Our State of Mind

by Quentin Beresford

  The Department of Native Affairs continued to hear about the level of physical punishment at Roelands. In 1966 it received a detailed explanation from the mission’s supervisor, K G Cross outlining the institution’s policy. His convoluted account is noteworthy for its attempt to justify the institutionalised practice of physical punishment:

  As you are quite aware, new Missionaries do find it difficult in the initial stages to obtain the necessary control and discipline of Native children. Instructions are given that all corporal punishment is to be administered by the Superintendent or Assistant Superintendent and as a general principle this has been followed, for the purposes of the control of the Homes and also to give the Home parents a certain amount of opportunity for Home discipline permission has been given to Home parents to give minor Home correction [what this covered is not specified]. Failing this proviso the situation could develop where an overall control would necessitate too much attention from the Superintendent, and could develop out of proportion when considering the overall conduct of the Mission.

  Cross’ ‘explanation’ was prompted by an investigation by the Department for Native Welfare into serious allegations of misconduct by one of the ‘Home parents’. Apart from this ‘serious issue of discipline’ the male in question:

  has apparently on some occasions entered the older girls’ bedroom whilst they were in various states of undress. One of these girls registered her dissatisfaction with this state of affairs with Mr Cross—who took it up with Mr [name blanked out on file]. The reason submitted for [his] action was that on some mornings as Mrs [the man’s wife] is not out of bed he, Mr [ ], has to bestir the house.

  The officer from Native Welfare did not find this a ‘satisfactory arrangement’, nor a ‘sufficient reason for entering the girls’ bedroom—particularly when they are at an age where such action on his part could only cause embarrassment.’177

  The authoritarian approach to discipline was periodically condemned by the Child Welfare Department in several missions for Aboriginal children. The tone of their comments leaves no doubt that, in the minds of officers, this discipline constituted the gross abuse of children. The Child Welfare Department was fully briefed by its officers about the extent of the routine use of physical discipline. S A Blanchard, the social worker from Child Welfare, wrote to his superiors: ‘From conversation with the Nuns and Brother Augustine, it is known that physical punishment is often used, even in cases where, to a person knowledgeable in child care, it would do more harm than good.’178

  At New Norcia Mission, the harshest discipline was reserved for those children who absconded—in the late 1960s, a frequent occurrence. Children were driven to flee the institution for many reasons, high among them for some was the clear lack of any reason for their being there. In 1969 the Child Welfare Department reported that the ‘Nuns state that many of these children [who are not wards] have been admitted through Department of Native Welfare officers who have claimed that the children would later be charged, or by parents who were pressured by Department of Native Welfare officers.’179 In other words, children were taken from their parents without any attempt to justify the action and literally dumped at the mission. It is no wonder many felt aggrieved and wished to escape.

  In May 1968 the Superintendent of the Moora District of the Department of Native Welfare investigated the case of a fifteen year old girl who had absconded twice since being admitted at the beginning of that year, each time returning to her home at Goomalling Reserve. On the second time she absconded she was given a standard punishment for such an offence: her hair was cut off ‘in a very short male style.’ The Superintendent, even after making allowances for the ‘incorrigible’ nature of the girls at the mission, could not countenance this action. ‘This treatment does not appear to be one generally approved in the Twentieth Century’, was his blunt assessment.180 The Superintendent was deeply unsettled about the impact which this brutality had on the attitudes of the girls. He felt sure that they had ‘a deep resentment against society, and emerge from this sort of experience with a feeling often expressed … that “Anyone can do anything to us, and nobody cares”’. The Child Welfare Department was aware of these cruel practices. In May 1968 the Acting Director wrote to the Lord Abbott about his concern over an episode involving several girls who had their hair shorn after running away from the mission:

  While I am appreciative of the control and discipline problems coped with by the Sisters, and the shortage of trained and suitable people, nevertheless the Department cannot condone such a method of punishment. If anything it is more likely to have the opposite effect to that desired and reinforce any hostile feelings the girls have.181

  Absconding was an act of defiance and such acts were a common feature of Aboriginal young people’s response to their institutionalisation. In 1948 Bateman had been told of older girls locked in early at night in a particular mission who protested by ‘singing “The Prisoners Song” over and over again.’182 But acts of defiance, as we have seen, were met with stern punishment. In 1964 Native Welfare investigated one girl at the Forrest River Mission whose behaviour the missionaries could no longer countenance. Her report read: ‘behaviour satisfactory till during one church service she shouted “Hooray” instead of “amen” at the end of the Prayer, whereupon Rev Hall forced her to leave the church.’ Following this incident the girl threatened to kill Rev Hall, ‘being generally defiant of authority’, for which she was locked in the dormitory for a whole day.183

  Were these missionaries just overzealous, or were they plain callous? There is no easy answer to explain the institutionalised violence against young people in many, if not all, of the missions. Lack of training was certainly a contributing factor. A Welfare Officer from the Department of Native Welfare admitted the limitations of the missionaries at New Norcia in a 1969 memo: ‘From my visits to New Norcia and discussions with the Nuns, they have no awareness of emotional needs and problems of adolescents, and my attempts to make them understand were unsuccessful. They are rigid in their attitude and think that whatever they do is best.’184

  A similar conclusion was reached about Wandering Mission in 1969:

  There are no trained staff at the Mission, and the motivation is mainly of a spiritual nature. I think it would be of immense value to have a social worker and psychologist to visit this Mission at frequent intervals. It seems quite obvious that there will be some children who will need professional guidance as they graduate from this Mission. The staff, also, should be included in this category as they need guidance to help them to understand the needs of these children.185

  The Department found itself compromised in its efforts to enforce a more appropriate form of care for mission children. It heavily relied on the missions not only to place children stolen from their families but also to take young Aborigines who had been before the court. It believed the facilities at New Norcia were crucial in solving its problem with delinquent Aboriginal youth. The Director of Child Welfare wrote to the Lord Abbott in 1968 to point out he was ‘most anxious that the mission continue and, if possible, extend its work with the care of native children.’ Correspondence had been periodically exchanged between the Department and the mission regarding its role. This makes very clear the Department’s double standards in its concern for Aboriginal mission children. On the one hand, the Department acknowledged the Brothers were ‘well acquainted with the Departmental view that the present set-up is below standard’, while, at the same time, supporting the mission to continue its work: ‘at present the advantage of New Norcia is that they are prepared to accept a number of delinquent younger children who are not acceptable in other missions.’186

  It was the same situation at Roelands. Superintendent Cross wrote to Child Welfare pointing out the problems associated with mixing together children admitted because they were classified as neglected, and those showing ‘delinquent symptoms’. Cross had a point about the difficulty this caused i
n the management of the young charges: ‘You can visualise the problems that present themselves, when children of both groups are placed together and the House parents endeavour to perform their task to the best of their ability. It requires only one or two delinquent tendencies to influence the whole group.’ Cross maintained such children should be placed in a more secure environment but, in reality, the problem demonstrated the complete inadequacy of government’s reliance on missions to provide for Aboriginal children. Most of the missions struggled to obtain an adequate number of staff prepared to work in the isolated locations. The Secretary for Roelands once complained to the Commissioner of Native Welfare that ‘an acute staff shortage has occurred and our Missionaries are tried beyond reasonable limits to meet the demands of the work.’ To overcome the problem, the Secretary wanted the Commissioner to remove a few of the teenage girls who ‘have taken the advantage of the greater liberties and are making the lot of the lady missioner almost unbearable to breaking point.’187 The fate of teenagers who refused to, or were unable to, conform to mission rules is unknown. Left at the mission they were vulnerable to outbursts of routine physical discipline. Removed, especially in the 1960s, they were likely to be fostered out.

  The extent of the damage done in terms of the socialisation of children in missions became clearer in the 1960s. As Mrs Morris had observed, Aboriginal mission children were being emotionally deprived. A 1970 memo from Child Welfare made this abundantly clear: ‘The smaller boys lack mothering and show signs of deprivation.’ Little else could be expected with just two Brothers in charge of seventy boys and because it was not in the Brothers’ make-up to be understanding. They were ‘extremely authoritarian in their handling of the children and [showed] little understanding and tolerance of the dull child or the child with behaviour problems’.188 In other words, these children lacked the very thing which, nearly twenty years earlier, John Bowlby had indicated was essential for children to thrive: access to permanent and affectionate parent figures.

  Missions such as New Norcia, constructed along the ‘dormitory’ model and operated on minimal staff, were calculated to stunt the socialisation of their charges. The Child Welfare Department was clear about this from the late 1960s. S A Blanchard’s 1969 Report outlined the problems: ‘The children who have been in New Norcia for some time are usually inhibited, lacking in social graces and unused to freedom’. The extent of their social isolation is revealed in the following extract from the Report:

  The Sisters at the Mission have seen the need to teach the children social graces in order to help them mix better with the outside world and to gain more confidence. To this end, two ‘socials’ were held towards the end of 1969, in which young people from outside the Mission participated. Six of the older girls were also taken to dinner at the local hotel by Brother Anthony. These activities should be greatly encouraged to overcome the isolation of the Mission … a programme of sports, picnics, and socials should be organised with church groups for weekends … A programme of deportment and make-up classes and discussions on job opportunities would also be helpful. The lack of table manners and the ability to converse fluently and poor speech of the Mission children has been observed by all their holiday hosts.189

  Even the faintly approving tone of Blanchard’s comments could not hide the reality of life at New Norcia. For decades, these children had been offered nothing to prepare them for life outside the mission; the belated and limited moves to do so in 1969 are an all too transparent attempt to gain the Department’s ongoing approval. In fact, it is clear from the evidence that mission life fostered in some of its charges the character of a social misfit. It did so by holding them as virtual captives, isolating them from the broader community, and inflicting regular and violent physical punishment upon them. Native Welfare admitted the extent of the problem in 1964 when an officer visited Forrest River Mission where he found: ‘the young ones are antisocial and hostile and very anxious to leave the Mission.’

  In fact, when many of them did finally leave Forrest River Mission and headed for Wyndham, they were ‘a continual source of trouble … because of antisocial behaviour; the boys are ‘all very reluctant to work’ and the girls were found to be regularly ‘chasing’ married men. ‘I find this chasing married men theme cropping up time after time’, the Native Welfare officer wrote to his District Office in Derby, ‘but it seems to me to be against the law of averages and nature, that so many young girls should behave in the same way.’190 Three years later it was even clearer to another Native Welfare officer that mission life had been responsible for fostering antisocial patterns of behaviour in too many young Aborigines. ‘Difficulties in the handling of teenage children have become apparent,’ the officer reported, ‘and in a number of instances have contributed to their nonadjustment and unsocial and even delinquent behaviour.’191

  To overcome the problems in the management of the children, local social and welfare workers from both Child and Native Welfare departments pushed their superiors to establish a training scheme for missionaries. This was considered, and rejected, by the Commissioner of Native Affairs in 1967 who acknowledged that, ‘whilst training of mission staff is desirable, there is no practical means of implementing it.’

  In addition to the regime of strict, and even violent punishment, the extent of social isolation may be a key to explaining the antisocial behaviour shown by many mission children. As late as 1972, the Child Welfare Department described Wandering Mission as ‘a closed institution. It was almost totally severed from the wider society … there were teenage children who had very limited social experience outside Wandering’.192 Mission children, especially in those cases where they did not attend state schools, were denied the range of experiences children require to build social competence. It is almost impossible to imagine the belief system held by the missionaries about these children and their needs which drove them to seclude the children from the community.

  Compounding the future adjustment problems for these young people was the lack of meaningful education and training they received at missions. Advocates of assimilation such as Bateman argued that Aboriginal children should be trained to fit into the lower echelons of the white workforce—boys as farm labourers and girls as domestics. The missionaries did little more in meeting these basic requirements than to place the young people on the mission farms. On missions such as New Norcia, where children did not attend a state school, ‘children are allowed to leave school and receive little preparation for future employment.’193 In such situations children were open to exploitation as little more than unpaid labour.

  The attempts at Wandering Mission to establish some form of vocational training were hampered by the Native Welfare Department. In the early 1960s, Father Mithern started a ‘farm course’ for the post-primary boys. Held only once a week it included shearing lessons, sheep butchering, ploughing, harvesting, post-cutting and general farm labouring. Boys were instructed by a local farmer. Limited as this training was, the Native Welfare Department opposed it, refusing to subsidise any equipment purchased because it already operated a farm school at Gnowangerup.194

  Significant as Child and Native Welfare departmental documents are in exposing the extent of abuse and neglect of children in missions, and the knowledge governments had of this, they are silent on one key issue: the sexual abuse of children. The few cases mentioned previously of inappropriate conduct on the part of some male supervisors/home parents only hint at what appears to have been a recurrent practice at many missions. According to one former employee of the Child Welfare Department, there was no general understanding of the existence of sexual abuse of children in the community until the late 1960s, with the consequence that officers from the Department were not actively looking for the signs of it. Many Child Welfare officers of the 1960s were insufficiently trained to detect symptoms of child sexual abuse. It is probable children who suffered this form of abuse were intimidated and/or too shamed to report it.195r />
  Considering together all the issues of abuse and neglect compels the question: why did government not act to stop it? To take systematic action against the missions would have required either to cease the removal of Aboriginal children from their families, or increase the resources of the Child and Native Welfare departments to properly supervise the missions. By the late 1950s, government had increased the subsidy it paid to missions for individual children but this applied only to wards of the state. There were also the significant number of parents coerced by the Department of Native Affairs and the missions to place their children in a mission—without being made wards of the state—and for whom the mission had to pay the total cost. Thus, conditions for children as a group improved little, or not at all, in most missions. Governments were not in a strong position to enforce better standards of care on the missions. To stop the removal of children would have required a rethink of assimilation, but government remained committed to it, as evidenced by the 1958 Special Committee. Politically, governments were averse to spending additional resources on Aboriginal affairs and especially on capital works, training and staff. In practice this meant the missions were largely unaccountable.

  In the 1950s and early 1960s especially, inspection visits to missions, especially from Native Welfare, were mostly little more than courtesy calls. ‘Called at the Mission’, wrote one Native Welfare Officer of his visit to Wandering,

  Rev Father Williams, the Superintendent, was away, and so I was unable to meet him … whilst talking to one of three native men employed on the property I was able to watch the children running around and playing and they seemed very happy.196