembly explained: ‘The intention of the Bill is to cause a definite segregation of the native from his relatives and friends’ so that he will ‘be able to lead a life of white citizenship.’117 Thus, Aborigines in Western Australia were forced to choose their cultural identity: they could be Aborigines or citizens, they could not be both.

  This record of racism occurred in the face of Australia’s nominal commitment to the principles set out in the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights. In the mid 1950s, this had become ‘so often quoted but seldom practiced where natives are concerned.’118 So immersed were the vast bulk of Western Australians in racist attitudes towards Aborigines that, any attempt by the authorities to advance coexistence between the races was fiercely opposed. In 1949 Middleton worried that most residents ‘would never accept our policy of assimilation with any feeling other than hostility’. He was certain that ‘this tragic fact’ of ‘bitter class [sic] feeling is manifest … in even the high level of senior public servants, party members, local authorities etc.’119 Why, then, did the policy persist? Partly because it had become accepted at the State and Commonwealth level, but also because it was still being driven by the fears of elites. Those who thought through the issues as they perceived them remained convinced that, without assimilating the Aborigines, the State faced threats to its future welfare. In July 1950 Middleton went on ABC Radio and lashed out at community attitudes. He pinpointed the deeply ingrained public fear widespread during and after the war that Aborigines, because of the ill-treatment they had received, would link up with a potential Asian invader to Australia.

  It’s time that white people in the south realised the danger of their attitude towards natives. They despise them and refer to them as ‘niggers’. This sort of thing made the native very bitter … the attitude of white people … has turned the natives into a fifth column.120

  In playing upon public fears, Middleton hoped to shift public attitudes. Former Commissioner for Native Affairs in the 1960s, Frank Gare, explained in interview that: ‘People did not want to admit that Aborigines had been ill-treated but they knew they had. Anyone who was conscious that Aborigines had lost their country to these British invaders feared that they might welcome some other invader to fight off the colonisers.’

  Future social stability, then, depended on assimilating Aborigines into wider society, but on white terms, according to white values. The continuing removal of children was the key to this policy. According to white officials, they needed to be taken out of their poverty-stricken and culturally inferior Aboriginal environment and trained for their assimilated role in white society. They needed skills and, above all, attitudes to fit them for this role.

  Officials had a simple but clear-sighted view on the resocialising process for Aboriginal youth. To take their place in society they needed to be offered a strong dose of Christian religion. The prevailing view about Aborigines well into the twentieth century held that, as the Cyclopedia of Western Australia expressed it, they were ‘lTow in the moral scale’; their sense of ‘right and wrong is not so strongly developed’, with a conscience ‘that is little more than rudimentary’.121 ‘Half-castes’ presented a different version of the problem. Neville put the case as strongly as anybody. Detribalised Aborigines, he argued, had drifted entirely away from the spiritual beliefs of the ‘bush blacks’. Few had learned anything to replace these beliefs so that, collectively, they were ‘in great need of spiritual teaching.’ Neville lamented the failure of Aborigines to emulate the American negroes who lapped up an adopted religion like mother’s milk … and what spiritual relief they enjoyed.’122 For Aborigines, Christian ethics had to be grafted on.

  Resocialising the youth also necessitated the development of vocational skills. But here again racial thinking predominated. The widely held view was that Aborigines lacked intelligence for any occupation other than unskilled labour. ‘The mental characteristics of the native are comparatively of a low order’, asserted the Cyclopedia of Western Australia.123 This view took deep root in the public’s mind. The near universal opinion, born of ignorance or sheer duplicity about the impact of Aboriginal living conditions and the differing styles of Aboriginal learning, was that Aboriginal children were not capable of being educated beyond year 3 or 4 of primary school. ‘There are some who maintain’, Bateman argued ‘that the half-caste child has equal ability to the white but this is not borne out by the facts.’ What were these ‘facts’, according to Bateman? Principally that ‘every teacher I have discussed this matter with held the same view’. Teachers daily witnessed the sight of Aboriginal children ‘of 11 or 12 years of age in the 3rd or 4th standards side by side with white pupils eight or nine years old.’124

  According to this thinking, Aboriginal youth could only aspire to the lowest rungs of white society. ‘The view is widely held’, reflected the Under Secretary of the Premier’s Department in 1950, ‘that native youths in this State should be absorbed into rural industries because their intelligence quotients preclude consideration of any other occupation for them.’125 Education was therefore deemed relatively unimportant, as was induction into the skilled trades. However, the ultimate testimony to the racism behind the policy was acknowledged by the Commissioner of Native Affairs in his Annual Report for 1945. In a frank admi
ssion, clearly designed to placate community concerns about the policy of assimilation, he wrote: ‘So far as education is concerned, our aim is to educate the children of detribalised natives who live in or near the white centres of population, and our object, too, is to subsequently bring them into employment which will not bring them into economic or social conflict with the white community.’126 (Italics supplied) In other words, the official architects of removal intended to limit the degree of assimilation of Aboriginal children in order to prevent them competing with whites for skilled jobs.

  This explains much about the subsequent development of the policy, and why successive governments ignored key parts of the Bateman Report. In articulating his view for post-war assimilation, Bateman tried to set high standards for government. For assimilation to work, he reasoned, missions would not only have to improve the effectiveness of their operations, but government must also lay down a ‘positive policy’ to oversee their work. Bateman believed evangelism must go hand in hand with practical training and every effort had to be made to ensure Aboriginal youth were given full opportunity ‘to play their full part in the uplifting of the native race.’ Racially inspired his vision may have been, but it was not to be had on the cheap.

  Mission workers should be carefully chosen and the Superintendent if possible should have anthropological training. Teachers including educational, technical and agricultural, nurses, etc., should be specialists and not as at present obtains in some instances persons of poor capacity who have heard the call and find something agreeable to them in mission activity.127

  Bateman’s call for a purposeful direction for assimilation was not heeded, with tragic consequences for children in missions and foster homes. This failure to fully implement assimilation, however undesirable it may have been, exposes the motive of the policy-makers. Assimilation was not intended, as is often claimed today, to be ‘in the best interests of the children.’ Rather, it was pursued largely as a convenient cover to continue with pre-existing policies aimed at the social and economic marginalisation of Aborigines. Removal and institutionalisation of children denied them their culture, as did the efforts to prevent contact with their families. Moreover, the lack of provision of adequate education and training ensured most would pose no future threat to white interests. If the ‘best interests’ of these children were uppermost in the minds of policy-makers, Bateman’s recommendations on the quality of care needed for them would have been followed through in tangible ways. It was not.

  Lack of political interest in the provision of care for these children did not stop the presentation of this scheme as a humanitarian mission; one designed to rescue Aboriginal children. Missionaries, especially, were prone to this justification. R Mitchell, from the United Aborigines’ Mission at Kellerberrin, articulated how the act of removal could be justified as a higher moral good. ‘Where parents fail to measure up,’ he argued, ‘then they should be compelled to place their children in the care of Missions, always bearing in mind that the object is not to destroy the parents’ affection for the child, but for the necessary welfare of the child itself; a system such as this would be just and fair to everybody, one to which no one could raise any objection.’128

  The use of the court system to achieve these ends raises some of the most troubling issues about the entire process. There is great uncertainty as to when the practice of indiscriminate rounding up of Aboriginal children actually ended and the practice of charging the children with neglect in a Children’s Court began. Ostensibly, S G Middleton was appointed by the State Government to implement the Bateman Report. However, by this time the practice of removing children had become deeply entrenched within the Native Affairs Department and he encountered fierce opposition in his attempt to introduce a package of sweeping reforms to the structure and operations of the Department.129

  In any event, the new legalism of using the courts for the removal of children amounted to another manifestation of injustice for Aboriginal families. Just as the 1936 Act had done, the mobilisation of child welfare legislation to charge children with being neglected gave legal authority to the practice, an authority which in most cases it did not warrant. The practice of charging children with neglect was a stipulation of the 1947 Child Welfare Act and was applied to all children. As one parliamentarian explained during debate on the measure: ‘we are trying to make a charge that a child is neglected by its parents and is destitute and a second charge that being a neglected child it is definitely guilty of an offence.’130 This was the mechanism chosen to give the State power to overcome the problems associated with abandoned children and to control children’s subsequent living arrangements. Although applying equally to Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal children, the former were particularly vulnerable to its application. In fact, there are a number of grounds upon which most of the children taken from their families after 1948 could be regarded in the same category of ‘stolen’ as those children taken before this time.

  Firstly, removing Aboriginal children because they were neglected was a convenient means to ignore the deeper issues of disadvantage among Aborigines, and especially those living in or close to urbanised areas. There is no doubt many Aboriginal children were materially deprived and that some may have been raised in families which were dysfunctional in some way. Frank Gare’s recollection of one case in the early 1960s is a reminder of the difficult situation facing authorities.

  I remember a case in Geraldton in which a couple—who were living in town—but who were fond of drinking put a child to bed one night and rolled on top of the baby, smothering it. That was a case where we should have acted and saved that child’s life. If we had acted and taken that child she would now be in her late 30s and, in all likelihood, complaining about being one of the stolen children.

  The real issue, however, is not how many cases of this type there were but whether it was a just policy to remove Aboriginal children, considering their institutionalised disadvantage and that little or nothing was being done to prevent the underlying circumstances leading to their removal. In 1967 the Commissioner for Native Affairs in his annual report belatedly acknowledged this reality. ‘The unfortunate environment’, he wrote, ‘in which so many have to live, makes nearly all of them more prone to child welfare problems than the other sections of the community.’ In Port Hedland, the Commissioner explained how disadvantage led to an upward rise in the number of children brought before the court for neglect. Families had been moving from the southern regions of the State in search of employment but ‘they find themselves without homes and the wherewithal to support a family, thus leading to the neglect of their children.’ In cases such as this, there is no indication parents were inadequate; they were simply denied the means to meet the needs of their children. Thus, the Child Welfare law was used to legitimise the broader failure of government policy.

  In the post-war era, the removal of Aboriginal children continued to occur in a discriminatory fashion. While most governments throughout Australia created a distinct legal framework for the welfare of white children, generally through the Child Welfare Act, welfare provided to Aboriginal children was not only different but was subsumed under Aboriginal-specific legislation. Thus, in Western Australia a law for the welfare of children was enacted in 1907, however it would be another four decades before Aboriginal children became a legitimate concern of the Child Welfare Department. Even then, Aboriginal children continued to be treated first under the ‘native’ welfare legal regime, in preference to general child welfare provisions. This situation remained until the early 1970s.

  At the ground level, assimilation perpetuated a value system of discrimination among officials charged with its implementation. According to a former employee of the Child Welfare Department, the Native Welfare Department had established a mentality towards Aboriginal people based around twin principles; a disregard of the Aboriginal family as an institution, and the need to have Aboriginal children in institutions. This manife
sted in a practice of threatening some parents with the Child Welfare Act, thereby obtaining their consent under pressure to have their children placed in institutions. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s most continued to be sent to missions where they were subjected to the practices of stripping them of their cultural background and limiting, or denying, contact with parents.

  Child welfare legislation was not applied impartially. The general child welfare law of most Australian states required that a child be found to be ‘neglected’, ‘destitute’ or ‘uncontrollable’ before he or she could be removed from their parents. The expectation that such requirement would apply equally to all children was not borne out in practice. As the Human Rights Inquiry found, these terms ‘were applied by courts much more readily to indigenous children than non-indigenous children as the definitions and interpretations of those terms assumed a non-indigenous model of child-rearing and regarded poverty as synonymous with neglect.’131

  There are additional concerns about the nature of the court process. The reliance on evidence obtained from police and departmental officers to secure convictions is wide open to potential miscarriages of justice and especially in light of the cross-cultural issues involved in such complex legal proceedings. Even Bateman acknowledged the hostility police displayed to Aborigines. He went further, claiming their role as agents of the Department of Native Affairs was an undesirable one. Aboriginal parents were nominally given the right to attend court hearings but they were not supplied with legal counsel.

  Significant community pressure throughout the 1950s and 1960s to have children removed was brought to bear directly and indirectly upon the magistracy. According to a former employee of the Child Welfare Department, sections of the business community disliked the presence of Aboriginal children around commercial areas and initiated contact with the Department to have certain children removed. Magistrates did not always scrutinise the reasons behind these removals.