Our State of Mind Read online

  QUENTIN BERESFORD & PAUL OMAJI

  OUR STATE OF MIND

  RACIAL PLANNING AND THE STOLEN GENERATIONS

  About Untapped

  Most Australian books ever written have fallen out of print and become unavailable for purchase or loan from libraries. This includes important local and national histories, biographies and memoirs, beloved children’s titles, and even winners of glittering literary prizes such as the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

  Supported by funding from state and territory libraries, philanthropists and the Australian Research Council, Untapped is identifying Australia’s culturally important lost books, digitising them, and promoting them to new generations of readers. As well as providing access to lost books and a new source of revenue for their writers, the Untapped collaboration is supporting new research into the economic value of authors’ reversion rights and book promotion by libraries, and the relationship between library lending and digital book sales. The results will feed into public policy discussions about how we can better support Australian authors, readers and culture.

  See untapped.org.au for more information, including a full list of project partners and rediscovered books.

  Readers are reminded that these books are products of their time. Some may contain language or reflect views that might now be found offensive or inappropriate.

  To our parents

  Rex William Beresford (1920–64) and Audrey and Bruce Piggott

  Omaji Akwu (who passed away in 1997) and Ataidu Omaji

  Contents

  Preface

  Introduction · Experiencing The Policies Of Child Removal

  1 · Fear Of The ‘Half-Caste’

  2 · Creating The Poverty Of Aboriginal Children

  3 · Life On The Inside

  4 · Official Negligence

  5 · Assimilation In Practice

  6 · Living With The Aftermath

  7 · The Inter-Generational Effects

  8 · The Politics Of Removal And Reconciliation

  Conclusion · The Stolen Generations And Racism

  Bibliography

  Endnotes

  Preface

  The genesis of this book lay in the work we began in 1993 on Aboriginal juvenile crime which was published in 1996 as Rites of Passage: Aboriginal Youth Crime and Justice. In the lives of Aboriginal youth who were in trouble with the law, we were confronted with the intergenerational effects of assimilation. Many of the serious and repeat offenders came from a family background where the parents and/or grandparents had been removed by government, leaving a trail of family dysfunction. In the early 1990s there was no comprehensive study which traced either the history of this policy or its effects on Aboriginal family life. This became our objective.

  Since beginning research in this area in 1993, several important materials have become available. In 1995 the Aboriginal Legal Service of Western Australia produced Telling Our Story which documented the histories of several hundred survivors of removal. The Service also made an extensive submission to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Inquiry into the stolen generations, titled After the Removal. The Commission’s own report was published in 1997 as Bringing Them Home. We have been able to draw on the valuable information in each of these publications, and refer those people wishing to gain greater insights into the personal stories of Aborigines removed from their families to these documents.

  This book, while complementing the work of the abovementioned organisations, differs substantially in scope and purpose. It is not our intention to speak for the stolen generations. Only those who have lived through such harrowing experiences can adequately explain what it feels like to lose a family, a culture and a sense of identity. Rather, our purpose is to bring into one accessible volume an understanding of the reasons why this policy was introduced and maintained and to show some of its longstanding effects. Our principal purpose is to inform the broader community and other researchers about this tragic episode so that people can be better equipped to understand the past, its effect on the present, and the need for reconciliation.

  Our account of the policy of removal is grounded in extensive archival research around which we have built an interpretative framework to examine why Australia held such unshakeable faith in it. In addition, we have conducted a number of interviews with Aboriginal people subjected to forced removal. These stories are used to bring the human face to our account; to link the operation of the policy with the people upon whom it impacted. This book provides a crucial reminder that the policy of removing children forms part of the life experience of many Aboriginal people living today. As well, we interviewed some key officials who had a close working involvement with assimilation, who provided many valuable insights into its operation.

  It remains for us to thank the people without whose assistance this book could not have been completed. Trish Hill-Keddie, Sandra Hill, Phillip Prosser and Rosalie Fraser gave generously of their time for extended interviews about their experiences as Aboriginal children removed from their families. We also appreciate the comments Trish Hill-Keddie, Sandra Hill and Phillip Prosser made on the draft manuscript.

  Invaluable material was also obtained from a range of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people who were prepared to share their knowledge with us. In particular we would like to thank: Gary Bowler, Gwen Byrne, Frank Gare, Marcia Greer, Bob Hewie, Elsie Hume, Roma Loo, Lena McGrath, Lorry Sims, Heather Vincetti and Maisie Weston.

  For assistance in research we would like to express our appreciation to the library staff of the Aboriginal Affairs Department and the State Library.

  This book also benefited from discussions with a number of people including Mary Dalyell, staff at the Aboriginal Legal Service, colleagues at Edith Cowan University, and many of our friends. We thank them for their interest.

  Our families provided invaluable assistance and encouragement throughout the two years it has taken to complete this project. Our thanks go to Marilyn, Michelle and William Beresford; and Alice, Ruth, Reuben, Timothy and Tabitha Omaji.

  Finally, we are immensely grateful for the commitment shown in this project by Fremantle Arts Centre Press and to the helpful advice and editorial skills provided by Ray Coffey.

  Introduction

  Experiencing The Policies Of Child Removal

  ‘We took the children from their mothers,’ acknowledged the then Prime Minister of Australia, Paul Keating, in December 1992 during a landmark speech about reconciliation.1 Visiting the inner-city Sydney suburb of Redfern, only a few kilometres from the site of the first landing of European settlers, Keating expressed the most heartfelt and extensive recognition of the historical injustices against Aborigines ever made by an Australian prime minister. Never before had the nation’s leader asked so pointedly for its people to confront the past and its legacy. Of its terrible treatment of Aboriginal people, he said, ‘We failed to ask—how would I feel if this were done to me?’ There could be few more appropriate comments by which to acknowledge the removal of Aboriginal children from their families. The policy that gave rise to the removal was undoubtedly, as we shall show, one of the most cruel expressions of the prevailing belief in white superiority. By drawing such public attention to this policy, Keating reflected the struggle of other non-Aboriginal Australians who were beginning to ask profound questions about its origin and impact.

  Since Keating’s Redfern speech many Australians have been challenged to recognise the injustice done. Most Australians who lived through the assimilation era had absorbed the thinking that the policy was for the long-term good of Aboriginal children. Many of this generation still think that the loss of these children’s fam
ilies was a small price to pay for the benefit of gaining access into white society, as if this justified the policy. More recent generations have faced a different problem coming to terms with the sudden attention given to the ‘stolen generations’. They know little or nothing about the origins and impact of the policy; it was not part of the school curriculum and rarely, if ever, did it feature in the media, whose coverage of Aboriginal issues in the 1970s and 80s focused predominantly on the struggle for land rights and Aboriginal ill-health, poverty and crime. Archie Roach’s poignant 1990 song—‘Took the Children Away’—brought this issue to the attention of a new generation.

  In recent times the stories of these stolen generations have been slowly coming to light and with them are details that Australians have not previously had to confront. Foremost among these is the racial underpinnings of the policy of removal. We have set out to challenge the widely held justification that this policy was a well-intentioned attempt to provide a better life for Aboriginal children. To challenge this notion we have placed this policy within the racial thinking of the times. By doing so we are able to construct an understanding of the motives of contemporaries who saw, in the policy of removal, a way to solve the ‘Aboriginal problem’ as they defined it.

  These racial underpinnings are well illustrated in the story of Trish Hill-Keddie and Sandra Hill, sisters who directly experienced Western Australia’s policy of assimilation. Now in their forties, both are professionals in their chosen fields; people who have outwardly ‘benefited’ from having been removed from their family. However, as their story illustrates, the personal costs have been great and attempts to calculate ‘benefits’ have a decidedly hollow ring. Both have spent years trying to piece together the fragments of their childhood memories and to better understand the system that tore away their childhoods. Even in bare outlines, their childhood experiences are chilling testimony to the scale of the degrading social experiment to which they were subjected. They also serve to amplify the major themes which constitute the focus of this book.

  Noongar by birth, the girls were destined to be caught up in the racial policies drawn around Aboriginal families. The history of their family has been shaped by these policies. In 1933, their mother, Doreen, a nine year old, was stolen, along with her seven year old sister, from their family who were living at the Caversham camp, north of Perth. It was a traumatic moment. Police and Native Welfare officers arrived unexpectedly at the camp in a black car. Fearing danger, the children ran to hide in the tall bamboo grass. Pursued and caught by the officers, they were bundled into the car, screaming for their mother. As the car drove off their mother gave chase, shrieking ‘give me back my children’. The girls were taken briefly to Moore River Settlement where they were colour-graded and sent off to Sister Kate’s Children’s Home, in Perth where Doreen lived until she was fifteen. The girls’ parents were devastated but refused to bow down to white authority. Despite their lack of income, they hired the services of a solicitor from the firm, Walker and Brockman. A letter from this firm to A O Neville, Chief Protector of Aborigines, has survived in the records. Here, an attempt was made to show the manner of the children’s removal amounted to stealing. The solicitor informed Neville:

  We have been consulted by Mrs Mary Calgaret of Caversham in regard to her two daughters who were taken from their Mother’s home at Caversham without their Mother’s consent, and placed in Moore River Settlement for aborigines. Mrs Calgaret informs us as follows:

  (a) That she has never been under your department;

  (b) That her mother was half Chinese and half English;

  (c) That she has a home, and that Calgaret has employment, and that she can provide for the children.

  It was to no avail. State legislation gave Neville the legal guardianship over all Aboriginal children. At fifteen, Doreen was sent out to work as a domestic servant and spent much of her early life working on an isolated country property. She washed, cooked, ironed and scrubbed the floors for her employer. She ate her meals alone on the back verandah. She had learnt nothing about loving family relationships, or of parenting, but she soon found her role as wife and mother. However, she was unable to escape the notice of the Native Welfare Department which continued to show obsessive interest in her racial background. In 1948, after fifteen years under the Native Welfare, Doreen was the subject to a ‘genogram’ to establish the degree of Aboriginal blood in order to determine whether or not the Department could maintain control over her until she attained the age of twenty-one, a cruel irony given that she was stolen supposedly because she was Aboriginal. The Assistant Commissioner for Native Affairs made his assessment:

  The face sheet of this file indicates that Doreen possesses 13/32 native blood. From appearance I doubt this and have for a long time doubted that Mrs Calgaret (her mother) is a half caste. She is very light in colour and the Bayswater Road Board not very long ago referred to her as a white woman. Whilst I do not class Mrs Calgaret as a white woman I would be prepared to say that she could be an octoroon or no more than a quadroon.

  The experience of Trish and Sandra’s mother raises crucial questions about the legality and justice of the proceedings. We identify two distinct phases in the use of the law to remove children. One begins with the passage of the 1905 Aborigines Act, extends through to the late 1940s encompassing the 1936 Native Administration Act. Under this phase, Aboriginal families were treated as legal nonentities. The second phase, beginning in the late 1940s, witnessed the application of the Child Welfare Act to ‘neglected’ Aboriginal children. It was under this regime that Sandra, Trish and their two other siblings were removed from their family. However, we argue that this process of removal frequently occurred in ways which were highly European-centred and, therefore, discriminatory. It certainly took no account of the ways in which many Aboriginal families had already been devastated by the policy of splitting up families. However, it should be noted that this division into two periods related only to the implementation of official policy. Some children continued to be removed after the 1940s without the involvement of the Children’s Court, because of pressure from both missionaries and welfare authorities.

  On 17 August 1949, Doreen married Herbert Clem Hill, a Noongar who was widely respected in the Busselton and Manjimup area. Herbert had not been removed as a child and, prior to his marriage, had served for fourteen years in the Australian Navy, including enlistment in the Second World War. He was a happy and well-adjusted man yet, like other Aboriginal adults of the post-war era, he was a non-citizen in his own country. As a war serviceman, he was automatically granted honorary Australian citizenship, which simply exempted him from the restrictions of the Native Welfare Act. He refused to apply for full citizenship—granted to a small number of Aborigines from the 1940s—because to achieve equal legal status with whites he had to renounce his connections to his Aboriginal culture. He was unwilling to do so.

  The circumstances leading to Sandra and Trish’s removal are closely connected to the experiences that their parents suffered under a legislative regime designed to marginalise and consign Aboriginal people to the lowest position in the white social structure. The policy which subsequently removed their children was a planned extension of this body of legislation. But how could such a policy be justified and openly promoted? We attempt to answer this by locating the policy to remove Aboriginal children in the broader scheme of racial theory and, by extension, in its aim to disempower Aboriginal people so that they would not pose any future social and economic threat to white society.

  The Hill family moved from Perth to Collie where their father worked as a miner in the local colliery. Though it was always difficult to make ends meet the family enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle and the living conditions were more than adequate. However, by 1955 the parents’ marriage had run into problems; their mother was unable to cope with parenting and relationships, problems which stemmed from her own background as a stolen child. Herbert was left
to look after his children which he struggled to do whilst still maintaining his long hours at the mine. During these times there were no pre-schools, and assistance with child care was usually provided by family, friends or neighbours. It was an impossible task for Herbert and he was forced to send the three children to Sister Kate’s for temporary respite while he arranged suitable care for them during his working hours. The Child Welfare Department thought differently; the children’s file was stamped ‘Notice of Removal’. A short time later Herbert and Doreen reunited and the children were returned to their care. However, from the moment of welfare intervention the family file would remain open until all the Hill children were eighteen years of age. Government policy favoured taking young Aboriginal children for the purposes of assimilation. In a 1949 memo, the Commissioner for Native Affairs stated: ‘Children under six years of age are definitely preferable. From two to six years is the ideal age. Babies in arms are acceptable and often preferred.’2 The logic was, the younger the children, the easier the assimilation process.

  At the prospect of earning higher wages Herbert moved the family north to the Pilbara. They lived in the town of Wittenoom Gorge where Herbert was employed as a miner in the asbestos industry. During this period Herbert was called up to do two years service in the Armed Forces. According to Sandra, ‘the level of isolation, alienation, responsibility and loneliness that Doreen experienced when Herbert was away was overwhelming.’ She now had five children under the age of eight. Tragedy struck the family when David, the youngest child died suddenly and as a consequence of all these issues and events the marriage deteriorated and finally broke down. Doreen left the family, entered another relationship and eventually settled at Point Sampson. At first Herbert struggled to care for the children but this proved to be an impossible task and, as a last resort, contacted Doreen to try to work out a solution. Doreen agreed to care for the children temporarily and they were transported to Point Sampson to live with their mother.