Delegates knew this resolution was a watershed in the treatment of Aboriginal people. It represented official government policy, sanctioned by the Commonwealth of Australia, to embark on practices aimed at controlling the destiny of the Aboriginal race. For observers of today, the resolution raises several critical questions: What led them to adopt it? Why did they draw a distinction between ‘fullblood’ Aborigines and those of ‘Aboriginal origin’? Why was it thought this latter group could not exist in its own right? What did delegates mean by their concept of ‘absorption’? We have addressed these questions in this book.
The motion was framed and submitted by Western Australian delegate to the Conference, A O Neville. He was to emerge as the foremost thinker on race in government circles at the time. Neville was able to speak about his observations of the ‘Aboriginal problem’ from his long experience as Commissioner for Native Affairs in Western Australia, in the course of which he had developed a long-range ‘solution’. Neville brought to the Conference an unusual combination of qualities and experience. He was a capable administrator who had spent a decade overseeing the Department for Native Affairs in Western Australia bringing unusual commitment and a sense of duty to an area nearly everybody else in government regarded as a backwater.
There is little doubt Neville was one of the prime architects of the formal policy of separating Aboriginal children from their families, not only in Western Australia but, through the force of his contribution at the 1937 Conference, throughout the other Australian states. He was keen to explain to delegates the policy of removal already underway in the West. At one point he laid bare the operation of the policy: ‘The child is taken away from the mother and never sees her again. Thus the children grow up as white, knowing nothing of their environment.’5 It is hard to imagine the values which drove Neville to implement and so proudly champion such a policy. This man’s talents and energies were directed at solving what he perceived as an emerging racial problem in Australia.
Neville’s own background is the starting point for understanding his ideas on race. An immigrant to Western Australia in the closing years of the nineteenth century, he had a near idyllic early life as the son of an Anglican minister on a wealthy but isolated estate in Northumberland. Raised in an environment dominated by Christianity, order and tradition, his values were well suited to romanticising the expansiveness of the British Empire. Stories of heroic missionaries were among the few outside influences to penetrate the quiet valley of his childhood. Empire and Christianity fused in his mind. It was the duty of the British, he came to believe early in his life, to bring Christianity and peace to ‘the remote and barbarous parts’ of the Empire.6
Of course, Neville shared this ideal with many of his contemporaries. It was one driven by racial ideology. Indigenous races were widely thought of as irredeemably inferior beings; their very blackness signifying their membership of a separate branch of humankind.7 When Neville became part of the wave of young civil servants to migrate to the far flung parts of the Empire he most likely carried with him a clear imprint about the organisation of humanity. The second half of the nineteenth century, when Neville’s views were being formed, was an age dominated more than any before it by the idea of race being the single most important factor governing human behaviour and, hence, the worth—or otherwise—of the world’s different peoples.
It is important to locate Neville within this intellectual climate because men like him applied their reasoning about race to policies and practices which culminated in the solution he eventually put forward to the 1937 Conference. Neville’s resolution on absorption is an example of race as an instrument of policy; such policies grew out of two centuries of thinking about race.
The link between race and behaviour was first articulated by the great Swedish botanist, Carl Linnaeus who, having worked on classifying plants, went on to develop in the 1750s a three-fold classification of humans—Europeans, Asiatics and Africans. The European was ‘of gentle manners, acute in judgement’, the Asiatic ‘of grave, haughty and covetous manners’, and the African ‘of crafty, indolent and careless dispositions’. Of course, there was no factual evidence to verify any element of this theory.8
In the wake of Linnaeus came several generations of scientists who completely abandoned any pretence to scientific method in order to propagate their theories about race, behaviour and culture. Robert Knox, a Scottish lecturer in anatomy, echoed Linnaeus in his 1850 book, the Races of Men, adding that ‘the dark races’ were psychologically as well as physically inferior. In the late 1850s, Charles Darwin had recently returned from his voyage on the Beagle, with his revolutionary view of all humans originating from the same stock. His work had the potential to completely undermine the flimsy foundations propping up racial thinking, but some of his utterances showed the extent to which it had become woven into the fabric of Western thought. He predicted that ‘the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world.’9
Darwin’s principal contribution to science—the concept of evolution through natural selection—profoundly impacted on racial ideas. Herbert Spencer, a social philosopher, adapted Darwin’s model of natural science to create a ‘grand theory of the social world’ incorporating ‘the survival of the fittest.’10 Known as Social Darwinism, this view was elevated into a theory which purported to explain the existence of ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ races, the former being able to overrun the latter with greater energy and mental ability. No more powerful idea had entered the debate on race. Black, inferior races would die out because they were biologically inferior to Europeans. When called upon for proof of his assertion, Spencer was merely to reply: ‘what is evident does not need proof.’11
Social Darwinism spawned its own solutions to the problem of ‘inferior’ social groups. Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin’s, introduced the idea of eugenics, which spread widely throughout the Western world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Advocates promoted measures to improve the quality of the racial stock by influencing the breeding rates of different sections of the population. It was a deliberate program to not only let the ‘inferior’ races die out but also focus attention on a problem perceived to be particularly menacing: the ‘half-caste’.
The children of mixed parentage were widely thought ‘to present the worst characteristics of both races’. The overt prejudice they suffered sprang from a deeply unsettling fear in the white population that this ‘half-caste’ race would breed up to become a social menace. Just how it was perceived this menace would manifest itself varied; however, common threads run right through white statements on this issue throughout the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries. It was feared ‘half-castes’ would be more black in their outlook than white; they would constitute a potentially numerically strong population to threaten white interests, especially in the north of the country; they would represent a source of racial conflict along American lines; and they would threaten established white social and moral standards. Moreover, their very presence signified the ease with which some whites could break the ultimate racial taboo and enter sexual relationships with blacks. Laws were passed in many colonial societies, including the United States and Australia, outlawing ‘miscegenation’—the interbreeding of races.12
By the time Neville set foot in Western Australia in 1897 as a young man of promise and good connections, he had internalised one of the most influential ideas of the nineteenth century: that humankind was a hierarchy of races and it was the business of government to protect and advance those thought to be ‘superior’. Soon after arriving Neville started his rapid rise through the ranks of the public service in Perth, then little more than a conservative colonial outpost. He reached a pinnacle of his career in 1902 when he became Registrar of the newly created Colonial Secretary’s Department.
Coinciding with Neville’s ascendancy in the public service were growi
ng concerns about the ‘Aboriginal problem’. In 1904 these culminated in the appointment of a Royal Commission on the Condition of the Natives. The outcome of the inquiry was a landmark report, the first official document which canvassed the need to remove Aboriginal children from their families as a deliberate policy of government. Headed by Queenslander Dr E W Roth, the Commission was given broad terms of reference focused around the treatment and conditions of Aborigines. Roth’s Commission was notable for drawing attention to the emergence of a ‘half-caste’ population. Nearly all the witnesses Roth interviewed expressed concern about the growing number of ‘half-caste’ children. Summing up the evidence given to him, Roth made the following comments:
Of the many hundred half-caste children—over 500 were enumerated in last year’s census—if these are left to their own devices under the present state of the law, their future will be one of vagabondism and harlotry. In speaking of the numerous aboriginal and half-caste children around Carnarvon, the Resident Magistrate says they will spend their lives in gaol or as prostitutes if nothing is done with them. He would suggest their being sent to some reformatory or mission whether their parents wish it or not; [italics added] but at present he has no power to deal with such cases. With regard to the 20-30 half-caste children around Broome, the officer in charge of police considers they should be taken right away … At Roebourne the Sub-Inspector of Police is of the opinion that such children should be removed from the blacks’ camps altogether: a shame that they should be allowed to run wild … At Derby, the Resident Magistrate considers that these are people that should be got at. There is a large number of absolutely worthless blacks and half-castes; if they are taken away young from their surroundings of temptation much good might be done with them.13
As these comments clearly show, significant community support existed for a policy of forced removal from the earliest years of the new century. To the people in the north, especially, the call for these children to be removed merely extended and formalised existing practice. As Roth discovered, Aboriginal children, often younger than ten years old, were regularly stolen to work in the pastoral and pearling industries where they were indentured as unpaid and uneducated apprentices. In the North-Western districts, Roth reported, ‘the pastoralists have taken most of the boys from the tribes’. Probing this issue further with the District Medical Officer in Broome, Roth discovered a virtual slave system involving Aboriginal children who were taken without authorisation of the Aboriginal Affairs Department and almost certainly without the consent of their parents.
Do you know whether any of these children under indenture are ever visited by a Justice?—I have not heard of it being done. What is the usual trade to which these children are indentured?—I should think that quite half of them are indentured to the pearling industry. The remainder are mostly girls indentured as domestic servants. Are these children indentured to the pearling industry taken out on to the pearling boats?—Yes. Do the boys … receive any wages?—It is almost certain that they do not. At what age are these boys signed up?—I think the age ranges from ten years upwards … As far as you know, are such apprenticed children signed on with the consent of their parents?—I do not know.14
Roth did not approve of this treatment of Aboriginal children and, when he came to weigh up the evidence submitted to him about their conditions and treatment, he recommended the Chief Protector of Aborigines be made the legal guardian of every Aboriginal and ‘half-caste’ child until such child attains the age of eighteen. In effect, he set out the foundations for the later wholesale removal of children from their families. In addition to justifying this measure, he went on to highlight the main implications of his major recommendations:
There can be no doubt that of the 500 half-caste children many will, when the necessary protective legislation is provided, become a charge upon the Executive, and the question will then arise as to whether a special Government institution or one of the other mission stations will receive them.15
Roth’s recommendation about legal guardianship was eventually embodied in the 1905 Aborigines Act which subjected Aborigines to tyrannical control. In addition to the power of legal guardianship over Aboriginal children, the 1905 Act empowered government to force the fathers of ‘half-caste’ children sent to missions to pay for their children’s upkeep. Moreover, it brought existing church missions dealing with Aboriginal children under the Act by classifying them as ‘Aboriginal institutions’ in order to formally separate the care of Aboriginal and white children.16 The mobilisation of the law in such a draconian way against Aboriginal people was a reflection of the legal treatment of Aborigines since the earliest days of settlement. Events from the early nineteenth century showed that white men who murdered Aborigines were rarely tried; if tried rarely convicted; and if convicted, rarely punished. In other words, Aborigines were regarded as legal nonentities, denied the legal rights which white society otherwise thought belonged to all humans. It was the evolution of this attitude which culminated in the use of the law to uphold the right of white society to remove Aboriginal children and to care for them separately.
Although by 1905 the Western Australian Government possessed sweeping powers over all Aboriginal children, the provisions of the Act to remove children were not extensively used in the years immediately after its passage through Parliament. Insufficient funds to cover the costs of transporting the children from their homes to the various missions was cited as the principal reason behind the fall in the number of children in institutions between 1906 and 1911.17 However, the administrative drive to make full use of the provisions was also lacking. Neville’s appointment in 1915 to head the Aborigines Department brought a new sense of urgency and purpose to the task. Although he had no prior knowledge or experience in Aboriginal affairs he ‘began a career that would consume the rest of his life.’18
Neville took up his post at a time of growing animosity among whites towards Aborigines, particularly in the south of the State where the ever encroaching pastoral and agricultural industries ensured a process of forcing Aborigines off their land and marginalising them as seasonal workers or dependents on government rations. Farmers and townspeople alike began clamouring for the exclusion of Aborigines from contact with white society. With characteristic enthusiasm and drive Neville set out in September 1915 on his first tour of inspection of the southern regions of the State and encountered, for the first time, large numbers of ‘half-caste’ children. Their living conditions shocked him but the trip marked the ‘beginning of the persistent search for solutions.’19
The first plan Neville implemented was the establishment of isolated ‘native settlements’, run by the government, where children could be physically separated from their parents, then educated and trained for unskilled occupations. Two key objectives were met by the plan for reserves: the anger of townspeople over the presence of Aborigines on the edges of towns would be appeased and children would be given the opportunity to shed their Aboriginal background and be accepted into white society. Two settlements were established—Carrolup, outside Katanning and Moore River, north of Perth.20
The fate of families and children on these settlements showed how Neville’s ideas on absorption were beginning to be implemented. At the Moore River Settlement, for example, children were removed from their parents, names and birth dates were arbitrarily assigned to them on arrival and they were told their parents had lost interest in them. Those who absconded were severely flogged.21 The high costs of operating the settlements were soon found to be crippling and Carrolup, which Neville had envisioned as ‘a thriving, self-supporting community’22 was forced to close. The inmates were taken to Moore River which then became the only place in the southern part of the State where Aborigines could be sent for ‘training’.
A subsequent Royal Commission into Aboriginal Affairs, set up in 1935, and headed by H D Moseley, condemned the conditions of this institution as overcrowded, dilapidated and vermin-ridden.
23 Although the settlement at Moore River limped on, a telling reflection of Western Australian’s concern for its Aboriginal population, Neville’s hope that the settlement idea would offer a solution faded.
The 1930s were a time of unrestrained growth in racist attitudes towards Aborigines among the broader community and of continuing developments in ‘scientific’ theories about race. Racist attitudes permeated thinking about Aborigines. Racial prejudice, especially towards ‘half-castes’, was paraded as the ‘aboriginal problem’. Commissioner, H D Moseley travelled 14,000 miles around the State collecting information from which he warned government ‘that the great problem confronting the community today is that of the half-caste.’24 Other investigators of the time agreed: ‘half-castes’ were a blight on the community. For instance Paul Hasluck, a young journalist on the West Australian in the mid 1930s, undertook a detailed, and largely sympathetic, investigation into the ‘half-castes’. However, beginning his account, he acknowledged: ‘The problem of the half-castes in this State is best shown by the numbers. In 1901 there was a total of 951 half-castes in Western Australia; in 1935 there were 4,245. In 1901 only one out of every 200 persons was a half-caste; today one out of every hundred is a half-caste.’25 Moseley’s first concern was also the rapidly multiplying number of ‘half-castes’. For both men, however, numbers alone hid deeper fears. For Hasluck, the conditions in which they lived, especially the children, were a grave concern:
The children are at once the section of the half-caste population that causes most alarm and gives ground for strongest hope. They might be able to profit from a chance to do better for themselves, but no chance is given. Today they are swarming about the native camps without proper care. Many of them—laughing, ragged urchins, keen in intelligence—are almost white and some of them are so fair that, after a good wash, they could probably pass unnoticed in any band of whites.26
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