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by Heather Goodall
Aboriginal adolescents are grossly over represented in both welfare and juvenile justice systems in NSW today. Asking why this is so must involve recognising the powerful history of colonialism, which continues to focus on Aboriginal children and young people. Public awareness has grown recently about the Aborigines Protection Board "apprenticeship" policy which sought systematically to remove as many Aboriginal children as possible and never to allow them to return to their communities.[1] This policy had an incalculable impact on Aboriginal communities. By 1969 more than 6000 children had been removed from their families.[2]
For this reason, the scheme has often been studied in isolation, as if it was something unique to a particular administration and very different to the policies faced by non-Aboriginal wards of the state. Nevertheless, the mechanisms of the removal system drew heavily on established procedures for dealing with non-Aboriginal wards and also reflected the broader relations between Aborigines and non-Aborigines that were not covered by legislation. What follows is an initial and tentative attempt to raise some of those wider considerations.
Locating the "apprenticeship" scheme historically includes looking at the ambiguous connections between "welfare" (care and custody] and corrective networks. Just as significantly, it involves a recognition that all these systems operate in a way that is "gendered", that is which work differently for girls and for boys. This is not a fixed process, however, and the history of removal of Aboriginal children reflects the shifts in concepts of gender which have occurred over the period of colonization. The group most over represented, in numerical terms, in the juvenile justice system now is male Aboriginal adolescents.[3] From 1900 to 1940, however, Aboriginal girls appear to have home the heaviest impact from interventionist policies which removed Aboriginal children from their communities. This paper explores the ways in which removals of Aboriginal children were "gendered" in the 1900 to 1940 period and suggests reasons for the shift in emphasis from girls to boys in the post-war years.
Early frontier and missionary intervention across south-east Australia consistently attempted to separate young Aborigines from their families because they were seen as most vulnerable to cultural indoctrination and could be used as hostages to maintain Aboriginal adult co-operation. The documentation is sparse but it seems that an early concentration on boys gave way to one on girls as inmates of missionary dormitories.[4] This shift may reflect many factors, perhaps the changing priorities from the violent frontier conflict where young men were to be feared to one where rural labour demands favoured women's domestic service.
The treatment of white convict and working class children to the 1880s was based on principles which were to be continued into Aboriginal administrations. Children of convict mothers were separated from them and placed in "orphan" homes to facilitate employment of their mothers [and often fathers] on remote pastoral runs.
The policies of these orphanages were to separate parent and child as much as possible, with parents discouraged from communicating with their children once they had "signed them over". During the 1870s and 1880s, a series of debates occurred about the value of such institutional care compared to the "home-like" nature of a boarding-out system and slowly the latter became more favoured, even though subject to criticism because of the potentially unregulated exploitation of children which could occur. "Apprenticeship" of both girls and boys was a widely used policy, with girls indentured to domestic service positions in which their wages were controlled by the State Children's Relief authorities.
During this time the employment of young Aborigines was not regulated. There was a high level of general Aboriginal employment in rural NSW until the 1890s and many children worked with their parents in rural labouring. There is substantial evidence of young Aboriginal girls working as nannies and housemaids to white families, as well as in heavier laundering and outdoor rural work.[5] As well, there were informal arrangements where at least some Aboriginal children were handed over by their guardians, possibly under duress, to white employers.[6] Such arrangements, not unlike those suffered by many rural working class youths, may not all have been negative but they left children vulnerable to cruelty, labour and sexual exploitation.
The Depression of the 1890s generated considerable pessimism about Aboriginal employment prospects. Of similar significance was the development of the Eugenics movement, with its concerns about racial purity, so closely linked to class assumptions and to the wider movement occurring at the time to control working class women's sexuality and limit the rate of population increase among the working class. The focus of much official concern throughout this period was on women. Anxieties about the falling birth rate among the white middle classes, which was blamed on women, was paralleled by the growing awareness that Aboriginal populations were increasing.[7] The resulting analysis is obvious in the 1912 Royal Commission into Neglected and Delinquent and Mentally-Deficient Children: Commissioner Mackellar attributed sexual promiscuity [or, more accurately, activity] to "moral feeble-mindedness" which he said was the condition of all "part-Aboriginal" women. In this way, Aboriginal women were held responsible for the sexual behaviour of white men. Mackellar recommended the permanent segregation of all Aboriginal women living near towns to protect white citizens from this "threat".[8]
The Protection Board's anxiety about the growing population of non-"full- blood" Aborigines was partly a concern that its rations had caused "pauperisation", mixed with wider fears about Aborigines as an alien culture and race. R. Scobie, a long-serving member of the Board, described Aborigines in 1915 as: "... an increasing danger. ... because there are 6,000 of the mixed-blood growing up. It is a danger to us to have people like that among us, looking upon our institutions with eyes different to ours.’[9] Like participants in the wider debates about the relation between welfare and population, such as Mackellar, the Aborigines Protection Board focused its strategies on women. There were at the same time stereotypes developing [or continuing] about the sexuality of Aboriginal men who were depicted as a sexual threat to white women.[10] Nevertheless, the major impact of APB policies formulated at this time fell on Aboriginal women.
The Aborigines Protection Act 1909, with its amendment in 1915, established the Board's total power, in loco parentis over Aboriginal children. The public rhetoric was that this power was to assist neglected Aboriginal children and to ensure non-exploitative labour conditions for Aboriginal adolescents. In fact, the 1909 Act had given the Board the same powers as under the then current State Children's Relief Act to intervene in cases of neglect: the reality was that the children the Board wanted to remove were not neglected, and it failed in a series of court cases on these grounds.[11]
To gain the powers it wanted, the Board embarked on a campaign to convince the public and parliament that, by definition, Aboriginal parenting was negligent. Relying on prevailing negative stereotypes of Aboriginal communities, the Board gained wide press coverage for statements describing Aboriginal camps, and its own managed stations, as places of vice and immorality from which it had to rescue Aboriginal children. The Board succeeded in gaining its greater powers in 1915, having in the process savagely reinforced contemporary racism.[12]
The 1915 policy was explicitly aimed, firstly, at ending the identification of the non-"full-blood" members of the Aboriginal population with those designated "full-blood"; and secondly, at reducing the Aboriginal birth rate by removing girls "approaching the age of puberty" from Aboriginal communities.[13] This second aim suggests that the Board shared the concept of Aboriginal women's sexuality as a threat which must be controlled, although it showed itself to be less concerned about children born to white fathers than to Aboriginal ones.
The implementation of the policy demonstrated that it was indeed targeted at pubertal girls rather than at all Aboriginal children. To 1921, 81% of the children removed were female and the proportion reduced only slightly by 1936. From 1912 to 1928, the only period when we can follow the age of the children taken, 68% of those taken were 12 and over. Girls made up 70% of the children taken over this time and of these, 72% were 12 and over, while of the boys taken only 55% were 12 and over. Girls who were 12 or older made up 54% of the total number of children made wards of the Board by 1928, while boys who were 12 or older made up only 14%.[14]
As well as reflecting anxieties about increasing Aboriginal population and racial and cultural purity, the Board was utilising a gap in the labour market for women. It was easier to place girls as "apprentices" in the period because domestic servants became increasingly harder to find.[15] This continued to be the case even with a declining demand for servants into the 1940s: Aborigines Welfare Board figures show consistently higher proportions of female than male wards employed into the early 1960s, even though the overall numbers of wards employed was diminishing.
To maximise the market's awareness, the Board advertised its Aboriginal maids in the Australian Women's Mirror in 1940.[16] Under the heading: "TRY AN ABO APPRENTICE!" a testimonial gushed " - has become one of the family and is worth three of the white maids we have employed." The Board used the State Children's Relief model for apprenticeship of wards to set up a system of "disposal" of the children into the workforce. Characteristically, the Board chose to take up this model precisely as the SCR abandoned the term "apprenticeship" as a misnomer given the absence of any real learning involved in the domestic work which wards were invariably given. Aboriginal "apprentices" were usually paid around the same low rates as white wards, but their access to their wages was far more limited, with many seeing only their 3d or 6d "pocket money" for years and some needing to embark on legal action to regain the balance from Board Trust accounts. Some, of course, never saw the balance.
There was a further consideration, which became evident once Aboriginal resistance had forced the Board to concede, in 1921, that the "apprentices" could return home after the end of their indentures. This was the assumed role of women as bearers of cultural indoctrination, and the Board increasingly characterised Aboriginal women as the channels through which it would reach into Aboriginal families to teach men and children how to live like whites.[17] To this end, the Board intervened whenever possible in the lives of Aboriginal women who had returned home to Board stations, ordering its managers to arrange prompt marriages for as many such women as possible. Aboriginal women and men recall these multiple arranged marriages on the stations, many of them hasty, unsuitable and traditionally inappropriate, causing social tension for years to come.[18]
There was then no simple determinant of policy and practice relating to Aboriginal children. It was instead an interaction between prevailing anxieties about race and gender, labour market needs and pre-existing administrative precedents [interpreted conservatively] which shaped the effects on Aboriginal communities of the removal policies.
How did Aborigines see this system? Activists like Pearl Gibbs and Bill Ferguson in the 1930s protested against the labour exploitation of "apprenticeships" which they saw as an aspect of colonial and discriminatory repression. These protests were more publicised in their time because they found support with white supporters, but there was also a major strand of resistance which saw the system as demonstrating another aspect of colonialism, an attack on women and on gender relations within Aboriginal societies. There were widespread reports of the sexual exploitation and rape of Aboriginal "apprentices", whom the Board deliberately sent far away from their families to aid cultural disassociation. As a minimal indication of this, the rate of pregnancies recorded in the Board's records was at least 7%. Non-Aboriginal domestic servants employed away from their families [often from the city and working in rural areas] also suffered sexual vulnerability and were prominent in statistics associated with unwanted pregnancies.[19] While comparative statistics are impossible, both Aborigines and whites saw the vulnerability of Aboriginal girls to be higher.[20]
Henry Hardy, a Yualiay Murrie from Angledool, explained the effects he saw in the 1920s and 1930s:
The hard part was they didn't like us after the girls... They'd come and get `em and take 'em away. They'd have `em down there for twelve months and they'd get 'em into trouble and they'd be comin' back with white babies. That's what we were up against. That's true that is. And it was better if they'd left `em with their own lot, let 'em link up that way, that's my opinion of it.[21]
Intervention in Aboriginal gender relations was, as Henry Hardy suggests, fundamental to the Board's intentions and practice.
The 1920s Aboriginal political movement, the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association, saw the sexual exploitation of "apprenticed" Aboriginal wards as an attempt "to exterminate the noble and ancient race of Australia".[22] So too did Mrs A. Morgan of Cumeragunja, who challenged the system on Melbourne radio in 1934, insisting that it demonstrated that "one of the functions of the Aborigines Protection Board is to build a white Australia".[23]
Like many forms of "welfare" intervention, "apprenticeship" and other forms of removal directed adolescents into the corrective network. Both Protection and Welfare Board systems operated in co-operation with the Child Welfare department, sending "light-caste" children into CW homes from at least 1917. The general Child Welfare network operated within the same assumptions of racial inferiority and immorality as did the Aborigines Boards [and which indeed they had fostered]. As well, the Boards used the Child Welfare punitive homes to control those Aboriginal wards who resisted removal and "apprenticeship". One in every five Aboriginal wards escaped or "absconded", for which they were pursued by the police and, if the Board chose, "removed to some home or institution". It was usually girls in the early Protection period who were so dealt with, to be sent to Parramatta Industrial School or, occasionally, for 2 to 14 days in Long Bay. A small but not insignificant number of wards, all girls, were sent to psychiatric institutions, their sustained resistance being interpreted as "deviance" or "mental illness".[24]
The whole "apprenticeship" apparatus left scars not just on the individual Aboriginal children taken but on their extended families. There have not been any Aboriginal families untouched by that system, and its impact continues into the present in Aboriginal distrust of agencies which deal in any way with Aboriginal children. The effects were not, however, only personal distress and disturbance. The political militancy of Margaret Tucker is only one example among many of Aboriginal ex-"apprentices" who directed their anger into campaigning against the Board.
The impact of Aboriginal political pressure and increased public scrutiny led to changes in the Aborigines Protection Act, so that from 1940 to 1965 the Aborigines Welfare Board operated its own system but under the scrutiny of the general Child Welfare legislation. Yet the removals and committals were conducted by the same police who had carried out APB policies and been imbued with its assumptions about the incompetence of the Aboriginal family to care for and nurture its children.
Removals continued and indeed increased under the Welfare Board, despite its adoption of the standard mainstream rhetoric of the 1950s which advocated keeping children with their families. There were 170 wards in the Boards system in 1951: in 1961 there were 300.[25] Tracing those in the Child Welfare system is far more difficult. There, the Aboriginality of inmates was overtly denied, but they faced covert racist abuse and an administration which used racial stereotypes to judge their intelligence and behaviour.[26] These years saw many changes to the methods of removal and the "disposal" of children, not least being the progressive reduction in "apprenticeship's" successor, work "under the Regulations of the Act".
The significant change for this paper is the shift in the balance of boys and girls being drawn into the AWB or CW systems. The processes by which children came under the control of the AWB were now "admission", supposedly at the "request" of family, and "committal" via the courts, as "neglected" or "uncontrollable" under the Act. The Board's figures are erratic, but they suggest that the proportion of boys entering its system in either way was increasing throughout the 1950s, to equal or surpass the proportion of girls. How reliable this is in view of the incompleteness of the figures is debatable, but it seems significant in relation to parallel shifts in public perception of adolescents.
These changes have occurred in concepts of both youth and crime. To oversimplify greatly: compared to the early years of the century, post-World War 2 thought has seen greater emphasis on environment rather than genetics to explain behaviour; an increase in psychological studies emphasising childhood as fostering crime; periods of anxiety about growing youth populations in the USA, Europe and Australia; and pressure to force women back into home after the war, which all combined to generate anxiety in the west about "juvenile delinquency". This anxiety usually concentrated on young males as the greatest threat. Parallel shifts can be seen in perceptions of Aboriginal adolescents in the AWB Reports of the early 1960s in which Aboriginal "youths" began to be presented as the main cause for Board concern.
There has undoubtedly been continued pressure on young women, with working class and Aboriginal women's sexual activity continuing to leave them vulnerable to charges of being "in moral danger". The AWB reported on one Aboriginal girl in 1953 as: "Seventeen years of age and ripe for some type of trouble". She was given "a pep talk on the evils of men and drink" and placed under surveillance.[27] Characterisations of Aboriginal women as sexually predatory and a menace to white men continue to appear in judicial documentation and are clearly a powerful, although hidden, agenda in legal proceedings against Aboriginal girls.[28] Nevertheless, public emphasis has shifted away from the hysterical construction of Aboriginal women's "moral feeble-mindedness" as the major threat to whites.
Over the time of full employment and technological change until the 1960s, demand for domestic servants and skilled and unskilled rural labourers declined, excluding any call for industrial exploitation of Aboriginal or white adolescents. More recently, since the early 1970s, the rural recession has been exacerbated, putting the remaining white population at economic risk and generating increased anxiety about growing, youthful Aboriginal populations. Aborigines are characterised as an economic and social threat and law and order campaigns have emerged which focus on towns with high Aboriginal population. These campaigns invariably target Aboriginal male adolescents as a group threatening white citizens' persons and [mainly] property and so requiring punishment and restraint, to the point of a curfew. Just a few from a wide range of examples include Bourke and Dubbo in NSW[29], Roeburn in Western Australia[30] and Port Augusta in South Australia.[31]
The process of removing children has been a cornerstone of policy affecting Aborigines from 1900s to 1960s and a central effect of overall Aboriginal/nonAboriginal relations throughout the whole period of colonisation, no matter what the policies said. There has been a shift in focus over this century from girls to boys as the major perceived threat to whites. This has been reflected in the numbers and proportions of each sex drawn into both the "welfare"/"care and custody" systems and the juvenile justice system, which continue to operate within and be informed by these climates of thought.
[1] See C. Edwards and P. Reed: Lost Children, M. Tucker: If Everyone cared, 1977; J. Mathews: The Two Worlds of Jimmie Barker, 1977; p. Reed: The Stolen Generations” n.d., R.R.Chisholm: Black Children: White Welfare, UNSW, 1985; Lousy Little Sixpence, 1983; H. Goodall: “’Prenticed out for 6d a week”, chapter 3A History of Aboriginal Communities in NSW, 1909 to 1939, Phd, SU, 1982, unpub.
[2] Some of these children went into the APB homes, Cootamundra and Kinchela. Others were channelled into State Children’s Relief, later Child Welfare homes. For attempts to estimate the numbers see Reed: “Stolen Generations”: Chilsholm, 1985; Goodall, 1982.
[3] Girls also suffer over representation, but in numerical terms are drawn less frequently into the juvenile welfare or custodial networks. K. Carrington, “Aboriginal Girls and Juvenile Justice – What Justice? White Justice” in Contemporary Race Relations in Australia, 1990, vol 3, Journal for Social Justice Studies.
[4] eg at Blacktown, 1810s,: Lake Macquarie and Wellington, 1820s and 1830s; and Cumeragunja, Warangeda and Brewarrina, 1880’s. Read: A One Hundred Years War, 1988, B. Attwood, “In the name of all my coloured Brethren’: a biography of Bessie Cameron”, Hecate, 12[1] 1986.
[5] At Work, At Play, Mitchell Library, for 1880s photographs of Aboriginal maids and nannies. Goodall, 1982, surveys known documentary evidence.
[6] Interview with Arthur Dodd, Walgett, 1978, for account of both his parents’ experience of such “handing over”.
[7] APB Reports, 1900, 1902.
[8] NSW Parliamentary Papers, 4, 1913:20
[9] NSW Parliamentary Debates, 27/1/1915.
[10] Nationally, see case of packsaddle in NT, 1932/3 for NSW, see School Segregation debates, Goodall, 1982: 169-75; White violence vs Aboriginal men at Walgett: M. Reay, “A half-Caste Aboriginal Community in north-western NSW”, Oceania, 15[4] June, 1945.
[11] APB Reports, APB Minutes, cited Goodall, 1982; 71-4.
[12] Ibid
[13] APB Reports, 1910, 1912, 1920-21, 1922-23, 1923-24.
[14] Goodall, 1982. Analysis of APB Register of Wards.
[15] Goodall, 1982.
[16] 30/1/1940, p57.
[17] See APB Reports, 1920s onwards.
[18] See Interview, Goodall, 1982.
[19] J. Allen: Sex and Secrets, 1990, eg pp30-31.
[20] See debates around the AP (Amendment) Act, 1915. NSW Parliamentary Debates.
[21] Interview, Brewarrina, 1978.
[22] F.G. Maynard, AAPA, K.B., 14/10/1927. NSW Premier’s Dept Correspondence.
[23] AWB Reports, 1945-1965.
[24] Goodall, 1982; 149.
[25] AWB Reports, 1945-1965.
[26] See survey of CW reports on “Malcolm Smith: A Happy Institutions Boy”, Report to the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, 1988.
[27] AWB Report, 1952/3, 4.
[28] K. Carrington: 1990, 8.
[29] C. Cunneen and T Robb: Criminal Justice in North West NSW, BCSW, 1989.
[30] P Hudson: “Diversity in Small Service Towns in north Western Australia”, P Loveday and A. Webb [eds] Small Towns in Northern Australia, NARU, 1989.
[31] 7.30 Report, ABC TV, 14/5/90.
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