It was becoming more difficult to sustain uncritically the assimilationist line. The Committee found cause for criticism in the work of missions. In a thinly veiled attack on their methods, the Committee wrote:
A feature frequently stressed was the necessity for developing in the child removed from his parents at an early age a sense of security—a feeling of acceptance. It was pointed out that too often those who devote their lives to his interests develop an authoritarian approach, denouncing native culture and failing to understand the resulting reactions. In consequence the child’s dignity and pride in his cultural background are shattered and he is left in a state of bewilderment which leads him to regard the white man’s ways as something imposed on him and hence views him with suspicion and distrust. This insecurity in early life leads in adolescence to defiance and hostility and the youth develops a pride in flouting authority with the results of which we are all too familiar.162
These comments are something of a watershed. In all likelihood, they represent the first official acknowledgment that mission life was causing damage to children’s behaviour patterns. The ‘all too familiar’ results to which the Committee referred was the growth in antisocial behaviour among Aboriginal youth, and especially the outbreak of criminal activity. As early as 1966, the Director of the Child Welfare Department alerted missions to the recent trend whereby ‘an increasing number of native and part-native children are being placed by the courts in the care of the Child Welfare Department.’163 Evidence provided to them convinced the Committee that to avoid these problems, an important concession should be made to the principle of assimilation; children must be able to balance pride in their own culture with absorbing ‘our Western approach’. Therefore, it recommended children should have access to those ‘features of native lore that are worth preserving’. What this actually meant was not elaborated upon but the Committee at least did recognise that special training in Aboriginal culture was necessary for those involved in bringing up Aboriginal children removed from their families.
Failure to develop the building blocks of self-esteem was only one of the substantial criticisms the Committee made of the network of missions straddling the State. It recognised that inappropriate living conditions were contributing to children’s failure to thrive. Missions of this era were structured along two basic types. The ‘dormitory’ model, as the name suggests, congregated large numbers of children in one sleeping area, divided only on gender lines. It had the obvious advantage of costing less to establish and maintain and therefore was found in most missions. Government subsidies to missions were low up until the mid 1950s and the dormitory system was the only option practicably available to mission authorities. The ‘cottage’ model, developed originally at Sister Kate’s, was thought to be preferable but high costs restricted its use. However, the dormitory model, as the Committee acknowledged, was particularly ill-suited to children because ‘it lacked the personal touch’.164 It recommended missions adopt the cottage model.
The care of children was only one aspect of the Committee’s deliberations on Aboriginal affairs, however, its critical importance to the future of Aboriginal policy was recognised. At one level it is remarkable that virtually nothing changed in the administration of missions following the release of the Report. After all, the presence of F E Gare should have ensured that the system improve in line with their recommendations. But to implement even the modest changes outlined required commitment of personnel and resources and, sadly, both were lacking. In fact, the Government claimed a special grant from the Commonwealth would be required to implement the recommendations. Such a grant was never formally requested.
Scrutiny of assimilation and the role of missions ceased for many years but the number of children taken from their families continued to grow.165 Only with the professionalisation of the Child Welfare Department and, to a lesser extent, the Department of Native Welfare, were politicians and senior bureaucrats forced to look again at the plight of Aboriginal children ‘exiled’ in missions. From the mid 1960s closer supervision and investigation of missions became part of the work of newly recruited social and welfare workers. These professionally trained personnel brought a clear perspective of the needs of children and they managed to expose the extent to which government knowingly turned a blind eye to their systematic abuse and neglect. Only when the case for negligence mounted overwhelmingly did the Child Welfare Department begin to withdraw its subsidies from the missions. This process did not begin until the early 1970s.
The available documents make it quite clear Government agencies were well aware of sub-standard care from at least the mid 1960s. Every aspect of the care at missions which took in Aboriginal children came in for criticism over the ensuing decade. The inappropriate housing of these children at some of the missions attracted the concern of the Child Welfare Department. New Norcia Mission came in for repeated criticism. In 1967 conditions for the hundred boys living at the mission run by the Benedictine Order of the Catholic Church were appalling. New Norcia continued to house children in the dormitory model a decade after the 1958 Special Committee recommended against the use of this form of accommodation: ‘The building is extremely old and would no doubt be very cold in winter. Many of the windows were in poor condition and appeared in major need of renovation. This, together with bare floors and damaged paint work contribute to a rather dismal, uncompromising dormitory.’166 Three years later nothing had changed. A Welfare Officer from Native Affairs described the boys’ section as ‘still rather depressing, with little more than the bare necessities being available.’ While concerned about these shabby conditions, the Department declined to provide a specific purpose grant to improve them. Such an offer would set ‘a precedent which may encourage dependency on the Department for any improvement programme.’167
Even the newly established missions built in the 1940s such as Roelands, Wandering and Carnarvon quickly had their facilities outstripped by the increasing numbers of children sent to them. By 1958 new buildings at most of the missions housing children were ‘badly needed’ but the State Government made no new finance forthcoming.168 In the very remote missions living conditions for children were also poor. At the isolated Forrest River Mission, east of Wyndham, a rare visit from the Native Welfare Department in 1964 damned the girls’ dormitory as having ‘no privacy for the girls—it is open to the outside, and each girl has a bed in the central space—there are no bathrooms, no change rooms, no mirror, no wardrobes, a most depressing place.’169 Living in such degrading conditions made a mockery of the justification used in removing these children from homes which were judged to be substandard and the children therefore at risk of neglect.
The poor living conditions endured by Aboriginal children were merely symptomatic of wider neglect. Inattention to the medical needs of children by missionaries was widespread. As early as 1953 a Native Welfare officer wrote a stinging report to the Commissioner about the medical neglect of Aboriginal children in missions:
Two cases of girls with extreme impairment of vision have recently come to our notice … both spent several years in Tardun and New Norcia Missions … Frances’ vision is so poor that she can only be assisted with the provision of contact lenses; Margaret is able to read only the top line of the test card of letters. In both cases nothing was done for these girls until they were 16 years of age and had left the mission.
Investigators acknowledged a disturbing truth. Had these children remained with their parents, they would have received better medical attention, because they:
have the advantage during their school life of at least one, and probably more, routine medical inspections by school doctors. The native child living in at a mission has to my knowledge, no such advantage, and, if suffering from some defect, it is probable that it will pass unnoticed, with a consequent retardation of the child’s progress and a worsening of the defect.170
The responsibility of Government, through Native Welfar
e, could not have been expressed in more stark terms. These children were being grossly neglected by the very authorities who judged their parents unsuitable. However, this stern memo failed to move Native Welfare into action. Missions continued to be criticised for nearly twenty years for failing to meet the basic needs of children. A 1969 Report into New Norcia Mission conducted by social worker, S A Blanchard, from the Child Welfare Department’s Midland Division, issued a warning about the need for medical examinations. ‘This was much needed,’ Blanchard advised, ‘as a lot of the children have hearing and vision defects which have not been attended to. From this we can expect a lot of hospital referrals.’ In the report, Blanchard noted that the Director of the Department, aware of the seriousness of the issue, was in the process of arranging the School Medical Services to examine the children.171 This intervention either did not eventuate or was nor properly undertaken because subsequent reports about New Norcia continued to express concerns about medical neglect of children. In 1971 a Welfare Officer from the Department of Native Affairs conceded:
For some time I have been concerned that the children at New Norcia are not being regularly examined. I have been informed that the Doctor in Moora is not very interested, and the time and expense in bringing children to Perth for treatment, is not practicable.172
Another inquiry by the Welfare Branch of the Department in 1970 gathered data on the extent of medical neglect. Of the ninety-two children then living in the institution, over sixty had untreated medical conditions ranging from defective hearing—which was common—to nasal discharges, scabies and dental problems. The same report also documented the health of children living at the Mogumber Mission where the situation was similarly shocking. Of the fifty-one children twenty-two were found with untreated medical problems including hearing, trachoma, heart murmur, vision loss and asthma. On one occasion, the Child Welfare Department received a complaint from a family which had fostered one of the children from New Norcia. The child came to the family with an abscess ‘about three inches in diameter’ which soon burst.
The situation at Wandering was little different, with one important exception—the children attended a nearby state high school. In 1971, the headmaster of the school wrote to the Child Welfare Department informing them teachers had ‘noticed small sores appearing on the hands of 2 or 3 of the Mission boys who attend our School.’ He explained these boys had been sent to a local doctor who diagnosed ‘viral blisters with secondary bacterial infection’ caused by poor hygiene. One boy’s sores became so serious he was hospitalised. Of this boy, the doctor told the headmaster, ‘it was a case of obvious neglect’ because ‘his hands and arms are covered in blisters, pustules and infected sores and he is suffering from gross hyperidrosis between the fingers of both hands. When two dirty bandages were removed from his hands his skin was mildewed.’173 This neglect of children at Wandering was known of by the Department of Native Welfare at least as early as 1966 when an internal memo admitted ‘many of these children have not been medically examined or seen by a doctor for some years. The same situation applies in regard to dental treatment.’ In the same year, the Welfare Superintendent of Native Welfare wrote to the Director of Child Welfare alerting him that ‘the physical well-being of every ward should be one of constant review … as it is too risky not to have children seen, and wait until some situation occurs.’174 Too often, this is exactly what did occur.
It takes little speculation to imagine the deleterious impact which years of this sort of medical neglect had on the subsequent lifestyle of many of these children. The damage done, in particular, to their education, such as it was, is but one obvious, serious consequence. Only a deep sense that these children were less than worthy human beings could have sustained such indifference from people whose very calling was supposed to be one of Christian compassion. Missionaries were not immune to the racial thinking about Aborigines prevalent in the wider community. As a generalisation, missionaries shared the community’s belief that Aborigines belonged to an inferior culture. Typically, they were disgusted by Aboriginal lifestyle and traditional practices. Most thought Aboriginal culture had to go.
The missionaries’ self-appointed role was to guide Aboriginal children along the path of spiritual and cultural transformation. Yet the negative characterisations of Aborigines as a race made, for example, by the Benedictines at New Norcia were cast in racial thinking of the firmest conviction. As late as 1972, his missionary work with Aboriginal children about to collapse, Brother Anthony could still proclaim: ‘We do not want children to reject their parents because of their low standards of morals but rather to accept them for what they are.’ Earlier, Brother Augustine astonishingly told a meeting, convened at New Norcia, to consider ways to improve relations between the mission and Aborigines, that ‘natives were basically selfish’ and ‘many parents subconsciously resent their children being educated’. He made these comments in spite of well-known grievances Aborigines had about the mission, and which were expressed at this meeting. The institution ‘has a bad image with some of the parents as a place that “takes kids away”.’175 The private correspondence of the mission is laced with derogatory language about Aboriginal families. In 1972 for example, Brother Anthony wrote of one Aboriginal girl: ‘although placement away from her parents will not meet with her approval it may be wise to make an attempt to get her out of the home. Elizabeth is now 13 and quite attractive so there could be sexual problems in the near future in such a lax household.’ Such vague and unsubstantiated allegations were driven by the old stereotypes of Aborigines as irredeemably inferior and morally suspect.
In their dealings with children, church missionaries constructed a method of control and management underpinned by harsh discipline. They were not alone in the belief that children required ‘a firm hand’. There are many testimonies to the cruel punishment of children who spent their childhood in Government institutions as wards of the State and who went to various boarding schools. Certain Catholic orders earned a reputation for the harsh physical punishment of children. It is therefore hard to quantify whether Aboriginal children were subjected to any greater level of physical abuse than significant numbers of other institutionalised children. However, Aboriginal children in missions had a different legal status from children whose parents had chosen to send children to particular schools. The State had made itself guardian of many of these children and, in other cases, missions themselves had pressured parents into leaving their children with them. As such, both bodies had a responsibility to ensure their safety and proper care. Moreover, in missions such as New Norcia and Roelands, where children were schooled on the premises, there was no escape from the regime of harsh and, sometimes violent, discipline inflicted on children.
Often Aboriginal parents did not know where their children had been sent and, when they did, distance often prevented regular visits. These factors limited the ability of parents to complain about the treatment the children were receiving. Frank Gare, Commissioner for Native Affairs in the 1960s does not remember many cases of ill-treatment of children coming to the Department’s notice but one incident does stand out. He recalled in an interview the case of a boy in Tardun Mission, outside Geraldton in 1958:
Some boy had offended the Brother in charge of the boys’ dormitory and as punishment this child was incarcerated in a sort of gaol. The mission had an enclosed storeroom completely darkened through the absence of proper windows. This child was locked in there overnight. I knew he must have been terrified in this place by himself. Not only was it very dark but there was a constant slow drip from the tank. I hit the roof when I learnt about it and told the person concerned that, with the consent of the parents, I’d bring a charge against him. The next day he was on a plane to Melbourne.
A lack of surviving documentary records prevent an independent assessment of both the level of inappropriate punishment and the Department’s handling of those cases which came to its notice. However, one letter to
the Native Welfare Department which has survived on the files, was written in 1962 by an Aboriginal mother whose daughter had been removed to Roelands Mission. Her letter is significant for several reasons. It highlights the capricious nature of the daughter’s initial removal and the combination of cruelty and sexual deviance at the mission; and it suggests the attempts of Native Welfare to properly address the mother’s concerns were not adequate. The mother wrote that the daughter was placed in Roelands, ‘because she had missed a bit of school’. It was the ‘first time she had ever been in trouble.’ The mother complained that the children were being ill-treated at the mission:
They have a man down at the mission who is a cruel man … he belted them with a wire whip and when they are changing after their bath this man stands at the door and watches them … also when you go to see the girls you are only allowed three minutes to talk to her … she was put there by welfare but what I can see she is not put there to be schooled but to be punished by those people. Don’t you think that three minutes is like speaking to people in gaol.176
On the back of the letter was a desperate plea: ‘if you can’t get her out have her transferred to Marribank Mission. I live in Albany … please I wish I could speak to you.’ In its ‘investigation’ the Department did nothing more than interview the man concerned, whose account was upheld. He was found only to use the cane ‘to administer punishment and was adamant that he never went into bathrooms without first knocking or, to maintain discipline as when six girls are in the toilet together, when only two are provided, this is an unnecessary congregation.’ Even his own testimony leaves open the likelihood of inappropriate behaviour, but no action was taken.
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