This is the broader racial context within which the removal of children must be placed if it is to be fully understood. Alongside restrictions on immigration, it represents a pillar of official policy aimed at ensuring that Anglo-Australian superiority remained unchallenged. The determination with which Australian governments of this period articulated and defended their policy of racial discrimination needs some emphasis. Australia’s efforts, from the early years of the twentieth century, to establish human rights in international law is well-documented. Less well known is the selective morality which lay behind these efforts: Australia’s commitment to human rights did not extend to racial equality.
Although heavily involved in developing international law to protect human rights following the First World War, including those of minorities, Australia was not prepared to recognise the human right of racial non-discrimination.381 The first real test came at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 when the Japanese representatives suggested a clause on racial equality be inserted in the Covenant of the League of Nations. The Australian delegation, led by the Prime Minister, William Hughes, was most uncomfortable, arguing such a clause would encroach upon the right of countries to determine their own domestic policies. Hughes outlined Australia’s opposition in these words: ‘Our White Australia policy would be a pricked bladder. Our control over immigration laws would be so much waste of paper.’382
Australia’s discriminatory attitude continued into the period following the end of the Second World War when the contemporary human rights protocols were developed. During this period, Australia’s eagerness for greater observance of human rights was counterbalanced by a tenacious defence of her racially discriminatory White Australia Policy and law. London describes this tenacity and its implication thus:
at the San Francisco Convention in 1945 Dr Evatt as Deputy Prime Minister vigorously argued for a Charter resolution which prohibited United Nations authority from interfering in the domestic policy of member states. His argument—a reaction to the possibility that pressure would be exerted to change the White Australia policy—unwittingly forced Australia into ‘the racialist camp’.383
Subsequent events, well into the 1960s, gave Australia the tag of being a human rights activist blinkered by racism. For instance, in order to save Australia’s immigration policy from scrutiny and denunciation, her representative in the United Nations General Assembly vehemently protested an attempt to put South African apartheid on the agenda in 1952. The Menzies government insisted that the UN respect the principle of non-interference in domestic affairs. When pressures forced South Africa out of the Commonwealth, Menzies had this to say:
Even though there has been a great deal of international agitation this is still a matter of domestic policy in South Africa … It is as much a matter of domestic policy as Australian immigration policy is a domestic matter for us. And to have a member of the Commonwealth virtually excluded on a matter of domestic policy presents, in my opinion, a rather disagreeable vista of the possibilities for the future.384
Such an official attachment to racism helps explain why the policy of removing children was so readily endorsed by government: Aborigines were not thought of as having rights. Rather, they were subjected to the broader racial aims of government and the nation. However, this broader connection to official racial policy is only part of the explanation for the persistence of the policy of removing children from their families. It could not have been sustained but for the character of Australian racism.
As a mode of human behaviour, racism has always defied easy explanation, as does its persistence in a wide-range of societies. In recent years a vast literature has grown around the concept of racism to try and explain its workings. Examination of the major theories about racism is valuable for shedding further light on the deeper motivations for policy-makers’ persistence with removing Aboriginal children.
One explanatory theory categorises racism into two main types: dominative racism and aversive racism. Together, they produced the uniquely troubled legacy of black-white relations Australia has witnessed to date. Dominative racism is the desire by some people to dominate or subjugate members of another group. Whites, for instance, would live and work in close proximity to blacks, even assigning black women to nurse and care for their young. White men might visit black women for sexual purposes, a practice producing the ‘mixed blood race’. Whites do not mind associating or having contact with blacks on a daily basis—‘as long as they know their place! They were not to get uppity or self-assertive.’385 Aversive racism, on the other hand, is expressed in the desire to avoid contact with blacks, thus restricting them to isolated areas—beyond the boundaries of white interests. Settlement reserves, mission homes and other forms of ‘caste barriers’ in Australia owe their origins largely to this racial concept.
Comte Gobineau, commonly cited as the father of modern racism, popularised the claims of dominative and aversive racism in his Essay on the Inequality of Human Races in the 1850s, a period during which both forms of racism were jockeying for dominance in Australia. As the experience of the stolen generations shows, the white attitude to Aborigines became simultaneously subjugatory and repelling from the second half of the 19th century, peaking arguably in the 1930s-60s. (In this regard, the Australian experience of racism stands apart from the United States of America where the dominative form has been more common in the southern states and the aversive form in the northern states.) During the era of the stolen generations in Australia, the two forms of racism drove official policy in a mutually reinforcing way. Aversive racism removed Aborigines off their land or out of the cities, to make way for European possession, and dominative racism turned them into cheap labourers and domestic servants. The result was a more systematic and long-standing implementation of white-on-black racism than in any other part of the Western world.
Giving effect to this fusion of dominative and aversive racism required that its aims become built into the operation of society’s institutions. It is only here that it can be transformed into official policies. This process involves formulating a vision and designing mechanisms to give effect to this vision. The aim of institutionalised racism is the subordination of one racial group by another and to render them as inferior beings. This process is crystallised around policies and laws designed to ensure subjugation. In Western Australia this included the raft of legal sanctions denying citizenship to Aborigines, using legal powers to determine where they could live, how they could work, and who they could marry. Reviewing this body of legislative restriction in 1953, the Commissioner for Native Affairs wrote:
It approved of their pauperisation on the one hand and on the other directed a form of control which bordered on unwarranted interference of personal liberty unparalleled in the legislative treatment of any other people in the Commonwealth. Its effect on Aborigines was to create in their minds a state of degradation, or at least inferiority.386
The removal of Aboriginal children from their families was an expression of the institutionalised racism in Australia. It was to play a significant role in this process of subordination. Alongside the contribution this policy made to destroying Aboriginal culture for the purposes of white Australia, it served several other purposes as well. It signified to Aboriginal people their inferiority as parents and it ensured the future economic marginalisation of generations of Aboriginal people. The frank admission made in 1958 by the Commissioner for Native Welfare—and discussed in Chapter 5—that assimilation was, in some respects, worse than apartheid because it gave to whites the right to decide whether Aborigines could share in their jealously guarded privileges, is the clearest possible demonstration that removal and assimilation were tools to perpetuate Aboriginal disadvantage. Moreover, the meagre preparation these children received in missions and other institutions to which they were sent condemned most of them to unskilled worker status. Neville alluded to this outcome in the 1940s. Of children in missions, he wro
te, ‘only a very few are taught how to handle modern farming machinery correctly, indeed much of the plant is obsolete, and as such would not be found on any up-to-date farm.’387 This was not just a product of neglect, it represented a choice; a decision not to train Aboriginal teenagers in any way that they might compete with white interests in the skilled trades. This was acknowledged by authorities at the time. It is in this context that the 1945 admission—discussed in Chapter 2—by the Commissioner of Native Affairs is so significant. The aim of education, he said, was to bring Aborigines into employment in ways which ‘will not bring them into economic or social conflict with the white community.’ In other words, Aborigines had to be kept, as much as possible, out of the skilled trades.
To characterise the removal of children as an example of institutionalised racism is to beg one further question. What perpetuates the institutionalised racism where expression is given to schemes to both segregate and subjugate Aboriginal people? While no general theory can account for this process, it is the product of several interacting forces. Importantly, it is a reflection of the determination of whites to protect their economic interests from any challenge by Aborigines. As Castles has argued, economic exploitation played a part in the emergence of racism throughout the world.388
Dispossessing Aborigines of their land and exploiting them as a cheap labour force have been central themes in black/white relations since the earliest days of settlement. Nowhere are these intentions clearer in Western Australia than in the report of a 1927 meeting at which the struggle for land was discussed. Archbishop Riley, A O Neville, together with several of the State’s large land owners were present:
the native and the European, the missioner and the squatter, both [sic] wanted the same thing … The meeting was held in view of the fact that the native was suffering under the impact from the white man … and that the future of the squatter depended upon getting rid of the native, even though he represented cheap labour, if only by segregation.389
Little more than a decade later, the desire to prevent Aborigines from becoming numerically strong enough to threaten white economic interests was an important part of the motivation behind the adoption of absorption among delegates attending the 1937 conference. There is little doubt, too, that it suited the purposes of whites to have a pool of marginalised Aboriginal workers to labour on the farms in times of high demand. The desire to institutionalise the removal of Aboriginal children thus suited the wider economic interests of white society. By removing the children’s culture they were unlikely to feel connected to their land; indeed many were not to know the location of their ‘country’. The almost universal acceptance that they should be trained as domestics and farm labourers reflects the future economic role envisaged for them.
Institutionalising racism in order to dominate and control Aboriginal people was also underpinned by the need for whites to protect their feelings of psychological superiority which, in racial terms, was manifest in prejudice. The depth of prejudice shown towards Aborigines by almost every level of society is one of the central themes running through this book. It was prejudice that lay behind the creation of the policy of segregation in the form of the disgraceful network of reserves. It was prejudice that justified the low wage levels paid to Aboriginal people and banned their entry into Perth city for so many years. The policy of removal was also a product of a mentality of prejudice. Those who planned the policy openly paraded this prejudice which they objectified in the form of ‘half-castes’: a group of people stereotyped as lazy, drunken, and lacking morality. From such prejudice it easily followed that their children should be taken from them. Those prepared to sanction this, and other policies of discrimination, closely represent the category identified by Rose as ‘prejudiced discriminators’: ‘These are people who embody the commonly held assumption that prejudice and discrimination are mutually dependent. [They do] not hesitate to express the basic attitude—“all whites are superior to coloured people”—or to convert it into overt behaviour.’390
The longevity of whites’ belief in their own superiority also owed much to the replication of this belief among succeeding generations. Racism is learnt attitudes and behaviours and, once ingrained into the fabric of social thought, it can easily become the accepted way of dealing with minority groups. The socialisation of succeeding generations into ways of thinking about Aboriginal families as inferior helped institutionalise the response of removal as a justifiable policy. As Rose observes, ‘if the agents of socialisation—parents or peers or community leaders—are themselves prejudiced people, they are apt to be effective teachers of group antipathies whether the objects of their attitudes are immediate neighbours or distant groups.’391 We have shown government officials, community leaders and ordinary members of the public openly seeking to segregate Aboriginal people from schools, workplaces and suburban areas; signalling to younger generations their belief in the inferiority of Aborigines. It was this well of community prejudice socialised into succeeding generations, which partly explains why removal lasted for more than three decades.
Considering the economic, psychological and sociological manifestations of prejudice, it is clear that the racism which Aborigines suffered cannot be seen merely as a product of some ‘fallen human nature’ or an aberrant human quirk. Nor should it be dismissed as the work of wrong-headed ‘scientists’ who come and go in the history of ideas. Moreover, we should not tell ourselves that its worst manifestations are only in the past. As this book has shown, the policy to separate Aboriginal children from their families was a deliberately constructed choice supported by many sections of Australian society. Other forms of removal exist today and are widely supported. Periodic opposition to this policy then, and now, underlies the choice available to policy-makers. Why has this policy persisted? The experiences of the stolen generations, their parents and, subsequently, their own children show it is the three-century phenomenon of white-on-black racism, grounded in a historically skewed world view on race and material exploitation.
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