Our State of Mind

by Quentin Beresford

  It is obvious that their living conditions cannot be compared with those of the white man who is in an elaborate social structure and who must receive a comparatively high wage to live up to the required standard. The basic wage of the white man … is based on the need to maintain a home and family. The white man has to make certain provisions regarding old age, sickness, education of his children, etc. None of these matters concerns the average native. Neither his living conditions nor his commitments are comparable to those of the whites.85

  Other forces at work during the 1950s conspired to deprive most Aborigines of a living wage. Catch-up work necessary after the war such as clearing, burning, root-picking and fencing had kept Aboriginal men and their families living on the farms and in seasonal work, but it came to an end in the early 1950s. Many displaced workers shifted onto the reserves near towns.86

  Additional unfavourable forces appeared as the fifties progressed. Technological changes in farming such as the spread of chainsaws, motor vehicles and tractors largely excluded Aboriginal people as contractors because they lacked capital to purchase such equipment. Newly arrived migrants competed with Aborigines for farm jobs while a rural downturn in the late 1950s robbed what little casual work remained for Aborigines.87 Estimates by the Department of Native Affairs, and reported in the 1953 Annual Report, claimed fewer than five per cent of Aborigines in the South West were in permanent employment. At best, the rest worked for eight or nine months a year, placing ‘a severe strain on the native breadwinner.’ Some supplemented their diet with kangaroo meat but ‘these are the fortunate few … who happen to live near uncleared bush country.’ As a consequence, poverty increased among Aboriginal families, again making them extremely vulnerable to having their children removed for ‘welfare’ reasons. Even when Aborigines derived limited, but important, additional assistance from the introduction of Child Endowment payments in 1943, the Department of Native Affairs increased its surveillance of Aboriginal families to ensure these monies were being spent ‘wisely’. For those unable to satisfy the Department, ‘consideration [would] be given to the removal of their children to Missions and Government Institutions.’88

  In 1955 reserves in the Geraldton area had witnessed, according to the Department of Native Affairs, ‘too much sickness, sometimes followed by death among the children’.89 Bronchial complaints and gastric upsets were the most frequent illnesses, and these were related directly to the standard of living of the parents: ‘Generally speaking these people are unable to afford ample nourishment for their families, but too many of them live in tents and humpies, with completely inadequate ablutions and sanitation.’

  The neglect of Aboriginal housing by successive State governments in the post-war period greatly exacerbated the impact of poverty on Aboriginal people. With the number of reserves growing from thirty-six in 1949 to seventy by 1964, an escalating crisis resulted. Throughout this period most of the reserves were a sorry spectacle. They continued to be located within a few kilometres of country towns but on sites not wanted for anything else. Often they were in close proximity to rubbish tips, sanitary depots or abandoned dumps. Only half had running water and earth closet latrines. Those reserves without these basic services were a dangerous health risk. An inspector from the Health Department visited the Borden Reserve near Gnowangerup and found atrocious conditions:

  The water supply is from a dam on the reserve. This dam is not fenced and is used for watering stock and dogs as well as for human consumption. The dam was just a mud hole at the time of inspection. There was all types of debris and manure in it. This water must be considered very dangerous … On these reserves the native camps consist of tent and bush huts. Some of the camps have beds, but the majority of the natives sleep on the ground.90

  In the worst of these camps, ‘half-clothed or naked children, filthy and invariably covered with flies, played among the rubbish which always accumulated in the camp.’91

  A state of virtual apartheid existed in many country towns during the 1950s. In Roebourne, for example, very few Aborigines lived in the town. However across the river, three-quarters of a mile away, was a reserve where 150 Aborigines lived. The numerous corrugated iron huts were self-built. They were small, unlined, unlit, and poorly ventilated. Each day, about thirty of the sixty children set out on the one kilometre walk to school. A 1956 Department of Native Affairs report into this reserve was couched in the language of blaming the victims. The living conditions of these reserves, the Report noted, ‘do much to hinder any opportunities the natives might have in this area of attaining some small measure of social acceptance and assimilation.’92

  The Commonwealth Government considered the need to upgrade Aboriginal housing as early as 1945, acknowledging that many Aborigines were then striving to improve their living conditions and social circumstances but, ‘where an aborigine desires to have good housing he is frequently frustrated by his low level of income.’93 However, the State Government made little effort to improve these conditions until the late 1950s, and then only modestly. In fact, State Governments in the post-war era were deliberately reluctant to spend adequate amounts of money for the social benefit of Aborigines. The continued removal of Aboriginal children from their families on the grounds of neglect must be seen against this moral failure by the State.

  The reserves presented Aboriginal families with impossible conditions under which to parent effectively, at least in ways which avoided the condemnation of white officials. At one level, the alleged neglect of children was a direct outcome of the impoverished conditions imposed on Aborigines by the reserve system. Worse still, officials knew this was the case. The Commissioner of Native Affairs was well aware that social conditions beyond the control of Aborigines, were leading to children being removed into State care. Documents relating to an investigation carried out by department patrol officers into three malnutrition cases among Aboriginal children in the Beverley-Brookton area in 1958 show government’s full knowledge of this link. The patrol officer began his report with a disturbing observation. Malnutrition among native children in his district, he wrote, ‘poses a very serious problem’.94 He noted that lack of knowledge about mothercraft was one of the causes for the poor health of babies. It is possible many of these mothers had themselves been childhood inmates of institutions where there was limited exposure to parenting skills. However, a range of environmental and economic causes were also noted in the report. Firstly, the only source of water for the infants had an unpalatable taste. This led to a dangerous reduction in fluid intake by the infants, especially over the summer months. Secondly, home conditions encouraged fly-borne diseases and infections which left them ‘unfit for camp conditions and camp type food.’

  These people were in a classic poverty trap. They had no regular employment and, consequently, no income with which to improve conditions for their children. As the Patrol Officer’s report noted: ‘most of the malnutrition in native children is found in those families whose breadwinners through lack of sufficient employment or because of very irregular employment are not able to adequately provide for their families.’ Compounding the problem was that very few Aborigines qualified for Commonwealth Social Service benefits. Commonwealth governments had decreed that Aborigines with ‘a preponderance of Aboriginal blood’, even though they may have been living alongside white society, were ineligible for benefits with the exception of child endowment.

  Most were forced to accept government rations, especially during the idle months of December through to February, when no casual work was available on the district’s farms. However, these rations did not make adequate provision for the needs of infant children. Of the three cases of malnutrition which came to light in the Beverley-Brookton area in 1958, one died, one was admitted to the care of the State as neglected and one was admitted to hospital. As officials continued to remove the children, a blind eye was turned to the very conditions—and the very reasons of neglect—which they used to
justify their actions.

  In a broader sense, the poverty imposed upon Aboriginal people had a crippling effect on the education of children. Among those Aborigines trying to instil ambition in their children, overcrowding severely limited the ability to study. On a 1949 inspection at Pinjarra, a Department of Native Affairs officer visited the Corbett family who lived in a hut two miles from the school. The parents and seven children shared four rooms, ten feet square in all, with numerous cracks in all the walls and only rough-laid planks as flooring. The children slept two to a bed in three beds in one bedroom, the parents and the baby in the other bedroom. The father was in regular employment and the hut was clean. The inspector talked to the eldest daughter—‘a quiet, attractive, well mannered girl’—who, he discovered, wished to become a nurse. However, he acknowledged it would ‘be almost impossible for her to study in the limited space available with six younger brothers and sisters.’95

  The difficulties faced by Aboriginal parents in their struggle to improve their material conditions—and many expressed a desire to do so—were greatly compounded by community racism. In the mid 1930s, Perth had been declared a prohibited area for Aborigines. To gain entry to the city, Aborigines were required to obtain a pass which would only be granted to those in employment.96 Throughout the 1940s and 50s, racism was explicit at all levels of society. Annual Reports from the Department regularly referred to the ‘wall of colour prejudice’ that existed in the community.97 Social ostracism was widespread. Commissioner F I Bray had acknowledged in the early 1940s that it was impossible for Aborigines and whites to cohabitate. Even where ‘detribalised natives become educated and desire to live as whites, they are not accepted socially by whites.’ With ‘few exceptions’, whites were hostile to the idea of social equality with Aborigines and Bray believed this prejudice forced Aborigines to live ‘as a class unto themselves’.98

  Aborigines living in Perth were concentrated in the slum area of East Perth and efforts to establish a reserve for them in the metropolitan area were bitterly and successfully resisted by pressure exerted from white residents backed up by local authorities. ‘Natives,’ commented the Department as late as 1959, ‘were not wanted anywhere in the metropolitan area.’99 It had been compelled to acknowledge some years earlier that majority white opinion ‘insists on natives “being kept in their place” which means, in effect, keeping them socially ostracised and under-privileged.’100

  Socially, Aborigines were kept at a tightly drawn distance from the white population. Throughout the southern part of Western Australia, they were widely debarred from attending trotting and race meetings, the cinema and from playing in organised football competitions. This last restriction in particular exacerbated Aboriginal marginalisation. ‘A game at which most native youths excel is denied to them because of what can only be termed blind colour prejudice. Instead, natives spend their Sunday afternoons—the football afternoon in the country—playing two-up at their camps.’101

  Even the Western Australian police were noted for ‘their extremely harsh attitude’ towards Aborigines; Bateman argued they were totally unsuited to act in the capacity of protectors, a role they held in country centres.102 Hospitals in the southern part of the State were reluctant to admit Aboriginal people during the 1940s,103 but it was schools that became the principal battleground over race and the continuing desire among many West Australians for segregation between themselves and Aborigines. The situation prior to the 1940s was summed up by A O Neville. In a frank admission in his 1938 Annual Report he acknowledged that, throughout his period of service, ‘a whole generation of [Aboriginal] children has grown up who have missed being educated through natural prejudice.’104 The situation improved somewhat in the late 1940s, when it was claimed Aborigines were attending over a hundred state schools, although usually only in very small numbers and with little community acceptance.

  Officially, schools in Western Australia followed a policy of non-segregation. In reality the system was not only highly discriminatory against the attendance of Aboriginal children, but also State Government policy allowed for such discrimination. In the early 1940s, a member of the Legislative Council, Mr Roche, called on the Commissioner for Native Affairs, to pursue the complaints of white parents at the Orchid Valley School who were objecting to the attendance of three Aboriginal students. ‘I gather from Mr Roche’s remarks,’ the Commissioner later wrote, ‘that the objection of the parents would rest entirely on the colour question and not on account of the living conditions of the children concerned [as the family] live under reasonably satisfactory conditions.’ Mr Roche indicated he favoured ‘the complete exclusion of native children from all schools’, but the Commissioner was more pragmatic: ‘no action will be taken about Orchid Valley at the moment’, he wrote. ‘We must await events and see whether a protest is made by the white parents.’105

  In country towns especially, parents were able to use a provision in the Act which allowed children to be excluded if they ‘suffer from any contagious, offensive or infectious disease or are habitually of unclean habits.’106 Even in the late 1940s, the Minister for Education, Mr Watts, was proclaiming the policy of coeducation of white and ‘native’ children while upholding the need for government to be sensitive to ‘the conditions prevailing at the school and in the district concerned’.107 It is difficult to determine how frequently this provision was used by local communities to exclude Aboriginal children as not all cases necessarily came to light. However there are a number of instances on record in the 1940s.

  Bateman’s observations about prevailing community opinion on the racial composition of schools give some telling insights. Fear of moral contamination from camp-dwelling children, he explained, drove white attitudes:

  It is unarguable that the environment of the native camp can only result in a low code of morals, bad habits and serious exposure to infection. In these circumstances it is not a strange phenomenon, but only a natural consequence that parents of white children object to their children being compelled to associate with children reared in such an environment.108

  In 1947 parental opposition to the education of Aboriginal children in state schools in Carnarvon flared ‘into bitter antagonism.’ Following the establishment in the town of the Church of Christ Mission, parents carried on a campaign for several months to bar the entry of mission children, ‘openly threatening to restrain their children from attending school.’109 It is likely that non-Aboriginal children in such schools would ‘tease, pick on and belt’ students from missions, as Trish Hill-Keddie recounted in her story.

  In 1949, a District Officer from the Department of Native Affairs visited the Pinjarra School where he talked with the headmaster. From this conversation, it emerged that Aboriginal children were barely tolerated at the school:

  He [the Headmaster] spoke with obvious repugnance of the condition in which they came to school but he had no knowledge of their living conditions. To illustrate his remarks he took me around to the classrooms and brought different native children to me. They were without exception, reasonably clean, particularly when one takes into consideration the fact that the inspection was made after the lunch break. He admitted that his wife (who teaches in the school) is very prejudiced against natives and said that when square dancing is contemplated, native boys are told to fall out, as ‘She couldn’t bear the thought of white girls having to hold their hands.’110

  In the face of these attitudes, it is perhaps not surprising Aboriginal children frequently absconded from school and most did not attend at all beyond the age of eleven or twelve.

  The reaction of Aboriginal parents to these difficulties varied. Some Aborigines who still followed a traditional way of life, even though they may have been classified as ‘detribalised’, were keen to have their children accompany them on their trips around the country. Others following a settled and largely urban existence harboured aspirations for their children and were distressed that prejudi
ce blighted their prospects. In a rare example of cultural empathy, a District Officer from the Department of Native Affairs detailed in a report to Head Office the feelings of the Aborigines living in Northampton. ‘Coloured parents,’ he said,

  show interest in seeing that their children are educated better than they themselves have been. Many have sent or are intending to send their boys and girls through High School to at least Junior Examination Standard. However, by several such native parents it has been said ‘What will they do then?’ Even those parents with their children now at High School can see no clear future for their offspring. They feel that prejudice in their field of employment and socially will prevent them from ever becoming more than just ‘another nigger’.

  The only heartening sign, according to the Northampton Patrol Officer, was the refusal of these parents to adopt a defeatist attitude.111 This is remarkable given the scale of hostility facing Aborigines over education. In September 1949, a meeting was held between the Native Affairs and Education departments about the irregular attendance of Aborigines at school. The Commissioner, S G Middleton, believed the provision of scholarships for Aboriginal children to stay on in high school, together with accommodation in Perth for those coming from the country, would be practical solutions to the problem. However, he was not hopeful of achieving either quickly because of the ‘public outcry and prejudice’. He put the problem bluntly: ‘In this State a solution to the problem could be seen but the Department was up against a wall of prejudice.’112 How, then, could these children get an education? Middleton put to the meeting a plan to extend in scope the existing practice of removing children from their families. He explained:

  One of their [Education Department’s] inspectors had already accompanied an Inspector of Native Affairs on a tour of some camps, with a view of getting evidence to the effect that parents were nomadic and not sending their children to school, with the idea of having them brought before the Children’s Court.