Our State of Mind

by Quentin Beresford

  Hasluck saw the rise of a ‘separate caste’; a race of outsiders, of ‘coloured people’ with no place in the community. They married among their own ‘colour’ and, he observed, ‘to an increasing extent with full-bloods’, so that ‘colour is not being bred out. More is coming in. We are pushing the half-castes back to the Aborigines.’27

  The idea that ‘half-castes’ were a threatening, separate race attracted Moseley’s attention. In a classic display of contemporary racial theory he linked their ‘race’ to their collective mode of behaviour. ‘Half-castes’, he wrote, were ‘disinclined to work’; they were ‘loafers’ and naturally possessed of ‘begging habits’. If nothing was done, he warned, ‘the time is not far distant when these half-castes, or a great majority of them, will become a positive menace to the community: the men useless and vicious and the women a tribe of harlots.’28

  When Hasluck and Moseley discussed solutions to this ‘problem’, both agreed the best chance lay with the children. Whereas Hasluck was content to canvass the various proposals circulating among the interested community to provide education and training for the children, Moseley had settled on a solution: ‘a gradual weaning from the aboriginal influence and an encouragement to fit themselves for life in a white community, so that when they reach adult age, they may, if inclined to forsake their bush life, be acceptable in other places.’29 In other words, Moseley favoured absorption, the idea that these children could be stripped of their cultural background and be made over as whites. However, he saw this as a gradual process which could be put into effect through the establishment of settlements where families could be housed and employed on local farms. Children could be given their own quarters ‘where, although not debarred altogether from seeing their parents, they may be gradually weaned from the aboriginal influence.’ Moseley also flirted with the contribution that eugenics could play in this cultural transformation. He gave considerable space to the evidence of a local medical practitioner, Dr H C Bryan, who spoke

  strongly against the mating of half-castes with half-castes, on the ground that it will perpetuate the black and coloured elements. And still, without advocating the marriage of whites and half-castes, he does support the mating of a half-caste with a coloured person higher in the white scale. To further this scheme, he says, we should do all in our power to prevent a half-caste marrying another half-caste, and to encourage him to look higher.30

  Neville’s thinking had been moving in the same direction for several years. The earliest indication of his emerging theories on race were outlined in an article he wrote for the West Australian in 1930. Here he revealed his ideas on genetic inheritance. He reassured readers that throwbacks to Aboriginality would not occur in unions between ‘half-castes’ and whites. He also raised a more far-reaching goal offered by genetics: ‘Eliminate the fullblood and permit the white admixture [to ‘half-castes’] and eventually the race will become white.’31 This was no idle interest; it was being fashioned into a policy. In the early 1930s, Neville began to openly worry about the emergence of ‘an outcast race’.

  Acting on his concerns, Neville took a critical step in his quest for a new direction towards Aboriginal affairs. In 1933 he had overseen the establishment of a government-funded ‘home’ for ‘quadroon’ (quarter-caste) children, the first of its kind in Australia. Its founder, Katherine Clutterbuck (Sister Kate), was of a similar cast of mind to Neville. A devout, English-born Christian with a sense of moral duty about doing good works in the colonies, she, too, embodied prevailing racial theory and applied it in her attitudes towards Aborigines.

  Sister Kate wrote to Neville in 1932 seeking his support to help establish the home. This was achieved and Sister Kate built the home amid spacious grounds in Perth’s southern suburbs, which she then ran until her retirement in 1946. Constructed along the pioneering ‘cottage model’ she had developed at the Parkerville Children’s Home orphanage before her retirement, each cottage at Sister Kate’s operated as a separate ‘family’ staffed by a ‘mother’ and a ‘father’. This model became the centrepiece of the homely image which she managed to project to the outside world, ensuring Sister Kate’s became one of the most fashionable charities among Perth’s social set. Sister Kate was a woman of certainties. She had no doubts the neat cottages and artificial family structure bubbled with a ‘happy atmosphere’. Material issued by the Home described it as offering a natural environment ‘where Dad goes to work and Mum prepares and cooks the meals’. She was convinced Aboriginal children found a ‘sense of belonging’ and ‘felt part of a family’ for the first time in their lives. By the early 1940s, Sister Kate claimed the dozens of cases with whom she had maintained a personal contact proved the work of her Home ‘a success.’32

  Behind these folksy claims lay the real purpose of the institution—Social Darwinist, racial engineering. Sister Kate explained: ‘We desire to have the quarter caste children treated like white boys and girls under similar circumstances.’33 Moreover, she had hopes to ‘breed out the colour’ from this group. As she explained once to Neville, she objected to the marriage of two ‘quadroons’, preferring instead these girls married white males.34

  Children were brought to the Home from all over the State; nearly two-thirds were from the pastoral areas where, in the late 1930s, ‘the mothers [had] been leading useful lives on the stations.’35 Officials from the Department of Natives Affairs gave her whole-hearted support in her enterprise. District officers were reminded that ‘colour is to be the deciding factor’ in the selection of children to be sent to the Home, because ‘it is desired to maintain trueness of colour as far as possible.’36

  The role performed by Sister Kate’s had legislative backing. Neville succeeded in having Parliament pass the 1936 Native Administration Act which brought the ‘half-castes’ under the same provisions as those of the 1905 Act and extended guardianship of children from sixteen (in the 1905 Act) to the age of twenty-one. Henceforth, government, through the Department of Native Affairs, had the power to remove any Aboriginal children from their parents, to institutionalise such children and, later, to control whom they married.

  Thus, when Neville, at the peak of his drive and purpose, travelled to Canberra in 1937 to attend the Commonwealth Conference on Aboriginal Welfare, his plan for absorption was the most developed of any of the States. Delegates showed a keen interest in Western Australian developments, outlined by Neville, and ultimately supported his motion that absorption became national policy. How did they justify coming to this agreement?

  Concerns about race, and about the threat from ‘inferior half-castes’ in particular, dominated procedures. A backdrop to these discussions were the latest developments in racial ‘science’ which saw the application of intelligence testing, developed by Frenchman Alfred Binet in 1905, and by researchers committed to eugenic principles.37 In many parts of the Western world debate over the causes of black under-performance attracted interest.38 This was the peak era of the eugenics movement, which had gained supporters among conservatives and progressives alike, and which spread with astonishing speed through Western society. Advocates of this pseudo-science were united in a common commitment to controlling reproduction to prevent the ‘degeneration’ of the European races. ‘Inferior’ social groups were variously defined as people of mixed races, the feeble minded and the insane, and they became the target of programs of forced sterilisation.39 While there is no direct evidence that this particular plan was ever contemplated by government officials as a solution to Australia’s ‘half-caste’ population, the ideas central to the eugenics movement certainly did: government intervention, racial planning and the pursuit of human perfectibility.

  Australia became a testing ground for another pioneering development in racial ‘science’—the ‘culture free’ intelligence test. An American professor, Stanley D Porteus, claimed to show that Aborigines always performed worse than whites, but that their scores improved the greater their contact w
ith whites.40 While Porteus remained convinced his tests proved the inferiority of Aborigines, broader scientific opinion questioned the reliability of ‘culture free’ intelligence testing. The ensuing debate in academic journals about this matter during the 1930s stimulated new understandings about race and human potential. In the forefront of this debate was Australian anthropologist, E P Elkin. In 1937 Elkin wrote an article published in a reputable journal, Oceania, in which he warned: ‘We must beware lest we undervalue their intelligence because of certain aboriginal cultural traits which seem to us superstitious or primitive.’41 Elkin advanced a radically different view about Aboriginal potential. He believed they were capable of being educated and that differences in the scholastic achievements between them and whites could be explained by cultural factors and by the lack of a home environment which encouraged scholastic learning.

  However, such informed views failed to shape the thinking of delegates to the 1937 Conference. Social Darwinism prevailed. It was generally agreed that ‘full-blooded’ Aborigines would soon die out. Dr Cecil Cook, Chief Protector of Aborigines in the Northern Territory, explained: ‘If we leave them alone, they will die out, and we will have no problem, apart from dealing with those pangs of conscience which must attend the passing of a race.’42 This was similar to Neville’s view:

  In my opinion, however, the problem is one which will eventually solve itself. There are a great many full-blooded aborigines in Western Australia living their own natural lives. They are not, for the most part, getting enough food, and they are, in fact, being decimated by their own tribal practices. In my opinion, no matter what we do, they will die out.

  Neville had no evidence for this view. Nevertheless, the practices of infanticide and abortion raised a deep moral issue for him; ‘should [we] allow any race living amongst us to practice the abominations which are prevalent among these people.’43

  In his major address to the Conference, Neville urged delegates to adopt the long-range plan being developed in his own State. He saw the Aboriginal situation in three phases: the ‘pure-blooded’ Aborigines in the far north who, he predicted, would eventually die out; a growing number of detribalised and ‘half-caste’ Aborigines in the middle-north; and a growing number of ‘coloured people’ or ‘half-castes’ in the south. It was this third group which was at the centre of Neville’s racial planning. If they were not absorbed into the general population, he rhetorically asked delegates, what is to be the limit to their number? His answer provoked the ultimate fear about Aborigines: ‘are we going to have a population of one million blacks in the Commonwealth?’ There was plenty of support for a play on these sort of fears from other delegates.

  Professor J B Cleland, Chairman of the South Australian Advisory Council on Aborigines who, in drawing attention to the increasing population of ‘half-castes’, concluded that a ‘very unfortunate situation would arise if a large half-caste population breeding within themselves eventually rose in any of the Australian States.’44 Cecil Cook expressed a similar concern when he said that ‘the preponderance of coloured races, the preponderance of coloured alien blood and the scarcity of white females to mate with the white male population’ would create ‘a position of incalculable future menace to the purity of race in tropical Australia.’ Worse could happen. Cook believed a large population of blacks ‘may drive out the whites.’45

  Delegates from Queensland, Northern Territory and Western Australia were unanimous on one point: white interests must be protected. As Cook argued, continuing with an elaborate system of protection would end up producing ‘an aboriginal population that is likely to swamp the white.’ Neville believed he could meet this emerging ‘menace’ head-on. He spoke to delegates about his twenty-five year plan ‘to merge the two races.’ This involved ‘breeding out’ Aboriginality through intermarriage in the white community, although the full explanation of his vision requires study of his book, Australia’s Coloured Minority which he wrote in 1947 after his retirement. Neville envisaged a three-part, interlocking plan set against the Social Darwinist belief that ‘full-blood’ Aborigines would eventually die out. For the remaining ‘half-castes’, the plan was to take the children away from their mothers; to control marriage among ‘half-castes’; and to encourage intermarriage with the white community. In this way, it would be possible to ‘eventually forget that there were ever any Aborigines in Australia’.

  Of the crucial first part of his plan, Neville explained:

  we must take charge of the children at the age of six years; it is useless to wait till they are twelve or thirteen years of age. In Western Australia we have the power under the act to take any child from its mother at any stage of its life, no matter whether the mother is legally married or not. It is, however, our intention to establish sufficient settlements to undertake the training and education of these children so that they may become absorbed into the general community.

  Neville described to the Conference details about the work of Sister Kate’s in implementing his policy. By way of background, he explained the key principle upon which the Home operated: ‘you cannot change a native after he has reached the age of puberty, but before that it is possible to mould him.’ In other words, the objective of the Home was cultural transformation. At this time Sister Kate’s was home to over a hundred children and, as Neville described:

  when they enter the institution, the children are removed from their parents, who are allowed to see them occasionally in order to satisfy themselves that they are being properly looked after. At first the mothers tried to entice the children back to the camps, but that difficulty is now being overcome.46

  Neville made one startling admission about this aspect of his long-range plan. He admitted it was ‘well known that coloured races all over the world detest institutionalisation.’ Neville knew why: Aborigines ‘have tremendous affection for their children.’

  The operation of Sister Kate’s excited considerable interest among delegates from other States. It is clear no one had so far established anything quite like it.

  The second part of Neville’s racial plan—controlling marriage among ‘half-castes’—was a matter on which he had already acted, as he explained to the delegates:

  in order to prevent the return of those half-castes who are nearly white to the black, the State Parliament has enacted legislation including the giving of control over the marriages of the half-castes. Under this law no half-caste need be allowed to marry a full-blooded aboriginal if it is possible to avoid it.

  Neville was at the forefront of racial thinking in advocating marriage between lighter coloured Aborigines and the white population as a desired outcome. Most of the community was appalled at the idea, including Neville’s own field officers. In Australia’s Coloured Minority he recalled the attitude of white superiority among his officers:

  I remember one of my senior officers, when discussing the future of a coloured girl, declaiming in florid language that ‘we of the blood of a Gladstone, a Shakespeare, or a Kitchener should not plant our seed in the womb of a native’, and that ‘for the half-blood child the slogan should be, back to the aborigine ever—marry a white man never.’

  However, Neville regarded intermarriage as a practical solution to Australia’s race problem. He possessed highly refined racial arguments in support of his view. His own observations told him that ‘incorrect mating’ among the ‘half-castes’ had steadily produced an inferior ‘breed’. In Neville’s mind, a better type of ‘half-caste’ had existed thirty or forty years previously. These were robust, vigorous people, who travelled the country as ‘good, hard workers’. However, they intermarried and ‘became lethargic’. Only with the admixture of further white blood did they, according to Neville, recover some of the original traits, eventually ‘acquiring part of the good qualities of both races; the physical improvement being notable.’47 Herein lay the crux of Neville’s plan. It was critical, he wrote, to encourage ‘the white ra
ther than the black through marriage.’

  In his 1947 book, Neville writes in lyrical terms about the potential for his scheme. Conceding momentarily that it ‘is not always wise for people of widely diverse races to intermarry’, it is nevertheless possible:

  The young half-blood maiden is a pleasant, placid, complacent person as a rule, while the quadroon girl is often strikingly attractive, with her oftimes auburn hair, rosy freckled colouring, and good figure … As I see it, what we have to do is to elevate these people to our own plane, and if intermarriage between them and ourselves becomes more popular, then we shall be none the worse for it. That will solve our problem of itself.48

  Existing law was designed to prevent miscegenation. Neville was only too aware of the legal difficulties involved, not least because the Act ‘said that cohabitation was an offence, but did not mention sexual intercourse.’49 Faced, on the one hand with these legal difficulties, and on the other with the need to solve the ‘half-caste’ problem, Neville pinned his hopes on intermarriage. ‘I know of some 80 white men who are married to native women, with whom they are living happy, contented lives, so I see no objection to the ultimate absorption into our own race of the whole of the existing Australian native race.’50 The key aspect of this plan needs re-emphasis. In Neville’s mind absorption did not mean merely co-existence on equal social terms. His was a larger vision. He believed that, through intermarriage, children of such unions would become steadily lighter in colour until, ultimately, the race of Aborigines ceased to exist.

  Neville gave considerable space in his 1947 book to detailing the genetics behind his plan for ‘correct mating’. In fact, one key section has the appearance of a ‘how to’ manual for breeding out the Aboriginal race. It contains a range of photographs of Aboriginal people captioned as various racial ‘crosses’.