Australia has many myths about its history, and particularly about our history of invasion and dispossession of Aboriginal people. Among them are the myth that Australia was terra nullius, an empty land, prior to the arrival of the British; the idea that Aboriginal people were hunter-gatherers who roamed randomly around the country; and the idea that the Europeans named the various parts of the country, as if they did not already have names.
Each of these myths has been comprehensively busted, but many Australians remain unaware of this fact. Other myths also remain alive.
Rosalind Kidd is a Queensland historian whose main work has been on the administration of Aboriginal affairs in Queensland. At the start of the 1990s she was given access, through the intervention of Aboriginal academic and activist Marcia Langton, to the files of Queensland's Aboriginal Affairs Department going back to the foundation of the colony. Aside from her doctoral thesis, the major results of this work were twofold. She wrote a scholarly but accessible history of Aboriginal Affairs in Queensland titled The Way We Civilise, which I read not long after its publication in 1997. Of perhaps more direct significance, she provided detailed historical evidence which backed efforts by Aboriginal people to recover wages stolen from them by the government over a number of decades.
Over the years I've attended a number of events hosted by Brisbane's Aboriginal Christian leaders and Aunty Jean Phillips regularly promotes Ros Kidd's books, including this one, Black Lives, Government Lies. Aunty Jean is a woman who has walked the talk for decades and well worth listening to, so I bought a copy last year and read it while I was confined to my lounge chair after my bike accident.
I was blown away not so much by the information in the book (much of it I knew already from reading The Way We Civilise) as by Kidd's passion. It was published in 2000 in the wake of the Bringing Them Home report into stolen children, and its 60-odd pages are bookended by telling quotes from two political leaders of the time. The opening quote is given to then Prime Minister John Howard, speaking in parliament in 1999.
I have frequently said, and I will say it again today, that present generations of Australians cannot be held accountable...for the errors and misdeeds of earlier generations.
It's final chapter is headed by a quote from then Aboriginal Affairs Minister, Senator John Herron:
...[T]he treatment of separated Aboriginal children was essentially lawful and benign in intent...it is impossible to evaluate by contemporary standards decisions that were taken in the past.
This is a cluster of myths often repeated by non-Aboriginal Australians - that the dispossession and mistreatment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people was long ago and need not concern us now, and that times and social standards have changed since then. Our ancestors may have done wrong, but our hands are clean.
Drawing on the records of over a century of Queensland Government management of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs, Kidd comprehensively blows this myth out of the water.
From 1897 to the 1970s, the lives of Aboriginal people in Queensland were governed by the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of Opium Act 1897. This Act defined all Aboriginal people, child or adult, as wards of the State, giving the 'Protector' virtually total power over the lives of Aboriginal people. He and his delegates (generally the senior police officer in each locality) could decide where they lived, where they worked, whether they could marry, what should happen to their money and pretty much every other important detail of their lives. Older Aboriginal people still talk about living 'under the Act'. John Herron would have liked us to believe that this regime was benign and well-intentioned but Kidd begs to differ
She begins with the practice of child removal. The Act allowed the Protector to remove any child and send him or her anywhere. While we often think of this in terms of Aboriginal children brought up in non-Aboriginal families a bigger story, if anything, was those raised in dormitories. These children sometimes had contact with their parents but often they were taken hundreds of kilometres from their home country.
Can we even imagine the terror of being wrenched, often at gunpoint, from your family and homelands, locked up in watch house cages en route, and then dumped in a strange place? Here, among perhaps a hundred other boys or girls, there might be not one person who could speak your language; if there was, if you spoke your own tongue you were thrashed. If you wet your bed you were made to stand outside in the freezing air draped in your urine-soaked sheet. If you answered back you were paraded in public humiliation with a shaven head and a hessian bag dress.
These dormitories, sometimes run by Christian missions and sometimes by the State, were subsidised at a rate per child 20-25% of that paid to orphanages housing non-Aboriginal children. Why? Did the authorities think these children ate less? Wore less clothes? Covered themselves more sparingly at night? Well, as it happened all these things were true because the managers had no money and the children were left cold, dirty and malnourished. Nor was much attention paid to their education - if they were taught at all it was in poorly lit, overcrowded classrooms with few if any books or writing materials. At best they learned elementary literacy and numeracy.
The adults and those children allowed to stay with their families did not fare much better. If they lived in town they would be unable to access housing and forced to live in makeshift dwellings on the edge of town. Their children would be refused school enrolment on the basis that their living conditions rendered them a health risk to other children. Yet if the family were moved to an Aboriginal community they would hardly be better off, because funding for the settlements was woefully inadequate.
Internal correspondence of the 1970s paints a terrible picture of continued gross overcrowding, cold unlined huts, lack of furniture, baths or sinks, blocked sumps, overflowing drains, smoke-blackened kitchens. At Edward River mission it was common for three and four families to share a hut; even so, many had to sleep outdoors by open fires. At Aurukun many families were still in bark huts; there was one tap for each ten houses and only six showers and one laundry for 650 people... At Yarrabah rampant hookworm and parasitic infestation was linked to malnutrition and water impurities, confirmed by data from 1973 to 1975 listing E coli present in 90% of water samples taken.
How did these people earn their living? Up until the start of the 20th century most Aboriginal people who were working were effectively slaves, unpaid and often forced into their work as stockmen or domestic servants for which they would receive meagre rations and cast-off clothes.
Then in 1901 a minimum wage for Aboriginal workers was set at between 6% and 12% of the white wage and, since employers frequently attempted to avoid payment, these wages were required to be paid into a government trust fund on their behalf. Although this money was supposed to support them, they didn't necessarily see any of it. Some of it was taken by the Protector in levies and charges. Some was kept as 'savings'. Meanwhile 'the people whose money it was continued to live, and die, in abject poverty'. Those who lived on the missions were rarely paid at all, and though forced to work would still be charged for rations if they had any savings in the trust fund. These trust funds remain notorious - much of the money ended up funding State infrastructure projects and many people are still fighting a legal battle to get their wages back.
This began to change slowly from the late 1960s when trade unions began advocating for Aboriginal members, but each victory was hard-fought and often pyrrhic. In 1968 the Aboriginal Affairs department moved to paying cash wages, but these wages were less than one fifth of the rates paid to non-Aboriginal workers. Even if one accepts the Department's excuse that they also received subsidised housing, electricity and food (remembering the quality of this housing described earlier) the total value was less than a third of that paid to other workers.
In 1975 the Commonwealth Government passed the Racial Discrimination Act, effectively making such pay differentials illegal. Despite Crown Law advice that the State was legally liable for full award wages, the government continued to fight wage cases in the courts up to the mid 1980s. When they inevitably lost, rather than increasing budgets for the settlements they simply cut staff. Employment on Aboriginal reserves was reduced from about 2500 in the mid 1970s to under 900 a decade later, plunging the communities into poverty and leaving their already substandard infrastructure to deteriorate further.
What is striking about this story, of which I have only included a small sample, is not only its rank injustice but its recency. These things happened in my lifetime. While I was living with my family in a comfortable Brisbane suburban home, Aboriginal families were living crammed into bark huts or sleeping in front of open fires. While I was receiving an excellent State education children my age were being denied the tools for basic literacy. As I was starting my first permanent job with the State Government in 1983 (a job that included overseeing the welfare of a number of Aboriginal children) the government I worked for was still resisting the payment of award wages to its Aboriginal staff and sacking them to balance the books.
Kidd applies the same analysis to Herron and Howard, and she doesn't hold back.
When Herron was a playful child at Home Hill, dormitory children of his own age in Yarrabah were dying from a diet of dry bread, black tea and shin-bone soup; when Howard was a youngster at Earlwood Primary, children at Ravenshoe lived in hessian and sheet iron shacks on a government reserve where the total lack of basic amenities excluded them from school for all of their childhoods. When Herron enjoyed his education at Christian Brothers College at Townsville, 180 of his Aboriginal cohorts across the water at Palm Island were crammed in a small poorly lit room while the best classroom, no longer needed for the eight white students, was allocated for record storage.
While Howard was winning accolades as an excellent debater and contemplating a university law degree, school-age Aboriginal children were still being contracted out to the pastoralists as cheap labour despite official records of frequent serious injuries. When Herron was carving out a medical career in Brisbane, epidemiological surveys showed malnutrition on government-controlled communities was the key factor in the deaths of 50% of Aboriginal children under three and 85% of Aboriginal children under four; infant mortality at Palm Island was fifteen times the State average, and the Queensland government was stripping the equivalent of nearly $206,000 from the mothers' endowment accounts for capital works on the mainland. When Howard entered Parliament, Aboriginal community workers were underpaid by almost 66%, and children were so hungry they stole scraps put out for the pigs.
Herron was vice-president of the Queensland Liberal Party when the State Coalition government left nearly 800 people at Mornington Island in rotting tents for a year while it disputed conditions on cyclone relief funds. He was elevated to president the year changes were made to the State's Audit Act so that the Aboriginal department could garnishee desperately needed social security cheques for rent arrears.
He was president from 1980 to 1983 while Queensland's Coalition government continued underpaying its Aboriginal employees although admitting, confidentially, it was breaking both State and federal law. How did he not know this to be the case? Howard became federal Liberal leader in 1985; he inherited the behind-the-scenes fight over wages, a fight whose blood terms of mass sackings and massive social damage were clearly defined by Bjelke-Petersen in 1978, a fight not then over. He must have known. Yet I have passed no record of his response.
Perhaps juvenile me, and juvenile Herron and Howard, had some excuse. Perhaps I even had some in 1983 when I started working in child welfare. In fact, the Aboriginal leaders I met in that job were kind enough to further my education on the other side of Australian history, beyond the little I had heard second-hand at uni. I still have a lot to learn.
By that time, Howard and Herron were well and truly walking the halls of power. Yet less than two decades later they could talk about what earlier generations did, about different standards in that distant past, as if it had nothing to do with them.
This is the elephant in the room, the uncomfortable truth we continue to deny. These injustices are not ancient history. This is the story of now, the story of my generation, the story of friends, neighbours, colleagues, the history that is so close under our noses that we can't see it. Or won't.
John Herron died recently, but John Howard is still with us, mentoring the current generation of Liberal leaders. Auntie Jean is, thankfully, also still going strong and mentoring a new generation of Aboriginal leaders. Aboriginal people are not going anywhere. Sooner or later we will have to come to terms with history and make amends. Let's make it sooner.
Each of these myths has been comprehensively busted, but many Australians remain unaware of this fact. Other myths also remain alive.
Rosalind Kidd is a Queensland historian whose main work has been on the administration of Aboriginal affairs in Queensland. At the start of the 1990s she was given access, through the intervention of Aboriginal academic and activist Marcia Langton, to the files of Queensland's Aboriginal Affairs Department going back to the foundation of the colony. Aside from her doctoral thesis, the major results of this work were twofold. She wrote a scholarly but accessible history of Aboriginal Affairs in Queensland titled The Way We Civilise, which I read not long after its publication in 1997. Of perhaps more direct significance, she provided detailed historical evidence which backed efforts by Aboriginal people to recover wages stolen from them by the government over a number of decades.Over the years I've attended a number of events hosted by Brisbane's Aboriginal Christian leaders and Aunty Jean Phillips regularly promotes Ros Kidd's books, including this one, Black Lives, Government Lies. Aunty Jean is a woman who has walked the talk for decades and well worth listening to, so I bought a copy last year and read it while I was confined to my lounge chair after my bike accident.
I was blown away not so much by the information in the book (much of it I knew already from reading The Way We Civilise) as by Kidd's passion. It was published in 2000 in the wake of the Bringing Them Home report into stolen children, and its 60-odd pages are bookended by telling quotes from two political leaders of the time. The opening quote is given to then Prime Minister John Howard, speaking in parliament in 1999.
I have frequently said, and I will say it again today, that present generations of Australians cannot be held accountable...for the errors and misdeeds of earlier generations.
It's final chapter is headed by a quote from then Aboriginal Affairs Minister, Senator John Herron:
...[T]he treatment of separated Aboriginal children was essentially lawful and benign in intent...it is impossible to evaluate by contemporary standards decisions that were taken in the past.
This is a cluster of myths often repeated by non-Aboriginal Australians - that the dispossession and mistreatment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people was long ago and need not concern us now, and that times and social standards have changed since then. Our ancestors may have done wrong, but our hands are clean.
Drawing on the records of over a century of Queensland Government management of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs, Kidd comprehensively blows this myth out of the water.
From 1897 to the 1970s, the lives of Aboriginal people in Queensland were governed by the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of Opium Act 1897. This Act defined all Aboriginal people, child or adult, as wards of the State, giving the 'Protector' virtually total power over the lives of Aboriginal people. He and his delegates (generally the senior police officer in each locality) could decide where they lived, where they worked, whether they could marry, what should happen to their money and pretty much every other important detail of their lives. Older Aboriginal people still talk about living 'under the Act'. John Herron would have liked us to believe that this regime was benign and well-intentioned but Kidd begs to differ
She begins with the practice of child removal. The Act allowed the Protector to remove any child and send him or her anywhere. While we often think of this in terms of Aboriginal children brought up in non-Aboriginal families a bigger story, if anything, was those raised in dormitories. These children sometimes had contact with their parents but often they were taken hundreds of kilometres from their home country.
Can we even imagine the terror of being wrenched, often at gunpoint, from your family and homelands, locked up in watch house cages en route, and then dumped in a strange place? Here, among perhaps a hundred other boys or girls, there might be not one person who could speak your language; if there was, if you spoke your own tongue you were thrashed. If you wet your bed you were made to stand outside in the freezing air draped in your urine-soaked sheet. If you answered back you were paraded in public humiliation with a shaven head and a hessian bag dress.
These dormitories, sometimes run by Christian missions and sometimes by the State, were subsidised at a rate per child 20-25% of that paid to orphanages housing non-Aboriginal children. Why? Did the authorities think these children ate less? Wore less clothes? Covered themselves more sparingly at night? Well, as it happened all these things were true because the managers had no money and the children were left cold, dirty and malnourished. Nor was much attention paid to their education - if they were taught at all it was in poorly lit, overcrowded classrooms with few if any books or writing materials. At best they learned elementary literacy and numeracy.
The adults and those children allowed to stay with their families did not fare much better. If they lived in town they would be unable to access housing and forced to live in makeshift dwellings on the edge of town. Their children would be refused school enrolment on the basis that their living conditions rendered them a health risk to other children. Yet if the family were moved to an Aboriginal community they would hardly be better off, because funding for the settlements was woefully inadequate.
Internal correspondence of the 1970s paints a terrible picture of continued gross overcrowding, cold unlined huts, lack of furniture, baths or sinks, blocked sumps, overflowing drains, smoke-blackened kitchens. At Edward River mission it was common for three and four families to share a hut; even so, many had to sleep outdoors by open fires. At Aurukun many families were still in bark huts; there was one tap for each ten houses and only six showers and one laundry for 650 people... At Yarrabah rampant hookworm and parasitic infestation was linked to malnutrition and water impurities, confirmed by data from 1973 to 1975 listing E coli present in 90% of water samples taken.
How did these people earn their living? Up until the start of the 20th century most Aboriginal people who were working were effectively slaves, unpaid and often forced into their work as stockmen or domestic servants for which they would receive meagre rations and cast-off clothes.
Then in 1901 a minimum wage for Aboriginal workers was set at between 6% and 12% of the white wage and, since employers frequently attempted to avoid payment, these wages were required to be paid into a government trust fund on their behalf. Although this money was supposed to support them, they didn't necessarily see any of it. Some of it was taken by the Protector in levies and charges. Some was kept as 'savings'. Meanwhile 'the people whose money it was continued to live, and die, in abject poverty'. Those who lived on the missions were rarely paid at all, and though forced to work would still be charged for rations if they had any savings in the trust fund. These trust funds remain notorious - much of the money ended up funding State infrastructure projects and many people are still fighting a legal battle to get their wages back.
This began to change slowly from the late 1960s when trade unions began advocating for Aboriginal members, but each victory was hard-fought and often pyrrhic. In 1968 the Aboriginal Affairs department moved to paying cash wages, but these wages were less than one fifth of the rates paid to non-Aboriginal workers. Even if one accepts the Department's excuse that they also received subsidised housing, electricity and food (remembering the quality of this housing described earlier) the total value was less than a third of that paid to other workers.
In 1975 the Commonwealth Government passed the Racial Discrimination Act, effectively making such pay differentials illegal. Despite Crown Law advice that the State was legally liable for full award wages, the government continued to fight wage cases in the courts up to the mid 1980s. When they inevitably lost, rather than increasing budgets for the settlements they simply cut staff. Employment on Aboriginal reserves was reduced from about 2500 in the mid 1970s to under 900 a decade later, plunging the communities into poverty and leaving their already substandard infrastructure to deteriorate further.
What is striking about this story, of which I have only included a small sample, is not only its rank injustice but its recency. These things happened in my lifetime. While I was living with my family in a comfortable Brisbane suburban home, Aboriginal families were living crammed into bark huts or sleeping in front of open fires. While I was receiving an excellent State education children my age were being denied the tools for basic literacy. As I was starting my first permanent job with the State Government in 1983 (a job that included overseeing the welfare of a number of Aboriginal children) the government I worked for was still resisting the payment of award wages to its Aboriginal staff and sacking them to balance the books.
Kidd applies the same analysis to Herron and Howard, and she doesn't hold back.
When Herron was a playful child at Home Hill, dormitory children of his own age in Yarrabah were dying from a diet of dry bread, black tea and shin-bone soup; when Howard was a youngster at Earlwood Primary, children at Ravenshoe lived in hessian and sheet iron shacks on a government reserve where the total lack of basic amenities excluded them from school for all of their childhoods. When Herron enjoyed his education at Christian Brothers College at Townsville, 180 of his Aboriginal cohorts across the water at Palm Island were crammed in a small poorly lit room while the best classroom, no longer needed for the eight white students, was allocated for record storage.
While Howard was winning accolades as an excellent debater and contemplating a university law degree, school-age Aboriginal children were still being contracted out to the pastoralists as cheap labour despite official records of frequent serious injuries. When Herron was carving out a medical career in Brisbane, epidemiological surveys showed malnutrition on government-controlled communities was the key factor in the deaths of 50% of Aboriginal children under three and 85% of Aboriginal children under four; infant mortality at Palm Island was fifteen times the State average, and the Queensland government was stripping the equivalent of nearly $206,000 from the mothers' endowment accounts for capital works on the mainland. When Howard entered Parliament, Aboriginal community workers were underpaid by almost 66%, and children were so hungry they stole scraps put out for the pigs.
Herron was vice-president of the Queensland Liberal Party when the State Coalition government left nearly 800 people at Mornington Island in rotting tents for a year while it disputed conditions on cyclone relief funds. He was elevated to president the year changes were made to the State's Audit Act so that the Aboriginal department could garnishee desperately needed social security cheques for rent arrears.
He was president from 1980 to 1983 while Queensland's Coalition government continued underpaying its Aboriginal employees although admitting, confidentially, it was breaking both State and federal law. How did he not know this to be the case? Howard became federal Liberal leader in 1985; he inherited the behind-the-scenes fight over wages, a fight whose blood terms of mass sackings and massive social damage were clearly defined by Bjelke-Petersen in 1978, a fight not then over. He must have known. Yet I have passed no record of his response.
Perhaps juvenile me, and juvenile Herron and Howard, had some excuse. Perhaps I even had some in 1983 when I started working in child welfare. In fact, the Aboriginal leaders I met in that job were kind enough to further my education on the other side of Australian history, beyond the little I had heard second-hand at uni. I still have a lot to learn.
By that time, Howard and Herron were well and truly walking the halls of power. Yet less than two decades later they could talk about what earlier generations did, about different standards in that distant past, as if it had nothing to do with them.
This is the elephant in the room, the uncomfortable truth we continue to deny. These injustices are not ancient history. This is the story of now, the story of my generation, the story of friends, neighbours, colleagues, the history that is so close under our noses that we can't see it. Or won't.
John Herron died recently, but John Howard is still with us, mentoring the current generation of Liberal leaders. Auntie Jean is, thankfully, also still going strong and mentoring a new generation of Aboriginal leaders. Aboriginal people are not going anywhere. Sooner or later we will have to come to terms with history and make amends. Let's make it sooner.
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