Our State of Mind Read online

  Far from being designed to promote future social equality, the transitional scheme helped perpetuate Aboriginal marginalisation. Under this scheme, basic houses were built on the reserves grouped around communal facilities. They were designed as an introduction to more sophisticated housing. In reality, the policy could not disguise the harsh reality; these houses were ‘little more than rural black slum ghettos’, as Henry Schapper vividly described them in his 1970 study of Aboriginal affairs in Western Australia.218 Most had neither heating nor water for ablutions; inside the houses there were few possessions other than clothing, blankets, cooking and eating utensils. ‘All are utterly inadequate for hygienic family living’, wrote Schapper.219 In the mid 1960s, ‘Brian’ was removed from the Wagin Reserve. His home consisted of ‘an old corrugated iron shack’, divided into three rooms with ‘dilapidated plaster board.’ The ceiling was only two metres high and, while there were spaces for windows, there was no glass and no electricity.220 From these primitive and unpromising conditions, which reflected the ongoing community drive for segregation, Aborigines were supposed to learn the art of ‘civilised’ white living.

  When they were deemed suitably experienced, Aborigines could move from the ‘primary transitional’ stage on the reserves, to a ‘standard transitional’ home in a country town. A final stage saw the transition to a conventional suburban house. This scheme gave authorities ongoing power to make judgements on Aboriginal people over their progress through the gateways to white living. By 1967, nearly twenty years after its commencement, the bulk of the building activity had been in the primary stage: 487 primary transitional houses had been built; 251 standard transitional houses and only 35 conventional houses.221 In fact, evidence collected by the Aboriginal Welfare Council in the mid 1960s indicates that shire council’s objection to the erection of transition houses in country towns, creating serious difficulties for the building program.222 These objections were driven by community opposition which feared the presence of an Aboriginal family next door would greatly depreciate property values. One such complainant suggested that ‘Aboriginal families should be placed in an area where all the homes were rented and this would not affect people like themselves.’223 Thus, the reserves remained for many Aboriginal people a place of gloomy impoverishment.

  Greatly adding to the problems of poor housing were the bleak employment prospects, especially for young people. In 1964 the Minister for Native Welfare was forced to acknowledge ‘the acute unemployment position of teenage natives in south-west towns’.224 The situation for young people who had gained little, or no, vocational training at missions, was made worse by their lack of access to technical training during most of the 1960s. As late as 1967 only twenty-seven Aboriginal boys were undergoing apprenticeships in any one year.225 The Aboriginal Advancement Council of Western Australia lobbied government to improve its training efforts for young Aborigines. ‘Re-training and rehabilitation of Europeans’, the Council argued, ‘are undertaken on an increasing scale. Why not raise the standard of skill among the hundreds of Aboriginal men who have missed the opportunity of apprenticeship in their young days through no fault of their own?’226 However, throughout the 1960s, government efforts, through the Department of Native Affairs, continued to be focused on providing agricultural training to Aboriginal youth. In other words, they were being trained for jobs on the land as farm labourers, a source of employment that had been declining for years.

  In 1967 the Department of Native Welfare became concerned at the ‘vexing problem’ of unemployment among Aboriginal youth, and surveys were conducted in regional areas ‘to establish whether an employment market exists for them’.227 A 1968 employment survey undertaken in Geraldton pinpointed the problems: ‘Low education and training standards have made it impossible to place natives in the past. Of several applications for any vacancy, the Aboriginal applicant is generally the least qualified. Even for manual jobs, qualifications are becoming increasingly important.’228 Contrary to the rhetoric behind assimilation, there is no evidence that Aborigines ‘trained’ in missions had greater advantages in the labour market than those who had remained in their communities. In terms of skills, they were largely indistinguishable. However, the failure of missions to prepare children for an employment future in white society was never the subject of critical examination until Henry Schapper drew attention to the issue in 1970. In his study of Aborigines in Western Australia he wrote that missions lacked skills and resources for the task.

  The result is that it is hardly possible for Aborigines on these missions to learn properly the skills and discipline of sustained work, the skills of household management, and to acquire adequate levels of hygiene, diet and health. Because of these inadequacies and because the school curriculum and methods of education are not geared to the needs of environmentally disadvantaged children, the formal education of school children on mission settlements is largely irrelevant.229

  Many Aborigines, especially in the South-West, were only too aware that they were effectively locked out of the employment market. In 1966 a group of Aboriginal prisoners in Fremantle Gaol set down their thoughts to prison authorities on ‘Why Noongars Can’t Get Good Jobs Outside’:

  1. Because they are unskilled labour.

  2. Because they should get more help from Native Welfare from the time they leave school.

  3. Because all the money supposed to be spent on Natives is spent on building little two-roomed houses throughout the country.

  4. We think the Native Welfare could have done better by building hostels for teen-age boys and girls.

  5. Boys should learn carpentry and cabinet making—also metal work like plumbing, engineering etc.

  6. Girls should learn secretarial work and nursing etc. (As it is all they do is run around the streets making a bad name for themselves.)230

  These comments show an acute awareness among the prisoners of the marginalised position of Aborigines in society, and particularly the problems facing the young. They reveal a desire for a better future. Little, however, was done to help provide it. The 1974 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Affairs was forced to concede: ‘Opportunities for gainful employment have declined markedly in recent years and it seems to be expected that this decline will increase rather than decrease with the passage of time, as the work load becomes more that of machines than of men.’231 Two decades of assimilation had succeeded in ensuring few Aborigines competed with whites for employment.

  With especially bleak prospects in country towns, Aborigines drifted to Perth in the 1950s and 60s. Here, they congregated in East Perth, a small locale of cheap rents, shabby houses and noisy social interaction. It had the city’s seediest wine bars. By the 1960s most people regarded the place as a slum. Many of the houses in which Aborigines lived had been condemned, but not demolished. The only study of East Perth during these years made a number of very interesting observations about the lifestyle of its residents.232 Jeanette Kidd found a close-knit, if chaotic, and frequently dysfunctional community. Most of the Aborigines who inhabited the area originated from the missions, drawn to the place to be with their own kind. They were indifferent ‘as to whether the rest of the community accepts them.’ However, they carried with them the legacy of their mission days. ‘One downfall of mission training’, Kidd observed, ‘is the children lead a sheltered life, free from experiences they may meet in the city. And when they come to the city looking for employment and a different way of life, many of them are completely lost.’ Here was the full realisation of the consequences of assimilation.

  Life was precarious for the Aborigines of East Perth in the 1960s. Unemployment was rife. The men drifted from one poorly paid job to another. Families were continually falling behind in their rent, and landlords showed little sympathy. ‘Landlords evict the part-Aboriginal tenants almost as soon as they fall behind in their rent, regardless of the circumstances.’ When this happened families moved in together, exacerbating
overcrowding. Lack of shower and toilet facilities affected standards of health. Girls became pregnant in their teens, but relationships were unstable.

  Husbands in general show tendencies towards being unable to accept the responsibility of finding permanent employment to support their families. This makes the wife’s task very difficult since not many part-Aboriginal women in East Perth are able to find employment due to lack of education and training.

  Some young women, recently arrived from the missions, were forced into prostitution. Their clients were the white men who prowled the streets at night. Some had illegitimate children. Drinking and drunkenness were common. Kidd described the habit as an ‘escape from the reality of life which the natives feel they have no part in.’ However, drinking brought Aborigines under the glare of the police and arrests for drunkenness, vagrancy, and neglect of children were regular occurrences.

  The children of these mostly ex-mission adults bore the legacy of their parents’ background: problems of adjustment were being transmitted to the next generation. Poor school attendance, the lack of ongoing male influences in households and general poverty made many prone to juvenile crime, the incidence of which was slowly on the rise in the area. These youth, Kidd reported,

  find the society hard to live in, mainly due to the fact that their environment makes it hard for them to adjust and conform. Surveys have shown that Aboriginal youths have no close ties with the ‘father’ image, which could contribute to their apparent lack of responsibility. There is a high incidence of minor crime which results mainly from boredom or lack of security. Car-stealing is common.

  These families were trapped in their poverty. ‘Most natives in East Perth’, Kidd wrote, ‘wanted a better class of home, but these were not available’. Native Welfare was keen for the State Housing Commission to launch a rehousing scheme for East Perth but finance was not forthcoming. However, the problem of poverty was more complex than lack of housing. Kidd’s study highlighted, but did not fully explore, a crucial aspect about their backgrounds. Missions had left them without the range of social and vocational skills to make the fullest use of their lives. However, Kidd had come closer than anyone else in understanding the link between ex-mission inmates’ tragic backgrounds and their life of unrelieved poverty.

  The extent of disadvantage among the Aboriginal community of Western Australia in the mid 1960s was graphically illustrated in a set of data compiled by Henry Schapper in his book Aboriginal Advancement to Integration. Contrasting their experiences with European families Schapper found one in three Aboriginal families had someone who was unemployed, compared with only one in ten in European families. Educational disadvantage was even greater with only one family in fourteen who had a member with a junior certificate or higher qualification, compared to Europeans with more than one per family. The extent of welfare discrimination was equally stark. One Aboriginal family in three had a child under the notice of the Child Welfare Department, compared to one European family in thirty-four. However, experience of the legal system between the two races showed the largest gap of all: one Aboriginal family in three had a family member committed to gaol while, for Europeans, it was one in seventy-one. The gap in the rates for juvenile convictions was also large: one in four families for Aborigines, compared to one in nineteen for Europeans.233

  Compounding the marginalised status of Aborigines in the 1950s and 60s was the existence of widespread community racial prejudice. It is especially hard to measure the extent of racism during the 1960s because it was not, at the time, the subject of systematic study. Undoubtedly, signs of positive changes in some quarters towards acceptance were evident. The state school system, for example, began to take seriously the disadvantage of Aboriginal students in schools and employed specially trained teachers. International trends towards more accepting racial attitudes in general filtered through to influence the educated section of community opinion. However, at other levels, racism towards Aborigines remained entrenched.

  Assimilation acted as a facade to perpetuate deeply ingrained racial attitudes. Whites who were disdainful of Aborigines had their views legitimised by the existence of this very policy. Leading advocates of assimilation had long maintained that Aboriginal culture was inferior and unstoppable historical forces would eventually wipe it out. This was the very point Paul Hasluck made in the Federal Parliament after the States and the Commonwealth reaffirmed their commitment to assimilation in the early 1950s. The ‘blessings of civilisation are worth having’, he told the House of Assembly:

  The world today … is coming around again to the idea that inevitable change can be made for the better. We recognise now that the noble savage can benefit from measures taken to improve his health and nutrition, to teach him better civilisation, and to lead him to civilised ways of life. We know that culture is not static but that it either changes or dies … The native people will grow into the society in which, by force of history, they are bound to live.234

  No matter how well intended the motives behind such ideas, they were not calculated to inspire acceptance or tolerance for Aboriginal people. The essence of assimilation was the belief in the superiority of white society. It is no great leap from this position to one which seeks to isolate the ‘inferior’ culture. In country towns throughout the South-West segregation was still widely practiced. At Wagin, for example, the local council erected ‘whites only’ signs on the lavatories and the rest rooms. In 1963 the Sunday Times investigated this discrimination and found that it was being driven by poor housing, poor hygiene and drunkenness. A member of the Wagin Native Welfare Committee explained to the paper that: ‘If there is any segregation it is purely because of a need for hygiene’. This ‘hygiene bar’ was the explanation given by the local cafe owner for refusing entry of Aborigines into her shop. Complaints about abuse of alcohol were also widespread among whites, in particular the frequent sight of Aborigines found drunk in the streets.

  Such complaints must be placed in their broader context. Whites were caught in an ongoing and vicious cycle of prejudice. The poor living conditions imposed on Aborigines fuelled the stereotypes which prevented them achieving social acceptance. Some whites could see the process at work. They could acknowledge the causes of the degradation but, seemingly, not to the point of incorporating this understanding into their social attitudes. Social conditions for Aborigines had barely changed in half a century. Maintenance of hygiene was difficult on the reserves and probably impossible in the worst of the ‘humpy’ tents: ‘The humpy has no electricity or cooking area and has an earthen floor covered mostly with ants’, reported the Sunday Times about one such structure on the Wagin Reserve. This was home to a family of ten including six school children. It had only four makeshift beds for the entire family. The occupant ‘said she had been refused a house by the Native Welfare Department because she did not have a priority.’ No action was taken by the local health inspector to condemn any of the humpies on the reserve because ‘only Native Welfare Officers are allowed in the area’.235

  Drunkenness had obvious wider causes. Apart from a desire for escapism, legal restrictions meant that alcohol had to be consumed before returning to the reserve or Aborigines faced the risk of prosecution. The Wagin publican knew it was ‘a vicious circle that causes so many of them to be found drunk in the streets.’ Another publican confirmed that: ‘The native has little incentive generally. If he is not working he should be employed by the Native Welfare at the reserve instead of roaming the streets and collecting rations and social service.’

  Wagin was by no means an isolated example of poor race relations. Gnowangerup earned the reputation during the 1960s as an ‘Aboriginal-hating town’ with attitudes equivalent to those in the American Deep South.236 Aboriginal opposition to the segregation of the town along racial lines erupted in 1963 when the Superintendent of the South Division of the Department of Native Affairs was called upon to investigate discrimination against Aborigines at the l
ocal cinema. It had only been several years since they were admitted at all and, under the prevailing arrangement, a separate block of seats was set aside for Aborigines even though the proprietor had the right to refuse entry to any person not suitably attired. In other words, even those Aborigines who were thought respectable enough to admit to the cinema, were still forced to sit in seats reserved for them only.237 One of the local service stations refused to serve Aboriginal customers, a practice challenged by one Aboriginal family returning from holiday in Albany in 1972. Driving a 1967 Ford Fairlane and towing a ‘fashionable’ caravan, the family was told by the owners when they entered the restaurant that ‘they did not serve Aborigines in the restaurant.’238 Geraldton was another town where discrimination was widely practiced. A local firm of furniture retailers had ‘a blanket refusal to assist Aborigines with finance irrespective of favourable credit rating.’239

  The treatment accorded Aborigines in country towns in the early 1960s and 70s was a reflection of wider racially intolerant views. The ‘No’ vote in the 1967 Aborigines referendum was higher in Western Australia than in any other State: 17 percent in urban areas and 22 percent in rural areas. This contrasted with 12 and 17 percent respectively in South Australia and 7 and 14 percent in Queensland—two other states with high percentages of Aboriginal people living in them.240 ‘A feature of the Western Australian vote’, commented the West Australian straight after the result was known, ‘was the strong “No” vote in the Federal electoral divisions of Kalgoorlie, Canning and Moore, where the number of Aborigines is higher than in other divisions.’241 This reluctance to concede the basics of citizenship to Aborigines, in the rural areas especially, indicates the remaining depth of racial antipathy.