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Indigenous:
Authority's racist intent writ large in our history |
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For near 200 years, government in this country, state and federal, considered "full-blood" Aborigines no better than vermin. The "Aboriginal problem", so-called, was confined mostly to what to do about mixed-blood children fathered by white Australians. Mixed-race numbers were increasing as rapidly as full-bloods were vanishing. Which is why, from 1890 to the early 1960s, generations of part-white children were forcibly removed, in all states, from their Aboriginal mothers.
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These were the children white authority sought to "save". These (and their relatives) are the children that still disfigure national political life. The ones that looked white. The public record is awash with the blatant racism of authority's intent across the years. Some examples, yet again, from the Bringing Them Home report to Parliament 11 years ago. Eleven years later and Parliament, finally, is to apologise.
But only to the whiter shade of black.
"By the late 19th century, it had become apparent that although the [full-blood] indigenous population was declining, the mixed descent population was increasing. The fact they had some European 'blood' meant there was a place for them in [white] society, albeit a very lowly one. Furthermore, the prospect this mixed descent population was growing made it imperative to governments that [these] 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." - From Bringing Them Home, the 597-page report in 1997 by Sir Ronald Wilson, former High Court judge and president of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC). The report was commissioned by the Keating Labor government in 1995.
"Mr Neville, the Chief Protector of WA, holds the view that within 100 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 fullblood natives in WA. Today there are only 20,000. In time there would be none." - Brisbane's Telegraph newspaper, May 1937, quoted by HREOC.
"In 1883 the NSW Aborigines Protection Board was established to control the lives of the estimated 9000 Aboriginal people in NSW. By 1890 the board had developed a policy to 'remove children of mixed descent' from their families to be 'merged' into the white population [after being] de-socialised as Aborigines and re-socialised as Whites." - Dr Peter Read, submission 49 to HREOC.
"The NSW Aborigines' Protection Amending Act 1915 gave total power to separate children from their families. No court hearings were necessary. The manager of an Aboriginal station or a policeman might simply have them removed. When they came to that part of the committal notice, 'Reason for board taking control of the child', they simply wrote, 'For being Aboriginal'." - Dr Read, quoted by HREOC report.
"By 1921, 81 per cent of the children removed in NSW were female. That proportion had decreased only slightly by 1936. Girls were sent to Cootamundra Girls' Home, established in 1911, until the age of 14, then sent out to work. In any one year in the 1920s there would have been between 300 and 400 Aboriginal girls apprenticed to white homes. Many girls became pregnant, only to have their children in turn removed and institutionalised. Generations of Aboriginal women passed through Cootamundra Girls' Home until it closed in 1969." - Quoted by HREOC report.
"When the girls left the home, they were sent to work in the homes and outlying farms of middle-class white people. You were lucky not to be sexually, physically and mentally abused, and all for a lousy sixpence [a week] that you didn't get to see anyway." - Confidential submission by a NSW woman removed at eight years with her three sisters in the 1940s and sent to Cootamundra Girls' Home.
"In 1937, the first Commonwealth/State Native Welfare Conference was held, attended by all States (except Tasmania) and the NT. Although the States had been influenced by each other's practices to that time about the 'Aboriginal problem', this was the first time [the issue] had been discussed at national level. Conference was sufficiently impressed by the idea of 'absorption' to agree that, 'The destiny of the natives of Aboriginal origin, but not of the fullblood, lies in their ultimate absorption by the people of the Commonwealth"'. - From HREOC report, 1997.
Still we're arguing what to apologise for.
Alan Ramsey, SMH, 10 Feb 2008, 2nd section,  tinyurl.com/3b8g32 |
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