Aboriginal Law Bulletin
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Desmond Sweeney's article provides a critical assessment of the NSW Department of Community Services' `Learning From the Past' report. Inara Walden here examines that past: the history of the Aborigines Protection Board (later the Aborigines Welfare Board), and its removal scheme under which girls were taken to white homes as apprentices. Her observation that the `continuing repercussions
The stories of the `Lost Children' (thousands of children forcibly removed from Aboriginal communities this century) have recently begun to be told.[1] That many of these people were forced into childhood apprenticeships is perhaps less well known. Under a scheme devised by the New South Wales Aborigines Protection Board and lasting from the 1880s until 1969, many hundreds of Aboriginal girls were indentured into servitude for wealthy families in Sydney and effectively cut off from their own communities.
Aboriginal domestics were apprenticed in the most fashionable middle-class suburbs of Sydney: Strathfield, Killara, Neutral Bay, Vaucluse. Sixty-one households in Mosman alone benefited from the services of Aboriginal girls from the mid-1910s to the late 1920s.[2] If the Protection Board saw acculturation as an important outcome of its apprenticeship scheme, it is ironic that the employers of Aboriginal domestics were a wealthy elite whose homes and lifestyles were in no way typical of the majority of white society.[3]
The incomplete nature of the Board's records make it difficult to gauge the exact level of labour market participation by apprenticed Aboriginal females. Nevertheless, we do know that 570 girls were apprenticed as wards under the Protection Board between the 1910s and the 1930s.[4] Over the course of three decades more than 1200 employers in city and country areas benefited from the services of these 570 girls. 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 this time.[5]
Whilst Aboriginal wards did represent a small segment of the domestic labour market, their contribution was significant for several reasons. First, Aboriginal girls were a particularly exploitable group of workers, being indentured and very inexpensive. Further, the overall decline in available servants in NSW from 1911 to 1921 was about one percent per year,[6] so that the presence of female Aboriginal apprentices delayed the rate of decline.[7] A comparable demand for unskilled male labour did not exist in NSW. Significantly, the apprenticeship scheme had a distinct gender bias, with the Board's officers concentrating on removing girls.[8]
`... it wasn't good to see these little parts or half-breeds running around the blacks' camps because you didn't know who to blame. Station manager? Storeman? Policeman? Teacher? So they came out with all these sincerest motives, you know ... to give these poor little devils a chance in life ... There's a chance for 'em because they've got white blood in their veins ... even though they wouldn't admit that these kids had white fathers'.[10]
Ironically, the apprenticing of young Aboriginal females to white homes frequently saw them sexually exploited by white men, leading to continuing cycles of part-Aboriginal children being born and removed by the Protection Board.
Whilst the Protection Board began an enthusiastic campaign to apprentice Aboriginal children from the 1880s, at this stage it had no legal power to remove children. Its efforts were strenuously resisted by parents, despite all manner of harsh inducements such as the withholding of rations.[11] The Board campaigned to get power `in loco parentis' over Aboriginal children. In 1909, the Aborigines Protection Act gave the Board some powers to remove non-'full-blood' children declared `neglected' by a court. But the Board was not satisfied with this.
In 1915, after a media campaign which portrayed its own managed stations as places of vice and immorality unsuitable for children, the Protection Board achieved an amendment to the Aborigines Protection Act allowing it to take custody of any Aboriginal child where it deemed this `in the interests of the moral or physical welfare of such child'.[12] The Board now had sweeping powers to remove Aboriginal children from their communities for reasons that would not have been sufficient to remove a white child from its family.
The Protection Board kept registers of the wards in its custody. One register survives, dating from 1916 to 1928 and containing 800 forms (hereafter referred to as 'the Ward Register'). There is a section on each file marked `Reason for Removal' and this is particularly telling about how members of the Protection Board made decisions to take a child into custody.
The most common reasons given for removal of females were: `To send to service'; `Being 14 years' or at risk of `immorality'; being `Neglected'; `To get her away from surroundings of Aboriginal Station/Removal from idle reserve life'; or `Orphan'. From the language used we can glean that negative stereotypes and misconceptions of Aboriginal parenting and lifestyles were a major factor influencing removals.
The meanings of terms such as `neglected' are highly subjective. In the context of white middle-class parenting expectations of the early 20th century, Aboriginal parenting was considered to be `negligent' by definition. If white society viewed child-rearing at this time as centring on prolonged and intensive maternal care, the extensive family childcare networks of Aboriginal communities, with their emphasis on encouraging children's independence, were scorned. Similarly, the removal of children as `orphan', despite `foster' care within kinship networks, is indicative of the Protection Board's ignorance of and/or disregard for kinship practices. The Board's fears for girls' `morality' would seem to be thinly disguised references to its aims to prevent pregnancies and keep the birthrate down.
Whilst white domestic servants no doubt suffered appalling working conditions compared to people in other areas of employment, a high demand for domestic workers meant that they had some freedom to change employers if they were abused or unhappy. Apprenticed Aboriginal domestics, on the other hand, were legally bound to their employers for periods of up to four years, and thus they were more likely to be exploited than white domestics. Ordinarily, the terms of apprenticeship set by the Protection Board were very favourable to employers and often served to worsen the situation for Aboriginal girls.
The wages paid to apprenticed Aboriginal domestics were set by the Protection Board, with the majority of the weekly wage paid into a trust account and only a small amount of `pocket money' being given to the apprentice. In 1910 the wage for a second year female Aboriginal apprentice was 2s 6d per week, with 6d paid to the apprentice as pocket money and the rest remitted to the Board.[13] The set wage was thus quite small relative to standard wages for servants in 1910 which ranged from 10s to 20s.[14]
Most girls considered the pocket money they received to be too small to buy anything decent and spent it on items such as beads. Others used it to buy small amounts of food when they had the opportunity. Many girls simply never received any pocket money from their employers.[15]
If domestic servants were in high demand in Sydney from early this century, and wages were therefore relatively competitive,[16] why did the Protection Board set wages for its apprentices that were so far below the market wage levels? Clearly it was assumed that employers would consider the value of an Aboriginal apprentice lower than that of a white domestic. The Board may well have misjudged the market however, because the employer clientele it consistently supplied in Sydney resided in the most fashionable and wealthy suburbs - employers who most certainly could have afforded to pay reasonable wages.
Evidence suggests that large numbers of Aboriginal apprentices, whose wages were paid into Protection Board (and later Aborigines Welfare Board) trust accounts, never received those wages upon the completion of their apprenticeships. In the 1930s and 1940s Aboriginal activist Pearl Gibbs attempted, often unsuccessfully, to have trust funds released for former Aboriginal apprentices.[17] Mary Griffith, who according to the Board's own salary registers should have had over 80 pounds forthcoming after 7 years work, did not receive any of this amount.[18] It should be noted that 80 pounds was a significant amount of money in the 1930s. In the 1980s at least 100 people have belatedly attempted, through the Kingsford, Redfern and Aboriginal Legal Services, to recoup wages entrusted by the Board or the Aborigines Welfare Board that were never handed over. As yet all such attempts have been unsuccessful and the whereabouts of the trust monies remains a mystery.
A large proportion of Aboriginal wards absconded from Protection Board apprenticeships or resisted their employers through defiant behaviour.[19] Sometimes this behaviour led to an early end to the apprenticeship, but often it drew children into the juvenile justice system or other institutions. Seventy percent of female apprentices experienced some form of institutionalisation during their wardship.
Many girls were returned to the Protection Board by their employers as `unsuitable' because of defiant behaviour such as refusing to work. Apprentices had no avenues of complaint and they were not legally permitted to leave a position. Many saw absconding as the only way out of a difficult situation. Unfortunately most girls who absconded were recaptured within a day. Whilst some were immediately dispatched to another employer (about 15%), others were institutionalised by the court or by the Protection Board itself. Brewarrina dormitory was used as a reformatory for disobedient apprentices, and other girls were sent to the Parramatta Girls School, Long Bay Gaol (for 2 to 7 days), or to a convent for a defined period. Some were even admitted to mental hospitals (about 5%).[20]
Writer Roberta Sykes discovered a list made in 1938 of the names and `ages of death' of children removed by the Protection Board:
`I felt faint as I read through and found I had in my hand perhaps the earliest list of black deaths in custody ... Girl taken, aged 13, died three years later, aged 16; girl taken, aged 8, died four years later, aged 12; girl aged 13, died aged 14; taken 13, died 18; taken 13, died 17; taken aged 7, died aged 12 ... and so on'.[21]
At least one in twelve Aboriginal girls admitted as wards under the Board between 1916 and 1928 died an early death.[22] The major cause of death listed in the Protection Board's Ward Register was tuberculosis, a disease that has been linked to poor living conditions and situations of social upheaval.[23] Certainly, Aboriginal wards suffered extreme social dislocation when torn from their families and communities, and this may well have made them susceptible to the disease. Whatever the cause, young Aboriginal women and girls apprenticed as domestics suffered high rates of institutionalisation and premature deaths that link their experiences to contemporary deaths in custody.
Whilst an apprenticeship legally started when a girl was aged 14 years[24] and continued until she was 21,[25] many young women were not notified by the Board that there was a completion date for apprenticeship and they stayed with employers much longer than they need have. Mary Griffith stayed with the same employer for almost 13 years. When she was in her mid-twenties she finally complained to a Protection Board officer that she wanted to leave and was astounded to be told that she was entitled to go.[26]
We know that many women continued to work as maids long after their apprenticeships had finished, but it is difficult to gauge just how many women never returned to their families or Aboriginal communities. It has been estimated that one third of the children removed by the Protection Board or Aborigines Welfare Board from 1883 to 1969 never returned to Aboriginal communities or families.
Once they turned 21 years of age the Protection Board could not legally stop Aboriginal wards from returning home, and at least half did return to Aboriginal communities and families on the completion of their apprenticeships. Some returned to the country; others lived at Redfern or La Perouse, where they married and raised families.[27]
In response to the reality that Aboriginal wards were returning to their communities, the Protection Board had to review its policy of dispersal through apprenticeship. After 1920, the Protection Board instructed managers to arrange `respectable' marriages for the young women returning to communities. The Board now hoped these women could act as cultural ambassadors for white society, setting up homes and raising families in a manner that reflected their training in white society. Violet Shea recalled the efforts of a manager's wife to arrange a marriage for her upon her return to an Aboriginal station. Whilst she rejected the man selected for her, she remembers that others usually did marry the person arranged for them.[28] Sometimes marriages to Aboriginal men were hastily arranged for women who had become pregnant as a result of sexual exploitation by white men. These arranged marriages were to be a cause of serious community disruption for many years because they were often unsuitable and traditionally inappropriate.[29]
If the Protection Board had hoped its apprenticeship scheme would be able to disperse people of `mixed descent' into the working classes of white society, it undoubtedly failed to achieve this goal. The continuing repercussions of the scheme for Aboriginal individuals and communities clearly demonstrate just how ill-conceived a scheme it was.
The system of removing and apprenticing Aboriginal children not only took from individuals the right to be a part of the lives of their families and communities whilst growing up, it left them at age 18 or 21 years stranded in a white society that had no place for them except as servants. Whilst friendship and support from other apprentices has enabled some women to overcome the problems of adjustment later in life,[30] others have experienced mental health and addiction problems that have ruined their lives.[31] In addition, there were strong links between the apprenticing system and the further institutionalisation of Aboriginal children. Rather than providing a smooth introduction to white society as the Board had hoped, the apprenticing system drew Aboriginal children into the white welfare and justice systems, and truly alienated them from white society.
[2] Aborigines Protection Board Register of Wards (APBRW), 1916-1928, Archives Office of NSW, Location No: 4/8553-8554
[3] Based on calculations from My Wife, My Daughter and Poor Mary Ann: Women and Work in Australia, Beverley Kingston, Thomas Nelson, Melbourne, 1975, pp 48-49.
[4] APBRW.
[5] Official Yearbook of New South Wales, Government Printer, 1909-10, page 461, and 1950-51, Table 842.
[6] Census for 1911 and 1921; Official Yearbook of the Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra, 1954, Vol 36, page 488.
[7] If our statistics for Aboriginal domestics were to include girls apprenticed under the State Child Relief Department (which took many `fair' Aboriginal children), or working under the informal employment agreements that have been a feature of Australia's history, our estimate of the level of labour market representation of Aboriginal women would be much higher.
[8] 570 of 800 wards under the Protection Board between 1916 and 1928 were female, constituting 71% of the whole group whose records appear in the APBRW.
[9] For example, during the 1913 Royal Commission into Neglected and Delinquent and Mentally-Deficient Children, part-Aboriginal women were described as promiscuous by nature (Vol 4, page 1207).
[10] Vi Stanton in Living Black: Blacks Talk to Kevin Gilbert, Kevin Gilbert, Penguin, Ringwood, Victoria, 1978, page 7.
[11] The Lost Children, op cit, page 73
[12] Aborigines Protection (Amendment) Act 1915 (NSW), s13A.
[13] Regulations to Aborigines Protection Act 1909, NSW Government Gazette, No 92, 8 June 1910, page 3064.
[14] Official Yearbook of New South Wales, Government Printer, 1915.
[15] If Everyone Cared, Margaret Tucker, Ure Smith, Sydney, 1977, page 116. Interview with Mary Griffith, La Perouse, 28 May 1991. Violet Shea in Lousy Little Sixpence, Alec Morgan (Director), Sixpence Productions, ACT, 1983.
[16] Wages for `general' domestic servants doubled from 1910 to 1920, rising from 10s to 20s, to 20s to 25s; `Women in Munitions', H. Crisp, The Australian Quarterly, September 1941.
[17] `Pearl Gibbs: A Biographical Tribute', Jack Horner, Aboriginal History, Vol 17, Part 1, 1983, pp 7-17
[18] APB Salary Register, 1922-1934; and APB Ledgers (Trust Account), 1897-1922. Griffith interview, La Perouse, 28 May 1991.
[19] 14% of apprentices absconded from their employers. 13.5% were reported in the Ward Register as displaying defiant behaviour (author's calculations from APBRW).
[20] Author's calculations from APBRW.
[21] The Sydney Morning Herald, 3 November 1988, page 15.
[22] The death rate for Aboriginal wards of the state was 7 times higher than for young Australian white women at the time. Author's calculation from APBRW; and Official Yearbook of the Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra, 1922, Vol 15, pp 98, 103.
[23] The White Plague, Rene Dubos, New Brunswick, 1987, pp 188, 190-196.
[24] 20% of girls were actually sent out younger at 11 or 12 years.
[25] The 1940 amendments to the Aborigines Protection Act 1909, which constituted the Aborigines Welfare Board, also reduced the completing age apprenticeships to 18 years; s3(a)(ii)).
[26] Griffith interview, La Perouse, 28 May 1991. Many Aboriginal girls whose records are included in the Ward Register continued service well past the age of 21 years, and did not receive their `own wages' until much later, with the Protection Board presumably continuing to keep wages in trust; APBRW.
[27] According to notes by Board officers in the Ward Register, 287 of 570 female records indicate return to family or an Aboriginal community, whilst 58 or 10% indicate that the young woman had not returned, to the knowledge of the report writer; APBRW.
[28] Violet Shea in Lousy Little Sixpence, Alec Morgan (Director), Sixpence Productions, ACT, 1983.
[29] "Saving the Children": Gender and the Colonisation of Aboriginal Children in NSW, 1788 to 1990', Heather Goodall, Vol 2, 44 Aboriginal Law Bulletin 6, page 8.
[30] Author's conversation with Link-Up caseworkers, Bullaburra, 24 July 1991.
[31] The Lost Children, op cit. See also NSW Aboriginal Mental Health Report, Aboriginal Medical Service Co-operative Ltd, Redfern, 1991.
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URL: http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/AboriginalLawB/1995/52.html