In both cases government agencies were neither trained nor resourced to adequately fulfil their duty of care. This, of course, exposes the sham of the State’s concern for Aboriginal children. Many were sent to places where they were infinitely worse off in a material and emotional sense than the homes from which they were taken.
4
Official Negligence
In February 1969 the Western Australian Minister for Child Welfare, L A Logan, received a letter from Mrs Pamela Morris of Gooseberry Hill outlining a series of startling allegations about the treatment of Aboriginal boys at the New Norcia mission, north of Perth. On three occasions Mrs Morris had sponsored holiday stayovers for boys from the mission, one of whom was with her family for ten weeks. From the things the boys told her, and from what she had observed, she felt compelled to ‘express my deep concern for these boys’ to someone in authority. Immediate issues such as inadequate food and clothing worried her as did their poor state of general health. However, the lack of supervision exercised by the Child Welfare Department was one of her more pressing concerns. Mrs Morris told the Minister the Department had insisted she gain prior approval for the boys to stay for the holidays. She was visited by an officer from the Department. However this officer had admitted to her that she was one of the few prospective families ever visited for inspection. The consequences of this worried her. As she told the Minister, most of the children from New Norcia ‘would be going to homes which would not be approved.’ While the boys were in the care of her family ‘no contact was made [by the Department] with them. Had the boys been miserably unhappy and ill-treated, none would have known.’
Mrs Morris also expressed her fears about the future prospects for these boys. They had no house-mother or matron—‘as recommended by child psychologists’—and little meaningful contact with the two Brothers who were ‘fully occupied with administration and discipline’. Consequently, the boys’ socialisation had been stunted: ‘when they first came to us [they] were quite unable to converse with adults.’ Their educational development was similarly retarded. One of the boys, who was ‘reasonably bright’ was not able to tell her how well he had done at school because he had not received any formal assessment that year. Although twelve years of age he was still in grade four and he did not think he would be progressing beyond the end of primary school. Otherwise, he received no instruction ‘in any of the things which could be useful to him’, such as carpentry, car or tractor maintenance, or farming which, Mrs Morris told the Minister, surely ‘precludes him from anything but a labouring position.’144 None of this, she concluded, would be tolerated in an orphanage for white children.
The Minister duly replied to her concerns and allegations. However, instead of assuring Mrs Morris he would investigate and act upon these, he sought to excuse the government from any direct responsibility for the operation of the mission. ‘The task of changing people’s ideas toward the best forms of child care, is unfortunately, a slow process, and we all from time to time chafe under the irritations of limited finance and the lack of any other quicker alternative.’145
This exchange is significant. The problems Mrs Morris identified were far from isolated ones and the Minister’s lame excuses were made in full knowledge of a recent departmental investigation into New Norcia and other missions. For several years, officers from both the Child and Native Welfare Departments had been investigating aspects of abuse and neglect of mission children. However, no systematic action was taken and none of this investigative activity reached the public. Even if it had, there is no certainty public clamour would have forced government to take the appropriate action—force the closure of missions by removing government subsidies given to them for looking after Aboriginal children made wards of the State. Consequently, only a few members of the public, such as Mrs Morris, who undertook to look after these children in the holidays, knew the full, and shocking, picture of life inside an isolated and secluded mission.
Long before L A Logan brushed aside the concerns of Mrs Morris, government in Western Australia had shown its indifference to opposition voiced against its policy of assimilating Aboriginal children through their forced separation from parents. Political opposition to the policy sprang up unexpectedly in 1956 when a Select Committee of Parliament was established to inquire into the conditions of Aborigines in the Laverton-Warburton range. Extraordinary circumstances surrounded the establishment of this inquiry. The lifestyle of the still mainly traditional Aborigines in the area, many of whom had little prior contact with white civilisation, was being disrupted in a startling way. British nuclear testing was taking place in the area at the Maralinga site. This meant some contact was necessary to warn Aborigines in the area not to go east of the Warburton Mission, into the danger zone. While some ignored the warning, others were encouraged to ‘hang around’ the Warburton Mission.146 These Aborigines had ‘no hope of work’ and police barred them from coming into the small towns in the area without police permission. Another impact of white civilisation also worried some officials. The Agricultural Department had been baiting dingoes from aircraft. Aboriginal children especially were at risk from poisoning because they hunted the goannas which were known to eat the fatty meat baits dropped from aircraft around the desert waterholes.
Serious as these risks were to Aborigines, the Member for South Perth, Mr Grayden, who moved the motion to establish the Committee, raised a dramatic allegation which, he believed, warranted investigation:
The Native Welfare Department has in hand plans to remove all the children from the Warburton Range area, without the consent of parents, and to take them 400 miles away across an area most of which is barren, waterless country, to Cosmo Newberry, the parents being left in the ranges.147
According to Grayden, the Department believed the move would assist their employment opportunities, and hence ‘their integration into the Australian way of life’ as the Warburton Mission was unable to find them work. It was the intention of the Department ‘to make a clean sweep’ and compel children of school age to go to the Cosmo-Newberry Mission, several hundred miles across the desert to the west of Warburton, where a program of part-time employment on the mission was offered. There was no intention to take the parents because no facilities were provided for them there. However, Grayden did not believe ‘for one minute’ that when these children were educated they would be able to find work in the Laverton area. However, under the Native Welfare Act, the Commissioner still retained powers to effect such a move. These children, in Grayden’s words, ‘were being sent into exile’. Even before Grayden began his work of chairing the Committee he was convinced the children’s rights were being violated.
What are the reactions of these children going to be when they are taken away from their parents, and sent 400 miles away from them until they reach the age of 21 years of age, when they will be required to work on stations in the vicinity? In other words they will not see their parents again unless they are prepared to walk 400 miles back to the [Laverton] mission. This enforced separation of the children from their parents is contrary to the universal declaration of human rights which has been agreed to by the United Nations Council, and of which Australia is a signatory.148
This was a profound speech. It was likely that it was the first time any Western Australian parliamentarian had directly invoked the United Nations Declaration against the practice of removing children from their families. Furthermore, Grayden had indicated that removal would be subject to review by his Committee at least in its application in the Warburton area. However, once the Committee got down to work in earnest, one thing became apparent—the removal of children from their families was a more complex business than has been thought to be the case. By the time children were school-age, the mission employed highly questionable practices to separate them from their parents.
Missions such as Warburton received children to feed and educate ostensibly with the consent of their parents. The Committee
was the first official body to raise doubts about the ethics of this practice. ‘It is unlikely that the natives would realise the full import of such consent on their part’, the report noted.149 No officers within the Department of Native Affairs were familiar with the language of the area and only one of the missionaries was in any way familiar with it. Such barriers meant that obtaining consent was extremely difficult ‘if we are to be assured that the parent in giving consent has a full realisation of all the implications involved.’ However, this was only one of the reasons which made ‘the separation of young children from their parents unthinkable from a humane point of view.’
The Committee detailed the circumstances which had led to the removal of children throughout the State. Aboriginal parents placed their children in the Warburton Mission ‘almost solely’ because of the lack of adequate food on the reserve. ‘To take children away from their parents in such circumstances’, warned committee members, ‘and abandon the parents to fend for themselves savours a form of duress.’ The offer of gifts of blankets, clothing and food often enticed parents to place their children in the mission. This was an unethical practice, the Committee argued:
it must be taken into consideration that the natives are living in one of the most arid areas in the world and are eking out an existence where even birds and animals find it difficult to survive. No responsibility is taken for the pre-school age children by the Native Welfare Department and to expect native mothers to bear and raise these children and be entirely responsible for them under those conditions, only to have them taken away at school age … to an area where in normal circumstances they could never hope to visit, would in effect mean that in many cases the parent would never see the child again, which would be an unpardonable violation of human rights.150
While these comments refer specifically to the activities of Warburton Mission, those involved in implementing the policy of removal would have been only too aware of their wider application across the State. In the mid 1950s, the Mission Superintendent at Wandering, Father Wellems, was able to keep numbers at his mission topped up by making ‘trips into the surrounding districts’ where he ‘was able to persuade native parents of the benefits of a mission education and training for their children.’ This practice was openly acknowledged in the Department of Native Affairs Annual Report,151 and grave doubts must surround the extent to which parents gave their informed consent. In other cases, children were regularly placed in missions at great distance from their homes which effectively meant that their parents could not see them again.
The Committee’s report contained a striking challenge to hardened assimilationists. The Committee wrote of the bonds that existed between mothers and their children. It argued that nature had made the maternal bond even stronger for Aborigines than existed between white women and their children. The sparseness of the environment compelled Aboriginal women to suckle their children to at least three, and sometimes to six, years of age.
This must assist in creating an even stronger bond of affection between parent and child than would apply in the case of whites where the child is bottle-fed or weaned at the age of nine months or so. In addition, the native woman is with her child constantly until it is well beyond school age. She carries the child as an infant wherever she goes when travelling or fossicking for food and later the child is with her constantly in her daily pursuits. This aspect must assist in strengthening the intimate relationship between the parent and the child. It may also be worthwhile pointing out that natives display a great deal of affection towards their children, seldom chastising them. Striking a child is extremely rare, notwithstanding this the children appear to be extremely well-behaved and unspoilt.
However bleak separation was for the parents, the Committee was in no doubt that, for the children, it ‘would be intolerable’. Children coming in from outlying parts of the region could only speak a smattering of English and would not have absorbed anything of western life. The Committee expressed its grave worry that such children ‘would be lost souls indeed’. They would be ‘perplexed in the extreme’ and ‘without a single stabilising influence on which to orient themselves to the new way of life so inhumanely thrust upon them.’152 No one had been prepared to so openly champion the virtues of Aboriginal parenting from such a humane point of view.
The significance of this report cannot be overstated. In a few short pages a Committee of Parliament totally condemned as immoral and inhumane the central plank of assimilation. While its investigations had been limited to Warburton, its implications straddled the practice of removing children everywhere. It had demolished as merely a pretext the justification used to remove these children; that their families were poor or their parents’ culture was inferior. Moreover, it foreshadowed problems in the years ahead when society would have to face the full enormity of the policy’s misguided intent. Yet, children continued to be removed.
Political response to the Report was characteristically indifferent. It was tabled in Parliament at 3 am when Members were ‘anxious to get home.’153 Behind the scenes a bureaucratic campaign was waged to undermine the Report’s credibility. In October 1956, Grayden told the House of Assembly that the Commissioner of Native Welfare had been rubbishing the Committee’s Report to the Minister by saying it had ‘grossly exaggerated’ the situation in Warburton and its recommendations ‘were not of any practical value.’154 Thus, an opportunity was passed over to scrap the policy of removing Aboriginal children from their families. Racial attitudes were still too firmly entrenched.
Barely two years later another parliamentary committee on Aboriginal affairs raised concerns about the removal of children from their families and again Grayden took a leading role in its establishment.155 The 1958 Report of the Special Committee on Native Matters, appointed by the Legislative Assembly, consisted of an influential group of members. It was chaired by F E Gare, from the Department of Native Welfare and had one member each drawn from the Health and Education departments, the Native Welfare Council and the Labor Party. The establishment of this Committee signified recognition that government policy on Aboriginal affairs, over a wide range of issues, was floundering. As the Committee expressed the problem facing it: ‘Despite all past efforts to solve it, the “native” problem remains today the State’s most pressing social challenge.’156 The Committee was also established in the wake of well-founded claims, made in the previous year, that Aborigines in the remote Warburton area were literally starving because of bad seasons and the lack of government provision. According to Grayden, in Laverton, ‘we have the spectacle of children fossicking in dust bins behind the Laverton Hotel in the hope of finding a few crusts.’157 Aborigines had few advocates in Parliament but Grayden pressed the issues with considerable force. He argued that Aborigines in Western Australia were infinitely worse off than those in the Northern Territory, where the Commonwealth Government exercised financial responsibility. He pressed the Minister for figures which, when provided, showed that in the Northern Territory £56 was spent per head on Aborigines, while in Western Australia the sum was little more than £21.
It was Grayden’s belief that membership of the Committee should be drawn from relevant Government departments, a decision which shaped the focus of the inquiry. A Committee composed largely of public servants was always going to feel compelled to conform to government. Thus, the prevalence of old, deeply rooted stereotypes about irremediable ‘half-castes’ easily convinced the Committee to reaffirm the importance of assimilation. This, of course, meant Aborigines had to be ‘acceptable to white society’ and ‘undergo a complete transformation’ in their ‘whole outlook on life’;158 something best achieved by exposing them to the influences of white society: ‘There is little doubt that a native child brought up in a white home from birth with the same rights and opportunities as the white child would in a single generation be white in all but colour’.159 To do this, however, required children to ‘so absorb our Western approach that
the inner core and not merely the external customs will change’.160
However, as the Committee was forced to acknowledge, the issue was no longer quite so straightforward. It had little choice but to reject the advice of those who suggested the process of assimilation should be expedited by removing all Aboriginal children from an early age and never letting them return home. New thinking on child welfare promoted by academic experts had begun to alter views about the underlying needs of children. The Committee acknowledged, in particular, the work of Dr John Bowlby in guiding its deliberations. Bowlby’s work had revolutionised thinking about child welfare in the early 1950s by articulating the concept of ‘maternal attachment’ to explain the way in which children form deep and affectionate relationships with their mothers. Bowlby drew attention to the dangers of maternal deprivation in orphanages and asylums. In an emphatic acknowledgement of Bowlby’s works, the Committee commented that it ‘indicates conclusively that the removal of a child from his mother at an early age can cause serious psychological and mental disturbances.’161 This recognition by the Committee deserves particular emphasis. It shows that the most senior officials implementing the policy of removing children were aware this practice damaged children. However, because of their commitment to the objectives of assimilation, they could not bring themselves to abandon it entirely. The result was a classic bureaucratic compromise. Henceforth, they recommended, no child should be taken from its parents before the age of six years. Unfortunately, no explanation was forthcoming as to why, when a child reached this age, he or she was automatically immune to the damage Bowlby had described.
Our State of Mind Page 11