Part 2	Tracing the History
Chapter 2	National Overview
Every morning our people would crush charcoal and mix that with animal fat and smother that all over us, so that when the police came they could only see black children in the distance. We were told always to be on the alert and, if white people came, to run into the bush or run and stand behind the trees as stiff as a poker, or else hide behind logs or run into culverts and hide. Often the white people – we didn’t know who they were – would come into our camps. And if the Aboriginal group was taken unawares, they would stuff us into flour bags and pretend we weren’t there. We were told not to sneeze. We knew if we sneezed and they knew that we were in there bundled up, we’d be taken off and away from the area.

There was a disruption of our cycle of life because we were continually scared to be ourselves. During the raids on the camps it was not unusual for people to be shot – shot in the arm or the leg. You can understand the terror that we lived in, the fright – not knowing when someone will come unawares and do whatever they were doing – either disrupting our family life, camp life, or shooting at us.  
Confidential evidence 681, Western Australia: woman ultimately surrendered at 5 years to Mt Margaret Mission for schooling in the 1930s.

2		National Overview
In this Part we outline the laws, practices and policies of forcible removal of Indigenous children in each State and Territory. This chapter briefly outlines the national background and thinking behind those laws, practices and policies.

The questions this history raises for us to contemplate today, at the very least, are what implications it has for relations between Aboriginal and white Australians, and what traces of that systematic attempt at social and biological engineering remain in current child welfare practices and institutions  (van Krieken 1991 page 144). 

Throughout this Part it is necessary in the interests of accuracy to quote the language of the times. Much of this language was and is offensive to Indigenous people. The terms ‘full descent’ and ‘mixed descent’ were not used. Instead categories of ‘full blood’, ‘half caste’, ‘quadroon’ and ‘octoroon’ were applied. However, we use the terms ‘full descent’ and ‘mixed descent’ to convey the policy and practice distinctions made at the time between what were perceived as quite different groups. The term ‘Indigenous’ was not used at the time either. We use that generic term throughout this report to include all Aboriginal groups and Torres Strait Islanders.

Colonisation 
Indigenous children have been forcibly separated from their families and communities since the very first days of the European occupation of Australia.

Violent battles over rights to land, food and water sources characterised race relations in the nineteenth century. Throughout this conflict Indigenous children were kidnapped and exploited for their labour. Indigenous children were still being ‘run down’ by Europeans in the northern areas of Australia in the early twentieth century.

… the greatest advantage of young Aboriginal servants was that they came cheap and were never paid beyond the provision of variable quantities of food and clothing. As a result any European on or near the frontier, quite regardless of their own circumstances, could acquire and maintain a personal servant (Reynolds 1990 page 169).

Governments and missionaries also targeted Indigenous children for removal from their families. Their motives were to ‘inculcate European values and work habits in children, who would then be employed in service to the colonial settlers’ (Ramsland 1986 quoted by Mason 1993 on page 31). In 1814 Governor Macquarie funded the first school for Aboriginal children. Its novelty was an initial attraction for Indigenous families but within a few years it evoked a hostile response when it became apparent that its purpose was to distance the children from their families and communities.

Although colonial governments in the nineteenth century professed abhorrence at the brutality of expansionist European settlers, they were unwilling or unable to stop their activities. When news of the massacres and atrocities reached the British Government it appointed a Select Committee to inquire into the condition of Aboriginal people. 

‘Protection’ and segregation of Indigenous people in the nineteenth century
The Select Committee Inquiry proposed the establishment of a protectorate system, noting that ‘the education of the young will of course be amongst the foremost of the cares of the missionaries; and the Protectors should render every assistance in their power in advancing this all-important part of any general scheme of improvement’ (quoted by Victorian Government final submission on page 25). The protectorate system was based on the notion that Indigenous people would willingly establish self-sufficient agricultural communities on reserved areas modelled on an English village and would not interfere with the land claims of the colonists.

By the middle of the nineteenth century the protectorate experiment had failed and the very survival of Indigenous people was being questioned. Forced off their land to the edges of non-Indigenous settlement, dependent upon government rations if they could not find work, suffering from malnutrition and disease, their presence was unsettling and embarrassing to non-Indigenous people. Governments typically viewed Indigenous people as a nuisance.

The violence and disease associated with colonisation was characterised, in the language of social Darwinism, as a natural process of ‘survival of the fittest’. According to this analysis, the future of Aboriginal people was inevitably doomed; what was needed from governments and missionaries was to ‘smooth the dying pillow’.

The government response was to reserve land for the exclusive use of Indigenous people and assign responsibility for their welfare to a Chief Protector or Protection Board. By 1911 the Northern Territory and every State except Tasmania had ‘protectionist legislation’ giving the Chief Protector or Protection Board extensive power to control Indigenous people. In some States and in the Northern Territory the Chief Protector was made the legal guardian of all Aboriginal children, displacing the rights of parents. The management of the reserves was delegated to government appointed managers or missionaries in receipt of government subsidies. Enforcement of the protectionist legislation at the local level was the responsibility of ‘protectors’ who were usually police officers. 
In the name of protection Indigenous people were subject to near-total control. Their entry to and exit from reserves was regulated as was their everyday life on the reserves, their right to marry and their employment. With a view to encouraging the conversion of the children to Christianity and distancing them from their Indigenous lifestyle, children were housed in dormitories and contact with their families strictly limited.

Tasmania was the exception to this protectionist trend. By the turn of the century most Indigenous families had been removed to Cape Barren Island off the north coast of the Tasmanian mainland where they were effectively segregated from non-Indigenous people. Until the late 1960s Tasmanian governments resolutely insisted that Tasmania did not have an Aboriginal population, just some ‘half-caste’ people.

‘Merging’ and ‘absorption’
By the late nineteenth century it had become apparent that although the full descent Indigenous population was declining, the mixed descent population was increasing. ‘Most colonists saw them as being in a state of racial and cultural limbo’ (Haebich 1988 page 48). In social Darwinist terms they were not regarded as near extinction. The fact that they had some European ‘blood’ meant that there was a place for them in non-Indigenous society, albeit a very lowly one. 

Furthermore, the prospect that this mixed descent population was growing made it imperative to governments that mixed descent people be forced to join the workforce instead of relying on government rations. In that way the mixed descent population would be both self-supporting and satisfy the needs of the developing Australian economy for cheap labour.

The reality that Indigenous people did not identify as Europeans, however much European ‘blood’ they had, was not taken into account. Nevertheless, the difficulties of permanently distancing mixed descent children from their Indigenous families was a matter of constant concern to government officials. Clearly they recognised the strength of the family bonds they were trying to break.

Unlike white children who came into the state’s control, far greater care was taken to ensure that [Aboriginal children] never saw their parents or families again. They were often given new names, and the greater distances involved in rural areas made it easier to prevent parents and children on separate missions from tracing each other (van Krieken 1991 page 108).

Government officials theorised that by forcibly removing Indigenous children from their families and sending them away from their communities to work for non-Indigenous people, this mixed descent population would, over time, ‘merge’ with the non-Indigenous population. As Brisbane’s Telegraph newspaper reported in May 1937,
Mr Neville [the Chief Protector of WA] holds the view that within one hundred years the pure black will be extinct. But the half-caste problem was increasing every year. Therefore their idea was to keep the pure blacks segregated and absorb the half-castes into the white population. Sixty years ago, he said, there were over 60,000 full-blooded natives in Western Australia. Today there are only 20,000. In time there would be none. Perhaps it would take one hundred years, perhaps longer, but the race was dying. The pure blooded Aboriginal was not a quick breeder. On the other hand the half-caste was. In Western Australia there were half-caste families of twenty and upwards. That showed the magnitude of the problem (quoted by Buti 1995 on page 35).

In Neville’s view, skin colour was the key to absorption. Children with lighter skin colour would automatically be accepted into non-Indigenous society and lose their Aboriginal identity. 

Assuming the theory to be correct, argument in government circles centred around the optimum age for forced removal. At a Royal Commission in South Australia in 1913 ‘experts’ disagreed whether children should be removed at birth or about two years old.

The ‘protectionist’ legislation was generally used in preference to the general child welfare legislation to remove Indigenous children. That way government officials acting under the authority of the Chief Protector or the Board could simply order the removal of an Indigenous child without having to establish to a court’s satisfaction that the child was neglected. 

In Queensland and Western Australia the Chief Protector used his removal and guardianship powers to force all Indigenous people onto large, highly regulated government settlements and missions, to remove children from their mothers at about the age of four years and place them in dormitories away from their families and to send them off the missions and settlements at about 14 to work. Indigenous girls who became pregnant were sent back to the mission or dormitory to have their child. The removal process then repeated itself.

Another method of forcing people of mixed descent away from their families and communities and into non-Indigenous society was to change the definition of ‘Aboriginality’ in the protection legislation to fit the government’s current policy in relation to Aboriginal affairs. People with more than a stipulated proportion of European ‘blood’ were disqualified from living on reserves with their families or receiving rations. This tactic of ‘dispersing’ Aboriginal camps was used in Victoria and New South Wales. An analysis of the definition of ‘Aboriginality’ has found more than 67 definitions in over 700 pieces of legislation (McCorquodale 1987 page 9).

However the notion that people forced off the reserves would merge with the non-Indigenous population took no account of the discrimination they faced. Unable to find work and denied the social security benefits that non-Indigenous people were granted as of right, they lived in ‘shanty’ towns near the reserves or on the edges of non-Indigenous settlement.

In New South Wales, Western Australia and the Northern Territory many children of mixed descent were totally separated from their families when young and placed in segregated ‘training’ institutions before being sent out to work. In South Australia, where there was an uneasy relationship between the government and missionaries in relation to the care of Indigenous children, government officials sent Indigenous children to institutions catering for non-Indigenous children while missionaries took in Indigenous children and operated their own schools.

As the ultimate purpose of removal was to control the reproduction of Indigenous people with a view to ‘merging’ or ‘absorbing’ them into the non-Indigenous population, Indigenous girls were targeted for removal and sent to work as domestics. Apart from satisfying a demand for cheap servants, work increasingly eschewed by non-Indigenous females, it was thought that the long hours and exhausting work would curb the sexual promiscuity attributed to them by non-Indigenous people. 

A common feature of the settlements, missions and institutions for Indigenous families and children was that they received minimal funding. In 1938-39 the jurisdictions with the largest Indigenous populations – the Northern Territory, Western Australia and Queensland - spent the least per capita on Indigenous people. The Commonwealth’s spending of £1 per person per annum compared to £42.10s per annum on non-Indigenous pensioners and £10,000 on the Governor-General’s salary (Markus 1990 pages 9-10). The lack of funding for settlements, missions and institutions meant that people forced to move to these places were constantly hungry, denied basic facilities and medical treatment and as a result were likely to die prematurely.

By contrast to this degree of intervention in the lives of Indigenous people, Indigenous families living on and near Cape Barren Island in Tasmania were left relatively undisturbed until the 1930s. From then on, however, the general child welfare legislation was used to remove Indigenous children from the Islands. These children were sent to non-Indigenous institutions and later non-Indigenous foster families on the ground that they were neglected. Alternatively, Indigenous families were threatened with the removal of their children if they did not consent to the removal of their children. 

This interest in removing Indigenous children from their families followed growing concern on the part of the Tasmanian Government in the 1920s and 1930s that the Islanders were refusing to adopt a self-sufficient agricultural lifestyle and would become permanently dependent upon government support.
‘Merging’ becomes ‘assimilation’
In 1937 the first Commonwealth-State Native Welfare Conference was held, attended by representatives of all the States (except Tasmania) and the Northern Territory. Although States had been influenced by each others’ practices to that time, and even sought the views of other Chief Protectors as to what should be done about their ‘Aboriginal problem’, this was the first time that Aboriginal affairs had been discussed at the national level.

Discussion was dominated by the Chief Protectors of Western Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory: A O Neville, J W Bleakley and Dr Cook respectively. Each of them presented his own theory, developed over a long period in office, of how people of mixed descent would eventually blend into the non-Indigenous population. The conference was sufficiently impressed by Neville’s idea of ‘absorption’ to agree that,

… this conference believes that the destiny of the natives of aboriginal origin, but not of the full blood, lies in their ultimate absorption by the people of the Commonwealth, and it therefore recommends that all efforts be directed to that end.
 
In relation to Indigenous children, the conference resolved that,

… efforts of all State authorities should be directed towards the education of children of mixed aboriginal blood at white standards, and their subsequent employment under the same conditions as whites with a view to their taking their place in the white community on an equal footing with the whites.

From this time on, States began adopting policies designed to ‘assimilate’ Indigenous people of mixed descent. Whereas ‘merging’ was essentially a passive process of pushing Indigenous people into the non-Indigenous community and denying them assistance, assimilation was a highly intensive process necessitating constant surveillance of people’s lives, judged according to non-Indigenous standards. Although Neville’s model of absorption had been a biological one, assimilation was a socio-cultural model.

Implicit in the assimilation policy was the idea current among non-Indigenous people that there was nothing of value in Indigenous culture.

Nobody who knows anything about these groups can deny that their members are socially and culturally deprived. What has to be recognized is that the integration of these groups differs in no way from that of the highly integrated groups of economically depressed Europeans found in the slums of any city and in certain rural areas of New South Wales. In other words, these groups are just like groups of poor whites. The policy for them must be one of welfare. Improve their lot so that they can take their place economically and socially in the general community and not merely around the periphery. Once this is done, the break-up of such groups will be rapid (Bell 1964 page 68).

Removal of Indigenous children under child welfare legislation
New South Wales was the first jurisdiction to reshape its Indigenous child welfare system according to the assimilationist welfare model. After 1940 the removal of Indigenous children was governed by the general child welfare law, although once removed Indigenous children were treated differently from non-Indigenous children. State government institutions and missions in which removed Indigenous children were placed received a financial boost after 1941 with the extension of Commonwealth child endowment to Aboriginal children. The endowment was paid to them rather than to the parents.

Under the general child welfare law, Indigenous children had to be found to be ‘neglected’, ‘destitute’ or ‘uncontrollable’. 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. It was not until 1966 that all eligibility restrictions on Indigenous people’s receipt of social security benefits were fully lifted. Before that time Indigenous families in need could not rely on the financial support of government which was designed to hold non-Indigenous families together in times of need. Moreover, ongoing surveillance of their lives meant that any deviation from the acceptable non-Indigenous ‘norm’ came to the notice of the authorities immediately.

From the late 1940s the other jurisdictions followed New South Wales in applying the general child welfare law to Indigenous children while still treating removed Indigenous children differently. State government child welfare practice was marked more by continuity than change. The same welfare staff and the same police who had previously removed children from their families simply because they were Aboriginal now utilised the neglect procedures to remove just as many Aboriginal children from their families. ‘Aboriginal parents were left on the margins of Australian society while attempts were made to absorb their children into non-Aboriginal society’ (Armitage 1995 page 67).

The children were still being removed in bulk, but it wasn’t because they were part white. They had social workers that’d go around from house to house and look in the cupboards and things like that and they’d say the children were neglected (Molly Dyer evidence 219, speaking of the practice of the Victorian Aborigines Welfare Board in the 1950s).

At the third Native Welfare Conference held in 1951 the newly appointed federal Minister for Territories, Paul Hasluck, vigorously propounded the benefits to Aboriginal people of assimilation and urged greater consistency in practice between all the States and the Northern Territory. Hasluck pointed out that Australia’s treatment of its Indigenous people made a mockery of its promotion of human rights at the international level (Hasluck 1953 page 9).

The conference agreed that assimilation was the aim of ‘native welfare measures’.

Assimilation means, in practical terms, that, in the course of time, it is expected that all persons of aboriginal blood or mixed blood in Australia will live like other white Australians do (Hasluck 1953 page 16).

During the 1950s and 1960s even greater numbers of Indigenous children were removed from their families to advance the cause of assimilation. Not only were they removed for alleged neglect, they were removed to attend school in distant places, to receive medical treatment and to be adopted out at birth. 

As institutions could no longer cope with the increasing numbers and welfare practice discouraged the use of institutions, Indigenous children were placed with non-Indigenous foster families where their identity was denied or disparaged. ‘A baby placed with white parents would obviously be more quickly assimilated than one placed with black parents. So ran the official thinking, but more importantly, so also ran the feelings of the majority of honest and conscientious white citizens’ (Edwards and Read 1989 page xx).

While Indigenous children were being removed from their families at a young age, child welfare practice in relation to non-Indigenous children was being influenced by the work on maternal deprivation conducted by John Bowlby for the World Health Organisation and by a 1951 United Nations report which stressed that child welfare services should be focussed on assisting families to keep their children with them (Keen 1995 page 35). 

By the early 1960s it was clear that despite the mandatory way in which the assimilation policy had been expressed, Indigenous people were not being assimilated. Discrimination by non-Indigenous people and the refusal of Indigenous people to surrender their lifestyle and culture were standing in the way. Consequently the definition of assimilation was amended at the 1965 Native Welfare Conference to include an element of choice.

The policy of assimilation seeks that all persons of Aboriginal descent will choose to attain a similar manner of living to that of other Australians and live as members of a single community (quoted by Lippmann 1991 on page 29).

Following the successful 1967 constitutional referendum the Commonwealth obtained concurrent legislative power on Aboriginal affairs with the States. Since at least the 1930s Aboriginal and humanitarian groups had been urging the Commonwealth to display leadership on Aboriginal affairs. Although the Commonwealth did not have constitutional power until 1967 to legislate in respect of Aboriginal people it could have influenced State policies by making grants of aid conditional on policy change. However the Commonwealth had been consistently wary of upsetting State sensitivities as well as committing itself to extra funding. 

This position changed after 1967. A federal Office of Aboriginal Affairs was established and made grants to the States for Aboriginal welfare programs.

‘Assimilation’ was discarded as the key term of Aboriginal policy in favour of ‘integration’, though precisely what this signified was somewhat unclear … Although these were significant changes, they continued to operate through the established structures and organizations of Aboriginal policy, rather than in any way directly challenging them (Altman and Sanders 1995 page 211).

Self-management and self-determination
The election of the Whitlam Labor Government in 1972 on a policy platform of Aboriginal self-determination provided the means for Indigenous groups to receive funding to challenge the very high rates of removal of Indigenous children. Aboriginal legal services began representing Indigenous children and families in removal applications, which led to an immediate decline in the number of Indigenous children being removed. In Victoria the first Aboriginal and Islander Child Care Agency (AICCA) was started offering alternatives to the removal of Indigenous children.

In 1976 a paper delivered at the First Australian Conference on Adoption directed the attention of social workers to the large numbers of Indigenous children who were being placed by non-Indigenous welfare workers with non-Indigenous families. The paper drew on the experience of Indigenous services with children who had been removed and placed away from the Indigenous community. This practice was inconsistent with the policy of self-determination and harmful to the Indigenous children concerned. 

For the Aboriginal child growing up in a racist society, what is most needed is a supportive environment where a child can identify as an Aboriginal and get emotional support from other blacks. The supportive environment that blacks provide cannot be assessed by whites and is not quantifiable or laid down in terms of neat identifiable criteria.

Aboriginal people maintain that they are uniquely qualified to provide assistance in the care of children. They have experienced racism, conflicts in identity between black and white and have an understanding of Aboriginal life-styles (Sommerlad 1976 pages 163 and 164).

The activism of Indigenous organisations and the growing awareness of welfare workers of the ways in which government social welfare practice discriminated against Indigenous people forced a reappraisal of removal and placement practice during the 1980s. In 1980 the family tracing and reunion agency Link-Up (NSW) Aboriginal Corporation was established. Similar services now exist in all States and the Northern Territory. In 1981 the Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care (SNAICC) was formed and there are now  approximately 100 Aboriginal community-run children’s services under its umbrella (Butler 1993 page 8).

These Indigenous services formulated the Aboriginal Child Placement Principle (discussed in Chapters 21 and 22) and lobbied for it to be adopted by State and Territory welfare departments as a mandatory requirement. It has now been incorporated into the child welfare legislation and/or the adoption legislation in the Northern Territory, the ACT and all States other than Tasmania and Western Australia where it takes the form of administrative guidelines.

Estimating the numbers removed
It is not possible to state with any precision how many children were forcibly removed, even if that enquiry is confined to those removed officially. Many records have not survived. Others fail to record the children’s Aboriginality.

Researchers have assisted the task by counting numbers of children in particular placements or in record series over particular periods. For example, historian Peter Read used official records to number Indigenous children removed in New South Wales between 1883 and 1969 at 5,625, warning as he did so that some of the record series were incomplete (1981 pages 8-9). South Australian researchers Christobel Mattingley and Ken Hampton found records relating to over 350 children entering Colebrook Home in the 54 years to 1981 (1992 page 219).

Another method is to survey adults and ask whether they were removed in childhood. Professor Ernest Hunter surveyed a sample of 600 Aboriginal people in the Kimberley region of WA in the late 1980s. One-quarter of the elderly people and one in seven of the middle-aged people reported having been removed in childhood (evidence 61).

Dr Max Kamien surveyed 320 adults in Bourke NSW in the 1970s. One in every three reported having been separated from their families in childhood for five or more years (cited by Hunter 1995 on page 378). Dr Jane McKendrick’s findings are almost identical. She surveyed Victorian Aboriginal general medical practice patients in the late 1980s, 30% of whom reported having been removed: 20% to children’s homes and another 10% to foster and adoptive families (cited by Hunter 1995 on page 378).

A national survey of Indigenous health in 1989 found that almost one-half (47%) of Aboriginal respondents of all ages had been separated from both parents in childhood. This very high proportion, which contrasted with a figure of only 7% for non-Indigenous people, must be read with some caution. Separation here includes hospitalisation and juvenile detention in addition to removal. It may also include living with family members other than parents for a period (National Aboriginal Health Strategy Working Party 1989 page 175).

More recent surveys are likely to understate the extent of removal because many of those removed during the early periods of the practice are now deceased. The 1994 Australian Bureau of Statistics survey of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders revealed 10% of people aged 25 and above had been removed in childhood (1995a page 2). Such surveys cannot capture the experiences of those people whose Aboriginality is now unknown even to themselves.

A further complicating factor is that although forcible removal affected every region of Australia it seems to have been more or less intense according to the period, the available resources and the ‘visibility’ of, in particular, children of ‘mixed descent’. Nationally we can conclude with confidence that between one in three and one in ten Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families and communities in the period from approximately 1910 until 1970. In certain regions and in certain periods the figure was undoubtedly much greater than one in ten. In that time not one Indigenous family has escaped the effects of forcible removal (confirmed by representatives of the Queensland and WA Governments in evidence to the Inquiry). Most families have been affected, in one or more generations, by the forcible removal of one or more children.

In the hard copy version of this report there is a reproduction of the following item:
Brother Luis Arrufat and students, St. Mary’s Orphanage, New Norcia, WA, c1930.
Courtesy Battye Library 74561P.

3		New South Wales and the ACT
At Darlington Point I have heard an aborigine, who was highly educated, explaining in the best of English how the aborigines were plundered of their rations, robbed of their lands, and reduced to the position of slaves. I do not say the man was right in all his contentions, but when you meet men who understand all these things, you cannot expect them calmly to submit to an order to take from them their girls or boys and to place them in a Government institution (Mr Scobie MP during parliamentary debate on the Aborigines Protection Bill 1915 quoted by Link-Up (NSW) submission 186 on pages 53-4).

Early policies and practices
Within months of the ‘First Fleet’ arrival at Sydney Cove in 1788 there was ‘open animosity’ as Indigenous people protested against ‘the Europeans cutting down trees, taking their food and game, and driving them back into others’ territories’. Bitter conflict followed as Aboriginal people engaged in ‘guerilla warfare – plundering crops, burning huts, and driving away stock’ to be met by ‘punitive expeditions of great ferocity in which bands of Aborigines encountered were indiscriminately killed’ (Bickford 1988 page 57).

The Native Institution at Parramatta, the first of many such schools for Aboriginal children, was opened by Governor Macquarie in 1814. Designed to distance the children from their families and communities, provide them with the ‘benefit’ of a European ‘education’ and inculcate the diligent subservience thought desirable in servants and the working class, it was quickly boycotted by Indigenous families. By 1820 it had closed and other attempts were similarly short-lived.

Early missionary activity similarly failed to attract the support of Aboriginal people to whom a settled agricultural lifestyle and study of the Bible had little relevance. In the meantime, as the non-Indigenous occupation extended throughout New South Wales, Indigenous people were forced from their lands to the fringes of European settlements.

In the 1870s the destitution and vulnerability of Aboriginal people moved the missionaries to renewed efforts. They successfully lobbied the government to reserve lands for their use and appealed for public support resulting in the establishment of missions at Maloga and Warangesda. In 1881 a Protector of Aborigines was appointed. He recommended that reserves be set aside throughout the State to which Aboriginal people should be encouraged to move. 

In 1883 the Aborigines Protection Board was established to manage the reserves and control the lives of the estimated 9,000 Aboriginal people in NSW at that time. The Board took over the reserves at Maloga and Warangesda. After the Australian Capital Territory was established in 1911 the Board compelled all Aboriginal people in the Territory (including those who had been granted land for farming) to move to the Egerton Mission Station at Yass. When that mission closed two years later the residents became fringe-dwellers on the outskirts of Yass until another forced move to Hollywood Mission in 1934. The few Aboriginal children who lived in the ACT came under the control of the NSW Protection Board.

By 1939 there were over 180 reserves in NSW. ‘In most cases they were small with housing consisting of humpies made from iron roofing’ (Learning from the Past 1994 page 14). They were of two kinds. ‘Managed reserves’, also called stations, were usually staffed by a teacher-manager and education of a sort, rations and housing were provided. Unmanaged reserves provided rations but no housing or education and were under the control of the police. 

Segregation and ‘merging’
By about 1890 the Aborigines’ Protection Board had developed a policy to remove children of mixed descent from their families to be ‘merged’ into the non-Indigenous population.

The Board reasoned that if the Aboriginal population, described by some as a ‘wild race of half-castes’ was growing, then it would somehow have to be diminished. If the children were to be de-socialised as Aborigines and re-socialised as Whites, they would somehow have to be removed from their parents (Dr Peter Read submission 49 page 11).

In 1893 a dormitory for girls was built on Warangesda station. From then until 1909 approximately 300 Aboriginal children were removed from their families and placed there. Local Aboriginal people were offered free railway tickets to vacate the area leaving their female children behind (Read 1981 page 5).

The Board relied on persuasion and threats to remove the children. But it wanted the legal power to take them and to control the movement of Aboriginal adults and children. Its lobbying resulted in the Aborigines Protection Act 1909 which gave the Board power ‘to assume full control and custody of the child of any aborigine’ if a court found the child to be neglected under the Neglected Children and Juvenile Offenders Act 1905. It also allowed the Board to apprentice Aboriginal children aged between 14 and 18 years.

In 1914 the Board instructed all station managers that all mixed descent boys 14 years and older must leave the stations to find employment and all girls 14 and over must go into service or to the Cootamundra Training Home for girls which had opened in 1911.
The Board thus acted as a father figure and in so doing denied the Koori parents their rights in the rearing of their children. For example, it was common for a white child to be apprenticed out to a master. But it was the child’s father who made the arrangements. If this child failed, then he would be sent back to his father’s care. However the Board decided when and to whom a Koori child would be apprenticed and when a Koori child failed in his apprenticeship duties, he would be placed under the Board’s control and would be punished for his misconduct by a Board official (Miller 1982 page 140).

Full control and custody 
The Board was not satisfied with having to seek the consent of a court to remove Indigenous children from their families. Its 1912 Annual Report declared, ‘To allow these children to remain on the Reserves … would be … an injustice to the children themselves and a positive menace to the State’ (quoted by Link-Up (NSW) submission 186 on page 47). As the Colonial Secretary complained,

… it is very difficult to prove neglect; if the aboriginal child happens to be decently clad or apparently looked after, it is very difficult to show that the half-caste or aboriginal child is actually in a neglected condition, and therefore it is impossible to succeed in the court (quoted by NSW Government submission on page 26).

The Board’s efforts to remove children were also inhibited by the ‘cumbersome and ineffective’ procedures involved. ‘For instance, after learning that action is intended, parents have removed children across the border into Victoria, and thus defeated the objects of the board’ (Parliamentary Debates 1914-15 quoted by Link-Up (NSW) submission 186 on pages 49-50).

Although great care has been taken to explain at length the many advantages a child would derive from such an opportunity, the almost invariable experience has been that the parents or relatives have raised some frivolous objection and withheld their consent. Consequently the children have perforce had to be left amidst their most undesirable surroundings (Colonial Secretary, 1915, quoted by Miller 1982 on page 141).

The Board’s concerns were addressed by the Aborigines Protection Amending Act 1915 which gave it total power to separate children from their families without having to establish in court that they were neglected.

No court hearings were necessary; the manager of an Aboriginal station, or a policeman on a reserve or in a town might simply order them removed. The racial intention was obvious enough for all prepared to see, and some managers cut a long story short when they came to that part of the committal notice, ‘Reason for Board taking control of the child’. They simply wrote, ‘For being Aboriginal’ (Read 1981 page 6).

Apart from just ‘being Aboriginal’ other commonly cited reasons for removal were ‘To send to service’, ‘Being 14 years’, ‘At risk of immorality’, ‘Neglected’, ‘To get her away from surroundings of Aboriginal station/Removal from idle reserve life’ and ‘Orphan’.

The only way a parent could prevent the removal was to appeal to a court.

We are told that the parents have an appeal. What does an appeal mean? Suppose a poor Aboriginal woman goes into court, who will listen to her? (Parliamentary Debates 1914-15 page 1953).

The 1915 amendment also abolished the minimum age at which Aboriginal children could be apprenticed.

Some Parliamentarians of the day such as the Hon P McGarry strongly opposed the 1915 amending Act. According to McGarry it allowed the Board ‘to steal the child away from its parents’. This ‘act of cruelty’ was a scheme to take the children ‘prisoners’ and ‘to gain absolute control of the child and use him as a slave without paying wages’. Another Member of Parliament assessed the amending Act as tantamount to the ‘reintroduction of slavery in NSW’ (Parliamentary Debates 1914-15 pages 1951, 1953, 1957).

Rather than appeal removal decisions, Indigenous parents protested by leaving the stations ‘with a view to escaping supervision and to evade having their children removed to domestic employment’ (1922 Board circular quoted by Link-Up (NSW) submission 186 on page 56).

Extending official control
From 1905 the Board was under pressure to relinquish reserved land in eastern NSW for non-Indigenous settlement. This pressure became ‘irresistible’ in 1917 with the Returned Servicemen’s Settlement Scheme whereby returned soldiers could select a block of agricultural land (Goodall 1996 page 124). At the same time changes in the pastoral industry were forcing Indigenous communities off pastoral stations as the stations were broken up into smaller family-based operations. Communities moved onto reserves or to the outskirts of towns where work might be found.

Coping with this influx of people put demands on the Board’s budget. Its response was to persuade the government to amend the 1909 Act to narrow the definition of ‘Aborigine’. Children who did not fall within this definition were not entitled to remain on the reserves with their families. According to the then acting Premier,

… quadroons and octoroons will be merged in the white population, and the camps will merely contain the full-blooded aborigines and their descendants … By this means, considerable savings will be effected in the expenditure of the Aborigines Protection Board … There is hope … in years to come, the expenditure in respect of Aborigines will reach vanishing point (quoted by NSW Government submission on page 28).
The 1918 strategy to force ‘lesser castes’ from dependence on the Board and into the wider community to make their own way did not take account of the discrimination they would encounter. They were said to be ‘a great annoyance’ to the European population and there was a public demand that they be supervised more closely. In 1936 the Board regained control over these people by yet another change to the definition of Aboriginality.

The effect of this change was to extend the Board’s control to Aboriginal children living away from the reserves and stations, then estimated at half the Aboriginal population. If a child refused to enter employment on the terms laid down by the Board, he or she could be admitted to an institution. Families who refused to move to reserves or from one reserve to another as reserve land was resumed were threatened with the removal of their children. This happened to families who moved to the Darling River at Wilcannia to escape being forcibly removed to the Menindee Mission after it opened in 1933 and to those resisting removal from Menindee when it closed in 1949 to Murrin Bridge.

It is ironic therefore that very often the Welfare Board would use the poor conditions of the river bank houses as a justification for subsequent removals. It was the neglect of the Welfare Board with the tacit approval of the Shire Council which had forced such appalling conditions on the Aboriginal community in the first instance (Western Aboriginal Legal Service (Broken Hill) submission 775).

As the Board had very limited resources it relied on local police to administer its child removal policy, ‘protect’ Indigenous people, distribute rations and prosecute offenders. 

The policeman, who no doubt was doing his duty, patted his handcuffs, which were in a leather case on his belt, and which May [my sister] and I thought was a revolver … ‘I’ll have to use this if you do not let us take these children now’. Thinking that the policeman would shoot Mother, because she was trying to stop him, we screamed, ‘We’ll go with him Mum, we’ll go’ … Then the policeman sprang another shock. He said he had to go to the hospital to pick up Geraldine [my baby sister], who was to be taken as well. The horror on my mother’s face and her heartbroken cry! (Tucker 1984 pages 92-3).

Training institutions
The Board expressed particular concern about the prospects of young Aboriginal women and girls. To 1921 81% of the children removed were female. That proportion had decreased only slightly by 1936 (Goodall 1990 page 44). 

Girls were sent to Cootamundra Girls’ Home until the age of 14 then sent out to work.

During any one year in the 1920s there would have been between 300 and 400 Aboriginal girls apprenticed to white homes. Aboriginal wards thus represented approximately 1.5% of the domestic workforce at the time (Walden 1995 page 12).

Many girls became pregnant in domestic service, only to have their children in turn removed and institutionalised. Generations of Aboriginal women passed through Cootamundra Girls’ Home until it closed in 1969.

When the girls left the home, they were sent out to service to work in the homes and outlying farms of middle class white people as domestics … On top of that you were lucky not to be sexually, physically and mentally abused, and all for a lousy sixpence that you didn’t get to see anyway. Also, when the girls fell pregnant, their babies were taken from them and adopted out to white families, they never saw them again.
Confidential submission 617, New South Wales: woman removed at 8 years with her 3 sisters in the 1940s; placed in Cootamundra Girls’ Home.

In 1918 the Board established the Kinchela Training Institution in northern NSW for Aboriginal boys. Kinchela moved to Kempsey in 1924. The Board also contributed to the United Aborigines Mission home at Bomaderry on the NSW south coast where younger children and babies were placed.

The Board regularly received complaints about the conditions in these institutions. A 1937 Board inquiry into allegations of extreme cruelty by the Kinchela manager led to him being transferred to the station at Cumeragunja. In response to his actions there Cumeragunja families walked off the station, crossed the Murray River and established communities in Victoria. These communities were later subjected to the child removal policies of the Victorian Government.  

Under arrangements with the Commonwealth Government the NSW Board also placed Aboriginal children from the ACT who had been removed from their families under the Neglected Children and Juvenile Offenders Act 1905 (NSW).

While Indigenous children were being institutionalised, removed non-Indigenous children were being fostered or ‘released back’ into the care of their mothers. An 1874 Public Charities Commission inquiry had stressed that institutional life,

… is prejudicial to a healthy development of character and the rearing of children as good and useful men and women. The one fatal and all-sufficient objection to the massing of children together under the necessary conditions of barrack life is, its utter variance from the family system recognized by nature in the constitution of human society as the best suited for the training of the young (page 40).
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Resistance and dissent
During the late 1920s and the 1930s Aboriginal resistance to the operations of the Board organised at the political level. In 1925 the Australian Aborigines Progressive Association (AAPA) was formed in New South Wales and immediately called for an end to the forcible removal of Aboriginal children from their families (Markus 1990 page 176). In 1928 the Association wrote, 

… girls of tender age and years are torn away from their parents … and put to service in an environment as near to slavery as it is possible to find (quoted by Markus 1990 on page 177).

Fred Maynard, an Aboriginal activist, wrote to the Premier in 1927 demanding ‘that the family life of Aboriginal people shall be held sacred and free from invasion and interference and that the children shall be left in the control of their parents’ (quoted by Learning from the Past 1994 on page 44).

The Member of Parliament for Cobar, a supporter of the AAPA, raised the management problems then existing at Brewarrina Station in Parliament which resulted in a Parliamentary Select Committee into the Aborigines Protection Board, followed by a further inquiry in 1938. 

Aboriginal activists continued to campaign against the actions of governments towards their people since the time of the invasion. At a 1938 protest meeting held on the 150th anniversary of the British occupation of Australia, William Ferguson and John Patten forcefully denied the myth of white benevolence in their manifesto Aborigines Claim Citizen Rights.

You have almost exterminated our people, but there are enough of us remaining to expose the humbug of your claim, as white Australians, to be a civilised, progressive, kindly and humane nation. By your cruelty and callousness towards the Aborigines you stand condemned … If you would openly admit that the purpose of your Aborigines Legislation has been, and now is, to exterminate the Aborigines completely so that not a trace of them or of their descendants remains, we could describe you as brutal, but honest. But you dare not admit openly that what you hope and wish is for our death! You hypocritically claim that you are trying to ‘protect’ us; but your modern policy of ‘protection’ (so-called) is killing us off just as surely as the pioneer policy of giving us poisoned damper and shooting us down like dingoes! (quoted by Markus 1990 on pages 178-9).
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Assimilation 1937-1975
New South Wales responded to the national consensus on assimilation at the 1937 Commonwealth-State conference by reconstituting the Board around the new goal and renaming it the Aborigines Welfare Board in new legislation introduced in 1940.

The problem that the Government has to meet and the community has to face in regard to the Aborigines can be estimated by realising the fact that there are some 10,000 people of full or mixed aboriginal blood … About 50% of the aborigines are camped on stations and reserves which are controlled by the Government. The remainder are living independently of the board … It has no effective control under the present law. They are quite independent and free to live according to their own wishes. In many cases, they are living in close proximity to towns, in much the same way as the unemployed lived during the worst years of the depression, and in that regard they are a great annoyance to the community (Parliamentary debates on the 1940 Act quoted by NSW Government submission on pages 37-8).

The 1940 Act did not give the new Board the same administrative removal powers. To remove a child the Board now had to proceed under the Child Welfare Act 1939 and establish to the satisfaction of a Children’s Court that the child was ‘neglected’ or ‘uncontrollable’. Once removed, however, the child became a ward of the Board (which was not the same as a ward under the Child Welfare Act) and subject to even greater control by the new Board. Two systems of regulation and administration thus operated side by side: one for non-Indigenous wards under the control of the Child Welfare Department and one for Aboriginal wards under the control of the Board. 

The Board was given explicit power to ‘establish … homes for the reception, maintenance and training of wards’. Aboriginal children who left their employment or a ‘home’ were guilty of an offence and punishable by the Children’s Court. Punishment could include forfeiture of rewards, isolated detention, corporal punishment and fatigue duties. In the pursuit of assimilation Aboriginal parents were prevented by law from contacting their institutionalised children. It was an offence to try to communicate with any ward ‘who is an inmate of such home’ or to enter the home. 

The new Board also placed Indigenous children from the Australian Capital Territory, although their removal continued to be governed by the 1905 Neglected Children and Juvenile Offenders Act until 1954, even though that Act had been repealed for NSW. From 1954 until 1968 Indigenous children in the ACT were removed under Commonwealth legislation, the Commonwealth Child Welfare Ordinance 1954, but placed in institutions or foster care in New South Wales. ‘Given the Territory’s location in regional NSW and the continuation of NSW administration, there was no real distinction between the ACT and the rest of NSW’ (ACT Government interim submission page 15).

‘The welfare’
In theory at least the court process in the Child Welfare Act 1939 provided safeguards against the kinds of discretionary separations that the Board had previously engaged in. However, since the Children’s Courts were located far from most Aboriginal communities and no legal assistance was available to parents, they were effectively prevented from contesting removal applications.

In that time we had nobody. No-one to talk for us or anything … We had to just go there … and … if we wanted to say something then, in court, it was too late. They said it was already finished. And then, bang, they’re gone. That was it (quoted by Wootten 1989 on page 15).

In any event the definition and interpretation of ‘neglected’ and ‘uncontrollable’ in the Child Welfare Act impacted adversely on Indigenous families. ‘Neglect’ was defined to include destitution and poverty was a constant feature of most Aboriginal people’s lives. Aboriginal lifestyles, adopted from choice or necessity, such as frequent travelling for cultural activities or seeking employment, resistance to non-Indigenous control and child-rearing by extended family members were regarded by courts as indicative of neglect. Aboriginal children who refused to attend school were labelled ‘uncontrollable’ as were Aboriginal girls running away from situations of sexual abuse or becoming pregnant. Yet until 1972 school principals could and did exclude Aboriginal children from schools on the ground of ‘home condition’ or ‘substantial (community) opposition’ (NSW Government submission page 57).

If parents could be ‘persuaded’ to consent to the removal of their children the Board did not have to show that a child was neglected or uncontrollable. 
Because [my mother] wasn’t educated, the white people were allowed to come in and do whatever they wanted to do – all she did was sign papers. Quite possibly, she didn’t even know what she signed … The biggest hurt, I think, was having my mum chase the welfare car – I’ll always remember it – we were looking out the window and mum was running behind us and singing out for us. They locked us in the police cell up here and mum was walking up and down outside the police station and crying and screaming out for us. There was 10 of us.
Confidential evidence 689, New South Wales: woman removed in the 1960s and placed in Parramatta Girls’ Home.

By the late 1930s it was clear the Board’s institutions could not cope with the number of children being removed. As the Board did not have the funds to establish new institutions but remained firmly committed to its policy of child removal, alternative arrangements had to be made. From 1943 Aboriginal children deemed ‘uncontrollable’ by the Children’s Court became the responsibility of the Child Welfare Department. They were usually sent to a State Corrective Institution such as Parramatta Girls’ Home or Mt Penang. 

During the 1940s and 1950s the Aborigines’ Welfare Board and the Child Welfare Department worked closely together to place Indigenous children. A child’s skin colour often determined the type of placement made. Lighter coloured children were sent to institutions for non-Indigenous children or fostered by non-Indigenous families. 

In 1950 the Board advertised for ‘foster parents … for 150 Aboriginal children’. By 1958 116 wards had been fostered, 90 of them with non-Indigenous families (Read 1983 quoted by Link-Up (NSW) submission 186 on page 65). In 1960 over 300 Aboriginal children were in foster homes and another 70 or so were in Cootamundra and Kinchela (Link-Up (NSW) submission 186 page 65). 

Until 1963 the Board was still exploring the possibility of constructing more institutions to house all its removed children. In that year it was finally decided not to proceed with another institution because they encouraged segregation and, moreover, they were too expensive. 

Adoption was another method of removing Indigenous children from their families. Mothers who had just given birth were coerced to relinquish their newborn babies. Those whose children had already been forcibly removed were pressured by Board officials to consent to adoption. The Child Welfare Department processed the adoption but relied on Board officials to obtain the mother’s consent. The Child Welfare Department did not check to ensure that Indigenous mothers understood they were being asked to agree to the permanent removal of their child.

Most of us went to Crown St. Hospital. That’s where my son was born, and then we went back to the hostel with the baby. Once we were there, we had the Welfare coming in, asking you what you was going to do – telling you most of the time that your parents didn’t want you, the father of the baby didn’t want you … they said to me they couldn’t find anyone that wanted me, and they couldn’t find anywhere for me, like a live-in job where I could take the baby. And then they said the only one they could find that was willing to take me was my eldest sister, who I’d never seen since I was a little girl – she’d gone before us: she went away with some white people that were supposed to take her away for a good education – and they said she was the only one who was willing to take me, but she didn’t want the baby. So they brought the papers in and told me to sign and that was it.
Confidential evidence 689, New South Wales: woman removed in the 1960s and placed in Parramatta Girl’s Home.

The powers of the NSW Board differed from those in some other States in that it never had guardianship of Indigenous children and therefore could not consent to the adoption of one of its wards. However the Adoption of Children Act 1965 allowed for the consent requirement to be waived if ‘that person is, in the opinion of the Court, unfit to discharge the obligations of a parent or guardian by reason of his having abandoned, deserted, neglected or ill-treated the child’. Rather than endeavour to contact the mother of a child whose foster parents wanted to adopt him or her, the Board applied to the Children’s Court to waive the consent requirement.

In 1968 responsibility for placing Indigenous children from the ACT was transferred to the Commonwealth Department of the Interior. This marked a shift in policy for foster care. Previously the practice had been to place children with an unrelated foster family in NSW. Restricted contact with their natural family and continued foster care arrangements meant that these placements, in effect, often became pseudo-adoptions. From 1967, the practice of Commonwealth Departments was to place children in residential care in the ACT and attempt to reunite the child with their family (ACT Government interim submission page 16).	

Abolition of the Board
In 1969 the NSW Aborigines’ Welfare Board was abolished ‘leaving over a thousand children in institutional or family care. Almost none of them was being raised by Aborigines, still less by the child’s own extended family’ (Dr Peter Read submission 49 page 14). Wards of the Board were transferred to the Department for Child Welfare and Social Welfare which set up the Aborigines’ Advisory Council in 1971. Although the abolition of the Board meant that Indigenous children were, in theory, treated the same as non-Indigenous children, ‘the child welfare approach was, in effect, overt denial but covert recognition and denigration of Aboriginality’ (historian Dr Heather Goodall quoted by Wootten 1989 on page 26). Kinchela and Cootamundra closed shortly after the Board was abolished but the home at Bomaderry was still functioning until 1980.
I was taken off my mum as soon as I was born, so she never even seen me. What Welfare wanted to do was to adopt all these poor little black babies into nice, caring white families, respectable white families, where they’d get a good upbringing. I had a shit upbringing. Me and [adopted brother who was also Aboriginal] were always treated different to the others … we weren’t given the same love, we were always to blame. … I found my mum when I was 18 – she was really happy to hear from me, because she didn’t adopt me out. Apparently she did sign adoption papers, but she didn’t know [what they were]. She said to me that for months she was running away from Welfare [while she was pregnant], and they kept finding her. She remembers being in – it wasn’t a hospital – but there were nuns in it, nuns running it. I was born at Crown Street. They did let her out with her brother one day and she run away again. Right from the beginning they didn’t want her to have me.
Confidential evidence 657, New South Wales: woman taken from her mother at birth in 1973 and adopted by a non-Aboriginal family.

The Broken Hill office of the Western Aboriginal Legal Service informed the Inquiry that it was clear from its research that ‘there were children removed from Wilcannia in the 1970’s in much the same way that children were being removed in the 1960’s’ (submission 775). Once Cootamundra and Kinchela had closed, Indigenous children who rebelled against their removal and foster placements could be sent to a detention centre.

Mt Penang Training Centre [in the early 1970s] was described to me by a former deputy superintendent as a para-military institution which followed the tradition of treatment of young offenders which commenced in the early days of colonisation … The atmosphere was one of absolute regimentation with very strict practices and procedures throughout the centre.

Attitudes to Aboriginals were described by the former deputy superintendent as ‘appalling’ … There are no figures on the number of Aboriginals who were at Mt Penang but there is no reason to think it was less than 25-30% … The regime would have been very harsh for any young person but must have been particularly oppressive for Aboriginals like Malcolm, having regard to the relative freedom with which he had lived his early years, and the racist attitudes (Wootten 1989 pages 25-6). 

Towards self-management
From the mid-1970s the NSW Department of Youth and Community Services began involving Aboriginal workers in the process of placing Indigenous children.

It is the deep and natural desire of Aboriginal people, particularly the young adolescents, to be housed and cohabit with those of their own race and foster placement within the Aboriginal community would help to resolve this situation (Annual Report 1977, quoted by NSW Government submission on page 64).

In 1978 12 Aboriginal caseworkers started working with the department on the placement of Indigenous children. However, Aboriginal submissions for separate legal consideration of Indigenous children in the Community Welfare Bill 1981 were rejected by the department (Milne 1982 page 31). Indigenous organisations such as the Aboriginal Children’s Service and Link-Up (NSW) pressured the department to change its stance in relation to making specific provision for Indigenous children. 

In 1980, the department’s Aboriginal Children’s Research Project reported that ‘17.2% of children in corrective institutions are Aboriginal’. Of these children, ‘81% … are not in their home regions [and] 34% had no contact with either parents or relatives’. In addition, ‘10.2% of children in non-government children’s homes are Aboriginal [and] 15.5% of children in foster care are Aboriginal’ (quoted by Select Committee of the Legislative Assembly upon Aborigines 1981 on page 293). The Aboriginal population of NSW at the time was about 1% of the total.

A conference of Aboriginal Community Workers in 1983 proposed changes to the adoption process to ensure that Aboriginal mothers were advised of alternatives. Departmental policy changed in 1985-86 with the development of policies for adoption and fostering that recognised that Aboriginal children who have been removed should be placed with Aboriginal families whenever possible. Following this policy change there was a 12% reduction in the number of Aboriginal wards from the previous year (NSW Government submission page 65).

The Aboriginal Child Placement Principle, under which an Aboriginal family must be the preferred option for an Aboriginal child needing out-of-home care, was incorporated into the Children (Care and Protection) Act 1987. In that year a survey of government and non-government foster parents found that only 51% of the families with Aboriginal foster children were also Aboriginal and that Aboriginal children tended to be over-represented among children in very long-term foster care (Link Up (NSW) submission 186 page 89).  

There is no similar principle in the Children’s Services Act 1986 (ACT) although there is in the Adoption Act 1993 (ACT). The ACT Government informed the Inquiry that it intends to review the 1986 Act and ‘is committed to the inclusion of this principle’ (ACT Government interim submission page 5).

Until 1968 the placement of ACT children was undertaken by the NSW Board. It was then transferred to the Commonwealth Department of the Interior. Following self-government in 1989 responsibility for the placement of Indigenous children from the ACT passed to the ACT Department of Family Services.

Jennifer
My grandmother, Rebecca, was born around 1890. She lived with her tribal people, parents and relations around the Kempsey area. Rebecca was the youngest of a big family. One day some religious people came, they thought she was a pretty little girl. She was a full blood aborigine about five years old. Anyway those people took her to live with them.
Rebecca could not have been looked after too well. At the age of fourteen she gave birth to my mother Grace and later on Esther, Violet and May. She married my grandfather Laurie and at the age of twenty-three she died from TB.
Grandfather took the four girls to live with their Aunty and Uncle on their mother’s side. Grandfather worked and supported the four girls.
Mum said in those days the aboriginals did not drink. She often recalled going to the river and her Uncle spearing fish and diving for cobbler. Mum had eaten kangaroo, koala bear, turtles and porcupine. She knew which berries were edible, we were shown by her how to dig for yams and how to find witchetty grubs. My mother also spoke in several aboriginal languages she knew as a small girl. The aboriginals had very strict laws and were decent people. They were kind and had respectable morals. Even though the girls fretted for their mother they felt secure with their own people.
Years later Grandfather told my mother a policeman came to his work with papers to sign. The girls were to be placed in Cootamundra Home where they would be trained to get a job when they grew up. If grandfather didn’t sign the papers he would go to jail and never come out, this was around 1915.
My grandfather was told he was to take the four girls by boat to Sydney. The girls just cried and cried and the relations were wailing just like they did when Granny Rebecca had died.
In Sydney my mother and Esther were sent by coach to Cootamundra. Violet and May were sent to the babies’ home at Rockdale. Grace and Esther never saw their sister Violet again. She died at Waterfall Hospital within two years from TB.
My mother was to wait twenty years before she was to see her baby sister May again.
Cootamundra in those days was very strict and cruel. The home was overcrowded. Girls were coming and going all the time. The girls were taught reading, writing and arithmetic. All the girls had to learn to scrub, launder and cook. 

Mum remembered once a girl who did not move too quick. She was tied to the old bell post and belted continuously. She died that night, still tied to the post, no girl ever knew what happened to the body or where she was buried.
Aunty Esther was a big girl for her age, so she was sent out as a cook to work at twelve years of age. Mum being of smaller build was sent out as children’s nurse at fourteen. She had responsibility for four young children; one only a baby for 24 hours a day. Mum said they used to put girls ages up if they were big for their age and send them out to work on properties. Some girls were belted and sexually abused by their masters and sent to the missions to have their babies. Some girls just disappeared never to be seen or heard of again.
Eventually after several years Mum was sent to Rose Bay to work. Whilst in Sydney she met her sister Esther who was working in the Chatswood area. As far as I know neither Mum or Aunt Esther ever got paid for those hard working years under the Board.
My mother often recalled the joyous time Aunty May came to Kempsey to see her sisters and father. The three young women hugged one another and cried with happiness and sadness for their sister and their mother.
Early one morning in November 1952 …
Early one morning in November 1952 the manager from Burnt Bridge Mission came to our home with a policeman. I could hear him saying to Mum, ‘I am taking the two girls and placing them in Cootamundra Home’. My father was saying, ‘What right have you?’. The manager said he can do what he likes, they said my father had a bad character (I presume they said this as my father associated with Aboriginal people). They would not let us kiss our father goodbye, I will never forget the sad look on his face. He was unwell and he worked very hard all his life as a timber-cutter. That was the last time I saw my father, he died within two years after.  
We were taken to the manager’s house at Burnt Bridge. Next morning we were in court. I remember the judge saying, ‘These girls don’t look neglected to me’. The manager was saying all sorts of things. He wanted us placed in Cootamundra Home. So we were sent away not knowing that it would be five years before we came back to Kempsey again.
Mum used to write to us every week. Sometimes it would be 2 months before we received the letters, of course they were opened and read first. Sometimes parts would be torn out of the letters by matron or whoever was in charge. 

Cootamundra was so different from the North Coast, it was cold and dry. I missed the tall timbers and all the time I was away there was this loneliness inside of me. I had often thought of running away but Kate was there and I was told to always look after her. I had just turned eleven and Kate was still only seven. I often think now of Cootamundra as a sad place, I think of thousands of girls who went through that home, some girls that knew what family love was and others that never knew; they were taken away as babies.
Some of the staff were cruel to the girls. Punishment was caning or belting and being locked in the box-room or the old morgue. Matron had her pets and so did some of the staff. I look back now and see we were all herded together like sheep and each had to defend themselves and if you didn’t you would be picked on by somebody that didn’t like you, your life would be made a misery. I cannot say from my memories Cootamundra was a happy place.
In the home on Sundays we often went to two different churches, hymns every Sunday night. The Seventh Day Adventist and Salvation Army came through the week. With all the different religions it was very confusing to find out my own personal and religious beliefs throughout my life.
My mother sent us a new outfit every change of season, we only received one parcel. The matron kept our clothes and distributed them to her pets. In winter it was icy cold and for the first time in my life I didn’t have socks to wear to school.
One day the matron called me to her office. 
One day the matron called me to her office. She said it was decided by the Board that Kate and myself were to go and live with a lady in a private house. The Board thought we were too ‘white’ for the home. We were to be used as an experiment and if everything worked out well, more girls would be sent later on.
We travelled all day long. We didn’t know what place we were going to, all I knew was we were going further and further away from home. Late afternoon we stopped at this house in Narromine. There lived Mrs S., her son and at weekends her husband Lionel.
The twenty months Kate and I spent at Narromine were honestly the worst time of my childhood life. I often thought I would not survive long enough ever to see my mother again.
The Scottish woman hated me because I would not call her ‘Mum’. She told everyone I was bad. 

She made us stay up late sewing, knitting and darning that pillowcase full of endless socks. Often we weren’t allowed to bed ‘till after 11 p.m. I was always late for school, the headmaster used to greet me with ‘Good afternoon Jennifer’. Mrs S. did not allow me to do homework, therefore my schoolwork suffered and myself – a nervous wreck.
When I was thirteen years old Mrs S. called this middle-aged male doctor to the house and said she wanted an internal examination of me. That was terribly shameful for me, I will not say anymore. During the time [with her] I was belted naked repeatedly, whenever she had the urge. She was quite mad. I had to cook, clean, attend to her customers’ laundry. I was used and humiliated. The Board knew she was refused anymore white children yet they sent us there.
Near the end of our stay she got Mr F. from Dubbo to visit. She tried to have me put in Parramatta Girls’ Home. By this time I knew other people had complained to the Board. Mr F. asked me if I wanted to go to a white home or back to Cootamundra. So a couple of days later we were back in the Home. It was hard to believe we had gotten away from that woman.
It wasn’t long after we were back at the Home and Matron called me to her office. She wanted to know what had happened at Narromine. I told her everything. She said the experiment did not work and she would write to the Board for fear they would send more girls out. It did not do any good though because more than half the girls were fostered out over the next three years. Some of the girls were sexually abused, belted and called names by their foster parents. Of course the brainwashing continued about Aboriginals being lazy, dirty and of low intelligence going nowhere.
In December 1957 our mother finally got us home. 
In December 1957 our mother finally got us home. She was the first Aboriginal to move into a Commission house. My mother died four years later, she suffered high blood pressure, she was 54 years old. It was fight all the way to survive because she was born an Aboriginal.
I still can’t see why we were taken away from our home. We were not neglected, we wore nice clothes, we were not starving. Our father worked hard and provided for us and we came from a very close and loving family.
I feel our childhood has been taken away from us and it has left a big hole in our lives.
Confidential submission 437, New South Wales.

Six o’clock … Outa bed
She entered Coota a young girl
about eleven / twelve but already
mature for her years.
She knew how to look after her
younger brothers and sister, keep house
and herself, her mother made sure of that.
Her life was forcefully changed.
She was parted from her brothers.
White washed in a ‘new alien’ white
way of thinking.
She never really had a childhood,
she went from baby clothes to 
Government uniforms, controlled by the
times of day.
Six o’clock, out of bed, wash, dress, work, breakfast,
work, inferior schooling, home, change clothes, work,
wash, tea, bed, nightmares, worry, little sleep,
cry.
Six o’clock, out of bed, wash …
Talk like whites, behave like whites,
pray like whites. Be white.
She new her family for she was part of one,
where she grew up, the things she did,
the strong family she had, the old people,
the stories of long ago, her own
identity. Her mother.
…
She was rebellious, she never
conformed, they never broke her spirit,
her family background made sure of that
and they were always in her thoughts.
Six o’clock, out of bed, wash ...........
she endured many years of this spirit
breaking torture, punished, bashed, humiliated,
starved.
…								   James Miller 1994
Extract from the poem Six o’Clock…Outa bed

4		Victoria
 Informal and formal foster care arrangements and holiday placements supposedly for a temporary period, were frequently the beginning of a permanent separation of Aboriginal children from their family and community. Some children placed informally, were passed from one foster home to another, names were changed and the child’s whereabouts ‘lost’ to their parents and unknown to welfare authorities. Some of these placements may have led to the granting of an adoption order with parents’ consents being dispensed with on the ground of whereabouts unknown, particularly as there was no restriction prior to the 1964 legislation as to who could arrange adoptions  (Adoption Legislation Review Committee Report 1983 page 59).

Segregation – 1835-1886
From 1835, when the European occupation of Victoria commenced, until the 1880s government policy was one of segregation of Indigenous people on reserves. These were mainly controlled by missions. 

Between 1838 and 1849 Victoria was the site of an unsuccessful ‘Protectorate’ experiment in which government appointed protectors attempted to persuade Indigenous people to ‘settle down to a life of farming’ (Rowley 1970 page 56). From 1837 missions established schools, attempting to wean the children away from ‘tribal influences’. Protectors and missionaries alike had Aboriginal ‘orphans’ living with them. 

In 1860 a ‘Central Board Appointed to Watch over the Interests of Aborigines’, the first of its kind in Australia, was appointed to consider how the government should deal with its Indigenous population. The Board commissioned reports which,

… disclosed a state of affairs almost everywhere which could only be described as appalling. Torn from their way of life by advancing settlement, they lived under wretched conditions, drunkenness, prostitution, and begging being apparently almost universal. Tuberculosis and other diseases were rife, and the early extinction of the race was freely predicted … The census indicated that at that time they numbered about 2,341 (McLean 1957 page 4).

The Board was given the task of overseeing the establishment of reserves to which Aboriginal people were to be confined. By 1867 it was managing reserves at Framlingham and Coranderrk, had indirect control of a number of missions which received some government assistance and administered a number of small reserves and ration depots. A school was constructed on the Coranderrk reserve with separate living quarters for the children. The manager of Coranderrk travelled around the Indigenous communities removing ‘neglected’ children for the school although he had no lawful power to do so until 1869.

The Aborigines Protection Act 1869 established the Aborigines Protection Board and set the pattern for subsequent laws applying to Indigenous people in Victoria. It contained very few substantive provisions but instead authorised the making of regulations on a wide range of subjects including ‘the care, custody and education of the children of aborigines’. As regulations do not attract the kind of Parliamentary scrutiny and publicity that occurs with proposed statutes, major decisions about the treatment of Indigenous children could go unnoticed.

One of the regulations allowed for ‘the removal of any Aboriginal child neglected by its parents or left unprotected, to any of the places of residence specified in Regulation 1 [the missions or stations] or to an industrial or reformatory school’. Another provided that, 

Every aboriginal male under 14 years of age, and also all unmarried aboriginal females under the age of 18 years, shall, when so required by the person in charge of any station in connection with or under the control of the [Board], reside, and take their meals, and sleep in any building set apart for such purposes.

These provisions were used to separate Aboriginal children from their parents and house them in dormitories on the Lake Hindmarsh, Coranderrk, Ramahyuck, Lake Tyers and Lake Condah reserves.

‘Merging’ and ‘dispersing’ – 1886-1957
The Aborigines’ Protection Board was chronically short of funds. In the early 1880s it proposed that it devote its budget and attention to ‘full bloods’ who were thought to be dying out and ‘merge’ the half-castes into the non-Indigenous community where they would have to find employment to survive.  

The Aborigines Protection Act 1886 and its regulations provided that at the age of 13 years ‘half-caste’ boys were to be apprenticed or sent to work on farms and girls were to work as servants. Having left, they were not allowed to return to their families on reserves without official permission for a visit. Orphaned ‘half-caste’ children were to be transferred to the care of the Department for Neglected Children or an institution for neglected children. All ‘part-Aborigines’ aged 34 and younger were to leave the stations and their families although they remained under the control of the Board until 1893. At that time the government estimated there were about 833 Indigenous people remaining in Victoria, of whom 233 were classed as ‘half-castes’, including 160 children. 

Subsequent regulations extended the Board’s removal power further to allow it to send children of mixed descent, whether orphaned or not, to the Department for Neglected Children or the Department of Reformatory Schools for their ‘better care and custody’. Families refusing to consent to the removal of their children were told they would have to leave the stations and would be denied rations.

The Board cannot grant rations to Henry Albert and family, as they are half castes, but every assistance will be given to place their children into the Industrial Schools and get them boarded out to respectable families  (letter from Rev. Hagenauer, General Inspector of the Board, dated 9 September 1897, quoted by Chesterman and Galligan 1995 on page 20).

Many people of mixed descent continued to reside near the stations, visiting their relatives in secret.

Between 1886 and 1923 the number of Aboriginal stations in Victoria declined from six to one. All Aboriginal people who wished to receive assistance from the Board had to move to Lake Tyers, the only staffed institution after 1924. The number of people there fluctuated, with a maximum of about 290 in the 1930s. 

By 1957 fewer than 200 Aboriginal people were under Board control at Lake Tyers. Those who were lived a highly regulated life. Their homes were inspected, they had to seek permission to leave the station and they could be expelled for misconduct or if thought able to earn a living elsewhere. Residents received low cash wages in return for work and were supplied instead with rations as late as 1966 (Long 1970 page 20). Although the Board continued to have power over Indigenous children generally, it was only concerned with the people at Lake Tyers. Adhering to this policy the Victorian Government refused to attend the 1948 and 1951 Commonwealth/State conferences, maintaining that the Indigenous population of Victoria was too small to justify any special attention.

During the 1940s and 1950s humanitarian and religious groups made repeated representations to the government about the inactivity of the Board. The Board’s response was to demolish or remove the houses on Lake Tyers station and offer the residents housing in nearby towns.

Indigenous people who had been forced off the Board’s reserves or who chose to leave faced continuing hostility in non-Indigenous society. They were denied government welfare assistance available to non-Indigenous people. Suffering the effects of dispossession and facing discrimination in employment, access to accommodation and other fields of life, the only form of government assistance provided to them was rations distributed by the police. Although the Board regained power over ‘half-castes’ in 1910, it refused assistance to anyone not living at Lake Tyers.
Although legislation from 1919 made it possible for a ‘destitute’ mother to seek financial assistance to maintain her children at home, the process involved going to court. Given Indigenous people’s unfamiliarity with and distrust of courts this was not a realistic option.

In the face of these difficulties, Indigenous people moved into shanty towns on the edges of country towns, on the sites of former missions and settlements and in areas that offered employment, such as seasonal fruit picking work. Indigenous communities grew up in the Goulburn Valley, East Gippsland and along the Murray River. They were joined by others from NSW, particularly from the station at Cumeragunja on the NSW-Victoria border, fleeing the removal policy of the NSW Protection Board. From the 1930s onwards Indigenous people also moved to Melbourne.
Assimilation – 1957-1970
In 1955 the newly elected Premier Henry Bolte commissioned Charles McLean to review and recommend changes to Victoria’s Aboriginal affairs policy. McLean reported on the conditions under which Indigenous people lived.

On these two areas [ at Mooroopna] live about 59 adults and 107 children, in most squalid conditions. Their ‘humpies’ are mostly constructed of old timber, flattened kerosene tins, and hessian, usually with some kind of partition to separate bedroom from living room. They are not weatherproof, have earthen floors, very primitive cooking arrangements, and no laundry or bathing facilities except the river, from which all water is drawn by buckets and carted for distances of up to half a mile.

As might be expected in these surroundings, many of the children are dirty, undernourished and neglected, and very irregular in attendance at school. Shortly after my visit there, twenty-four of the younger children were, at the instance of the police, taken from these ‘homes’ and committed to the care of the Children’s Welfare Department by the Children’s Court (McLean 1957 pages 6 and 7).

The Aborigines Advancement League had petitioned McLean expressing fears for the physical and cultural extinction of Aboriginal people and advocating self-government for the communities. McLean rejected these claims and recommended instead a ‘helpful but firm policy of assimilation’ with emphasis on rehousing projects and improved educational and employment opportunities consistent with the assimilation policy that the other States had agreed to at the 1951 conference. 

McLean found that the policy of segregating full descent people at Lake Tyers and dispersing those of mixed descent had failed, noting that most of the people remaining at Lake Tyers were of mixed descent. He recommended the establishment of an Aborigines Welfare Board with an assimilationist objective, modelled on the NSW Board. 

McLean felt that the provisions of the Child Welfare Act 1954 were generally adequate to deal with the welfare of Aboriginal children. He failed to appreciate the support networks within Indigenous communities to care for children. Shortly afterwards Barwick described a distinct culture and sense of community that existed among Indigenous people living in Melbourne. The community held weekly dances, had a strong sense of kinship and supported each other. ‘Few women refuse to foster the children of close kin or to help unemployed relatives and friends for short periods’ (Barwick 1964 page 27).

The Aborigines Welfare Board
Most of McLean’s recommendations were reflected in the ensuing Aborigines Act 1957. The Act established the Aborigines Welfare Board ‘to promote the moral, intellectual and physical welfare of aborigines … with a view to their assimilation in the general community’. However, for the first time in Victoria’s Aboriginal affairs legislation, the Board was given no specific power in relation to Aboriginal children.

Nevertheless, comments were made in debate on the Bill on the desirability of separating Aboriginal children from what were regarded as the degenerate influences of their family. The best hope for these children was seen to lie in making them believe they were part of non-Indigenous society.

Although the Aborigines Welfare Board had no power to remove children, it could notify the police that it was concerned about a particular child and thereby initiate forcible removal action. Generally its role in relation to removed children was to examine placement options for them including ‘home release’ whereby children were allowed to return home and the home situation monitored.

Housing was a major focus of the Board’s activities. Ironically the provision of public housing for Indigenous families brought them into conflict with government authorities and thereby at increased risk of having their children taken. For example, strict limits on visitors staying in public housing and restrictions on the number of family members that could live together took no account of Indigenous family and community relationships.  

By 1961 six government institutions had been opened to cope with the increasing numbers of children removed. Until then most Indigenous children had been referred to non-government agencies.

Role of police
Until 1985 the Victorian police were empowered to forcibly remove children under the child welfare laws. Until the mid-1950s, this power does not seem to have been used to a great extent against children in Indigenous communities.

However, while the McLean inquiry was underway, police suddenly took action to remove children from Indigenous communities in Gippsland, the Western District and the Goulburn Valley under the newly passed Child Welfare Act 1954. Shortly after McLean visited Mooroopna, 24 of the 107 children noted by him were taken. Many of these children were taken to Ballarat Orphanage. According to Barwick, 

During 1956 and 1957 more than one hundred and fifty children (more than 10 per cent of the children in the Aboriginal population of Victoria at that time) were living in State children’s institutions. The great majority had been seized by police and charged in the Children’s Court with ‘being in need of care and protection’. Many policemen act from genuine concern for the ‘best interests’ of Aboriginal children, but some are over-eager to enter Aboriginal homes and bully parents with threats to remove their children. Few Aboriginal families are aware of their legal rights, and accept police intrusion at any hour of the day or night without question. This ignorance of legal procedure has also prevented parents from reclaiming children committed as Wards of State when their living standard has improved (quoted by Victorian Government final submission on page 52).
  
In 1969 the Aboriginal Affairs Act was amended to provide that the Victorian police were to notify the Ministry whenever an Aboriginal child was brought before a Children’s Court. Thereafter the Aborigines Advancement League would be notified enabling the children to be legally represented. Prior to 1969 Children’s Court care and protection cases were not usually defended, there were no duty solicitors at court and it was rare for legal representation to be provided.

Informal and private removals
Until the 1957 Act was passed and the Aborigines Welfare Board established, the main source of outside assistance available to Indigenous people in Victoria was non-government welfare agencies. The government had long relied upon non-government agencies and private individuals to tend public welfare.

Between 1887 and 1954 private welfare agencies and individuals were authorised to apprehend children they suspected were neglected, assume guardianship of them and keep them in institutions or in other forms of care. Children who had been removed by the police and made State wards were also placed in these privately-run institutions. In 1957 there were at least 68 institutions managed by 44 different non-government agencies (Leonard Tierney quoted by Victorian Government final submission on page 50) and it was not until 1956 that the first two government institutions for children were opened. Minimum standards of conduct and treatment by non-government agencies were not imposed until the Child Welfare Act 1954.

The lack of welfare regulation meant that offers of temporary assistance accepted by Indigenous families from non-government agencies or individuals could be the start of an irreversible removal process. Although legislation required the registration of houses in which children under the age of five years had been ‘privately placed’, this requirement was largely ignored in relation to Indigenous children. 

We left Lake Tyers [because the station was being closed down] – I think it was the early 1960s – and we went to Ararat and lived there for quite a while … And [my parents] are sort of thinking it’s a new world. We can cope. But unbeknown to them they couldn’t cope. I mean they weren’t taught how to manage money or even live in a white society, because they only knew how to live the way that they had lived at Lake Tyers … There was a lady that came to the vestry. I was forever going to the vestry and seeking help up there because of the problems that were happening … She befriended me and said, ‘Would you like to come and stay with me for a holiday’. When we were at Lake Tyers we were billeted out to people in Melbourne and went for holidays, then went back home again. Then when I met this lady and she came down and met my mum and dad … they didn’t want me to go with her. But she just sort of said, ‘You’ll be seeing her. We only want her for a holiday’. And they sort of kept to that. And we were coming from Melbourne up to Ararat to see mum and dad all the time, and then my brother had left and lived with people that my foster parents knew, and he came down and stayed with them and my other sister M-, she came and stayed with us for a little while but then went back. And then I think it was in 1970 the government sort of stepped in and said, you know, the problems were there and mum and dad couldn’t look after the kids. And they ended up taking the kids – the three of them – away.
Confidential evidence 213, Victoria: woman removed at about 12 years. When she was 16 her father was killed in a road accident while he was hitchhiking to see one of the children.

The informality of these ‘private placements’ has made it very difficult for removed children to discover how they were taken.

Adoption
The Victorian Adoption Act 1928 allowed anyone to arrange an adoption. The process involved the mother signing a consent form and thereafter losing all rights in relation to her child. In a wide variety of situations the consent requirement could be waived. The child would then be matched with an adoptive couple by the agency or individual making the arrangements. In the meantime the child would be cared for by the arranger of the adoption, often in an institution associated with the adoption agency. To finalise the process the adoptive parents would go before a judge to seek the formal adoption order. The emphasis in the Act was on ‘secrecy, safety and stability’ (Jaggs 1986 page 125).

My Mum became pregnant in Alice Springs. She knew a minister in Ballarat. They brought her to Baxter House. She was about 16 when she had me. My adoptive Mum knew Mum was upset. My adoptive Mum was a nurse at Geelong Hospital and knew of it. My Mum signed papers. My adoptive mum says the minister told the doctor that she couldn’t look after me because she was a single mother and not working … My adopted parents are fantastic. But it would be nice to know my cousins. I would have liked to know about my Dad … I don’t think Mum had any options. I don’t know where I’d have ended up. 
Confidential submission 667, Victoria.

In the 1960s police officers routinely investigated reports of girls under the age of 16 years giving birth. Young mothers, whether Indigenous or non-Indigenous, were told that if they did not consent to the adoption of their babies the father of the child would be prosecuted for carnal knowledge.

Under the Adoption Act 1964 adoptions were more regulated. Adoption agencies had to be approved by the Chief Secretary of the Social Welfare Department. The Aborigines Welfare Board was one of the ‘private’ agencies approved under the 1964 Act.  
Adoption wasn’t one of the … major functions [of the Aborigines Welfare Board] but the Board was one of 23 adoption agencies in Victoria at the time. If you really wanted a baby and you were struggling and couldn’t get a baby through a normal adoption agency, you went to the Aborigines Welfare Board and you could get yourself a baby (Professor Colin Tatz evidence 260 page 15).

Although adoptions were more regulated after 1964, many procedures are still unclear. Some adoptive families simply returned children they no longer wanted. Some Indigenous parents found out that they had unknowingly agreed to relinquish children when they believed they were placing them in temporary care. Still others simply could not locate children who had been fostered or adopted by the agency.

See what happened was, [my adoptive] dad served up near Darwin during the Second World War, and he seen how bad black fellas got treated up there. So he decided if he could he would do something to help Aboriginal people. Now, back in the sixties obviously, the way society was then, they felt the best thing was, you know, adopting kids and stuff like that … On the adoption forms it’s got written there in somebody else’s handwriting – not [my mother’s], because it just doesn’t match her signature and stuff like that – reason for giving up the child is ‘no visible means of support’. Now, generally that could be accurate, but in the case of [the] Aboriginal community and kids, that’s on nearly every form or whatever. Considering I come from a big family – my mother had lots of brothers and sisters who could’ve looked after me … So, I mean, why was I different? 
Confidential evidence 136, Victoria: man adopted at 3 months when his mother was 22. At the time his mother had 2 sons and 2 daughters who remained with her. She died two years later at 24.

The low level of financial support that non-government agencies received to keep children in their institutions meant that the agencies were keen to find permanent homes for these children as quickly as possible. Non-Indigenous parents have told the Inquiry that they responded to appeals that stressed the unwanted nature of these children and how they faced a lifetime in an institution. They feel they were deceived by not being told the circumstances under which the children were removed from their families. Some are still suffering grief and shock from unwittingly being part of a process of forcible removal.

In 1960 my wife and I applied to adopt an Aboriginal baby, after reading in the newspapers that these babies were remaining in institutionalised care, going to orphanages, as no one would adopt them. Later that year we were offered a baby who had been cared for since birth in a Church run Babies Home in Brunswick. We were delighted! We had been told, and truly believed that his mother was dead and his father unknown. Where we lived there seemed to be no Aboriginals around. We knew some were grouped in Northcote and in Fitzroy but the stories told about them were so negative, we felt we should avoid them at least until Ken was much older. [By the time Ken was a teenager] he was in fact an isolated individual, alienated from the stream of life with no feeling for a past or a future, subject to racism in various forms day in and day out. No wonder he withdrew to his room, and as he told me later, considered suicide on occasions. When Ken was eighteen he found his natural family, three sisters and a brother. His mother was no longer living. She died some years earlier when Ken was four. Because of the long timespan, strong bonds with his family members could not be established.
Confidential submission 266, Victoria.

Children from inter-State
Victoria was also a destination for holidays arranged by welfare organisations and government departments in other States. One of those schemes was the ‘Harold Blair Aboriginal Children’s Holiday Project’ which brought groups of children from Queensland settlements, and later the Dareton area of NSW, to Melbourne for up to three months.
  
Well, I was fostered when I was 7. I was staying with my foster parents and they rang up one day and said that my mother had died and would they consider fostering me. That was over the phone. I know there was nothing signed for me and that, and I want to know why because my father was still alive, and he didn’t die until I was 10. [I was with these people] through the ‘Harold Blair Scheme’ for Christmas holidays and when I come down me and my two sisters got split up. We used to live in Coomealla on the mission, across the border from Mildura. They just rang me up and said that my father had died, that’s all … 
Confidential evidence 214, Victoria: woman removed at 7 years in the late 1960s having come to Melbourne for a holiday. She never saw her parents again.

Abolition of the Welfare Board
Dissension within the Board and the entry of the Commonwealth Government into the field of Aboriginal Affairs following the 1967 referendum led to another reassessment of its Aboriginal affairs policy by the Victorian Government. 

The Aboriginal Affairs Act 1967 gave the newly appointed Minister for Aboriginal Affairs very broad powers including the ‘coordination of voluntary organizations concerned with the welfare and interest of aborigines’. The Act also made provision for regulations concerning ‘conditions regulating the entry of aborigines to training and other institutions on aboriginal reserves and the conditions under which such aborigines may remain in or be required to leave such training or other institution’.

In its first Annual Report in 1968, the Ministry expressed concern about ‘unauthorised fostering arrangements of Aboriginal children’ and stated that about 300 Aboriginal children were known to have been informally separated from their parents, with possibly many more unknown. At that time the Aboriginal population in Victoria was estimated to be about 5,000.
[An informal placement] takes place when some person, usually with a working relationship and knowledge of Aboriginal people as well as some credibility in the wider community, considers that there are Aboriginal children in the area who are at risk. Contact is then made with some resource person who may have contact with a group of people who will accept care and responsibility for these children at a minute’s notice … the children are placed informally with various other people and as has happened on many occasions, when parents request the return of their children, some cannot be traced. It is not until the children reach early adolescence that they re-appear – usually through the court scene. It is often difficult to identify these children as it is not uncommon for the ‘foster parents’ to change the name of the child (Victorian Aboriginal Child Care Agency, late 1970s, quoted by Victorian Government final submission on page 72). 

Despite the apparent recognition in government reports that the interests of Indigenous children were best served by keeping them in their own communities, the number of Aboriginal children forcibly removed continued to increase, rising from 220 in 1973 to 350 in 1976 (Victorian Government final submission page 72).

Self-management
Real change came with the establishment of Indigenous community-based services. From the early 1970s the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service Cooperative Ltd (VALS) appeared for Aboriginal children in the Children’s Court. VALS reported in 1975 on the high number of Aboriginal children in institutions, the number of ‘adoption’ breakdowns and that 90% of its clients in criminal matters had been removed from their families as children (Sommerlad 1976 page 161).

The Victorian Aboriginal Child Placement Agency, later renamed the Victorian Aboriginal Child Care Agency (VACCA), was established in 1976. The efforts of VACCA and other Aboriginal organisations had resulted in a 40% reduction in the number of Aboriginal children in children’s homes in Victoria as early as 1979 (Palamara quoted by Victorian Government final submission on page 73). Even so, 270 Aboriginal juveniles were wards of the State, comprising 6.5% of the total ward population. 

VACCA was instrumental in starting the ‘Ghubbariginals’, a group of non-Indigenous families who had adopted or fostered Indigenous children. The group provides support and counselling for non-Indigenous people in a similar position to enable them to better care for the Indigenous children with them. These families are also available to VACCA if it has no choice but to place an Indigenous child with a non-Indigenous family. An Indigenous child placed with them will be in touch with other Indigenous children and the foster carers will have an understanding of the needs of the child.  

In 1979 the Victorian Social Welfare Department adopted policy guidelines on Aboriginal adoption and foster care. A decade later the Aboriginal Child Placement Principle was incorporated into the Children and Young Persons Act 1989.

  

Paul
For 18 years the State of Victoria referred to me as State Ward No 54321.
I was born in May 1964. My Mother and I lived together within an inner suburb of Melbourne. At the age of five and a half months, both my Mother and I became ill. My Mother took me to the Royal Children’s Hospital, where I was admitted.
Upon my recovery, the Social Welfare Department of the Royal Children’s Hospital persuaded my Mother to board me into St Gabriel’s Babies’ Home in Balwyn … just until Mum regained her health. If only Mum could’ve known the secret, deceitful agenda of the State welfare system that was about to be put into motion - 18 years of forced separation between a loving mother and her son.
Early in 1965, I was made a ward of the State. The reason given by the State was that, ‘Mother is unable to provide adequate care for her son’.
In February 1967, the County Court of Victoria dispensed with my Mother’s consent to adoption. This decision, made under section 67(d) of the Child Welfare Act 1958, was purportedly based on an ‘inability to locate mother’. Only paltry attempts had been made to locate her. For example, no attempt was made to find her address through the Aboriginal Welfare Board. 
I was immediately transferred to Blackburn South Cottages to be assessed for ‘suitable adoptive placement’. When my Mother came for one of her visits, she found an empty cot. With the stroke of a pen, my Mother’s Heart and Spirit had been shattered. Later, she was to describe this to me as one of the ‘darkest days of her life’.
Repeated requests about my whereabouts were rejected. All her cries for help fell on deaf ears by a Government who had stolen her son, and who had decided ‘they’ knew what was best for this so-called part-Aboriginal boy.
In October 1967 I was placed with a family for adoption. This placement was a dismal failure, lasting only 7 months. This family rejected me, and requested my removal, claiming in their words that I was unresponsive, dull, and that my so-called deficiencies were unacceptable. In the Medical Officer’s report on my file there is a comment that Mrs A ‘compared him unfavourably with her friends’ children and finds his deficiencies an embarrassment, eg at coffee parties’.

Upon removal, I was placed at the Gables Orphanage in Kew, where I was institutionalised for a further two years. Within this two years, I can clearly remember being withdrawn and frightened, and remember not talking to anyone for days on end.
I clearly remember being put in line-ups every fortnight, where prospective foster parents would view all the children. I was always left behind. I remember people coming to the Gables, and taking me to their homes on weekends, but I would always be brought back. Apparently I wasn’t quite the child they were looking for.
My dark complexion was a problem.
The Gables knew my dark complexion was a problem, constantly trying to reassure prospective foster parents that I could be taken as Southern European in origin.
In January 1970, I was again placed with a foster family, where I remained until I was 17. This family had four natural sons of their own. I was the only fostered child.
During this placement, I was acutely aware of my colour, and I knew I was different from the other members of their family. At no stage was I ever told of my Aboriginality, or my natural mother or father. When I’d say to my foster family, ‘why am I a different colour?’, they would laugh at me, and would tell me to drink plenty of milk, ‘and then you will look more like us’. The other sons would call me names such as ‘their little Abo’, and tease me. At the time, I didn’t know what this meant, but it did really hurt, and I’d run into the bedroom crying. They would threaten to hurt me it I told anyone they said these things.
My foster family made me attend the same primary and secondary school that their other children had all previously attended. Because of this, I was ridiculed and made fun of, by students and teachers. Everyone knew that I was different from the other family members, and that I couldn’t be their real brother, even though I’d been given the same surname as them. Often I would run out of class crying, and would hide in the school grounds.  
The foster family would punish me severely for the slightest thing they regarded as unacceptable or unchristian-like behaviour, even if I didn’t eat my dinner or tea. Sometimes I would be locked in my room for hours. Countless times the foster father would rain blows upon me with his favourite leather strap. He would continue until I wept uncontrollably, pleading for him to stop.

My Mother never gave up trying to locate me.
Throughout all these years – from 5 and a half months old to 18 years of age, my Mother never gave up trying to locate me. 
She wrote many letters to the State Welfare Authorities, pleading with them to give her son back. Birthday and Christmas cards were sent care of the Welfare Department. All these letters were shelved. The State Welfare Department treated my Mother like dirt, and with utter contempt, as if she never existed. The Department rejected and scoffed at all my Mother’s cries and pleas for help. They inflicted a terrible pain of Separation, Anguish and Grief upon a mother who only ever wanted her son back.
In May 1982, I was requested to attend at the Sunshine Welfare Offices, where they formerly discharged me from State wardship. It took the Senior Welfare Officer a mere twenty minutes to come clean, and tell me everything that my heart had always wanted to know. He conveyed to me in a matter-of-fact way that I was of ‘Aboriginal descent’, that I had a Natural mother, father, three brothers and a sister, who were alive.
He explained that his Department’s position was only to protect me and, ‘that is why you were not told these things before’. He placed in front of me 368 pages of my file, together with letters, photos and birthday cards. He informed me that my surname would change back to my Mother’s maiden name of Angus.
The welfare officer scribbled on a piece of paper my Mother’s current address in case, in his words, I’d ‘ever want to meet her’. I cried tears of Relief, Guilt and Anger. The official conclusion, on the very last page of my file, reads:
‘Paul is a very intelligent, likeable boy, who has made remarkable progress, given the unfortunate treatment of his Mother by the department during his childhood.’
Confidential submission 133, Victoria. When Paul located his mother at the age of 18 she was working in a hostel for Aboriginal children with 20 children under her care. She died six years later at the age of 45.

•	Allambie Reception Centre
•	Bayswater Boys’ Home
•	Berry Street Babies’ Home
•	Box Hill Boys’ Home
•	Catherine Booth Memorial Home
•	Royal Park Receiving House/Reformatory
•	St. Josephs, Abbotsford
•	Tally Ho Boys’ Farm
•	Winlaton Youth Training Centre

5		Queensland
… the Government is not going to allow white and near white children whether their parents are black or white to remain on the Settlements at the cost of the tax payer. You have to educate coloured people to make the sacrifice to have their children adopted and so give them the chance to enjoy the privileges of the white community (Cornelius O’Leary, Director of Native Affairs, speaking at a Superintendents’ Conference in October 1960, quoted by Kidd 1994 on page 529).

Colonial policies and practices
The colony of Moreton Bay was established as a penal outpost of New South Wales in 1825. Extreme violence accompanied the rapid expansion of European settlers, particularly in the north. This violence and the spread of introduced diseases resulted in a rapid decrease in the Indigenous population. Kidnapping Indigenous women and children for economic and sexual exploitation was common.

… the aboriginal inhabitants are treated exactly in the same way as the wild beasts or birds the settlers may find there … Their goods are taken, their children forcibly stolen, their women carried away, entirely at the caprice of the white men (the Queenslander newspaper, 1883, quoted by Kidd 1994 on page 83).

While officially deploring the activities of the settlers, the government left the protection of Indigenous people to the missions, reserving land for their use and providing them with limited subsidies.

The Industrial and Reformatory Schools Act 1865 allowed Indigneous children to be sent to industrial schools or reformatories on the ground of ‘neglect’. Simply being Aboriginal was proof of neglect and for the purposes of the Act missions were declared to be industrial schools or reformatories to which Indigenous children could be sent.

Segregation – 1897-1965
In 1896 Archibald Meston was commissioned to report on the ‘working conditions of the various Mission stations and various other stations where food is supplied to the aboriginals by the Government’. Meston’s report focussed on the need to protect Indigenous children from contact with non-Indigenous society.

Kidnapping of boys and girls is another serious evil … Boys and girls are frequently taken from their parents and their tribes, and removed far off whence they have no chance of returning; left helpless at the mercy of those who possessed them, white people responsible to no one and under no supervision by any proper authority … Stringent legislation is required to prevent a continuance of abuses concerning the women and children   (Meston 1896 page 4).

Meston urged the ‘principle of isolation on reserves, and total exclusion of whites’ which had ‘long been adopted by the Canadian and American Governments towards the Indians of both nations’ (Meston 1896 page 4). His report laid the foundations of government policy until at least 1965: Indigenous people, including children, were to be isolated on missions and government settlements well away from non-Indigenous society. 

The protectionist policy proposed by Meston was put into effect by the Aboriginal Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897, replaced in 1939 by the Aboriginals Preservation and Protection Act and the Torres Strait Islanders Act. These Acts allowed government officials under the control of the Chief Protector and, after 1939, the Director of Native Affairs to ‘remove’ Indigenous people to and between reserves and to separate children from their families. All that was required under the Act of 1897 was an administrative decision authorised by the Minister. There was no court hearing.

Although families were generally removed together this did not always happen. Children of mixed descent were targeted for removal from their communities. The 1897 Act also provided that ‘orphaned’ and ‘deserted’ ‘half caste’ children could be removed to an orphanage.

In the case of half-caste children, especially girls, already living in camps, it is desirable that these, where old enough, should be removed at once to the mission station or reformatory: on no account should they be allowed to be given into private hands. The State takes upon itself the responsibility – a serious one to my mind – of taking such children from their aboriginal environments, but at the same time hands them over to the various mission stations, which are now under direct Government supervision and control (1902 Annual Report of the Northern Protector of Aboriginals page 10).

After 1939 use of the removal power was even easier and more unchecked because the Director of Native Affairs was made the guardian of all Indigenous children under 21. The power of removal was vested in him rather than the Minister. He had virtually total control of the lives of Indigenous children.

The influence of Chief Protector Bleakley
J W Bleakley, Chief Protector and Director of Native Affairs from 1913 to 1942, exercised a major influence over Queensland policy and the practices of officials and the missions. He believed firmly in the segregation of Indigenous people from non-Indigenous people.
It is only by complete separation of the two races that we can save him (‘the Aborigine’) from hopeless contamination and eventual extinction, as well as safeguard the purity of our own blood (Chief Protector Report 1919 page 7 quoted by Long 1970 on page 97).

Bleakley was a strong supporter of the missions.

Few realise the value of work done by missions. Not only do they protect the child races from the unscrupulous white, but they help to preserve the purity of the white race from the grave social dangers that always threaten where there is a degraded race living in loose condition at its back door (Bleakley 1961 on page 124).

His annual reports record large numbers of people removed to missions and settlements for protection or discipline (Long 1970 page 96). By the early 1930s he was agitating for the 1897 Act to be extended.

[It should] include the illegitimate children of half caste mothers, the children of parents both half castes, and the crossbreed element of aboriginal or Pacific Island strain which were reported … to be living in low conditions and a menace to health and discipline (memorandum to Home Secretary, 10 April 1933, quoted by Kidd 1994 on page 362).

The Act was amended in 1934 to bring more people under his control and effectively disenfranchise them. In the replacement Acts of 1939 the definition of ‘half blood’ was narrowed again, partly in response to Indigenous protests such as those of Thursday Islanders. This left fewer people  under the Director’s control. However, his power over those people was expanded.

Conditions on the missions and government settlements
During his period in power Bleakley unsuccessfully urged the government to provide more funds to the missions and government settlements. At the settlement at Barambah (later called Cherbourg), 

There were no cots or beds in the children’s dormitories … and the protectress described how children slept on a single blanket on the ground with another blanket for warmth. Clothing was allocated only twice a year and was too limited to keep clean. Children were underfed, and a recent scheme to provide one meal a day of soup and bread had been discontinued … Normal sanitation facilities were non-existent on the settlement … Indeed the facilities there were so bad that … [the doctor there] considered the common usage of the bush as a toilet as the safest practice (Kidd 1994 page 304). 

Malnutrition, lack of clothing and protection and disease led to very high morbidity and mortality rates, with death rates frequently exceeding birth rates (Kidd 1994 page 272).
The missions in the remote north have been described as ‘total institutions’ where ‘there is a basic split between a large managed group, conveniently called inmates, and a small supervisory staff’ (Long 1970 page 6). Every aspect of life for the inmates was regulated so that ‘[a]ny difference from a prison farm was not marked’ (Rowley 1970 page 248). In 1934 one-third of Indigenous people in Queensland were living on missions and settlements (Kidd 1994 page 487).

People were moved among the missions and settlements as punishment for failure to conform to the discipline and lifestyle demanded. As a result children could easily be separated from their families.

My mother did a terrible crime – she spoke back to the authority and she was sent to Woorabinda settlement as punishment. It was there that she met and married my father, two years later I was born. They were married in 1933 and my mother and I went back to Palm Island as told to me by my mother.
Confidential submission 756, Queensland: woman removed to Palm Island in the 1930s.

Forcible separation through the dormitory system
On the missions and settlements many children were separated from their family by the rigid operation of a dormitory system.

The young require not only isolation from the outside world, but what proved still more difficult, separation from their own people. When the latter was possible a marked difference is noted in the manners, ways and point of view, as contrasted with those who were not so fortunate (a missionary in 1916, quoted by Harrison 1974 on page 37).

When we got to Palm Island we stayed with our mother in the women’s dormitory. The day we turned five years old we were taken off our mother. Girls were put in another dormitory with other girls, some of them were orphans and some of them were children of unmarried mothers.

After about a year or couple of years, our mother got a job at the Palm Island Hospital as a night nurse. She was allowed to live there … and my brother and I, when we got up to school age, we were allowed to go down and visit her at the hospital and then spend about an hour together every Friday afternoon. That is the only contact I had with my mother and brother.
Confidential submission 109, Queensland: woman removed to Palm Island at 12 months in the 1940s. 

A medical survey in 1950 declared the dormitory system to be,

[P]ernicious … [it] must be broken down if these coloured women are to become properly adjusted to normal life. It is completely futile and artificial and unnatural to enclose, or rather encage, women, and to expect any sort of normal psychological balance on their release (quoted by Kidd 1994 on page 461).

Despite condemnations, dormitories were still functioning in the 1970s on some missions and settlements. In 1966, for example, 70 children were living in the dormitory at Aurukun, 58 at Doomadgee, around 70 at Cherbourg, 34 at Woorabinda and 71 at Palm Island (Long 1970 pages 106, 113, 123, 146 and 152). The Inquiry was told of the practice in the Torres Strait Islands of sending children born to Islander mothers and non-Islanders to mission dormitories on the Islands (such as at Thursday Island) or to mainland institutions up until the late 1970s. The Queensland Government estimates that between 1908 and 1971 2,302 Indigenous children were removed to missions and settlements. Almost all would have been removed to dormitories. 

Forcible removal through employment
Children were sent away from the missions and settlements at an early age to work.

The sending of young people to employment not only fitted the rhetoric of retraining and independence but was a double economic advantage to the government, saving the cost of support as well as accumulating income. This was especially the case with the increased number of young girls and women ‘rescued’ from camp environments and sent to government settlements (Kidd 1994 page 292).

My mother came from Fraser Island. My father was originally put on Yarrabah reserve. I was about seven years old when we got [to Palm Island]. When I was thirteen I left school and the Department arranged a job. I had to leave my family and friends. I was really home sick. I was there for two years. I could not go home. There were no Aboriginal people or people of my age to mix with. Until a cyclone hit and blew my little shack up, I lived and ate on my own in the shack.
Confidential submission 275, Queensland: man removed to Palm Island at 7 years in the 1920s; sent out to work at 13.

These children were vulnerable to physical and sexual abuse. In 1899 a protectress was appointed to supervise girls sent to work as domestics in and around Brisbane. By 1914 she was supervising 137 Aboriginal girls, ‘many of them fresh from leaving school, some as young, even, as ten years of age’ (Bleakley 1961 page 295). Twenty of these girls were soon returned to their home settlements including 13 who were pregnant. Archbishop Donaldson, visiting Barambah in 1915, noted that of the girls sent out to service ‘over 90% come back pregnant to a white man’ (quoted by Kidd 1994 on page 273). Girls who contracted venereal disease could find themselves labelled ‘immoral’ and removed yet again as punishment.

Mothers, too, were sent away from missions and settlements to work, forced to leave their children behind.

One day the Superintendent [of Palm Island] sent for my mother and told her she would have to go and work on a cattle station. Arrangements were already made for me and my brother to live with another Aboriginal family who had no children of their own. I was four years old and my brother was 4 months old at the time. Later we were put in the dormitory when I was five years old and my brother one year old.

My mother had written several letters to the Superintendent on Palm Island to have my brother and I sent out to her on the station but to no avail it fell on deaf ears. She also wrote to the Superintendent to make arrangements for us to live with our grandmother in Ingham as she was getting a job there. But they wrote back to her and said my grandmother was a drunk and unfit person to be in charge of two young children and living in a gunyah was out.

Mother felt isolated, depressed and very upset and it affected her work. Because of this her bosses tried to have her removed back to Palm Island but the Superintendent would not hear of it so he ignored it. Mother finally had permission to come home to visit us after one year was up. When she finally came home to Palm Island I was five and my brother one year old. Our mother had become a stranger to us and we cried and cried because we had become very frightened of her. We clung to the skirts of our foster mother but our mother took us gently in her arms and kissed our tear stained face and cradled us close to her breast.
Confidential submission 756, Queensland: 1940s. 

With regard to Torres Strait Islanders, government policy was to restrict their movement to ensure their availability for employment in the marine industry, enabling the Island communities to be self-supporting. ‘Even their visits to Thursday Island were to be limited to daylight hours’ (Beckett 1987 page 47).

Removal of children not living on missions and settlements
Away from the missions and government settlements some Indigenous people lived in camps, trying to survive on the subsistence rations earned in the pastoral industry or casual work for which they were paid far less than non-Indigenous workers. In 1933 an inquiry into the living conditions of the families of pastoral station workers in the Boulia protectorate found that they were starving because they were not being given the rations to which they were entitled. 

Following that inquiry, the local protector recommended to Chief Protector Bleakley that the two ‘half-caste’ children be removed ‘as they are living in a state of filth and have no accommodation’. Bleakley responded that he would prefer not to separate the children but as it would be too expensive to remove all the family members to a government settlement he agreed to remove only the two children to Woorabinda.

mapinsert
Assimilation from 1956
In 1956 Cornelius O’Leary, Director of Native Affairs from 1942 to 1963, announced for the first time in Queensland that the government’s policy was now one of assimilation, based around ‘sound education’ and ‘suitable housing’. He referred to the pre-1956 policy as ‘pre-assimilation’ (1956 Annual Report of the Director of Native Affairs pages 3 and 5). Legislation to implement the new policy was finally passed in 1965. Until then assimilation was implemented by forcing people off the missions and settlements. The 1939 guardianship power was still used to control the lives of Indigenous children. 

Expulsion from missions and settlements
In the mid-1950s the Queensland missions were pleading with government for more funding to address the derelict housing, constant food shortages, unsafe water supplies and high rates of sickness and death common to most. On the missions and settlements infant mortality and rates of disease were much higher than for non-Indigenous children in the State.

The protests of Indigenous people forced to live under these conditions were also creating a management crisis on some of the missions such as Mapoon, Aurukun and Yarrabah. One tactic for dealing with dissenters at Yarrabah was to force them and their families to leave the mission, with most joining a shanty camp at Bessie Point near Cairns (Kidd 1994 page 532). In the face of these difficulties control of Yarrabah was handed to the government in 1960. 

There was growing dissension, too, on government settlements. Palm Islanders demanded adequate payment for work they did on the settlement. They were told,

… to get off the Settlement and stay off it … they will be told that they are not going back on the pretext of seeing their wives and children but can make arrangements for their dependants off the Settlement with them … whether they can [maintain themselves] or not is for them to demonstrate (Director O’Leary, 1957, quoted by Kidd 1994 on page 539). 

By the early 1960s the economic value of Torres Strait Islanders as workers to be held in the Islands had vanished with the collapse of the marine industry. The adoption of the policy of assimilation coincided with this change and Torres Strait Islanders were freed to leave the Islands and settle on the mainland.

Repeal of ‘protectionist’ legislation
Under pressure from the Commonwealth, Queensland finally repealed its ‘protectionist’ legislation in 1965. The dual objectives of the new legislation were in line with the national affirmation of the assimilation policy.

The first is the continuation of the development and progress of Aboriginal communities for the benefit of the people who wish to live there. The second is an increase in the scope of social welfare programs which will benefit all Aboriginal people throughout the State (Queensland Government, 1965, quoted by Nettheim 1981 on page 6). 

Under the Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders Act 1965 Indigenous people, in theory, regained the guardianship of their children. However the Director could still order the compulsory removal of people, including children, between reserves. This power was finally repealed by the Aborigines Act 1971 and the Torres Strait Islanders Act 1971 although the government’s power to expel people from reserves was not abolished until 1979. Until then family members could be prevented from living together by the use of this power.

The 1965 Act introduced the concept of an ‘assisted’ person, defined so as to widen the potential application of the Act. Every Aborigine or Torres Strait Islander resident on a community or mission was proclaimed ‘assisted’ at the date of the commencement of the Act. It was mandatory for people on reserves to hold a ‘certificate of entitlement’ to remain there. The certificate was liable to be cancelled at any time.

105 regulations were made under the Act to deal with all forms of behaviour control. Regulation 70 allowed the use of dormitories as places of detention for any male or female who ‘commits an offence against discipline … leaves or escapes or attempts to leave or escape from such reserve or community … is guilty of any immoral act or immoral conduct’ or fails ‘to carry out instructions in hygiene, sanitation or infant welfare’. ‘[The] references to “escape” fortified the “prison camp” impression of reserves given by the disciplinary code generally’ (Nettheim 1973 page 135). 

‘The welfare’
Rather than accede to the missions’ requests for more funding, the government explored ways to reduce expenditure on Indigenous affairs. One proposal discussed in 1960 to reduce the financial cost of the missions and settlements was to put as many ‘light skinned children as possible’ up for adoption and force ‘eligible people’ into the non-Indigenous community.

The State Children’s Department refused to handle these adoptions claiming it was a matter for the Department of Native Affairs. However, it did deal with some Indigenous children who had been committed to State care by placing them in foster homes with non-Indigenous foster parents and in its institutions for non-Indigenous children. Here the children were subject to discrimination and vilification.

Claims by the inmates that there was discrimination by the Superintendent against the coloured inmates were fairly frequent. In effect, the inmates state that the coloured inmates receive a greater number of strikes which were inflicted with greater force than would be applied to a white inmate guilty of a similar breach of the rules.

[R]emembering the 3 additional strikes to boy 28, the general opinion and the expressions used of coloured inmates in the punishment book, which were not only descriptive but contemptuous, such as ‘darkies’, ‘poor type of darky’, ‘aboriginal of poor colour’, ‘bad poor type of aboriginal’, ‘typical nigger’, ‘black waster’, and ‘black mongrel’, neither am I prepared to hold beyond reasonable doubt that there was not discrimination in punishment against the coloured inmates (Schwarten 1961 pages 44 and 45).
Until the 1970s church representatives in the Torres Strait Islands would notify the Department of Native Affairs of pregnancies and parentage and the Department would then arrange for girls to be placed in the Catholic Convent dormitory on Thursday Island while boys were often adopted out to Islander families.

From 1965 the primary power of removal of Indigenous children from their families  was the Children’s Services Act 1965. This provided that children found to be ‘in need of care and protection’ or ‘in need of care and control’ could be removed from their families and placed in an institution or fostered.

In Parliamentary debate on this Bill it was said,

No group of children is more neglected than those who are living with their coloured parents in the fringe-dwelling areas of many of our country towns.

I want that unfortunate group of people to be included in the children and youth of the State whose well-being it is proposed to promote, safeguard and protect by the introduction of this Bill (quoted by Stephanie Gilbert submission 577 on page 23).

As in preceding decades, a number of the missions and settlements including Woorabinda and Palm Island were registered as industrial schools under the Children’s Services Act 1965 to receive children sent by the Department of Native Affairs and the State Children’s Department. 

In the name of assimilation a  program was established in 1967 to employ liaison officers to monitor hygiene practices and social habits by inspecting Indigenous homes, policing truancy and interceding with the police or children’s services departments in the case of child neglect or crime. Although it meant some assistance in holding families together, it was at the expense of increased surveillance of the lives of Indigenous families.

People living away from missions and settlements were not free from government surveillance and intrusion. In 1959 Director O’Leary declared,

[W]e know the name, family history and living conditions of every aboriginal in the State (quoted by Kidd 1994 on page 525).

Indigenous people were paid much lower wages than non-Indigenous people under the award for workers in the pastoral industry and so lived in destitute circumstances, unable to afford adequate rented accommodation. Local councils reacted to the presence of camps in their area by demolishing huts and forcing people to scatter and regroup elsewhere where the process repeated itself. Many children suffered poor health in these conditions. They were then at risk of being declared neglected and removed. Growing numbers of the children in care were Indigenous. By the early 1970s one-half of children in welfare institutions in the north of the State were Indigenous children (O’Connor 1993 page 17).

A Commission of Inquiry into Youth in 1975 noted the detrimental effects of placement in non-Indigenous institutions and other forms of non-Indigenous care and recommended that Indigenous staff be employed and that alternative programs be developed. This was finally achieved in 1984 when concern that the Commonwealth Government would pass overriding federal legislation requiring adherence to the Aboriginal Child Placement Principle led the Queensland Government to approve its ‘Draft Statement of Policy in Relation to the Fostering and Adoption of Aboriginal and Islander Children’ containing the Aboriginal Child Placement Principle. 

In the same year the Aborigines Act 1971 and the Torres Strait Islanders Act 1971 were replaced by the Community Services (Aborigines) Act 1984 and the Community Services (Torres Strait) Act 1984. The 1984 Acts established incorporated Community Councils to govern trust areas, formerly reserves, and gave them greater administrative and financial responsibilities.

In 1987 the draft policy containing the Aboriginal Child Placement Principle was formalised. The following year the Adoption Act 1964 was amended to require an adoptive parent to have ‘a similar indigenous or ethnic and cultural background’ to the child being adopted.

Peggy
My family went to Cherbourg. They volunteered to go there during the Depression. So I would have been about 6 months old when grandfather, who was, I mean, he was independent. He had eight kids all birthed out in the trees you know, under the stars. My mother spoke her own language. She had me with the promise to marry my father. And then when the Depression came they talked to the policeman. He said go to Buramba. When things get better come back out again. He was the Protector so he sent them there. The thing is though, when we got there you got caught up in the system. You weren’t allowed out anymore.
The decision that my grandfather made at the time, he didn’t know that that would split his whole family up.
My Dad was away. He thought we had died. He didn’t know what had happened. No-one else seemed to know where we had disappeared to. The whole family went to Cherbourg. Mum said when they got there they were immediately split up. Mum said the superintendent said, ‘Agnes, you can’t live in the camp with your small baby and you have to go into the dormitory’.
Mum thinks that’s just … She won’t talk about it. She’s in denial. She said they did it for our good because there was no room in the camp. But I said, ‘You lived in Ayumba with your old people when you was outside. Why would it now be different that you didn’t want to live with them?’
She said, ‘Well, they offered the dormitory to me, so I took you there’. I was 6 months old. Because the dormitory is such a big place and it’s made up, you know … it’s split that way [in half] downstairs with your women that side, your girls that side.
I stayed with my Mum for 4 years on that side with the other mothers. The boys went into the boys’ home – my grandfather’s sons. And he had Mum’s younger sister and younger brother – they stayed with the old people. But the rest of them – the boys – were put in a home. Mum was put in the dormitory.
I stayed with her until I was 4 years of age. You slept with your mother because there was basically no room for a cot or anything and for the 4 years you’re there living with her. 
But when I turned 4, and because I was such an intelligent child, sneaking off to school because all the other kids are going … matron made the decision that, ‘ Peggy has to go to school’. And so immediately that decision was made, I was transferred over to this section. I was taken away from her. Separating her from me was a grill. There was chicken wire across there. That was the extent of how far you could go to this [other] side.
Once you were separated from your Mum, you’re not to go back to her again. Absolutely no interaction. You have a bed on your own. No contact during the day. I’m out of her control. She is no longer actually my mother type of thing. So you go under the care and control of the Government. That’s what happened.
No-one said anything to me. No-one said anything to her but everybody else in that section knew that this is what happened. And most of those women, my mother tells me, kept their children on the breast for a long, long time, because that bonding was going to be broken at some stage and so keeping their children close to them was the only thing that they had. I’ve always been an angry child. Very angry. I don’t remember much about this section with my mother. I remember nothing. It embarrasses me when she talks of me running to her for cuddles and she’ll say, ‘I fed you on my titties’. And I get rather embarrassed because I don’t remember that time with her.
I can remember sitting here at this grill…
But I can remember sitting here at this grill on that side waiting for her to come out of the door of one of these wards here so that I can just see her. She wouldn’t come out because it hurt her to see me over this side. I turned 5 around about July. I went to school, but then she had to go to work. So we had that removal from our grandparents, her family, then I was removed from her and I then became the victim.
She ate on this side and I ate on that side. Birthdays were arranged. No, I never saw her on birthdays. I got a cake every birthday that was arranged by the Government – only because she fought for it.
I didn’t get to know her. To me she was just the woman who comes and goes. When I was 5 she went again. They sent her out to work. I remember the night the taxi pulled up to take her. 
Again, there was nothing emotional because if you were a little girl on this side you got into trouble for crying. You couldn’t show emotion. Here at this wire grill I could just hear the director of the management call out to me, ‘Is that you Peggy?’. They could just see my little form there sitting at the wire grill. 
‘You don’t get to bed, you’ll be punished!’ And so, go to bed. If I’m crying at night, ‘Is that you Peggy, crying again?’. And so it just went on. You’ve got about 60 or 70 other kids there, so why cry for your mother because kids are going to look after you and think ‘she’s crying for her mother’. You got to show your anger some place.
I remember that night. We had to sing prayers at night, and I could catch up, I mean, it didn’t take me long to know what the system is all about. You’re better off living within that system rather than out of it. You go with it. I remember singing prayers that night:
		Now the day is over
		Night is drawing near
This always upsets me because at the end of singing that prayer, I couldn’t remember the words. ‘Cause I’ve got a very high voice – a lot higher than a lot of the kids – they’d hear me first.
		Meadows of the evening
		Creep across the sky
		La la la la la la la la 

Getting higher and higher 
		Four and twenty blackbirds
		Baked in a pie.
That ended the prayer and the old lady called out, ‘Is that you, Peggy? Get out here’. And I had to kneel on the floor till everyone went to sleep.
It was all about control, reform. The bald head was part of the dormitory system for punishment. If you had lice, you had your head shaved. But you could have your hair cut off for being naughty, doing anything naughty. It didn’t matter what it was: speaking back, not doing your chores. Cold baths, getting your hair shaved off if you didn’t go for wood in the afternoon so you could warm the baths up.
You also got the strap and you got put into jail. There was three components of the punishment that you got. You could even be left without any food. Go without your meal. Stand in the middle of the dining room there while everybody else finished. Many times I stood there. Humiliation, because when you got your head shaved we were not allowed to put a beret or anything on our heads. Not allowed.
So you walked to school like this and the camp kids made fun of you and that would bring us closer together as a group. As a group [dormitory kids] we were able to fight off the other kids and their insults to us.
We were called the dormitory girls. But the kids who slept out on the verandah – they break my heart and it still upsets me: they were the pee-the-beds. They were called nothing else but pee-the-beds. Maybe you’d pee the bed one night because you were upset tummy, fear, no electric light just a flickering light of an old hurricane lamp. It would scare you because old people have the habit of telling you there’s people walking around here at night time. All these ‘woop-woops’ around the place. And you didn’t want to go to the toilet and you may wet the bed. It may only have been a one night occurrence, but you transferred from your bed out onto the verandah. You slept on a mattress on the floor and all you were called was pee-the-beds. ‘Tell the pee-the-beds they’ve gotta get their mattresses in off the line.’ ‘Tell the pee-the-beds they’ve gotta put their blankets out.’ ‘Tell the pee-the-beds it’s time to get up.’ No identity at all. Absolutely nothing. These kids were just grouped together.
I was talking to a young girl the other day. I said, ‘Your mother never peed the bed but her sister did. She had to go down there to sleep with her sister because the kid was crying. She needed her sister with her’.
I could see them on a morning, a winter’s morning. No ceiling. Just when the sun hit the tin roof. ‘All you pee-the-beds gotta get up!.’ And they would get up out of their wet clothing and all you see is steam coming off them. It was absolutely dreadful and I grieve for those kids, honestly. We were cruelly treated.
Confidential evidence 404, Queensland, 1930s.

In the hard copy version of this report there is a reproduction of the following item:
Building listed for demolition: interior girls’ dormitory.
Moore River Settlement, WA, 1949
Courtesy University of WA Berndt Museum of Anthropolgy.
The one thing that really, really sticks in my mind is being put into this cold bed with white cold starchy sheets and having to sleep on my own and looking down the room and just seeing rows of beds and not knowing where my brothers and sister were.
Confidential evidence 227, Victoria.

Penny & Murray
In 1958, whilst our family [Penny aged 10, her brother Trevor 11, Murray 7, sister Judy 6 and baby Olive was five or six weeks old, their mother and step-father] were all resident at a house situated in Cairns, my mother’s capacity to look after her children in a fit and proper manner became the subject of challenge within the Cairns District Children’s Court. This action was initiated by Sgt Syd Wellings, then attached to the nearby Edmonton Police Station.
At the end of those proceedings, it was determined by the court that we be made wards of the State and as such we were to be placed under the care and protection of the Queensland State Children’s Department [shared with the Department of Native Affairs]. We were transferred via train to the State Children’s Orphanage at Townsville.
It was as though someone had turned the lights out – a regimented existence replacing our childhood innocence and frolics – the sheer snugness, love, togetherness, safety and comfort of four of us sleeping in one double bed – family! Strange how the bureaucracy adopts the materialistic yardstick when measuring deprivation/poverty/neglect.
[Baby] Olive was taken elsewhere – Mr L (Children’s Department official) telling me several days later that she was admitted to the Townsville General Hospital where she had died from meningitis. In 1984, assisted by Link-Up (Qld), my sister Judy discovered that Olive had not died in 1956 but rather had been fostered. Her name was changed. Judy and Trevor were able to have a reunion with Olive in Brisbane during Christmas of 1984. I was reunited with Olive sometime during 1985 and Murray had his first meeting with Olive two months ago.
Murray
I do remember my mother showing up for visits, supervised visits. We used to get excited. I just wanted her to take us away from there. Then the visits suddenly stopped. I’m told the authorities stopped them because she had a destabilising effect on us.
That didn’t deter my mother. She used to come to the school ground to visit us over the fence. The authorities found out about those visits. They had to send us to a place where she couldn’t get to us. To send us anywhere on mainland Queensland she would have just followed – so they sent us to the one place were she can’t follow ‘Palm Island Aboriginal Settlement’. By our mother visiting us illegally at that school ground she unknowingly sealed our fate. I wasn’t to see my mother again for ten nightmare years.

I remember when I learnt to write letters, I wrote to my mother furiously pleading with her to come and take us off that island. I wrote to her for years, I got no reply then I realised that she was never coming for us. That she didn’t want us. That’s when I began to hate her. Now I doubt if any of my letters ever got off that island or that any letters she wrote me ever stood a chance of me receiving them.
Penny
Early in 1959, under a ‘split the litter approach’, the State Children’s Department bureaucracy sanctioned Judy’s being fostered to a European family resident in Townsville, Trevor’s being ‘shipped off’ or ‘deported’ to Palm Island Aboriginal Settlement.
Trevor’s file reveals he was transferred to Palm Island because he was ‘a great trouble’ to the Orphanage. ‘He has given us no serious trouble, although inclined to be somewhat disobedient at times. We find that physical punishment has little or no effect on him and that the best way to punish him is by depriving him of privileges.’
Murray and myself were to follow Trevor some time later. I recall our being driven to the landing at Hayles Wharf at 4.30 – 5.00 am – given two small ports and being told to ‘catch that boat to Palm Island over there’ then leaving us there. Bewilderment – scared – where was Palm Island? What was Palm Island? Why were we going there?
State Children Department, Townsville to Superintendent, Palm Island October 1958 
‘As you will realize, it is almost impossible to find suitable Foster Homes for such children and they do not fit in very well with white children in institutions, such as are conducted by this Department. It would be greatly appreciated if you could advise whether it would be possible to admit all, or some of these children to Palm Island.’
State Children Department, Townsville to Superintendent, Palm Island, June 1960 
‘These two children have been in our home in Townsville for more than two years, and in view of their very dark colouring, have not been assimilated in the white race. Every effort has been made to place them in a foster home without success because of their colour.’
Penny
I can’t remember much about when or why it was decided that Murray and I should leave the Orphanage and be sent to Palm Island – Just know that I came home from school one afternoon and walked in on two other girls. They were both crying and then told me that Murray and I were going to be sent to Palm Island – it was where Trevor had been sent. 

Prior to that information – didn’t know what the hell had happened to Trevor – Matron told me that he was going on a picnic – he never came back on that day and we never saw him again until we were reunited with Trevor on Palm Island some time later. 
After awhile you just give up asking and learn acceptance of situations even though you don’t fully understand the whys and wherefores.
State Children Department, Townsville to Superintendent, Palm Island, July 1960
 ‘We will notify some responsible person on the boat as to the circumstances concerning these children and no doubt you will arrange to have them met on arrival at Palm Island.’
Penny
Upon arrival at Palm Island – we were lost – we went to the Police Station – the sergeant advised as we were white children that we must have caught the wrong boat and maybe should have been on the one that went to Magnetic Island. He also said that no one was allowed onto Palm Island without the Superintendent’s permission. I informed the sergeant that my brother Trevor was already on Palm Island. After meeting with Trevor over at the school – we were taken into the Superintendent’s office (Mr B) and he said that we shouldn’t have been sent to the island – that there must have been some mistake. He said that he would have to look into matters and in the meantime that I would be taken to the young girls’ dormitory and that Murray would be with Trevor in the boys’ home. Mr B lost the battle to have us returned to the Orphanage at Townsville.
Murray
At that time Palm Island was regarded by many both black and white as nothing more than an Aboriginal Penal Colony. Our only crime was coming from a broken home. Palm Island was ruled with an iron fist by a White administration headed by a Superintendent whose every word was law which was brutally enforced by Aboriginal Policemen who were nothing more than a group of thugs and criminals in uniform.
If I were to write a book of my childhood experiences, I would write of my arrival as an eight year old boy. I would write of how I was spat on by Aboriginal adults, all complete strangers. Of being called a little White bastard and names much too vile to mention. It didn’t matter to those people that I was just a kid. The colour of my skin and eyes were enough to warrant their hostile attentions.
I would write of regular beatings and of being locked in a cell on many occasions on the whim of a Black Woman who was a female guardian of that home. 

 I would tell of a White headmaster belting the living daylights out of me because he overheard me tell a Black classmate not to crawl to White teachers; of how I felt his hot stinking breath on my face as he screamed ‘how dare I say such a thing being White myself’.
That island was seething with hatred for the White Man and his System so why in Gods name were three fair skinned children condemned to such a place?
Eventually, my siblings and I got off that terrible place. Towards the end of our unpleasant stay on that island the populace finally accepted us. The harsh treatment subsided and eventually ceased as did the swearing and suspicious looks. Today many people from that island are our closest and dearest friends. But I’ll never go back to visit, it holds too many painful memories for me.
Penny
Judy had the resources to seek psychiatric care. Murray’s got psychiatric care. Trevor’s still under psychiatric care and been diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic. His psychiatrist says he attributes all the things that happened to him in his childhood to bring him to that state he is in today. Sometimes he gets suicidal. He rings up and wants to kill himself. And I say, ‘Don’t let your life pass into nothingness’.
People probably see on the surface that we’ve lead successful lives. But that’s on the surface. Nobody knows that Trevor, who until six year ago has never been out of a job in his life, owns his own home, got his own car. They look at that and say, ‘He’s achieved the great Australian dream’. And they don’t look behind that. Is that what it’s all about. They look at us and say, ‘Well, assimilation worked with those buggers’. They see our lives as a success.
Confidential submissions 191 and 776, Queensland.
In the hard copy version of this report there is a reproduction of a photo/ad headed 'Homes are sought for these Children':
 Courtesy 'Between Two World' Australian Archives

We was bought like a market. We was all lined up in white dresses, and they’d come round and pick you out like you was for sale.
Confidential submission 695, New South Wales: woman fostered at 10 years in the 1970s; one of a family of 13 siblings all removed; raped by foster father and forced to have an abortion.
I clearly remember being put in line-ups every fortnight, where prospective foster parents would view all the children. I wasn’t quite the child they were looking for.
Confidential evidence 133, Victoria: man removed at 6 months in the 1960s; institutionalised for 3 years before being fostered by a succession of white families.

6		Tasmania
… there does not appear to be any likelihood in the immediate future for further [voluntary] … admissions being effective as a method of assimilation of children. Firstly, there appears to be a close bond between children and parents and they are naturally reluctant to let them go  (report of child welfare officer to the Director of Child Welfare on the officer’s visit to Cape Barren Island in 1961, quoted by Tasmanian Government final submission on page A-28).

Policies and practices
The forcible removal of Indigenous children from their families occurred during two periods in Tasmania. The first commenced with the European occupation of Van Dieman’s Land (as Tasmania was called until 1856) in 1803 and lasted until the middle of the nineteenth century. The second commenced in the 1930s with the forcible removal of Indigenous children from Cape Barren Island under general child welfare legislation and continues into the present. However in recent times the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre has been successful in intervening in potential removal situations to keep Indigenous families together and welfare practice in Tasmania now regards removal as a last resort.

The colonial period 
Van Dieman’s Land was occupied in 1803 as a penal colony. Bitter conflict ensued. Many Indigenous people were shot and Indigenous children taken to be used for their labour. By 1818 the Aboriginal population had fallen from an estimated 4,000 to somewhere below 2,000 (Ryan 1981 page 79).

In 1814 Governor Davey issued a proclamation expressing his ‘utter indignation and abhorrence’ about the kidnapping of Aboriginal children (quoted by Reynolds 1995 on page 90) but by 1816 ‘kidnapping had become widespread’ (Ryan 1981 page 78). Governor Sorrell made a similar declaration in 1819 and ordered the Resident Magistrates and District Constables to list all the children and youths held by ‘Settlers or Stock-keepers, stating from whom, and in what manner, they were obtained’ (quoted by Rowley 1970 on page 44). He ordered that those who had been taken without parental consent were to be sent to Hobart where they would be maintained and educated at government expense. 

Removal to Flinders Island
By the late 1820s the conflict between Aboriginal people and the non-Indigenous population had escalated to the ‘Black War’ as it was known at the time. After a spate of attacks on settlers in 1830, Colonel George Arthur decided ‘to deliver the knock-out blow that would bring the conflict to an end once and for all’ (quoted by Reynolds 1995 on page 117). It was known as the ‘Black Line’. Over 2,000 men moved in a line across the Island for six weeks with the aim of driving the Aboriginal population onto two peninsulas in the far south-east. This costly plan was an utter failure.

Warfare continued and the government looked for other strategies to deal with ‘the Aboriginal problem’. George Augustus Robinson, a local building contractor who had travelled unarmed among Aboriginal people and gained their trust, suggested to the government that he negotiate with them and offer them protection, food, clothing and shelter away from the mainland. This plan received official sanction and it was agreed that they would be removed to Flinders Island. By 1835 more than 200 Aboriginal people had been moved to the Wybalenna settlement on Flinders Island. Shortly after arriving the 14 Indigenous children aged between six and 15 years were sent to live with the storekeeper and the catechist.

On the Island the combination of inadequate shelter, insufficient rations, disease and loss of freedom proved fatal to the Aboriginal population. By 1843 only about 50 remained. In 1847 the 48 survivors were moved again, this time to another reserve at Oyster Cove. The children were forcibly removed to the Orphan School in Hobart to ‘adjust’ to non-Indigenous society. In 1855 all the people of mixed descent at Oyster Cove were made to leave. By 1876 everyone left had died.

Apart from the Indigenous people taken to Wybalenna, there was another community of Indigenous people resident on Flinders Island and other islands in the Furneaux Group. These people were the descendants of Aboriginal women and about 12 non-Indigenous sealers. The sealers and their families worked the sealing grounds of Bass Strait between about 1803 and 1827 when the seals became virtually extinct. Thereafter they remained on the islands and turned to other sources of income, notably mutton birding. 

When Robinson established Wybalenna he tried to remove the sealers and their families from Flinders Island but had little success. Robinson referred to the descendants of the Aboriginal women and sealers as ‘half-castes’ – presumably to distinguish them from the mainland Aboriginal people under his charge. By 1847 this community numbered about 50 people (Ryan 1981 page 222).

By the end of the 1870s most of the people  had moved to Cape Barren Island. In 1881 the Cape Barren Reserve was formally established. By then this Indigenous community was in its third generation. The community received regular missionary visits and in 1890 a missionary school teacher was appointed. By 1908 the island population, called ‘half-castes’ by the government, numbered some 250 people. In time, the term ‘Cape Barren Islander’ came to be used synonymously with ‘half-caste’ regardless of the place of origin of the person concerned.

The government sought to control the lifestyle of the people on Cape Barren and force the Island to become self-sufficient. The Cape Barren Island Reserve Act 1912 provided that unless the residents of the Island constructed dwellings and fenced and cultivated land they would lose their right to occupy that land. It also stated that ‘in order to encourage the settlement of the half-castes in other parts of Tasmania outside the Reserve’ the Minister for Lands could authorise an applicant for a licence to occupy Crown land elsewhere in Tasmania. 

Ten years later few of the Islanders had complied with the Act. The Secretary of Lands wanted to remove the children and appoint a manager to oversee the land. However he received a legal opinion that it was against the common law to remove children from their parents without their consent (Ryan 1981 page 244).

mapinsert

Assimilation
In the late 1920s proposals to remove Indigenous children from their families started to appear in government reports. A 1929 report lamented the impoverished living conditions of the Islanders and found that many of the children were suffering from sickness, including malnutrition. Despite the hardships under which they lived, the Islanders had no intention of moving.

[The Act of 1912] has given [the Islanders] … the belief that they have a claim on the State, and that it was passed in recognition of their claim that their country has been taken away from them by the  whites (A W Burbury, Attorney-General’s Department, quoted by Tasmanian Government final submission on page A-15).

This report recommended that the federal government be encouraged to take over responsibility for the Island reserve, that a missionary society take over responsibility for the welfare of the Islanders and that children be encouraged to leave the Island and the influence of their family once they had finished school. The Australian Board of Missions was approached but declined because the Islanders were not ‘fullbloods’ (Ryan 1981 page 246).

‘The welfare’
Although the Tasmanian Government did not formally adopt a policy of removing Indigenous children from the Island, the Infants Welfare Act 1935 was used to remove these children from their families. From 1928 until 1980 the head teacher on Cape Barren was appointed a special constable with the powers and responsibilities of a police constable, including the power to remove a child for neglect under the child welfare legislation. A shed at the back of the school sometimes served as a temporary lock-up.

Poverty, alcohol abuse, the refusal of the Islanders to adopt an agricultural lifestyle as specified in the 1912 Act and the surveillance of their lifestyle that Act entailed put Indigenous families at risk of losing their children. The reliance of community members upon each other to care for their children in times of difficulty was regarded not as a strength but as an indication of neglect. Fearful of losing their children, some families moved to the mainland and settled in Invermay on the outskirts of Launceston.

Encouragement to leave the Island
In 1944 an inquiry was held into the future of Cape Barren Island. The Aboriginal population there had fallen to 106.

The inquiry noted that the health of the Islanders was deteriorating, particularly because they were dependent upon outside supplies of food. The subsequent Cape Barren Island Reserve Act 1945 was similar to the 1912 Act but it imposed more rigorous conditions on the lessees in return for a free land grant. The intention of the Act was to force the Islanders to become self-sufficient agriculturists by 1950 and end their dependence upon social welfare.

Another inquiry the following year recommended that,

… the Government offer every encouragement to half-caste families to leave the Reserve and settle in Tasmania, the objective being a gradual but eventually a total absorption of the half-castes into the white population. It is suggested that incentives such as homes and employment be offered to families in various parts of the State as an inducement for them to leave the Reserve (quoted by Tasmanian Government final submission on page A-16).

This shift in approach was influenced by the decision of the Commonwealth statistician in relation to the 1944 census not to count as Aboriginal anyone who was less than ‘octoroon’. Tasmania determined it had no Aboriginal people left.

If they were not Aboriginal then there was no need for a special Reserve. The Cape Barren Islanders had been defined as white people, after having been defined as non-white for the previous 70 years (Tasmanian Government final submission page A-16).

Ironically, although their Aboriginality was denied, Indigenous families were known and targeted because their lifestyle was not ‘acceptable’, they lived on Cape Barren and nearby islands and they usually had surnames which marked them as ‘half-castes’.

By the time the Cape Barren reserve land reverted to the Crown in 1951, only one lessee was eligible for a land grant. Rather than assist families living in poverty, the government demanded they move to the mainland or risk having their children taken. 

As late as 1968 the Director of Social Welfare expressed the view that if 15-20 houses were acquired on the mainland ‘the Cape Barren Island problem which has been with us for well over a hundred years would virtually disappear in a decade … adequate housing may lead to the return of children [who had been removed] to their parents’ (quoted by Tasmanian Government interim submission on page 11).

From the 1950s officials increasingly removed Aboriginal children to the mainland under child welfare legislation. 

We never ever questioned the right of any white person, whether they had a blue uniform or not, to come into our homeland more or less to do what they liked. That was just part of life and I grew up and people of my generation grew up in an environment where we had no rights other than the rights within our community … If the teacher called us half-castes in the school there was nothing wrong with that. If the police would come into our homes and take people away because there was some offence committed somewhere in the vicinity there was nothing wrong with that. It was just the way of life and we grew up accepting that white people had some greater right than we did (Michael Mansell evidence 325).

Removal for ‘neglect’
Between 1937 and 1970 Indigenous children were taken into care under the Infants Welfare Act 1935 and the Child Welfare Act 1960 on the ground of neglect ‘because of their circumstances’ (Tasmanian Government interim submission page 9). Indeed, circumstances were hardly propitious given the lack of fresh food, including milk and other perishables, which had to be brought to the Island by boat. After surveys by the Health Department in 1956 and 1960, children were finally provided with food supplements by the Health and Education Departments and the Save the Children Fund.

Documentation shows that families with Aboriginal ancestry on the Islands from time to time experienced difficulty in obtaining relief payments, particularly single women responsible for the care of children. It is also evident that inadequate housing and living conditions led to the removal of some children (Tasmanian Government interim submission on page 9).

I remember when I was very young though, that there was a big thing going around the community then that the government wanted to get the people off the island. I remember them saying, ‘Well, I’m not going’. And next thing you see families going off. And one of the ladies … she had a little girl out of wedlock, and the welfare came in and threatened her. They said to her she either had to marry the father of that baby or they would come and take the child, so she married. She was very young, and she married. 
Confidential evidence 329, Tasmania: woman who grew up on Cape Barren Island.

Not only could children be taken away from their families if they were judged by a court to be ‘neglected’, a parent could be charged with the criminal offence of neglecting that child and sentenced to imprisonment. Once the parents were imprisoned, their other children would also be removed. 

Welfare just took the lot, no reason –  just took us. They took mum and dad to court here for no reason. But there was no neglect. We was happy kids, you know. We just – we lived in the bush all our lives. Dad never believed in bringing his family to the city, he just loved the bush and that’s where we stayed. We were always fed and happy there but I suppose they were looking for this other family and when they came to take them they just decided, ‘Well, we’ll take these as well’.
Confidential evidence 321, Tasmania: man removed at 11 years in the 1950s along with his younger brother and sister and 4 children from another family who were staying with them at the time.
Although a parent was entitled to appear at court to argue that the child was not neglected, this theoretical possibility took no account of the remoteness of mainland and non-Indigenous legal processes from the Island communities, the speed with which removals occurred, the parents’ lack of knowledge of their rights under the law, their financial inability to get to the court in Launceston in time and the fact that no legal assistance was available to them. It was not until the early 1970s that solicitors began to appear on behalf of Indigenous children and parents. 

On their removal siblings were often placed separately and had little contact with each other. This occurred even though the Department of Community Welfare Manual 1966 specified that siblings should keep in touch with each other. 

I wasn’t allowed to go to the same school where my natural siblings were attending school. I knew my siblings’ names but I didn’t know what they looked like. I was told not to contact my natural family … My foster family and the Welfare Officer said to me that I shouldn’t get in touch with my natural family because they were not ‘any good’.
Confidential submission 314, Tasmania: woman removed at 18 months with 5 siblings in the 1960s; placed in several foster homes before being adopted by the last of her foster families, where she was physically and sexually abused.

Usually children were fostered although some Indigenous children were sent to children’s homes where most of the other children were non-Indigenous.

We seemed to have a lonely existence at the Home. They had children there who were under Legacy and things like that. Sadly, we didn’t have any relatives to come and see us and, you know, we used to get a bit upset when other children could have relatives come, their mothers, and bring them toys and things, perhaps some fruit.
Confidential evidence 56, Tasmania: man removed at 2 months from grandmother’s care on Cape Barren Island in the 1930s; placed in a group home in Launceston where only he and his siblings were Aboriginal.

The Department’s manual also specified that removed children should be kept in contact with their family. However,

Information from personal files indicates that the Government and the non Aboriginal community’s attitude towards Cape Barren Island people may have influenced foster carers in discouraging children in care from having contact with their families during this period (Tasmanian Government interim submission page 11).

Indigenous children continued to be removed under the 1960 Act in the 1970s and 1980s, although a number of initiatives were taken during this period to assist families to stay together. The availability of federal funding and the government’s acknowledgement during this period that Tasmania has an Indigenous population entitled to assistance to overcome the trauma of colonisation have allowed these programs to develop.

Separation for schooling 
Although there has been a primary school on Cape Barren Island since 1889, there are no secondary education facilities on the Island. In 1965 the government began exploring the possibilities of ‘providing scholarships, and adequate hostelling, for the most suitable [Cape Barren Island children], to induce them to seek secondary education in Tasmania. The idea being to eventually work towards apprenticeships for the children’ (quoted by Tasmanian Government final submission on page A-34). Islander children could also obtain Education Department bursaries or charity sponsorship to board on the mainland and receive a secondary education.

By 1970 20 Island children were in receipt of study grants and living on the mainland in accommodation approved by their families although Indigenous families remained concerned about the separation of their children that schooling involved.

Self-management
The Aboriginal Information Service, established in 1973, arranged legal representation of Indigenous children and parents in neglect cases and juvenile justice matters, thereby reducing the likelihood of Indigenous children being removed from their families. The Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre now incorporates the Tasmanian Aboriginal Legal Service. 

At the 1980 Australian Aboriginal Affairs Council Meeting of Ministers held in Hobart, the Tasmanian Government indicated its acceptance of the nationally agreed policy guidelines developed in 1977 relating to the fostering and adoption of Aboriginal children and the principle of Aboriginal participation in the planning and delivery of welfare services. The combination of pressure from the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre, Indigenous involvement in departmental committees and the Tasmanian Government’s participation in national discussions about Aboriginal child welfare led to the incorporation of the Aboriginal Child Placement Principle into the practice of the Social Welfare Department in 1984.

Greg
I was born on Cape Barren. At the time I was taken the family comprised mum, my sister and [my two brothers]. And of course there was my grandmother and all the other various relatives. We were only a fairly small isolated community and we all grew up there in what I considered to be a very peaceful loving community. I recall spending most of my growing up on the Island actually living in the home of my grandmother and grandfather. The other children were living with mum in other places. 
Until the time I was taken I had not been away from the Island, other than our annual trips from Cape Barren across to Lady Baron during the mutton bird season.
The circumstances of my being taken, as I recollect, were that I went off to school in the morning and I was sitting in the classroom and there was only one room where all the children were assembled and there was a knock at the door, which the schoolmaster answered. After a conversation he had with somebody at the door, he came to get me. He took me by the hand and took me to the door. I was physically grabbed by a male person at the door, I was taken to a motor bike and held by the officer and driven to the airstrip and flown off the Island. I was taken from Cape Barren in October 1959 [aged12].
I had no knowledge [I was going to be taken]. I was not even able to see my grandmother [and I had] just the clothes I had on my back, such as they were. I never saw mum again. 
To all intents and purposes, I guess my grandmother was looked upon as my mother in some respects because of my association with her and when I was taken there are actual letters on my file that indicate that she was so affected by the circumstances of my being removed from the Island that she was hospitalised, and was fretting and generally her health went on her. A nursing sister on the Island had my grandmother in hospital and she was in fact writing letters to the Welfare Department to find out, you know, how I was getting on and that sort of thing, and asking if I could go back to the Island for holidays. That was refused. My grandmother was removed from the Island and placed in an aged-care hospital, and I was taken to see her and when I did she had basically lost her mind and she did not know who I was.
It is fairly evident from reading my welfare file that [the teacher] was the eyes and ears of the Welfare Department and that he was obviously sending reports back to them about the conditions on the Island.

There is a consent form on [my] file that mum signed and it did include [my sister and my two brothers] – and their names were crossed out and mine was left. I do not know whether it was because I was at the top or not. I might add that most people that I have spoken to said that mum, whilst she could read her name, could not read or write, and obviously would not have understood the implications of what she was signing. [It] has been witnessed by the schoolmaster.
I was flown off the Island and …  I was flown to where the small planes land at Launceston. I was eventually placed with some people  in Launceston. I have some recollection of going to school at some stage. I noted from my file that I was transported to Hobart in 1960 – my recollection of that was being put into a semi-trailer and picked up on the side of the road by some welfare officers down there. I was placed with some people in [Hobart], and I guess, fortunately for me, I could not have been in better hands because I still maintain a relationship with them; they look on me as their son. They had one daughter but Mrs — used to care for other foster children and the house was full of other non-Aboriginal children.
I had always wanted to return to the  Island but I could never bring myself to hopping on a plane and returning. [It was] thirty years before I went back. [The night I returned] I could not settle.  I think I had a cup of tea and I decided I would go in a different direction and I walked around the sand spit and - I do not know, something just made me turn around and look back and I looked to the school and - I just looked back to where we used to live as kids. My whole life flashed before me and I just collapsed in the sand and started crying … And when I composed myself as best I could I just sort of reflected on things and my whole life was just racing through my mind and I guess I just wanted to be part of a family that I never had. I just wanted to be with my mum and my grandmother and my brothers and sisters. 
Confidential evidence 384, Tasmania. The consent form signed by Greg’s mother states the reason for his removal: ‘I am a widow, in poor health’. After Greg was taken his mother had another daughter but Greg was not aware of her existence until 1994. One of Greg’s brothers states that after Greg went their mother ‘was in total despair’. They lived in conditions of extreme poverty in ‘a run down shanty’. One afternoon their mother went drinking and suffered a fatal accident. Later the police came with a warrant to collect the children and flew them to Launceston. The boys were fostered together but each of the girls went to a different family. The first time the five children were all together was in 1995.

7		Western Australia	
In many things the white people mean well, but they have so little understanding. My experience has convinced me that, psychologically, the Native Department is working on wrong lines … The same law that applies to the white race should apply to the native races in that particular. I think that is most essential. Our native mothers have all the natural feelings of mothers the world over, and to many of them the administration of the Native Department, by men only, is stark tragedy (Gladys Prosser, a Noongar mother, in an interview to Perth’s Sunday Times, later quoted in a speech to the Legislative Council by Hon. H Seddon Hansard 22 November 1938 page 2246).

Initial contact
Following the founding of the Swan River Colony in 1829 relations between the British settlers and local Indigenous peoples in Western Australia became characterised by conflict. As a result of fierce fighting,

… on the Swan and Canning Rivers all opposition by the Aborigines had ceased by 1832, while the Murray River tribe gave no further trouble after it had been decimated by posses of settlers and soldiers in what became known as the battle of Pinjarra (Biskup 1973 page 7).

Following the report of the 1837 British Select Committee into the condition of ‘natives’ in all British colonies, protectors were appointed in Perth and York. By 1850 the protectors had become firmly aligned with the colonists against the Aboriginal population. So successful were they in securing the settlers’ interests that the office of protector was abolished and not revived until 1886. In the interim police and magistrates were assigned the protective role. In reality settlers took the law into their own hands.

From the 1860s the pastoral frontier expanded northwards and eastwards, with the Kimberley region reached in the 1880s. A ban on the employment of convicts north of the Murchison River made pastoralists dependent upon Indigenous labour for which rations were provided instead of wages. In the south, the pattern was different. Indigenous communities developed in camps on the outskirts of towns and supported themselves by hunting and working casually for local farmers and businesses. Some became farmers themselves until their properties were resumed in the early twentieth century.

In the 1840s several church-run schools for Indigenous children opened with government financial assistance. By 1847 all but one had closed because of financial constraints and because children had been reclaimed by their parents following the deaths of some pupils from disease. The remaining school was at the Roman Catholic mission at New Norcia where Indigenous families settled near the mission while their children were housed in dormitories within the mission complex.

In the late nineteenth century two institutions opened in the south for Indigenous children. Although they were run as orphanages, many of the children sent there had living parents (Haebich 1988 page 8). The children were schooled and trained for domestic and farm work. Under the Industrial Schools Act 1874 children who were voluntarily surrendered to a school, orphanage or institution would remain under its authority until the age of 21 regardless of the parents’ wishes. The manager of the institution could apprentice children over the age of 12.

Responding to atrocities committed against Indigenous people in Western Australia the British Parliament passed the Aborigines Protection Act 1886 establishing the Aborigines Protection Board. Among the Board’s functions was ‘the care, custody and education of Aboriginal children’. Resident Magistrates, acting on the Board’s instructions, were empowered to apprentice any Aboriginal or ‘half-caste’ child of a ‘suitable age’. Under the 1874 Act applying to non-Indigenous children the minimum age at which children could be apprenticed was 12 years.

In reducing the age of Aboriginals against whom contracts shall have force, your committee considers that ten years is not too young, as Aboriginal children mature so much more quickly than civilised ones, and it is at that age that habits of thrift and honesty are most easily inculcated. Should they be at liberty to roam about without employment until 16 they would be useless afterwards (comments of the Parliamentary Select Committee which reviewed the Bill prior to its enactment, quoted by Dr Neville Green submission 341 on page 6).

Concern about the treatment of Indigenous people in WA led the British Government to retain control of Aboriginal affairs until 1897 when the Aborigines Act 1897 was passed. This Act created the Aborigines Department with the same functions as the Board. Henry Prinsep, who had experience in colonial administration in India, was appointed Chief Protector.

Prinsep believed that Aboriginal children of mixed descent who grew up with their Aboriginal families would become ‘vagrants and outcasts’ and ‘not only a disgrace, but a menace to society’ (quoted by Haebich 1988 on page 57). Lacking any legislative power to forcibly remove these children to the existing institutions and missions (which were not under his control), he endeavoured to ‘persuade’ the parents to part with their children. In a circular letter to all Protectors and Government Residents in WA dated February 1902 Prinsep requested information on any ‘half-caste’ children in their districts who could be induced to enter one of the existing institutions for their care and eduction. 
Not surprisingly, most mothers refused to part with their children. For the few that agreed, hasty arrangements were made for the child’s removal in case the mother changed her mind (Dr Christine Choo submission 385 page 7). Referring to his very limited success in this exercise, Prinsep complained in 1902 that ‘the natural affections of the mothers … stood much in the way’ (Aborigines Department Annual Report 1902 quoted by Haebich 1988 on page 67).

Prinsep proposed the extension of his powers to enable him to remove children forcibly and without parental consent.

The 1905 Act
In 1904 the WA Government established an inquiry into Aboriginal administration headed by Dr W E Roth, the Chief Protector of Aborigines in Queensland. Although he was asked to inquire into ‘the treatment of the aboriginal and half-caste inhabitants of the State’ as well as the administration of Aboriginal affairs generally, he limited his inquiry to conditions in the north-west and far north. His findings of ‘a most brutal and outrageous state of affairs’ in which Aboriginal people were exploited, brutally controlled and malnourished caused a public furore. He recommended ‘proper legislation, combined with firm departmental supervision’ (quoted by Leaming 1986 on page 4).

Although Roth did not investigate conditions in the south-west he supported Prinsep’s concerns about the increasing numbers of ‘half-castes’ there, then numbering about 750. He noted that pastoralists who fathered ‘half-caste’ children made little attempt to educate or support them. The appropriate course, according to Roth, was for the Chief Protector to assume guardianship of these children, to remove them from their Aboriginal families and place them in institutions. To prevent the problem arising again in the future there should be prohibitions against ‘mixed marriages’ and ‘miscegenation’.

Roth’s recommendations were implemented by the Aborigines Act 1905 making the Chief Protector the legal guardian of ‘every Aboriginal and half-caste child’ under 16 years.

[A] half-caste, who possesses few of the virtues and nearly all of the vices of whites, grows up to be a mischievous and very immoral subject … it may appear to be a cruel thing to tear an Aborigine child from its mother, but it is necessary in some cases to be cruel to be kind  (J M Drew, WA Parliamentary Debates 1904, quoted by Biskup 1973 on page 142).

It was claimed that it was ‘wrong, unjust and a disgrace to the State’ to leave children to be cared for by their mothers. More generally, the 1905 Act 

… laid the basis for the development of repressive and coercive state control over the state’s Aboriginal population. It set up the necessary bureaucratic and legal mechanisms to control all their contacts with the wider community, and to enforce the assimilation of their children and to determine the most personal aspects of their lives (Haebich 1988 page 83). 

Missions
In the north of WA a Catholic mission was established at Beagle Bay in 1890. Another four followed in the next 20 years with the help of government subsidies. The missions shared Prinsep’s objectives of removing the children from their families.

As soon as possible, children can be removed from the adult camp and the nomadic ways of their parents, and be housed in dormitories on mission premises to be educated at school and in trades (Father George Walter, Superior at Beagle Bay, 1906, quoted by Dr Christine Choo submission 385 on page 6).

In 1906 the Pallottines at Beagle Bay requested that the police round up the Indigenous children living in and around the north-west towns, now wards of the Chief Protector, and send them to the mission.

If the police sent me only the most obvious cases, the number of children on the mission would be about 200 (Father George Walter, Superior at Beagle Bay, 1906 letter to Chief Protector, quoted by Dr Christine Choo submission 385 on page 11).

The local protector, James Isdell, supported the mission’s concern to rescue ‘waifs and strays from the bad contaminating influence of natives’ camps’. 

The half-caste is intellectually above the aborigine, and it is the duty of the State that they be given a chance to lead a better life than their mothers. I would not hesitate for one moment to separate any half-caste from its aboriginal mother, no matter how frantic her momentary grief might be at the time. They soon forget their offspring (quoted by Dr Christine Choo submission 385 on page 14).

In the south of the State little use of the removal power was made before 1909. In that year a regulation dispensed with the need for the Chief Protector’s permission to remove any mixed descent child under the age of eight. The number of forcible removals increased and the children were taken to New Norcia, the Swan Native and Half-Caste Home and the Dulhi Gunyah Orphanage in Perth. To put pressure on parents to send their children to the missions the Aborigines Department refused to assist orphaned or needy children away from the missions.

Mapinsert

‘Native settlements’
Protests from non-Indigenous people in the south about the presence of Aboriginal camps on the edges of towns led the government to revise its approach. The new plan was to establish isolated self-contained ‘native settlements’ run by the government. Chief Protector A O Neville who was appointed in 1915 and who remained in the position until 1940, was firmly committed to the new plan.

Neville saw the settlements as a means of integrating children of mixed descent into the non-Indigenous society. They were to be physically separated from their families on the settlements, receive a European education, be trained in domestic and stock work and then sent out to approved work situations. Between jobs they would return to the settlements. Neville theorised that this process would lead to their acceptance by non-Indigenous people and their own loss of identification as Indigenous people.
My [wife’s] father died when she was eleven, so Rose was left an orphan, and was placed in the New Norcia home for Aboriginal girls … Rose left her life in New Norcia mission when she turned fourteen, to work as a housemaid. But before she could go out to work, she had to come to the Moore River Native Settlement … Rose had no trouble being placed in service to a white woman. In between she had to return to the settlement … All those who went out to work had to return to Moore River when their terms of employment were finished: to do otherwise meant to be hounded by the authorities and made to return. Again, no options! No choice! (van den Berg 1994 pages 88-89).

Neville began by taking control of the mission at Carrolup and expanding its size to be self-supporting. In 1918 a second settlement was opened, at Moore River. In the north, too, Neville wanted to take control of the missions and turn them into self-supporting cattle stations. Moola Bulla in the Kimberley was his model. It had opened in 1910 as a ration depot and government-run cattle station. It was intended to be an alternative to the more expensive option of imprisoning large numbers of Aboriginal people for cattle spearing as well as ‘raising beef to feed them and … training men for work on the stations’ (Long 1970 page 192).

There would be considerable savings to the government as it would no longer have to subsidise the missions.

Generally the recommendations are made on the score of economy, combined with the knowledge that the Missions are not performing the useful work which might be expected of them. A large number of natives and half-castes are growing up in idleness instead of being employed on the various stations in the Northern portions of the State … scores of the children are growing up without any prospect of a future before them, being alienated from their old bush life, and rendered more or less useless for the condition of life being forced upon them (A O Neville quoted by Jacobs 1990 on pages 77-78).

Two former pastoral stations were acquired: Munja in 1926 and Violet Valley in 1935. On purchasing Munja Neville commented that ‘the purpose of establishing the stations was to pacify the natives and accustom them to white man’s ways and thus enable further settlement’ (quoted by Kimberley Land Council submission 345 on page 11). Although no other missions were established in the north during Neville’s time in office the United Aborigines Mission founded a mission at Mount Margaret in the Goldfields in 1921.

Indigenous families did not willingly move to these settlements. In the south most were able to find employment in their local area, receiving wages which were preferred to the payment in kind offered at settlements. The living conditions at the settlements were not significantly better yet they were highly regulated. The parents rightly feared that their children would be placed in segregated dormitories if the family moved to a settlement.
We were locked up at night. All the boys, young girls. Married girls and women what had no husbands and babies, they had one room. Another dormitory was for young girls had no babies. But we was opposite side of that, see? The boys’ dormitory. I’m not going to complain about it because, you know, I survived. A lot of kids died. Depression time it was pretty hard.
Confidential evidence 333, Western Australia.

The missions attracted families whose children would otherwise be taken from them.

Even when at the mission the children still took every precaution. The women discussed in the raffia room what to do with their children if the police should take them on the hop. Where could they hide them? – inside the cupboard perhaps? … The children however took matters into their own hands. They continually kept their ears cocked for horses’ hooves. 

[In 1926] came a visit from A.J. Neale, new manager of Moore River Settlement, representing the Aborigines Department. Dicky Wingulu, Doris’s tribal father, talked to Mr Neale and pleaded for his little girls that they not be sent away to Moore River. Finally he persuaded Mr Neale that Mount Margaret would be a good place to send them, as he had heard they were starting a school  (Morgan 1991 pages 83 and 94).

As in the past, to compel people to move the Aborigines Department refused rations or other assistance to people living away from the settlements. In response to complaints from local police about the camps on the outskirts of non-Indigenous towns, Indigenous people were ‘rounded up’ by police and sent to the settlements. Aborigines convicted of alcohol related offences were also sent to Moore River for their ‘rehabilitation’. Between 1915 and 1920 at least 500 people, about a quarter of the Indigenous population in the south, had been removed to settlements. Moore River expanded quickly. In January 1919 there were 19 inmates at Moore River, in June 1919 93 inmates, by June 1927 330 inmates and by 1932 500 (Choo 1989 page 45). 

In the north, travelling inspectors kept a watch for mixed descent children on pastoral stations and in communities. Warrants were then prepared for their forcible removal to the government settlements in the north or far south to Moore River.

When I was about twelve or thirteen years old I was taken to Moola Bulla. That’s where I lost my Aboriginal ways. The Police came one day from Halls Creek when they were going on patrol to Lansdowne and found me, a half-caste child. The manager … took me down to Fitzroy Crossing to wait for the mail truck from Derby to take me to Moola Bulla. When [the manager’s wife] told my people, mum and dad, that they were taking me to Fitzroy Crossing for a trip, they told her ‘you make sure you bring her back’. They did not know that I would never see them again.
Quoted by Kimberley Land Council submission 345 on page 66.
The welfare just grabbed you where they found you. They’d take them in threes and fours, whatever. The Native Welfare blokes used to come to every station and see where our half caste kids were. They used to drive right down to Port Hedland. Our people would hide us, paint us with charcoal. I was taken to Moola Bulla. The Welfare bloke … sent his son … to pick up me and Colin Swift. We were about 5-6 years old, and my mother was allowed to come with us in the manager’s car and then he took her away. 
Quoted by Kimberley Land Council submission 345 on page 60.

Work placements
At the age of 14 children of mixed descent were sent out from the settlements to work. A large proportion of the young women returned pregnant. Though annoyed that the burden of maintaining these children fell upon the government, Neville did not feel that the high rate of pregnancies reflected adversely on his department’s policies.

The child is taken away from the mother and sometimes never sees her again. Thus these children grow up as whites, knowing nothing of their own environment. At the expiration of the period of two years the mother goes back into service so that it doesn’t really matter if she has half a dozen children (quoted by Choo 1989 on pages 49-50).

‘Biological absorption’
By the 1930s Neville had refined his ideas of integrating Indigenous people into non-Indigenous society. His model was a biological one of ‘absorption’ or ‘assimilation’, argued in the language of genetics. Unlike the ideology of racial purity that emerged in Germany from eugenics, according to which ‘impure races’ had to be prevented from ‘contaminating’ the pure Aryan race, Neville argued the advantages of ‘miscegenation’ between Aboriginal and white people. 

The key issue to Neville was skin colour. Once ‘half-castes’ were sufficiently white in colour they would become like white people. After two or three generations the process of acceptance in the non-Indigenous community would be complete, the older generations would have died and the settlements could be closed.

Neville claimed that the settlements prepared Indigenous children to be ‘absorbed’ into non-Indigenous society. He argued that for the absorption process to work properly his powers needed to be extended to all children with any Indigenous background. The grandiose nature of his ‘vision’ contrasted starkly with the reality of life in the chronically under-funded settlements.

I visited the Moore River Settlement several times [in the 1930s]. The setting was a poor one with no advantage for anyone except isolation. The facilities were limited and some of them were makeshift. The staff were inadequate both in numbers and qualification. The inmates disliked the place. It held no promise of a future for any of them and they had little or no satisfaction in the present. It was a dump (Hasluck 1988 page 65). 
Opposition and dissent 
Public reaction to Neville’s ideas was mixed. The segregation of Aboriginal people had been actively supported by non-Indigenous people. Neville’s support for ‘miscegenation’ was in a different category. ‘[A] variety of harsh words were expressed about the Chief Protector’s outrageous suggestion that marriages between black and white (because if it was out in the open it would have to be marriage) should be condoned’ (Jacobs 1990 page 195).

In the early 1930s allegations of slavery, mistreatment of Aborigines and abuse of Aboriginal women appeared in the local and international press. Among them was a series of articles by Mary Bennett attacking the administration of Aboriginal affairs. The pressure of this publicity forced the government to establish a Royal Commission into the conditions of Aborigines, headed by a Perth magistrate, H D Moseley. In evidence to the Commission, Bennett attacked the practice of removing children from their mothers.

They are captured at all ages, as infants in arms, perhaps not until they are grown up, they are not safe until they are dead  (quoted by Jacobs 1990 on page 234).

Bessie Rischbieth also gave evidence to the Moseley Commission arguing that ‘neglect’ was not a justification for removing Aboriginal children to the settlements. ‘In most instances I should prefer to see the children left with their parents … the system of dealing with the parents should be improved in order that they might keep their children.’ (quoted by Paisley 1995 on page 266). In her opinion government administrations were forcibly removing children ‘because it was cheaper than providing the same system of support which operated for neglected white children’ (Paisley 1995 page 266).

Aboriginal women from Broome sent a petition to the Commission in which they asked ‘would you like to think that when you send your children to school that you would never see them again?’ (quoted by Paisley 1995 on page 267).

Neville’s response to these attacks on his policies was to argue that removal was in the best interests of children.

I say emphatically there are scores of children in the bush camps who should be taken away from whoever is looking after them and placed in a settlement … If we are going to fit and train such children for the future they cannot be left as they are … I want to give these children a chance … Unless those children are removed, social conditions in those places will go from bad to worse … I want to teach them right from wrong. How are the children to fight against these conditions? The conditions in the absence of teaching, are going to become infinitely worse than they are now  (quoted by Jacobs 1990 on page 235).
Moseley was sufficiently impressed by Neville’s views to recommend the extension of his powers to all people of Aboriginal descent. The Native Administration Act 1936 defined ‘natives’ to include nearly all people of full and part descent regardless of their lifestyle and expanded restrictions on movement and lifestyle.

Virtually any child of Aboriginal descent could now be taken forcibly from his or her family and placed in a government institution to be trained in the ways of ‘white civilisation’ and ‘society’. The Commissioner of Native Affairs, not their parents, had total control over their lives until they reached the age of twenty-one. From this age any person of ‘quarter-caste’ or less was prohibited by law from associating with persons deemed to be ‘natives’. In this way they were to be forced to live in the white community, although no measures were introduced to force white people to accept them  (Haebich 1988 on page 351). 

Sister Kate’s
In the early 1930s Kate Clutterbuck, an Anglican nun, offered to open a home in Perth for ‘half-caste’ children if government funding were provided. She informed Neville that ‘we should of course like to have the poorest and most neglected children not those who have mothers who love and care for them, but those who are most unwanted in the State’ (quoted by Jacobs 1990 on page 218). Neville took advantage of the offer to put his ideas into practice. Once the home commenced operations in 1933 he began to supply Sister Kate with the lightest skinned children.

Some kids who were brought to Moola Bulla and who were too white would be sent to Sister Kate’s in Perth and some of them who were too dark for Sister Kate’s were sent to Moola Bulla. There was a half-caste boy who was at Moola Bulla, his mother was half-caste and his father white, and I suppose they couldn’t bear to see him down the camp with all these Aboriginal people so they sent him to Sister Kate’s.
Confidential evidence 814, Western Australia.

Sister Kate’s Home operated until 1974 with an average of 85 children staying there at any one time (WA Government submission page 19). 

Assimilation
In 1940 Neville retired. He was succeeded by Francis Bray and then, in 1948, by Stanley Middleton. Just prior to Middleton taking office, an inquiry by F E A Bateman had recommended the abandonment of the policy of government settlements. By then, the language of ‘welfare’ and ‘social assimilation’ had started to replace that of ‘absorption’ and ‘miscegenation’. 

In Middleton’s view, isolating children of mixed descent on run-down government settlements was not the way to achieve assimilation. In 1951 Carrolup (Marribank) and Moore River (Mogumber) were transferred to mission control, followed by Sister Kate’s Home in 1956, and financial arrangements were made with them for the placement of removed children.

In the north financial support was offered to the existing missions and whole communities were forced to move, sometimes several times, as the smaller missions were closed. In 1955 Moola Bulla was sold. Although it was a condition of the sale that the new owners would look after the interests of the Aboriginal inhabitants of the area, the new owners arranged for the Department of Native Affairs to transport them to Fitzroy Crossing and Halls Creek (WA Government submission, Appendix 2 page 9).

I can’t remember anything much about the day we were evicted from Moola Bulla [in July 1955] because they just came and told us to go. There was no explanation, we don’t know what happened. We were stunned. There were four kids and no money to feed them. A transport contractor, took all the people into Halls Creek.

We camped around the race course for a few days, whilst asking for jobs on other stations … The welfare gave us some rations, that’s all. It was July and pretty cold and we camped, waiting, just like a refugee camp.

We were brought to Moola Bulla as children without our consent nor our mother’s and the later kicked off the land after living there for so long. It caused us a lot of pain inside. We were displaced and lost with no sense of belonging. 
Quoted by Kimberley Land Council submission 345 on pages 64-5.

Another aspect of the assimilation policy was that Indigenous children were to be accepted into the state schools. From the early 1950s the schools were opened to them. Children in the north were encouraged to attend schools in Derby, Wyndham and Broome while they stayed in government and mission-run educational hostels for most of the year. They were allowed home during holidays if they had a ‘suitable home’ to go to.

In the Kimberley, during this period, a ‘suitable home’ was difficult to provide for people who had limited employment opportunities, no housing and limited access to Welfare services. In any case, not all parents could afford to pay for airfares or other means for their children to travel long distances across the Kimberley (Kimberley Land Council submission 345 page 18).

As in other remote regions of Australia, Indigenous children were effectively separated for very long periods from their families, communities and cultures by their need to relocate for schooling. In 1958 it was estimated that 25% of Kimberley children were living in missions (Dr Anna Haebich submission 342). 
‘The welfare’
From 1951 in WA Aboriginal children were more likely to be removed under the Child Welfare Act 1947 by the Child Welfare Department than by the Department of Native Welfare acting under the 1936 Act. This practice was formalised when the Native Welfare Act 1954 was passed revoking the removal power of the Commissioner for Native Affairs. The Commissioner remained the legal guardian of all Aboriginal children except State wards until the Native Welfare Act 1963 was passed.

Although the child welfare legislation required a court to be satisfied that the child was destitute or neglected, the requirement made little impact on the numbers removed in practice. The definition of destitution could be applied to the situation of many Aboriginal families with few material resources whose lifestyle was the subject of constant surveillance by government officials. 

… all of a sudden the Welfare just came and took them, they didn’t say anything to me, just picked up the boys coming back from the shop and the Welfare made them wards of the State. I used to work at the hospital nursing, keeping my little family together. If the Welfare wanted to help they could have given money every fortnight like they do now … They weren’t helping taking [them] away or splitting us up, that was the most terrible thing that they done to my family, my sons and myself.
Confidential submission 197, Western Australia: mother of two boys removed in the late 1950s.

A thorough examination was not made as the father was not present. From what I saw however, I am satisfied that the children are ‘neglected’, if for no other reason than the shack they live in (welfare officer’s file note dated 11 January 1968, quoted by Telling Our Story 1995 on page 76).

The definition of neglect was also interpreted in a climate of assimilation which denigrated the worth of Aboriginal lifestyles. Aboriginal families who had moved to towns and cities following the closure of some of the missions and settlements and had to re-establish themselves were particularly vulnerable to action under the 1947 Act. 

In 1958 the Special Committee on Native Matters warned that ‘removal of a child from his mother at an early age can cause serious psychological and mental disturbances’. This warning was ignored (WA Government submission page 26). Between 1958 and 1961 the number of Aboriginal children committed to government care more than doubled (Marron 1994).

In 1966 the award for pastoral workers was extended to Aboriginal people, meaning that from 1968 Aboriginal workers in the pastoral industry were entitled to equal pay. This decision led to the eviction of whole communities from pastoral stations. These families settled on the outskirts of towns in conditions of dire poverty and were extremely vulnerable to intervention by ‘the welfare’.
During this period Native Welfare Department publications increasingly stressed the need to keep families together. However, as records on the numbers of Aboriginal children in care were not kept, it is almost impossible to assess the impact of this change in emphasis. Overall the number of children committed to care between 1971 and 1973 halved and over half of those committed were returned home or placed with their extended family (WA Government submission page 51).

Towards self-management
In 1972 the Department of Native Welfare was abolished and its welfare responsibilities were absorbed by the Department of Community Welfare. At the time there were 3,099 Aboriginal people in institutions, almost one in every ten Aboriginal people in the State. The majority of these people were children.

The Child Welfare Act 1947 was amended in 1976 to repeal ‘destitution’ and ‘neglect’ as grounds for removal and to introduce the concept of being ‘in need of care and protection’. Aboriginal children, however, remained dramatically over-represented among WA children in State care. In the period 1979-81 57% of children in care were Aboriginal and 66% of them had been placed with non-Indigenous families (Children in Limbo 1981 page 157). 

In 1980 an Aboriginal Child Care Agency was established in Perth. It was replaced in 1991 by the Yorganop Child Care Corporation. 

The Aboriginal Child Placement Principle became the policy of the Department of Community Services in 1985. A review of the department in 1989 showed that there had been a 58% reduction over the previous five years in the number of Aboriginal children in departmentally subsidised foster care and that most Aboriginal children were placed with Aboriginal caregivers, including 66% with relatives (WA Government submission page 58).

Afternoon tea at the Benson residence, Ruby Jones – maid – at left,
Wanaaring, NSW, 1906
Courtesy Bicentennial Copying Project, State Library of New South Wales.
I never received any money from my employers or the Protection Board. I did not know what money was.
Confidential submission 331, Queensland: child removed at 3 years in 1915.
When anybody come to pick up a worker they used to line us up and they’d make you flex your muscles. If you were big and strong they’d pick you – like a slave market. I was sent out at 11. I worked there for seven and a half years, never got paid anything, all that time. We used to bring the cattle in ... we didn’t get nothing. So I had to join the army to survive.
Confidential evidence 549, Northern Territory: man removed in the 1930s.

Millicent
At the age of four, I was taken away from my family and placed in Sister Kate’s Home – Western Australia where I was kept as a ward of the state until I was eighteen years old. I was forbidden to see any of my family or know of their whereabouts. Five of us D. children were all taken and placed in different institutions in WA. The Protector of Aborigines and the Child Welfare Department in their ‘Almighty Wisdom’ said we would have a better life and future brought up as whitefellas away from our parents in a good religious environment. All they contributed to our upbringing and future was an unrepairable scar of loneliness, mistrust, hatred and bitterness. Fears that have been with me all of life. The empty dark and lonely existence was so full of many hurtful and unforgivable events, that I cannot escape from no matter how hard I try. Being deprived of the most cherished and valuable thing in life as an Aboriginal Child – love and family bonds. I would like to tell my story of my life in Sister Kate’s home – WA.
My name is Millicent D. I was born at Wonthella WA in 1945. My parents were CD and MP, both ‘half-caste’ Aborigines. I was one of seven children, our family lived in the sandhills at the back of the Geraldton Hospital. There was a lot of families living there happy and harmonious. It was like we were all part of one big happy family. 
In 1949 the Protector of Aborigines with the Native Welfare Department visited the sandhill camps. All the families living there were to be moved to other campsites or to the Moore River Aboriginal Settlement. Because my parents were fair in complexion, the authorities decided us kids could pass as whitefellas. I was four years old and that was the last time I was to see my parents again. Because my sisters were older than me they were taken to the Government receiving home at Mount Lawley. My brother Kevin was taken to the boys home in Kenwick. Colin and I were taken to the Sister Kate’s Home. We were put in separate accommodation and hardly ever saw each other. I was so afraid and unhappy and didn’t understand what was happening. 
We were told Sundays was visiting day when parents and relatives came and spent the day. For Colin and I that was a patch of lies because our family were not allowed to visit. We spent each Sunday crying and comforting each other as we waited for our family. Each time it was the same – no one came. That night we would cry ourselves to sleep and wonder why. We were too young to understand we were not allowed family visits. 
A couple of years passed and I started primary school. 

It had been such a long time since I had seen my brother Colin. I was so helpless and alone.  My brother had been taken away to the boys’ home in Kenwick and now I was by myself. I became more withdrawn and shy and lived in a little world of my own hoping one day Mum would come and take me out of that dreadful place. As the years passed I realised that I would never see my family again. 
They told me that my family didn’t care…
They told me that my family didn’t care or want me and I had to forget them. They said it was very degrading to belong to an Aboriginal family and that I should be ashamed of myself, I was inferior to whitefellas. They tried to make us act like white kids but at the same time we had to give up our seat for a whitefella because an Aboriginal never sits down when a white person is present. 
Then the religion began. We had church three times a day, before breakfast, lunchtime and after school. If we were naughty or got home from school late we had to kneel at the altar for hours and polish all the floors and brass in the church. We had religion rammed down our throats from hypocrites who didn’t know the meaning of the word. We used to get whipped with a wet ironing cord and sometimes had to hold other children (naked) while they were whipped, and if we didn’t hold them we got another whipping. To wake us up in the morning we were sprayed up the backside with an old fashioned pump fly spray. If we complained we got more. Hurt and humiliation was a part of our every day life and we had to learn to live with it. 
Several more years passed and I still had no contact with my family, I didn’t know what they looked like or how I could ever find them. By this time I was old enough to go to High School. This meant I didn’t have to look after several of the younger kids as I had previously done, bathing, feeding and putting them on the potty and then off to bed, chopping wood before school and housework which all of us kids done and the housemothers sat back and collected wages – for doing nothing. My life was miserable, and I felt I was a nobody and things couldn’t get any worse. But I was wrong. 
The worst was yet to come. 
While I was in first year high school I was sent out to work on a farm as a domestic. I thought it would be great to get away from the home for a while. At first it was. I was made welcome and treated with kindness. The four shillings I was payed went to the home. I wasn’t allowed to keep it, I didn’t care. I was never payed for the work I did at Sister Kate’s so you don’t miss what you didn’t get, pocket money etc. 

The first time I was sent to the farm for only a few weeks and then back to school. In the next holidays I had to go back. This time it was a terrifying experience, the man of the house used to come into my room at night and force me to have sex. I tried to fight him off but he was too strong. 
When I returned to the home I was feeling so used and unwanted. I went to the Matron and told her what happened. She washed my mouth out with soap and boxed my ears and told me that awful things would happen to me if I told any of the other kids. I was so scared and wanted to die. When the next school holidays came I begged not to be sent to that farm again. But they would not listen and said I had to. 
I ran away from the home, I was going to try to find my family. It was impossible, I didn’t even know where to go. The only thing was to go back. I got a good belting and had to kneel at the altar everyday after school for two weeks. Then I had to go back to that farm to work. The anguish and humiliation of being sent back was bad enough but the worse was yet to come. 
This time I was raped, bashed and slashed with a razor blade on both of my arms and legs because I would not stop struggling and screaming. The farmer and one of his workers raped me several times. I wanted to die, I wanted my mother to take me home where I would be safe and wanted. Because I was bruised and in a state of shock I didn’t have to do any work but wasn’t allowed to leave the property. 
When they returned me to the home I once again went to the Matron. I got a belting with a wet ironing cord, my mouth washed out with soap and put in a cottage by myself away from everyone so I couldn’t talk to the other girls. They constantly told me that I was bad and a disgrace and if anyone knew it would bring shame to Sister Kate’s Home. They showed me no comfort which I desperately needed. I became more and more distant from everyone and tried to block everything out of my mind but couldn’t. I ate rat poison to try and kill myself but became very sick and vomited. This meant another belting. 
After several weeks of being kept away from everyone I was examined by a doctor who told the Matron I was pregnant. Another belting, they blamed me for everything that had happened. I didn’t care what happened to me anymore and kept to myself. All I wanted now was to have my baby and get away as far as I could and try and find my family.
My daughter was born [in 1962] at King Edward Memorial Hospital. I was so happy, I had a beautiful baby girl of my own who I could love and cherish and have with me always. 

 But my dreams were soon crushed: the bastards took her from me and said she would be fostered out until I was old enough to look after her. They said when I left Sister Kate’s I could have my baby back. I couldn’t believe what was happening. My baby was taken away from me just as I was from my mother. 
My baby was taken away from me just as I was from my mother. 
Once again I approached the Matron asking for the Address of my family and address of the foster family who had my daughter. She said that it was Government Policy not to give information about family and she could not help me. I then asked again about my baby girl and was told she did not know her whereabouts. In desperation I rang the King Edward Memorial Hospital. They said there was no record of me ever giving birth or of my daughter Toni. Then I wrote to the Native Welfare Department only to be told the same thing and that there were no records of the D. family because all records were destroyed by fire. 
I now had no other options but to find a job and somewhere to live. After working for a while I left Western Australia and moved to Adelaide to try and get my life together and put the past behind me. I was very alone, shy and not many friends and would break down over the simplest thing. Every time I saw a baby I used to wonder, could that by my little girl. I loved her and so desperately wanted her back. So in 1972 I returned to Western Australia and again searched for my family and child. I returned to see the Matron from Sister Kate’s. This time she told me that my daughter was dead and it would be in my best interest to go back to South Australia and forget about my past and my family. I so wanted to find them, heartbroken I wandered the streets hoping for the impossible. I soon realized that I could come face to face with a family member and wouldn’t even know. 
Defeated I finally returned to Adelaide. In my heart I believed that one day everything would be alright and I would be reunited with my family. My baby was dead. (That’s what I was told). I didn’t even get to hold her, kiss her and had no photographs, but her image would always be with me, and I would always love her. They couldn’t take that away from me.
Confidential submission 640, South Australia: WA woman removed in 1949. In January 1996, Millicent received an enquiry from the South Australian welfare authorities. A woman born in 1962 was searching for her birth mother. This was Toni, Millicent’s daughter. The two have since been reunited.

8		South Australia
The general opinion of station people is that it is a mistake to take these children out of the bush. They say that the aboriginal mothers are fond of their children and in their own way look after them and provide for them and that when they grow up they are more easily absorbed and employed than those who have been taken out of their natural environment and removed to towns.

The Mission Representatives say that if the girls are left in the bush they only became the prey of white men and become mothers at a very early age. My experience has been that removing them to towns and to institutions does not overcome this trouble and only accentuates and increases it (Chief Protector of Aboriginals to Commissioner of Public Works, 27 August 1932, documents provided by United Aborigines Mission evidence 264).

Early policies and practices
In 1836, just two years after South Australia was founded as a ‘free colony’ unlike the penal settlements of New South Wales or Van Dieman’s Land, the Governor issued a proclamation promising to protect Aborigines ‘who are to be considered as much under the safeguard of the law as the Colonists themselves, and equally entitled to the Privileges of British Subjects’.  In the same proclamation the Governor also said he would promote ‘their conversion to the Christian faith’ (quoted by Gale 1964 on page 64).     

A Protector was appointed soon after and land was reserved for Indigenous people. Under the Aboriginal Orphans Ordinance 1844 the Protector was appointed legal guardian of ‘every half-caste and other unprotected Aboriginal child whose parents are dead or unknown’. The same law allowed for the apprenticing of Indigenous children ‘of a suitable age’ with parental consent. It was used to place a number of teenage boys attending the Aboriginal School in Adelaide as apprentices with the Harbours Department, the Colonial Engineers Department, a tannery and a bricklayer and as messengers for the Governor. Aboriginal girls were placed in domestic service. However, in most cases the children left the apprenticeships to return to their families and the law fell into disuse.

In 1839 the ‘Native Location’ School for Aboriginal children was established, followed by several more such schools in the 1840s. All became boarding schools so as to maximise control over the children.  

The children’s attendance is procured in various ways – some will come into the School because they prefer a regular supply of food to an irregular one and especially in the winter season; others are sent by the parents on condition that they receive a blanket for three months’ attendance and others again are sent by the police if found begging about town. No healthy adult is entitled to receive a blanket on the Queen’s Birthday unless he have a child in school (quoted by  Mattingley and Hampton 1992 on page 100).

Despite the early attempts at protectionism, the pattern elsewhere of violence and dispossession of Indigenous people repeated itself in South Australia. Matthew Moorhouse, Protector from 1839 until 1856, himself presided over a massacre of 30 Indigenous people in 1841. In 1856 the office of protector was abolished and by 1860 35 of the 42 reserves set aside for Aborigines had been leased to settlers. 

From then until 1881 when another Protector was appointed, the protection of Indigenous people was left entirely to missionaries. The lack of government intervention gave the missionaries independence from the government but meant also that they received little contribution from it, apart from limited rations (primarily for the sick and old) and an annual ration of blankets (Rowley 1970 page 205).  In this period no action was taken to control the depredations of pastoralists who removed children from their families and brutally put them into service as stockmen and servants.

The Government effectively condoned the forcible removal of Aboriginal children from their families by its inaction (SA Government interim submission page 9).

Missions – 1850-1908
In the nineteenth century missionary activity was mainly concerned with establishing settled farming communities near the coast and in the fertile inland areas on reserved land: Poonindie, Point McLeay, Point Pearce and Koonibba. Schooling on these missions was designed to distance Indigenous children from their family and community influences. 

The reason why it is desirable to have boarders at all is, to withdraw the youth of the tribes from the contaminating and demoralizing influence of the vile practices carried on at the wurleys (George Taplin, Point McLeay, 1860, quoted by Mattingley and Hampton 1992 on page 100).

‘Protection’ – 1908-1939
In 1908 the government appointed Senior Constable W G South to the position of Protector. From the following year the general child welfare law, the State Children’s Act 1895, was used to remove Indigenous children on the ground of ‘destitution’ or ‘neglect’. A child could be deemed ‘neglected’ if he or she ‘sleeps in the open air, and does not satisfy the Justices that he or she has a home or a settled place of abode’ and ‘destitute’ if he or she has ‘no sufficient means of subsistence … and whose relations are … in indigent circumstances and unable to support such a child’. 
These definitions could easily be applied to children whose parents were nomadic, involved in seasonal (and therefore necessarily shifting) work or impoverished through loss of their land.

… children should be committed to the care of the State Children’s Council where they will be educated and trained to useful trades and occupations, and prevented from acquiring the habits and customs of the aborigines, and I feel sure they will as a rule, grow up useful, self-supporting members of the community, instead of developing into worse than useless dependants (Protector South, 1909, quoted by Mattingley and Hampton 1992 on page 157).

South lobbied for the power to remove Aboriginal children without a court hearing because the courts sometimes refused to accept that the children were neglected or destitute. In South’s view all children of mixed descent should be treated as neglected.

The government responded by enacting the Aborigines Act 1911 making the Chief Protector the legal guardian of every Aboriginal and ‘half-caste’ child with additional wide-ranging powers to remove Indigenous people to and from reserves. Under the Act family members could be separated from each other for disciplinary reasons.

The [Aborigines Act 1911] ratified institutionalization as a way of life and confirmed the status of Nungas as ‘inmates’ whose affairs and families were to be controlled in every respect. It supported vested economic interests by developing reserves as enclaves of slave labour and provided a hidden subsidy to rural employers (Mattingley and Hampton 1992 page 45).

South did not use his new powers immediately. He continued instead to use the State Children’s Act 1895 because it allowed him to send Indigenous children to children’s homes where the emphasis was on training them to be sent out to work from the age of 14 years. He was scathing in his criticism of missions which he believed were creating dependence upon charity as well as ignoring the needs of residents. South argued that the policy should be to ‘look after and feed the full blooded Aborigines and train the half castes and quadroons’ (quoted by SA Government final submission on page 9).

Royal Commission 1913
A Royal Commission was established in 1913 ‘to inquire into and report upon the control, organisation and management of institutions … set aside for the benefit of Aborigines’.

There was discussion about the appropriate age at which children of mixed descent should be taken from their families. The Secretary of the State Children’s Council argued that they should be taken away as soon as they are born. ‘If they are in the wurley for a week it is bad for them, but it is fatal for them to remain there a year’ (quoted by Mattingley and Hampton 1992 on page 160).
Professor Stirling from the University of Adelaide, on the other hand, argued that the best time to take Aboriginal children was when they were about two years old.

The more of those half-caste children you can take away from their parents and place under the care of the State the better … When they are a couple of years of age they do not require so much attention and they are young enough to be attractive.

I am quite aware that you are depriving the mothers of their children, and the mothers are very fond of their children; but I think it must be the rising generation who have to be considered.  They are the people who are going to live on (quoted by Mattingley and Hampton 1992 on page 160).       

The Royal Commission also heard protests against forcible removals.

In regard to the taking of our children in hand by the State to learn trades etc., our people would gladly embrace the opportunity of betterment … but to be subjected to complete alienation from our children is to say the least an unequalled act of injustice, and no parent worthy of the name would either yield to or urge such a measure (Matthew Kropinyeri quoted by Mattingley and Hampton 1992 on page 119). 

The Royal Commission’s final position favoured ‘assimilation’, as it later became known, in preference to segregation, at least for people of mixed descent.

… with the gradual disappearance of full blood blacks, the mingling of the black and white races and the great increase in the number of half castes and quadroons, the problem is now one of assisting and training the native to become a useful member of the community, not dependent on charity, but upon his own efforts (quoted by SA Government final submission on page 9).

As recommended by the Royal Commission the government took control of the missions at Point Pearce and Point McLeay. A decade later the Aborigines (Training of Children) Act 1923 was enacted specifically to allow Indigenous children to be ‘trained’ in a children’s institution and sent out to work. Any Indigenous child could be committed to any child welfare institution and once committed could be dealt with as if ‘neglected’ under the State Children’s Act 1895, which meant that the child could be apprenticed. The removal of a non-Indigenous child required a court finding of ‘neglect’ or ‘destitution’. The 1923 Act dispensed with this requirement for Indigenous children. This was justified on the basis that it was less traumatic for Indigenous children.

The procedure is very simple, and is in no way analogous to the judicial proceeding whereby neglected or convicted children are put under the control of the State Children’s Council. There is no publicity in the proceeding under the Bill, merely the execution of a document after an agreement has been reached between the Protector and the Council as to the transfer of the particular child (second reading speech, Hansard 17 October 1923 page 902, quoted by SA Government final submission on page 13). 

The 1923 Act was vehemently opposed by Aboriginal families who petitioned the government.  In 1924 a magazine editor condemned the practice of child removal.

There is not and never should be occasion for the Children to be taken away from their parents and farmed out among white people  (J C Genders, editor of Daylight (magazine), 1924, quoted by  Mattingley and Hampton 1992 on page 187).

The protests met with some success. The operation of the Act was suspended in 1924. The South Australian Government told the Inquiry that it has been unable to confirm whether the Act was subsequently revived, although indications are that it was (SA Government final submission on page 12). The administrative removal power in the 1923 Act was re-enacted in the Aborigines Act 1934. 
 
In 1936 David Unaipon spoke on the steps of the SA Parliament House and was quoted in the News.

We have been for nearly a century under a Chief Protector. Some of the men who have held that office have acted as ‘protector’ of the Government (quoted by Mattingley and Hampton 1992 on page 57). 

Missions
In the 1920s a ‘second wave’ of missionary activity began in South Australia. In 1924 the United Aborigines Mission (UAM) opened its first mission at Oodnadatta. The mission incorporated a school and a cottage for children. In 1926 the mission moved to Quorn where it became known as the Colebrook Children’s Home. The UAM went on to establish missions at Swan Reach (which was later moved to Gerard and taken over by the Government in 1961-2), Nepabunna, Ooldea and Finniss Springs.

The children taken into Colebrook included some who were placed there by their traditional mothers or non-Indigenous fathers because that parent was unable to care for them, those who had been taken from their families by non-Indigenous people to work for them and then ejected when their services were no longer wanted and children who were forcibly removed by government officials. In 1944 the Colebrook Home moved to Adelaide where it remained until it closed in 1981. From shortly after it opened until 1952 it was managed by Matron Ruby Hyde and Sister Rutter. ‘They were Colebrook. Those kids went through hell on earth after they had gone’ (quoted by Mattingley and Hampton 1992 on page 216).

The UAM reviewed the role of Colebrook in a submission to the Inquiry.

I don’t believe that mission personnel were involved in the forceful removal of children from their homes or in any way sought to bring pressure to bear on the parents … The people who established this home were single lady missionaries … They tell us they saw a desperate need and they responded to it without government funding or support. They sought to provide love, care and shelter and in some cases refuge to children who they saw as being vulnerable to harm … When the very persons who were their only recourse to protection brought Aboriginal children to them, they were hardly in a position to refuse to take them in.

The missionaries who worked in this home over the years sought to provide Aboriginal children with an education and with the skills they felt the children would need to make their own way in an ever-expanding society dominated by non-Aboriginal culture. Some will say they were wrong in doing this but we believe it must be acknowledged that their desire was to do good and not harm (evidence 264 pages 228-9).
Assimilation – 1936-1962
The definition of an Aboriginal person was broadened in 1939 to include anyone ‘descended from the original inhabitants of Australia’. An exemption system was introduced at the same time to allow Indigenous people, who ‘by reason of their character, standard of intelligence, and development are considered to be capable of living in the general community without supervision’, to escape the application of the Act and the control of the Aborigines’ Protection Board. 

An exemption certificate entitled the holder to open a bank account, receive certain Commonwealth social service benefits, own land and purchase alcohol. All of these were denied to Indigenous people under the Act. On the other hand, holders of exemption certificates were not allowed to live with their families on reserves and even had to apply for permission to visit them. People could be stopped at any time by the police and required to show their certificates as proof of their ‘status’. Exempt families remained vulnerable to the removal of their children, although for them a court hearing was necessary under general child welfare legislation.

Dad and Mum moved down to town. When they moved down to Adelaide things seemed to go wrong … The inevitable come when Mum and Dad split up and Mum went back to her Homelands. But because we were light-skinned kids [the manager] told Mum she had to leave [the mission at Point McLeay known as ‘Raukken’] and take us with her. I was about 5 or 6, something like that.  Sooner or later you got caught up with [the welfare] because we didn’t have anywhere else to go. But they made it that Mum had to leave Raukken with us. When she went back to town, there was no support of any sort. So she was told to take us to the courthouse. We had to appear in court. That was their job, to take light-skinned kids. Actually they told Mum to come back on a day to the courthouse when it was going to be heard and I think they told her 2 days wrong. When she come back we had already been committed as wards of the State. Same as they stamp on everyone – neglect.
Confidential submission 284, South Australia: woman removed in the early 1940s along with her two sisters.       	

The system put Aboriginal families in a double-bind.  If they wanted to receive Commonwealth social security benefits to assist them care for their children, they had to leave their homes and extended family on the missions.

‘Assimilation’ was not formally adopted as a policy by the Aborigines Protection Board until 1951. From the 1940s, however, assimilation was practised in all but name. It took the form of dispersal, moving people off the reserves where they had lived regulated lives to cities and towns. Dispersal had high social costs. Indigenous people who moved from the reserves found themselves financially struggling, isolated and discriminated against. Families found every aspect of their lives monitored and assessed against non-Indigenous standards that discriminated against them.  People who were under the control of the Board (non-exempt) were regularly visited by Board officials. Those who were exempt ran up against the Board whenever they sought contact with their non-exempt families. With this ever-present level of intrusion, the numbers of children removed from their families as ‘neglected’ or ‘destitute’ increased.

They reckon we were starving which was not true because my mother never drink in her life. She had to stay with us and looked after [us], feed and wash us. Just because Mum was not married, they wanted to take us away. Really we were taken away for nothing.
Confidential submission 112, South Australia: man removed in the 1950s along with 3 siblings and 4 cousins after welfare determined they were neglected. 

In 1956 the relationship between the Aborigines Protection Board and the Children’s Welfare and Public Relief Board was redefined.

a)	The part Aboriginal, whether exempted or not, who is living a fully independent life, earning and paying taxes, should be accepted into our community life. Neglected or destitute children from this group should be subject to the same court orders as other children and should continued to be placed, when necessary, in our departmental institutions with white children.

b)	All other destitute or neglected Aboriginal or part Aboriginal children should continue to be the responsibility of the Aborigines Protection Board. In some cases, eg myall Aborigines living a tribal life etc it would be unthinkable to remove the children from their parents. In others, it seems hardly right to expect this Department to admit these children into departmental institutions when it has no power or authority in the matter of improving their usual living conditions (quoted by SA Government final submission on page 19).

People removed remember a less cautious and less progressive approach.

I came into welfare care at 6 weeks of age when an officer of the [Department of Child Welfare] deemed my mother physically abusive towards me due to the fact of bruising on my body. This was not bruising it is what is known   – and little known at that – as mongolian black spots. Many non-caucasian babies have this birthmarking … In fact nothing was wrong with me I was not malnourished, unhappy, retarded or unclean … I was back and forth from my mother to welfare until I was about 3 … I was relinquished by my natural mother at 6 years old to be adopted by my foster family.
Confidential submission 851, South Australia.    

I grew up Oodnadatta area…with my grandmother and she would see the missionary coming …  she would run away with me. She would keep running away and the police … would come sometimes and shoot the dogs and that and my grandmother would run in the creek and hide me away till about really dark and come back home … I might [have] been about 10 or 11 years … we seen one missionary coming … one of my auntie roll me up like a swag sort of thing, you know, and hid me away…but I must have moved and he got me out and he said to me ‘I’ll give you a lolly and we’ll go for a ride, go to Oodnadatta’ … they put me on a train and my grandmother was following the train – she was running behind the train, singing out for me … then I was singing out ‘I’ll be back’, I thought I was going for a holiday or something.
Confidential evidence 382, South Australia: woman removed from her grandmother’s care in the 1960s. She was never informed of the grounds for her removal.   

The 1951 Commonwealth-State conference at which the assimilation policy was further articulated spurred the South Australian Government to take action aimed at assimilation. State schools were opened to Aboriginal children and Aboriginal parents were urged to send their children to secondary schools. In many cases the children had to live away from home to attend secondary school, often in children’s homes in Adelaide.

In 1954 the Aborigines’ Protection Board began placing Indigenous children in non-Indigenous foster homes in preference to institutional care. Some of these children came from reserves such as Point McLeay and Point Pearce, others from the ‘shanty towns’ in country areas and the remaining few were from traditional communities in the far north or west of the State (Gale 1968 page 8).

‘The welfare’
 The Board’s guardianship of all Indigenous children was repealed by the Aboriginal Affairs Act 1962. However, the numbers of Indigenous children being removed for reasons of lifestyle and poverty under the general child welfare law did not decrease (SA Government interim submission page 18). 

The new Department of Aboriginal Affairs favoured placement of removed children in hostels and institutions ‘for the development of a positive Aboriginal identity’ (SA Government interim submission on page 12). It was not until 1967 that Indigenous children were fostered with Indigenous families. In that year 157 Indigenous children were in non-Indigenous foster homes, 123 in hostels or institutions, 29 with Indigenous families and 6 in ‘medical facilities’  (SA Government interim submission page 18). Many were adopted by non-Aboriginal people.

In 1972 the Community Welfare Act established the Department of Community Welfare and the separate legislation relating to Indigenous people was repealed. Despite the policy emphasis of the department on promoting the family relationship, a disproportionate number of Indigenous children continued to be removed from their families as ‘neglected’. 
Professional and organisational attitudes were at times slow to change. It was still possible for an Aboriginal child to be removed from his or her home because there was insufficient food in the house. Prevailing attitudes did not allow the provision of food, money and other material assistance as a family support measure to help prevent the removal of children  (SA Government interim submission page 14).  

After the Federal Government took responsibility for Aboriginal affairs in 1973, the State welfare department functioned as the regional office of the federal Department of Aboriginal Affairs while retaining responsibility for providing welfare services to Aboriginal people. 

Role of AICCAs
In 1978 the South Australian Aboriginal Child Care Agency (‘ACCA’) was established ‘to have an input into issues surrounding Aboriginal child welfare and to attempt to redress the injustices that were occurring within the government welfare field’ (ACCA submission 347 page 10). Of particular concern was the provision of culturally appropriate (and preferably Indigenous) alternative care. At the same time the department tried to place all Indigenous children who were unable to live with their own family with other Indigenous families and to de-institutionalise its care programs (SA Government interim submission on page 14). 

In the Community Welfare Amendment Act 1982 cultural considerations were explicitly mentioned for the first time.

… in recognition of the fact that this State has a multi-cultural community, the Minister and the Department shall, in administering this Act, take into consideration the different customs, attitudes and religious beliefs of the ethnic groups within the community (section 10(4)).
 
In 1983 the Aboriginal Child Placement Principle became the official policy of the welfare department. However, in the same year there were still more Indigenous children in non-Indigenous foster placements than in Indigenous placements (SA Government interim submission page 19).  The Principle was incorporated in the Adoption Act 1988 and the Children’s Protection Act 1993.

Fiona
1936 it was. I would have been five. We went visiting Ernabella the day the police came. Our great-uncle Sid was leasing Ernabella from the government at that time so we went there.
We had been playing all together, just a happy community and the air was filled with screams because the police came and mothers tried to hide their children and blacken their children’s faces and tried to hide them in caves. We three, Essie, Brenda and me together with our three cousins … the six of us were put on my old truck and taken to Oodnadatta which was hundreds of miles away and then we got there in the darkness. 
My mother had to come with us. She had already lost her eldest daughter down to the Children’s Hospital because she had infantile paralysis, polio, and now there was the prospect of losing her three other children, all the children she had. I remember that she came in the truck with us curled up in the foetal position. Who can understand that, the trauma of knowing that you’re going to lose all your children? We talk about it from the point of view of our trauma but – our mother – to understand what she went through, I don’t think anyone can really understand that.
It was 1936 and we went to the United Aborigines Mission in Oodnadatta. We got there in the dark and then we didn’t see our mother again.  She just kind of disappeared into the darkness. I’ve since found out in the intervening years that there was a place they called the natives’ camp and obviously my mother would have been whisked to the natives’ camp. There was no time given to us to say goodbye to our mothers. 
From there we had to learn to eat new food, have our heads shaved. So one day not long after we got there my cousin and I … we tried to run back to Ernabella. We came across the train. We’d never seen a train before and it frightened the hell out of us with the steam shooting out. So we ran back to the mission because that was the only place of safety that we knew. She was only four and I was only five. 
Then we had to learn to sleep in a house. We’d only ever slept in our wilchas and always had the stars there and the embers of the fire and the closeness of the family. And all of a sudden we had high beds and that was very frightening. You just thought you were going to fall out and to be separated. There was a corridor and our cousins were in another room. We’d never been separated before. And the awful part was we had to get into that train later on with one little grey blanket and go down to Colebrook … a matter of weeks after. From that time until 1968 I didn’t see [my mother]. Thirty-two years it was.
[I stayed at Colebrook] till 1946 [when] I was fourteen or fifteen. We were trained to go into people’s home and clean and look after other people’s children. I went to a doctor and his wife. They were beautiful people. I stayed with them a couple of years. 

I guess the most traumatic thing for me is that, though I don’t like missionaries being criticised – the only criticism that I have is that you forbad us to our speak our own language and we had no communication with our family. We just seemed to be getting further and further away from our people, we went to Oodnadatta first, then to Quorn next, then when there was a drought there we went to Adelaide and went out to Eden Hills and that’s where we stayed till we went out to work and did whatever we had to do. 
I realised later how much I’d missed of my culture … 
I realised later how much I’d missed of my culture and how much I’d been devastated. Up until this point of time I can’t communicate with my family, can’t hold a conversation. I can’t go to my uncle and ask him anything because we don’t have that language …
You hear lots and lots of the criticisms of the missionaries but we only learnt from being brought up by missionaries. They took some of that grief away in teaching us another way to overcome the grief and the hurt and the pain and the suffering. So I’m very thankful from that point of view and I believe that nothing comes without a purpose. You knew that in those days there was no possibility of going back because cars were so few and far between and the train took forever to get anywhere so how could a five year old get back to the people.
I guess the government didn’t mean it as something bad but our mothers weren’t treated as people having feelings. Naturally a mother’s got a heart for her children and for them to be taken away, no-one can ever know the heartache. She was still grieving when I met her in 1968.
When me and my little family stood there – my husband and me and my two little children – and all my family was there, there wasn’t a word we could say to each other. All the years that you wanted to ask this and ask that, there was no way we could ever regain that. It was like somebody came and stabbed me with a knife. I couldn’t communicate with my family because I had no way of communicating with them any longer. Once that language was taken away, we lost a part of that very soul. It meant our culture was gone, our family was gone, everything that was dear to us was gone.
When I finally met [my mother] through an interpreter she said that because my name had been changed she had heard about the other children but she’d never heard about me. And every sun, every morning as the sun came up the whole family would wail. They did that for 32 years until they saw me again. Who can imagine what a mother went through?
But you have to learn to forgive.
Confidential evidence 305, South Australia.

9		Northern Territory
The removal of the children from Wave Hill by MacRobertson Miller aircraft was accompanied by distressing scenes the like of which I wish never to experience again. The engines of the ‘plane are not stopped at Wave Hill and the noise combined with the strangeness of an aircraft only accentuated the grief and fear of the children, resulting in near-hysteria in two of them. I am quite convinced that news of my action at Wave Hill preceded me to other stations, resulting in the children being taken away prior to my arrival.

I endeavoured to assuage the grief of the mothers by taking photographs of each of the children prior to their departure and these have been distributed among them. Also a dress length was given [to] the five mothers. Gifts of sweets to the children helped to break down a lot of their fear and I feel that removal by vehicle would have been effected without any fuss  (report from patrol officer, 23 December 1949, quoted by Between Two Worlds on page 55). 

Occupation of the Territory
In 1863 the area now known as the Northern Territory came under the control of South Australia. By 1903 the whole area was leased to non-Indigenous people. As there were few non-Indigenous women, relationships between the Indigenous women and non-Indigenous men were relatively common. The consequence was a growing population of children of mixed descent who were usually cared for by their mothers within the Aboriginal community.

As in other parts of Australia Indigenous people were brutally dispossessed. Forced off their land they moved to pastoral stations or to the edges of non-Indigenous settlement. The stations depended upon the labour of Aborigines but paid barely subsistence wages in the knowledge that Aboriginal people had few other choices. Although a part-time protector was appointed by the South Australian Government in 1864, ‘there was a general lack of concern for the welfare of Aborigines in the Territory’ (SA Government interim submission page 16).

Apart from the Hermannsburg mission on the Finke River in central Australia, the difficulties in accessing the region effectively deterred the establishment of missions in the Northern Territory until the twentieth century. 

The Hermannsburg mission was founded by Lutheran missionaries in 1877 and continued until 1982 when the lease on the land was finally surrendered and the land returned to Aboriginal people. Shortly after arriving, the missionaries gathered the Aboriginal children daily for schooling, with the promise of rations afterwards. 
Protection and segregation – 1890-1937
By the 1890s the presence of pale-skinned Indigenous children within the Aboriginal communities and the sexual exploitation of young Indigenous girls by non-Indigenous men were matters of public concern. In response the Government Resident sought to take these children away from the communities in which they were living and place them in the care of missions. 

From 1899 the Protector of Aborigines for the Northern Territory, Frederick Goldsmith, argued for the establishment of an industrial school. Although the Aboriginals Ordinance 1844 (SA) allowed for the apprenticing of ‘orphan’ and ‘half-caste’ Aboriginal children, these children tended to run away (Austin 1993 page 36).

By 1909 the ‘half-caste’ population of the Northern Territory was estimated at 200, of whom one-third were females of child-bearing age (Austin 1993 page 36). Darwin’s European population then numbered about 300. The fact that Aboriginal girls often became pregnant at a young age and bore a relatively large number of children compared to non-Indigenous females raised fears among non-Indigenous people that ‘half-castes’ would soon be in the majority. For Dashwood’s successor as Government Resident, C E Herbert (1905-10), the answer lay in establishing a reserve on which all people of mixed descent could be confined.

Legislation 1910, 1911
The Northern Territory Aboriginals Act 1910 established the Northern Territory Aboriginals Department ‘to provide, where possible, for the custody, maintenance and education of the children of Aboriginals’. Under this Act the Chief Protector was appointed the ‘legal guardian of every Aboriginal and every half-caste child up to the age of 18 years’, whether or not the child had parents or other living relatives. The Chief Protector was also given power to confine ‘any Aboriginal or half-caste’ to a reserve or Aboriginal institution.

Just a few weeks after the passage of the 1910 Act the Commonwealth took control of the Territory and enacted the Northern Territory Aboriginals Ordinance 1911. The Chief Protector was further empowered to assume ‘the care, custody or control of any Aboriginal or half caste if in his opinion it is necessary or desirable in the interests of the Aboriginal or half caste for him to do so’. These powers were retained until 1957.

Spencer report
Following a 12 month posting as Chief Protector in 1912, Professor Walter Baldwin Spencer reported,

No half-caste children should be allowed to remain in any native camp, but they should all be withdrawn and placed on stations. So far as practicable, this plan is now being adopted. In some cases, when the child is very young, it must of necessity be accompanied by its mother, but in other cases, even though it may seem cruel to separate the mother and child, it is better to do so, when the mother is living, as is usually the case, in a native camp (quoted by Australian Labor Party submission 840 on page 5). 

In town areas, Spencer argued, compounds should be established to contain all the Aboriginal people. They would be required to undertake agricultural work to make their compound self-sufficient. In rural areas, stations were to be established under the control of a Superintendent. Their aim would be to train the residents in industrial work, such as carpentry, agriculture and stock work for males and domestic work and gardening for females. Removed from Aboriginal people of full descent they would be schooled, trained and encouraged to marry other ‘half-castes’.

Kahlin Compound and The Bungalow
Kahlin Compound was established outside Darwin in 1913. The training the children received ‘involved little more than doing the jobs needed to keep the Home and its inmates clean and orderly; occasionally some needlework was taught’ (Austin 1993 page 54). ‘The boys were quite free as far as the reserve was concerned but the girls had to be locked up in dormitories like birds in a cage’ (quoted by Austin 1993 on page 58). At 14 years the children were sent out to work.

In 1914 an Aboriginal woman, Topsy Smith, arrived in Stuart (as Alice Springs was known until 1933) with her seven mixed descent children following the death of her husband. The local Protector, Sergeant Stott, to whom the Chief Protector’s guardianship and removal powers were delegated, obtained approval for the erection of an iron shed, which came to be known as ‘The Bungalow’, on land adjoining the police station. The practice began of removing light-skinned children from Aboriginal camps and placing them under the care of Topsy Smith.

Bungalow matron, Ida Standley (1916-29), was firmly of the view that the children needed to be kept away from their families. ‘What it takes us five years to build up is undone by the black influence in 5 minutes’ (quoted by Austin 1993 on page 62). But in fact the conditions under which the children were kept encouraged proximity with their families: lack of room in the small sheds meant that they slept in the open; lack of food meant that they went out searching for it and depended upon family and friends to bring them food from the bush.

1918 Ordinance
The Aborigines Ordinance 1918 extended the Chief Protector’s control over Indigenous people even further. Aboriginal females were under the total control of the Chief Protector from the moment they were born until they died unless married and living with a husband ‘who is substantially of European origin’. To marry a non-Indigenous man they had to obtain the permission of the Chief Protector. They could be taken from their families at any age and placed in an institution. They could be sent out to work at a young age and never receive wages. They had no right of guardianship over their own children who could be similarly taken from them. Male Aborigines fared little better except that they could be released from guardianship at 18.

During the 1920s the pace of forcible removals increased, leading to severe overcrowding in Kahlin Compound and The Bungalow. The Methodist Missionary Society indicated it was prepared to take the mixed descent children from the Kahlin Compound, where they still had some contact with their family, to its mission on Goulburn Island.

This proposal threatened the availability of cheap domestic labour from the Compound and was opposed by Darwin residents. To accommodate employers a government house just outside the Compound was taken over in 1924 for the girls and the younger boys and became known as the Half-Caste Home. Compound families were thereby separated. 

By 1928 overcrowding at the Half-Caste Home had reached a critical level with 76 inmates living in ‘house large enough for only one family’ (Cummings 1990 page 20). In 1931 the boys were moved to Pine Creek to relieve the pressure on the Home.

At The Bungalow in the 1920s about 50 children and 10 adults lived in the three exposed sheds, crowding together on the floor to sleep at night, eating the meagre meals provided on the ground.
 
There’s where food was scarce again. Hardly anything … night time we used to cry with hunger, y’know, lice, no food. And we used to go out there to the town dump … we had to come and scrounge at the dump, y’know, eating old bread and smashing tomato sauce bottles and licking them. Half of the time our food we got from the rubbish dump. Always hungry there.

That’s another thing – culture was really lost there, too. Because religion was drummed into us, y’know, when we’d be out there and we’d have knuckle-up and that, we were that religious we’d kneel down in prayer … We had to pray every time you swear or anything, you’d go down on your hands and knees … they pumped that religion into us.
Confidential evidence 549, Northern Territory: man removed to Kahlin Compound at 3 years in the 1930s; subsequently placed at The Bungalow.

It is more than a scandal. It is a horror. The best that can be said of it is that it is reasonably clean, but that is the fault of its mistress and not of the Commonwealth Government and of those Federal Ministers and members who let it remain as a blot on Australia … At night the doors cannot be locked. Inevitable trouble results. Residents of Central Australia a hundred miles from Alice Springs told me that the place was a moral cesspit, and if the stories which they related were only an eighth true … they would make the whole community recoil with horror if they could be repeated … At the Alice Springs bungalow the appearance of everybody and everything convicts the Home and Territories Department of the progressive destruction of 50 young promising human lives and souls (newspaper report 1924, quoted by Markus 1990 page 26).

Yet for some mothers with their children, confinement in The Bungalow at least offered the chance of survival. From 1924 to 1929 central Australia suffered one of the worst droughts on record. Aboriginal people in search of food who came too close to land controlled by non-Indigenous people were liable to be shot. Curable diseases caused blindness, misery and death.

The Commonwealth Government cast about for measures to relieve the overcrowding in the institutions and to remove mixed descent children more completely from Indigenous influence. The South Australian Government was asked if it would accept the children but declined claiming that it had no suitable institutions for such young children and that ‘it would introduce an undesirable element in the population’ (quoted by Markus 1990 on page 28). Nevertheless, older mixed descent girls from the Northern Territory were welcome in South Australia as domestics during the 1920s owing to a shortage of labour there. 

The conditions at The Bungalow reached crisis point in 1928. It was decided to move the 45 children (37 of whom were under the age of 12) to a temporary ‘home’ at Jay Creek, 45 kilometres west of Alice Springs. Another 90 living with their families and on cattle stations were targeted for removal to a new home if they had not been ‘too long with nomadic blacks to be desirable inmates’ (quoted by Australian Labor Party submission 840 on page 16). 

At Jay Creek the superintendent and matron lived in two tents while the children were housed in a corrugated iron shed where they suffered from a severe shortage of water, extreme cold in winter and lack of protection from the rain when it came. In 1932 the Bungalow children at Jay Creek were moved yet again, on foot, to the cheaply refurbished former telegraph station at Temple Bar, 11 kilometres from Alice Springs. In 1933 they were joined in Central Australia by most of the boys from Pine Creek in the Top End. By 1935 132 children lived at The Bungalow.

Bleakley report
In 1927 the Commonwealth Government, responding to pressure from the Association for the Protection of Native Races, set up an inquiry under J W Bleakley, the Queensland Chief Protector of Aborigines, into its administration of Aboriginal affairs in the Territory. In his 1929 report Bleakley estimated that the Aboriginal population of the Northern Territory was about 21,000 people, including about 8,000 ‘half-castes’. He found that many Aborigines were not being paid wages, their living conditions were appalling, Aboriginal children were not being schooled and the institutions run by the government ‘were badly situated, inadequately financed and insufficiently supervised’ (Franklin 1976 page 121). Bleakley, however, was impressed with the work of the missions. 

Bleakley proposed that all illegitimate ‘half-castes’ under the age of 16 years be placed in government-subsidised mission homes for education and vocational training. He proposed that children be sent to different mission institutions according to their proportion of ‘European blood’. 

Chief Protector Cook 1927-39 
In 1927 Dr Cecil Cook was appointed Chief Protector and Chief Medical Officer. He was the first full-time Chief Protector since 1914. Cook was preoccupied with the continuing increase in the numbers of mixed descent children, foreseeing ‘a danger that half-castes would become a numerically preponderant under-class, in conflict with the white population of the north’ (Markus 1990 page 92). Cook’s solution was similar to that proposed by Chief Protector Neville in WA, namely, the absorption of people of mixed descent.
Generally by the fifth and invariably by the sixth generation, all native characteristics of the Australian aborigine are eradicated. The problem of our half-castes will quickly be eliminated by the complete disappearance of the black race, and the swift submergence of their progeny in the white … The Australian native is the most easily assimilated race on earth, physically and mentally (quoted by Markus 1990 on page 93).

Removal of children from their families was the way to achieve this end.

Children are removed from the evil influence of the aboriginal camp with its lack of moral training and its risk of serious organic infectious disease. They are properly fed, clothed and educated as white children, they are subjected to constant medical supervision and in receipt of domestic and vocational training (quoted by Markus 1990 on page 98).

Unlike Bleakley, Cook was fervently opposed to mission involvement. He felt that the different approaches of the various missions created the potential for disparate treatment of ‘half-castes’ and could jeopardise his vision of genetically engineered future ‘absorption’. He wanted to close existing missions where they did not conform to his standards for diet, accommodation and sanitation. 

Nevertheless, he agreed with Bleakley that ‘quadroon’ (‘quarter-caste’) and ‘octoroon’ (one-eighth Indigenous descent) children should be treated differently to promote their chances of absorption. To that end school-aged ‘quadroon’ girls in the north were sent to board at Darwin Convent. With no convent in Alice Springs, paler skinned girls stayed at The Bungalow but were expected to marry non-Indigenous men. Cook discontinued the practice of sending ‘half-caste’ children south for work.

The Bleakley report was discussed at conferences in 1929 and 1930. In the Depression climate of cost-cutting his proposals to spend more on Indigenous people were unwelcome to the government. Ultimately Cook’s views prevailed and the Half-Caste Home and The Bungalow continued under government control as previously with no improvements.

In the 1930s an Aboriginal group emerged called the Northern Territory Half-Caste Association. It successfully lobbied for the introduction of an exemption system in an amendment to the Aboriginals Ordinance in 1936. According to this amendment a ‘half-caste’ could be declared ‘not a half-caste’ and thereby not subject to the 1918 Ordinance, although the declaration could be revoked at any time.
 
In the Northern Territory, half-caste aliens constitute a perennial economic and social problem and their multiplication throughout the North of the continent is likely to be attended by grave consequences to Australia as a nation (1938 NT Administrator’s Report quoted by Cummings 1990 page 16).
By the late 1930s the Temple Bar premises were in a state of collapse.

I went carefully through this building this week and to use entirely unofficial language, the whole place stinks and is in exceedingly bad condition (Administrator C L Abbott quoted by Markus 1990 on page 36).

Conditions at the Half-Caste Home were little better. There was never enough food.

The porridge, cooked the day before, already was sour and roped from the mould in it, and when doused with the thin milk, gave up the corpses of weevils by the score. The bread was even worse, stringy grey wrapped about congealed glue, the whole cased in charcoal. The tea had most of the leaves floating on top  (former Acting Superintendent, Xavier Herbert, quoted by Austin 1993 on page 178). 

The widow and son of an Anglican parish priest who visited The Bungalow during the 1930s told the Inquiry, 

… there was an air of gloom and repression about the place and the children were sad, silent and sullen. There was no laughter and it was a slow process to gain the confidence of the children … The children and their mothers were frightened to say anything and had not the wherewithal to cope with the problems. Eventually one of the older girls plucked up enough courage to smuggle out a letter of complaint which came to the notice of the authorities … On receipt of the letter the superintendent was immediately dismissed and left Alice Springs overnight.

Girls of all ages from babies to adolescents slept in one dormitory that was poorly ventilated. There were rows of three tiered beds. Such cramped conditions led to all sorts of emotional and developmental pressures on those subject to them. The boys slept in a separate dormitory under similar circumstances.

The advent of a new superintendent changed things markedly. The general situation improved … [but] the children took a long time to recover from the repressive treatment (Mrs Isabelle and Mr John Smith evidence 7).

Missions 
By the early 1930s there were seven missions operating in the Northern Territory, most of them around the northern coast. Together they claimed to be caring for 1,100 Aborigines by the late 1920s and in contact with a further 1,300 (Markus 1990 page 69). The brutality that characterised the non-Indigenous occupation of parts of the Northern Territory meant that the missions were often the only place of sanctuary.

Typically, the children were housed in dormitories, attended school daily and undertook work around the mission.
One [dormitory], measuring 22 feet by 12 feet is used as a sleeping room for about 25 boys. It has three small barred windows and a small closet at one end. The floor is sanded, and on this the boys sleep with a bluey between each two of them. They are locked in at sundown and released at 8 o’clock in the morning. The other is somewhat larger, and has a verandah closed in with strong pickets round two sides and a closet at the end. There are six small windows, two of them opening on to the closed-in verandah. The floor of this is also sanded, and on it about 30 girls sleep. The hygienic state of these dungeons during the extremely hot summer nights can better be imagined than described. The sand is renewed once every two weeks, which is quite necessary  (description of the dormitories on the Hermannsburg mission in 1923, quoted by Markus 1990 page 82).

Contact with family and community was discouraged. The Church Missionary Society (CMS) which founded the Roper River mission in 1908 told the Inquiry that it treated children of full descent and children of mixed descent separately in accordance with the prevailing views of the day. In 1924 all Roper River children of mixed descent were removed to Groote Eylandt.

Several of these children in later adult years recalled the sorrow of that separation. CMS, however, saw what they were doing as creating some positive opportunities for these children. None of these separations were permanent. Their mothers visited them on Groote Eylandt, and some spent school holidays and other times with their mothers at the Roper River Mission (Church Missionary Society submission 453 page 3). 

The missions received little government funding until the mid-1930s which made it very difficult for them to provide dispossessed Aboriginal people with sufficient food or water. 

The stated intentions of the mission were to protect Aboriginal people from exploitation and murder, to bring the Christian faith, and to provide European education and vocational training. Right from the outset, CMS was concerned about the obligations which the then South Australian government might place upon them if government funding was accepted. The first missionaries told the Premier that they ‘did not care to devote their lives to training cheap labour’ (Church Missionary Society submission 453 pages 1-2). 

After 1936 more money was forthcoming but it was still grossly inadequate. The Commonwealth was generally reluctant to spend more than the absolute minimum possible on Aboriginal people in the Territory. In addition some officials, notably Spencer and Cook, viewed missionary activity with contempt. 

[T]he philosophy of Croker [was] ‘a place where children could be saved from the destructive forces of Territory society’. The Territory society at that time [1939-1941] was a pretty rough place from the perspective of missionaries, and there was often conflict between traders and missionaries  (Rev. Bernie Clarke evidence 119).  

Disease was prevalent at the missions. At Hermannsburg many children died from whooping cough in the late 1920s after those initially infected were not isolated. At Oenpelli the children’s eyesight was endangered by insufficient light in the classroom. At Groote Eylandt almost 50% of one generation of people of ‘mixed descent’ suffered from leprosy due, according to Chief Protector Cook, to ‘low resistance following years of improper feeding’  (quoted by Markus 1990 page 87). Such conditions confirmed Cook’s low regard for the caring capacity of the missions.   

Assimilation – 1937-1973
Some of the complaints about the Half-Caste Home and the Bungalow came before the 1937 Commonwealth-State conference. Although Cook refuted the content of those complaints, he did concede that there were some legitimate concerns. He presented a picture of the Northern Territory in a few years into the future when the ‘half-caste’ population was numerically as great as the non-Indigenous population and threatening their power. To avoid this scenario ‘everything necessary [must be done] to convert the half-caste into a white citizen’ (quoted by Austin 1993 on page 198). 

McEwen’s New Deal
In 1937 John McEwen was appointed Minister of the Interior. He was determined to raise the profile of his portfolio and show the Commonwealth to be leading the way in the field of Aboriginal affairs. For example, he wanted his field staff educated in anthropology and law. He visited the Territory shortly after his appointment and was shocked by conditions at The Bungalow and the Half-Caste Home in Darwin.

I know many stock breeders who would not dream of crowding their stock in the way that these half-caste children are huddled   (quoted by Australian Labor Party submission 840 on page 13). 

In 1939 McEwen announced his ‘New Deal’ based on greater government control over people of mixed descent, with the exception of those sufficiently versed in non-Indigenous ways to apply for an exemption.

Cook’s policy of biological absorption was displaced by economic and social assimilation. Education of ‘half-castes’ to the ‘full white standard’ received more attention. Children of mixed descent were to be removed to government institutions where ‘up to a certain age, the children of both sexes would be given the care necessary for young children and certain elementary education’ (quoted by Austin 1993 on page 203). The missions would take an expanded role as the inculcation of Christian ‘moral values’ was seen as a way of promoting assimilation.

‘Quadroons’ and ‘octoroons’ were to be institutionalised separately, either in the Territory or inter-State. A new compound was constructed urgently at Darwin, the Bagot Aboriginal Reserve. In 1939 the inmates of the Half-Caste Home were transferred there to join those from Kahlin Compound. The move angered McEwen.

This is the very opposite of what has been agreed upon as the proper care of the half-caste people, the idea being to raise their status by keeping them away from the Aborigines. I could not, without being unparliamentary, express the shame I feel that no money has been provided in the Estimates this year to correct this state of affairs (quoted by Franklin 1976 on page 126). 

However, McEwen’s plans and policy proposals came to an abrupt end with the commencement of the Second World War and his transfer to the defence portfolio in 1941.

WWII and its aftermath
The bombing of Darwin in February 1942 forced the evacuation of the missions in the Northern Territory. The children were taken to ‘homes, rented rural housing and disgraceful makeshift camps’ (Austin 1993 page 215) in South Australia, New South Wales and Victoria. They lived there for several years, far from their families and communities. In 1946 some but not all of these children returned to the Territory. Some went ‘missing’. Others were refused financial assistance by either the Commonwealth or the State governments to return to the Territory.

After the War, the forcible removal of Indigenous children recommenced. Patrol officers were required to report on the presence of children of mixed descent living in Aboriginal communities and make arrangements for their removal to settlements and mission homes.

Some of the mothers have said that the day the patrol officer and a woman missionary arrived to remove them they were told that the children were going on a picnic, something they were used to … ‘We were tricked’, one mother said afterwards and others agree.

Sixteen children, all related in one way or another, were removed from the mission on a day Julia has never forgotten. The version as presented by the woman missionary years later was that at the request of the Native Affairs Branch she gained the consent of 16 or 18 mothers of the same number of children, and implied that the two children not taken were left solely because their mothers did not consent. However as she (as well as the missionaries based there) did not speak any Aboriginal language at all, and the mothers did not speak English, it is not credible that any form of informed consent was obtained.

The assembled children were loaded into the truck very suddenly and their things thrown in hastily after them. The suddenness and the suppressed air of tension shocked the mothers and the children and they realised something was seriously wrong … Children began to cry and the mothers to wail and cut themselves … The tailgate was slammed shut and bolted and the truck screeched off with things still hanging over the back and mothers and other children running after it crying and wailing (Stolen Generations NT submission 754 pages 19-20). 

An official protest in 1949 by one of the patrol officers at having to effect such removals caused considerable argument in government circles during the early 1950s. The Government Secretary advised that the practice seemed likely to attract ‘criticism for violation of the present day conception of ‘human rights’ and ‘to outrage the feelings of the average observer’ (quoted by Long 1992 on page 83). In October 1951 Dr Charles Duguid, President of the Aborigines Advancement League, received widespread publicity when he called the practice of taking babies from their mothers ‘cruel’ and ‘the most hated task of every patrol officer’ (quoted by Between Two Worlds on page 57).

The Director of Native Affairs maintained that removals were for the benefit of the children concerned and conducted humanely. Nevertheless instructions were issued that children under the age of four years were not be removed, that no child was to be removed ‘until the Director is satisfied that a painstaking attempt has been made to explain to the mother the advantages to be gained by the removal of the child’ and that aircraft were not be used to remove children unless there was no other transport available (quoted by Between Two Worlds on page 55). The age at which children could be taken was subsequently revised downwards to three months on the basis of a psychological theory that very early separation was less traumatic for both mother and child.

At the beginning of the 1950s NT missions cared for 360 children (Cummings 1990 page 79) which was most if not all of the mixed descent children in the Territory (Armitage 1995 page 59). 

Retta Dixon Home
One of the main homes for these children was the Retta Dixon Home, run by the Aborigines Inland Mission (AIM). It opened after the War with 51 children and eight young women housed in temporary premises in the Bagot Compound (Aborigines Inland Mission submission 535). It operated until 1980. According to AIM ‘[t]he number of children [in the Home] steadily climbed as the Native Affairs officers constantly asked for additional children to be accommodated. The total stabilised at around 100, but there was a time when a peak of 120 was reached’ (submission 535). 

Accommodation was in dormitories. Breast-feeding mothers were allowed to stay with their babies for a few months but once weaned the infants were taken from them and placed in the nursery. Mothers could only see their children during the day. At night the infants were in the charge of the mission staff.

As well as receiving children who had been forcibly removed by government officials, former inmates of the Kahlin Compound and the Half-Caste Home ‘more or less voluntarily committed their children to Homes as they failed to cope in a hostile social and economic environment for which their own institutional background had ill-prepared them’ (Austin 1993 page 213). 

A 1953 inquiry by a patrol officer with the Native Affairs Branch into conditions at Retta Dixon and other mission homes for children of mixed descent reported,

The Home in its present location and form is a failure, and the children are merely benefitting to the extent that they are clothed, fed, and are receiving some form of education. The only other contribution to their upbringing is perhaps the religious training given by the staff, which to my mind is made to play far too important a part in their formative years, and is far too restrictive (quoted by Cummings 1990 on page 83).

No government action was taken following the report but AIM decided to construct new premises based on the cottage system. 

Inexperienced staff, a high rate of staff turnover, and the frequent transfers of children from cottage to cottage without explanation, prevented a family-style environment from developing. While it was intended that the cottages were supervised by a married couple, most often, it was young, single females who had usually just come up from south. The burdens placed on these young women and the stresses and frustrations they experienced, were no doubt responsible for the brutal punishments that often  occurred (Cummings 1990 page 119).
 
‘The welfare’
Following the 1951 Commonwealth-State Ministers Conference Paul Hasluck, the Minister for the newly created portfolio of Territories, urged the Commonwealth Government to adopt a national coordination role and set an example in the Northern Territory by taking active measures to encourage assimilation. Indigenous people of full descent as well as mixed descent people were now subjected to control.

The Welfare Ordinance 1953 repealed the 1918 Ordinance. It was intended to be the vehicle of assimilation. Its original intent was to move away from the protectionist approach to Aboriginal welfare and subject all Aboriginal people to the same welfare legislation as non-Indigenous people. Accordingly, it made no mention of race, referring instead to ‘wards’. A ward was any person who ‘by reason of his manner of living, his inability to manage his own affairs, his standard of social habit and behaviour, his personal associations … stands in need of special care’. 

The Director of Welfare was made the guardian of all wards. People who were made wards were denied the most basic of human rights concerning their person and property. They could be taken into custody and removed to a reserve or institution and the Director could take control of any property they possessed. The Director’s functions included maintaining a ‘Register of Wards’, commonly known as ‘the stud book’.
In response to concerns among non-Indigenous Territorians that they could be subject to wardship under the Ordinance, it was amended to make it quite clear that it was only designed to target Aboriginal people. This was done by specifying that people with voting rights could not be made wards. The Ordinance effectively excluded nearly everyone except Aboriginal people. Non-Indigenous children could only be dealt with under the Child Welfare Ordinance 1958 which permitted their removal only on a children’s court finding of neglect or destitution. 

The 1953 Ordinance entered into effect in 1957. It was accompanied by a blanket gazettal of wardship of all Aborigines of full descent, with a few notable exceptions. The Welfare Ordinance proceeded on the assumption that Aboriginal people of mixed descent had been assimilated although they could be the subject of individual declarations. Within a family or a community some members might be wards and others not. 

The presumption of assimilation made in the Welfare Ordinance must be assessed against the reality of the urban Aboriginal experience in the 1950s and 60’s. Darwin at this time had the barest of public housing programs. There were no child care centres and very limited employment opportunities. The employment that was available to women – basically domestic service in the households of public servants – did not allow for a woman to work and at the same time care for her children.

These conditions ensured that an urban Aboriginal family unit would fulfill the criteria for a declaration of wardship under the Ordinance. However, the result of a declaration itself caused profound social effects to some into play. Inevitably the whole family unit was not declared wards. Rather, only the children were. The children, once declared, were then removed to one of the mission stations. The result of the delivery of family services was then to effect the separation of the family ‘in the interests of the child’. Of course there was an alternative, a woman could enter into a ‘private arrangement’ with a mission institution to care for her children. This avoided the direct intervention of the government, but the resulting family dispersion was the same (Cummings 1996 page 5).

If children who had been made wards absconded from the mission home or proved unmanageable there were no other facilities in the Northern Territory for them. Unless they were allowed to be returned to their parents they would be sent to a juvenile detention centre in one of the southern States.

In 1955 the Commonwealth Government decided that Aboriginal children would have greater opportunities if they left the Territory and lived in a foster home, boarding school or other educational institution in one of the southern States. This scheme continued until the late 1960s.

Perhaps the most positive step taken by the Government in regard to part-aborigines has been to transfer where practicable, part-aboriginal children from the Territory environment, and give them a chance to develop normally in southern States … Since this scheme began in 1956, 63 children have been transferred to foster homes and institutions in southern States where they are attending technical colleges and high schools, and undertaking apprenticeships, nursing and other courses; as at 30th June, 1961, 47 of these children were being maintained under the Scheme  (Progress towards Assimilation 1960 page 22).

Reverend Bernie Clarke, who worked at the Croker Island mission, described the selection of foster families in South Australia.

[T]here was an active program of fostering children in which the government elicited the support of the churches … The churches would provide the Northern Territory Welfare Department with lists of names of people willing to be foster parents. Children from the age of four upwards] would then be placed in a foster placement here in South Australia … [I]t was a direct arrangement between the church and the Welfare Department in the Northern Territory.

In my experience, nearly every foster arrangement resulted in those children going back to search for their roots – nearly everyone tried to find  out (evidence 119).

The Social Welfare Ordinance 1964 repealed the 1953 Ordinance. The distinction made by the government in the 1953 Ordinance in its treatment of full descent and mixed people was further emphasised in the 1964 Ordinance. Under the 1964 Ordinance entry to reserves was limited to people who ‘in the opinion of the Director are socially or economically in need of assistance’. The effect of this restriction was to force many island mission residents into urban communities. Despite being made to relocate in a traumatic way, little government assistance was provided. A 1958 survey revealed that approximately 1,200 people in Darwin were living in sub-standard huts and 103 people living at Mindl Beach were in ‘something which amounted to far less than huts’ (quoted by Cummings 1996 page 7). 

The repeal of the 1953 Ordinance meant that Indigenous children came under the same removal legislation as non-Indigenous children, the Child Welfare Ordinance 1958. However, the conditions of life for Indigenous people put them at greater risk of having their children removed on the ground of neglect or destitution. The inaccessibility of the courts to Indigenous people, too, rendered most procedural protections ineffective.

It seems to me that ordinary concepts of justice require that if an allegation is made that a child is under unfit guardianship then the mother or other guardian must be given adequate notice of the Children’s Court hearing at which the link between mother and child is likely to be severed, if not permanently, then for an appreciable time. So far as Aboriginal women are concerned, time and trouble must be taken to ensure that the mother understands what is alleged against her and what the result of the proceedings may be. The assistance of the Aboriginal Legal Aid Service should be enlisted for this purpose (Justice Forster in McMillen 1976).

In 1967-68 almost 18% of Territory Indigenous children were in government care (Armitage 1995 page 61). 

Towards the end of the 1960s foster care began replacing institutional care and the mission homes began closing, although some were operating until 1980. Although foster care was regarded by non-Indigenous workers as better for the children than institutional care, it meant that children of mixed descent were more isolated than they were in places like the Retta Dixon Home. In 1971 97% of Territory children in foster care were Indigenous (Armitage 1995 page 62). The Department of Social Welfare noted, ‘Most part-Aboriginal children have been fostered by white people, and full-blood Aborigines by full-blood Aborigines’ (quoted by Armitage 1995 on page 62). 

Self-management 
The assimilation policy was discarded in favour of self-management as Commonwealth policy in 1973. However, as no data were kept by the Commonwealth Department of Aboriginal Affairs which administered welfare policy until its responsibilities were taken over by the NT Department of Community Welfare in 1977, it is difficult to assess the practical effect of this change. By the date of Territory self-government the subsidisation of missions to care for Aboriginal children was regarded as out-dated and inappropriate. 

In 1979 an independent community-controlled child care agency for Aboriginal children was established instead named ‘Karu’, a Gurindji word meaning ‘child’. In 1984 Karu received funding to recruit Aboriginal foster parents and reunite Aboriginal children and families. Even before that the newly created Department of Community Welfare sought to use extended family networks to care for Aboriginal children. From the late 1970s there was a marked decrease in the number of Indigenous children taken into government care although there was still a disproportionate number of Indigenous children in care.

The Community Welfare Act 1983 incorporated the Aboriginal Child Placement Principle for the first time in legislation in Australia. It was also included in the Adoption of Children Act 1994. Referring to Justice Forster’s 1976 criticism of child welfare practice quoted above, the Northern Territory Government representative told the Inquiry, 

Why it may have taken until 1983 for those sort of values to be enshrined in both the Adoption of Children Act … and the Community Welfare Act … I don’t know, but certainly in terms of the people who were involved in that matter Justice Forster’s words continued to ring in their ears for a very long time (evidence 539).

Evie
My grandmother was taken from up Tennant Creek. What gave them the right to just go and take them? They brought her down to The Bungalow [at Alice Springs]. Then she had Uncle Billy and my Mum to an Aboriginal Protection Officer. She had no say in that from what I can gather. And then from there they sent her out to Hermannsburg – because you know, she was only 14 when she had Uncle Billy, 15 when she had Mum. When she was 15 and a half they took her to Hermannsburg and married her up to an Aranda man. That’s a no-no. 
And then from there, when Mum was 3, they ended up taking Mum from Hermannsburg, putting her in The Bungalow until she was 11. And then they sent her to Mulgoa mission in New South Wales. From there they sent her to Carlingford Girls’ Home to be a maid. She couldn’t get back to the Territory and she’d had a little baby. 
Agnes [witness’s sister] and I have met him [their older brother]. We met him when he was 35. He’s now 42 so that’s not that far away. Mum had him and she was working but she doesn’t know what happened to her money. When she kept asking for her money so she could pay her fare back to Alice Springs they wouldn’t give her any. 
I’ve got paperwork on her from Archives in New South Wales. There’s letters – stacks of ‘em – between the Aboriginal Protection Board, New South Wales, and Northern Territory. All on my mother. They were fighting about which jurisdiction she was in – New South Wales yet she was a kid from the Northern Territory. So one State was saying we’re not paying because she’s New South Wales, they should pay.
In the end New South Wales said to Mum, ‘We’ll pay your fare back on the condition that because you haven’t got a husband and you’ve got a baby, you leave that baby here’. So she left her baby behind and came back to the Territory. 
And then she had me and then my brother and another two brothers and a sister and we were all taken away as soon as we were born. Two of them were put in Retta Dixon and by the time they were 18 months old they were sent down south and adopted. She had two kids, like they were 15 months apart, but as soon as they turned 18 months old they were sent down south and adopted out.
One of them came back in 1992. He just has that many problems. The others – we don’t know where they are. So it’s like we’ve still got a broken family.
I was taken away in 1950 when I was 6 hours old from hospital and put into Retta Dixon until I was 2 months old and then sent to Garden Point. I lived in Garden Point until 1964. And from Garden Point, Tennant Creek, Hermannsburg. While in Garden Point I always say that some of it was the happiest time of my life; others it was the saddest time of my life. The happiest time was, ‘Yippee! all these other kids there’. You know, you got to play with them every day. The saddest times were the abuse. Not only the physical abuse, the sexual abuse by the priests over there. And they were the saddest because if you were to tell anyone, well, the priests threatened that they would actually come and get you.
Everyone could see what they were doing but were told to keep quiet. And just every day you used to get hidings with the stock-whip. Doesn’t matter what you did wrong, you’d get a hiding with the stock-whip. If you didn’t want to go to church, well you got slapped about the head. We had to go to church three times a day. I was actually relieved to leave the Island. 
Q.	Did any girls get pregnant at Garden Point when you were there?
I remember one and they actually took her off the Island. And when I ask everyone, like even now when I ask people about her, they don’t know what happened to her. All they remember is her being put on the helicopter and flown out and I’ve never heard her, about her name or anything about her anymore. They remember her but don’t know what happened to her.
Q:	Who was the Father?
The Priest. The same bastards who …
Q:	How do people know that?
Well, the reason they know is, Sister A, poor thing, who’s dead – I know she was upset because that priest had that young girl living in his place. He used to come and get her out of the dormitory every night. He used to sneak in about half past twelve, one o’clock in the morning and take her. We’d get up in the morning and she’d be just coming in the door.
All the girls slept in one dormitory. All the boys slept in the other. And we couldn’t lock the dormitory from the inside – it had a chain through and padlock outside, so there was only the nuns or priest could get in there. I know he used to come and get her because I was three beds up from her.
There was another priest, but he’s dead. The rest of the mob that were on the Island are all dead. He’s the only one that’s kicking and he should have been the one that’s bloody dead for what he did. He not only did it to girls, he did it to boys as well. There was six of ‘em involved. Nuns were assaulting the young fellas as well as the priest assaulting the young fellas and the girls.
There was four priests and two nuns involved. We were in their care. That fella’s still walking around. He’s now got charge of other kids. He’s got charge of other kids in D.
In 1977 I had three children. In 1977 my oldest was three years old then. I had another one that was twelve months and another one that was two months old. All those kids were taken off me. The reason behind that was, well, I’d asked my girl-friend and so-called sister-in-law if she could look after my kids. She wouldn’t look after my daughter because my daughter’s black. So, she said she’d take the two boys and that was fine. And while I was in hospital for three months – that’s the only reason I asked them to take ’em ’cause I was going to hospital because I had septicaemia.
I couldn’t get my kids back when I came out of hospital. And I fought the welfare system for ten years and still couldn’t get ‘em. I gave up after ten years. Once I gave up I found out that while I was in hospital, my sister-in-law wanted to go overseas with my two boys ‘cause her husband was being posted there for 12 months from foreign affairs. And I know she brought some papers in for me to sign while I was in hospital and she said they were just papers for their passports. Stupid me, being sick and what-have-you didn’t ask questions – I signed ‘em and found out too late they were adoption papers. I had 30 days to revoke any orders that I’d signed. 
And with my daughter, well she came back in ’88 but things just aren’t working out there. She blames me for everything that went wrong. She’s got this hate about her – doesn’t want to know. The two boys know where I am but turned around and said to us, ‘You’re not our mother – we know who our real mother is’.
So every day of your bloody life you just get hurt all the time …
Confidential evidence 557, Northern Territory.

In the hard copy version of this report there is a reproduction of the following item:
Camp scene, Narrogin, WA, 1938
Courtesy University of WA Berndt Museum of Anthropology
All the teachings that we received from our [foster] family when we were little, that black people were bad … 
I wanted my skin to be white.
Confidential evidence 132, Victoria:  fostered at 10 years in 1964.
I started looking at my hands and wondered, why am I the colour that I am? Why are you white?
Confidential evidence 215, Victoria: removed in the 1960s and adopted by a non-Indigenous family.