Our State of Mind

by Quentin Beresford

  When some pressure came to bear on Child Welfare officers in the mid 1960s to pay attention to the circumstances of individual children, one District Officer wrote to the Director of the Child Welfare Department in 1966, shocked at the new expectations:

  what a colossal task it would be to see 54 children individually, in one visit, by the District Officer alone, and then to make reports on each child … and keep other work going … [Nevertheless] acting under those instructions I went direct to the Mission [Wandering] with the intention of seeing each child … Father Mithern said this had never been carried out before by the C.W. Dept., nor had it been done by the Native Welfare Dept., when they had been responsible. He said he considered it would have to be gone into, and given some thought. I feel sure that it was the system he objected to, not my own personal approach. He told me that it appeared that we did not trust them to care for the children.197

  Conflicts over responsibility for supervision between the Native Welfare and Child Welfare departments seems to have impeded proper supervision of children. This, at least was the complaint expressed in 1969 by the Inspector of Child Welfare in Narrogin who wrote:

  I am rather concerned as I feel that there are several wards in this district that have not been supervised by the NWD or the CWD in the past. Supervision is very important to the child and in some cases … the child lacks supervision for months while the two Departments decide who will supervise.198

  As circumstances showed, the absence of proper supervision allowed neglect and abuse to prevail in the institutions. However, the churches must bear their share of the responsibility for allowing such gross neglect and abuse of children to become institutionalised in missions. The role of the Catholic, Anglican and Church of Christ in particular, in the mistreatment of Aboriginal children is difficult to rationalise. There is little evidence that these children were valued as individuals or that much thought was given to their post-mission life.

  However, changing times eventually overcame the resistance of the Child Welfare Department to cease sending Aboriginal children to the missions. A report made out on Wandering Mission in April 1973 explains the Department’s emerging policy. In a memo to the Minister for Community Welfare, the senior social worker for the Metropolitan region pointed out that the Department had reduced its usage of Wandering Mission, due largely to an emphasis on foster caring as a preferred alternative, the development of other facilities in locations more suited to the comprehensive care of children, and improved social conditions for Aboriginal parents resulting in fewer children being removed.199 The era of the mission slowly petered out without any major public scandal arising from its operations in the post-war era or without any parliamentary interest in the fate of the children.

  The number of children separated from their parents in the name of assimilation will never be known with any accuracy. It is indicative of the disregard officials had for Aborigines in general, and for children in particular, that they did not feel compelled to keep precise records on numbers. In 1968 the Minister for Native Affairs was asked in Parliament to provide information on the numbers of children in missions, government institutions and ‘other’ institutions. The curt reply was ‘No records are kept’.200 The statement was not entirely true insofar as records do show several attempts were made to document the number of Aboriginal State wards in the various missions. Records for 1956 and 1957 show nearly 1400 Aboriginal State wards of school age.201 However, without continuous records showing admissions and discharges the overall numbers remain elusive. Perhaps the most accurate figure available is from the Australian Bureau of Statistics which, in 1994, found that seventeen percent of respondents over the age of twenty-five had reported being taken away from their natural family by ‘a mission, the government, or welfare.’ With an Aboriginal population in Western Australia of approximately 42,000, this represents over 7,100 individuals.202 However, this figure is undoubtedly a significant underestimation as it obviously does not include those taken as children but who died before this survey was carried out. With high death rates commonly experienced in the Aboriginal community it is possible that the figure for those taken after the official start of the policy of removal in 1937 may be many thousands higher.

  Although the precise figure of those removed remains unknown, the existing record of neglect and abuse is sufficient to raise the query as to the real purpose behind assimilation.

  5

  Assimilation In Practice

  In 1965 ‘Yvonne’ arrived at Wandering Mission. She had been committed by the court ‘due to the neglect of her parents and her lack of attendance at school’. She was included as a case history in a 1971 thesis submitted for a Teacher’s Higher Certificate which examined the work of Wandering Mission.203 The details of her case highlight the difficulties in assessing the impact of assimilation. The author is at some pains to construct a ‘success story’ out of the misery of her family life. Yvonne’s father was said to have been ‘drinking fuel spirits by the time he was twenty and had over 60 convictions in police courts.’ Yvonne was described as ‘undernourished, extremely shy, frightened, self-conscious and very moody’. She had little school prior to coming to the mission. For a year she worked at the mission as a domestic, during which time, ‘she developed good tastes in personal grooming as well as dress sense.’ Through the mission she obtained outside employment as a domestic on a nearby farm. However, she left to rejoin her mother at Narrogin Reserve. Twelve months later she returned looking ‘dirty, undernourished and shabbily dressed’. She was again accepted as a domestic and not long afterwards ‘she quickly changed to a well mannered, well dressed young girl’. With the help of the Mission’s Pallotine Order she was sent to Melbourne to train as a nursing aide and, at the time the thesis was completed, was said to be doing well in her chosen career. She was assessed as capable of doing well ‘if she remains in Melbourne. Could possibly meet a suitable male and settle down in that city to a well adjusted domestic life.’

  Was this an unequivocal success story of assimilation, as the writer so readily assumes? The ‘storyline’ is so apparent: mission rescues Aboriginal girl from wretched home life and gives her the skills to enter white society. We will probably never know what this young woman felt about the course her life had taken under assimilation. However, efforts to construct success stories, such as Yvonne’s, raise a number of issues. Firstly, she was being constructed as a ‘success’ only by reference to her external circumstances and, secondly, she was an atypical case. During the 1950s and 60s, when most of the children separated from their families emerged as young adults in the community, Yvonne was one of the very few who managed to obtain vocational qualifications.

  Pronouncements in the post-war period ascribed a range of different meanings to assimilation. The official position, as enunciated at the Commonwealth level continued to be, as Paul Hasluck expressed it: ‘that, in the course of time, it is expected that all persons of aboriginal blood or mixed blood in Australia will live like white Australians do.’204 This position assumed a cultural transformation occurring among Aborigines but otherwise gave the appearance of a society striving for material and social equality. It suggested that, eventually, blacks and whites would live side by side albeit with blacks having dispensed with their culture. Some well-intentioned people of the time found this an attractive ideal. It was seen to be an advance on the policy of segregation. It probably explains why some young people like Yvonne were show-cased as success stories. However, as debates within Western Australia show, assimilation was understood by most people in the 1950s and early 60s to involve a much more predetermined set of outcomes. As the Commissioner of Native Welfare wrote in his 1958 Annual Report:

  the policy and the term assimilation postulates a state of mind, our mind, in regard to natives being a people apart—it appears therefore to be a term aligned with the policy referred to elsewhere as ‘apartheid’. In its effect it may even be worse because the notion
of apartness leads to a belief that we have the right to decide whether they as natives are entitled to share with us certain rights and privileges which we regard and jealously guard as being our birth right.205

  Hence, assimilation was never really designed to produce many ‘Yvonnes’—young Aborigines with an education who could compete equally with whites. There remained an unspoken assumption that assimilation would still confer to white society the ability to exercise social control over the Aboriginal population. This control would be all the more effective if Aborigines could be stripped of their culture. Hence, assimilation involved an explicit understanding about the place of Aboriginal culture. This was acknowledged by the Superintendent of Tardun Mission outside Geraldton who in his 1956 Annual Report to the Commissioner explained the difference between ‘integration’ and ‘assimilation’.

  We [the mission] use the term ‘integrate’ designedly, in preference to ‘assimilation’, the term now in current use. ‘Integration’ implies the existence of two separate elements which must be moulded to an homogeneous whole at the same time as retaining their individual identity. ‘Assimilation’, on the other hand, means the absorption of one of the elements, in this case the natives, and their ultimate disappearance.206

  These comments make the purpose of assimilation during the 1950s, and much of the 1960s, quite clear. At the very time large numbers of young Aborigines were coming out of missions and foster homes to live in the general community, they confronted a society which legitimised racial inequality and cultural destruction while it left the racial attitudes of white society intact and unchallenged. It therefore imposed a double tragedy on those children, now turned young adults, who had been separated from their families. It not only stripped them of their heritage, but it thrust them into a society which never intended to receive them as anything other than inferior beings. Thus, another generation of Aborigines remained firmly marginalised.

  Not surprisingly, the missions tried hard to convince themselves they were working towards the social equality of Aborigines. In 1956 the Superintendent at Roelands Mission published figures on the post-release outcomes of the sixty-five children who had finished ‘their course of training’ since its establishment in 1941. These purported to show seventy-eight percent were living ‘in standards equal to the white community’, while twenty-two percent have ‘gone back to camp conditions.’ Of the latter group, nine percent were girls who married husbands who could not provide them with any other accommodation; four percent were ‘subnormal and represent special cases’ while nine percent ‘have of their own choice drifted back into camp life.’ Of the larger group, nearly half were domestic and farm workers; a quarter were in ‘trades and professions’ while just under a quarter were married females.207 In other words, according to the superintendent of this mission, his efforts had met with significant success. However, his figures are almost meaningless. The categorisation used, that most were living ‘in standards equal to the white community’, is too vague to make much sense. Which white community? The very poorest or the moderately affluent? Most likely, missions felt the pressure to justify the continued funding they received by placing their work in some sort of vague, unthreatening, but favourable light.

  The general pattern of what happened to most of these young people is clear. Lady Jessie Street pointed to the problems as early as 1957 when, in the course of her tour around Australia visiting Aboriginal settlements, she wrote of the mission children in Western Australia.

  When they leave school, neither the Mission nor the church to which denomination it belongs take further responsibility for these young people. This is a most difficult period for them. They have led a dependent, sheltered life in boarding school … When they leave school many of them have to return to aboriginal camps without any facilities. They have not only to adjust themselves to this but as they are unskilled and untrained and coloured they find it difficult to find work. They awaken to the fact that they are regarded as inferior because of their dark skin. They go to towns, as they must to get jobs, and as they can’t get proper accommodation on account of their colour they are exposed to all sorts of danger. Many of these young people are exploited and demoralised by the bad elements among the whites against which police seldom take action.208

  There could be no more concise summation of the realities of assimilation as it was experienced by hundreds of Aboriginal young people. Each of the issues Jessie Street raised—the discrimination, the lack of accommodation, and the difficulty in finding work—are worthy of detailed examination for in them we see the reality of assimilation at work.

  At the core of assimilation, as it was understood and practised in Western Australia, was the retention of white attitudes of superiority and political control. State Governments of the period, backed by wider community attitudes, practised massive discrimination against Aboriginal people that was intended to restrict their social advancement. Indeed, Frank Gare remembers the fierce political opposition to Aboriginal advancement throughout the 1950s and 60s. While the occasional minister may have been sympathetic to proposals for Aboriginal social advancement, governments were not. This opposition, and its consequences, were well understood among sections of the educated elite. The members of the 1958 Special Committee chaired by Frank Gare summed up the second-class status of Western Australian Aborigines.

  In accordance with Section 10 of the Federal Nationality and Citizenship Act, 1948-1955, every aboriginal person born in Australia is a citizen of the Commonwealth. Western Australia, however, has enacted special legislation which deprives aborigines and most part-aborigines of some of the normal rights and privileges of citizenship, even though it does not absolve them from most of its responsibilities—including taxation. Under this legislation, one of the influential principles of democracy—that there shall be no taxation without representation—is denied the native living in Western Australia. The State Electoral Act deprives him of the right to vote in State elections, and … disqualifies him from voting in the Federal sphere. In addition, the Licencing Act, the Firearms and Gun Act, a number of other Western Australian Acts and even the Native Welfare (Administration) Act itself, all impose restrictions of varying degree on natives as distinct from other persons. It is obvious, therefore, that although natives in Western Australia may be citizens of the Commonwealth, they are not full citizens of their own State. They suffer under the further disability that the State-imposed restrictions automatically disqualify many of them from certain very important benefits under the Federal Social Services Act.209

  This body of legislative discrimination, much of which remained in force until the mid to late 1960s, had the effect of entrenching stereotypical attitudes among both whites and blacks, as the Special Committee recognised.

  It has the inevitable result, among other things, of implanting in too many minds, native and otherwise, the belief that anyone officially classed as a ‘native’ must be an inferior being. Anything more calculated to destroy the self-respect and self-confidence of such a people would be difficult to imagine.210

  One of the core assumptions behind assimilation—that Aborigines could be kept in their place—extended to a reluctance by most governments to provide proper services to them and to grant them civic rights. When, in July 1964, new legislation came into effect removing much of the legal discrimination against Aborigines, the Commissioner noted in his Annual Report that it was passed against a background of considerable social anxiety, of ‘fearful and gloomy prophecies of widespread, serious social disorder’, which many believed would accompany legal equality.211

  Keeping Aborigines ‘in their place’ meant curtailing their social advancement through government sponsored measures. Frank Gare recalls a proposal he backed in the early 1960s to build education hostels for young Aborigines in the bush. When he told his minister of the proposal, the minister said: ‘If I am going to get these through Cabinet, you’ll have to design hostels that cost
half the price of a country high school where white kids go to school.’ As Gare explains: ‘So we put it to Public Works and they designed cut-price hostels. It was the only way we could get it through Cabinet.’

  Backed by community opinion hostile to the integration of Aborigines, governments, throughout the 1950s and 60s continued to drag their feet in providing housing for Aboriginal people. This meant that young Aborigines coming out of the missions were forced back into the same cycle of poor housing that most had experienced prior to their removal. Many went back to the reserves. Reflecting the continuing preference for segregation of the races, governments continued to expand the reserve system. Their number increased from thirty-six in 1949 to sixty in 1959 and rising to seventy in 1964.212 For those young institutionalised Aborigines who went back to live in these reserves, conditions remained primitive. Lack of funds from government meant that, by 1959, twenty of the reserves were still without basic water and toilet facilities and only a modest start had been made on housing.213 Many of the children lacked an electric light to do their homework. Some District Officers from the Native Welfare Department deplored the housing situation facing Aborigines. ‘With better facilities for living’, the District Officer for the Southern District wrote in his 1958 annual report, ‘both on and off the reserves—the lot of the Native People should be considerably ameliorated. But unless the provision of Government finance keeps pace with the needs of the native community and the plans for their advancement, this will remain a pipe dream.’214

  The double-bind many Aborigines were trapped in became apparent in the early 1950s when the Department of Native Welfare and the State Housing Commission sponsored about one hundred Aboriginal families into conventional suburban housing which failed disastrously. Within a few years, seventy-five percent had been forced to relinquish their properties. The financial commitment involved for rent or purchase payments ‘was too much for their insecure economic status.’215 The Department of Native Welfare expressed dejection in trying to assist these people into housing, reporting in 1957: ‘Every consideration has been shown to these people by the State Housing Commission and this office, but in very few cases has the response been worth the effort.’216 The failure of the scheme fuelled the critics of assimilation. Aborigines were now believed to be incapable of living in the white way. New moves to deal with the housing policy emerged out of the failure of this scheme. These were based on the old desire to maintain segregation: ‘until the economic and social standards of the Aborigines reached a level acceptable to the white community, a transitional housing scheme should be provided.’217