Book 3
When the Moore River Native Settlement was opened in 1918, it was to have been the ideal environment where half-caste children would receive basic education and be trained in semi-skilled jobs. The inmates present at the beginning were brought down from stations in the north under ministerial warrants and confined against their will in this strange place amongst strangers. For these children—many just toddlers not yet weaned from their mothers’ breasts—this was no doubt the most traumatic experience in their young lives, and even more so for their bewildered mothers, grandmothers and other relatives left behind to grieve.
The wailing and the mourning went on for a long time—until time and tears wiped out all memories of their lost children. Many mothers never saw their children again. They were discouraged from visiting them, in case these visits would disturb the children and interfere with their education. Even in the Settlement the mothers were segregated from their children. This government institution was a residential school for part-Aboriginal or half-caste children only. Non-Aboriginal staff were employed, as well as the older boys and girls who were later sent away to work on stations. The Settlement also housed unmarried mothers and their babies. About 300 yards away was the “camp” where Aboriginal families lived. Many were former inmates who had moved back to the area to send their children to the Settlement school.
Mr A.O. Neville, Chief Protector of Aborigines (1915-1940) saw this scheme as a positive move towards a final solution of the part-Aboriginal “problem”. The inmates would be encouraged to seek marriage partners from white or near-white individuals. He envisaged that this policy, based on controlled racial inter-marriages, would eventually lead to a gradual “breeding out” of Aboriginal genes.
However the administrators and indeed the government of the day overlooked one important factor, and that was that for an experiment of this kind to succeed an ideal environment for this new Aboriginal society must be created—one where total segregation was essential. The children had to have no physical contact with any Aboriginal adult if they were to become the clones or hybrids that Mr Neville and his policy makers hoped to produce.
Fortunately for these children they had at least some interaction and contact with adults even if it was under controlled conditions. These adults were the nurse maids, cooks, laundresses and surrogate mothers at the Settlement. Breast-feeding motherless babies was a common practice amongst nursing mothers. Baby Kate Muldune was one of many babies who was loved and nurtured by her aunt Josie Leach, mother of Kevin John born a couple of days before her.
On arrival at the Settlement the newcomers were told that speaking “native language” was forbidden. Those who misunderstood or knowingly disobeyed the instruction (which had become an unwritten law) and continued to communicate in their traditional language were intimidated and victimised by others. Foreign and colonial words such as “uncivilised”, “primitive” and “savages” were bandied about in the compound and the school playground.
This was a form of subtle indoctrination based on fear and superstition that gave birth to one of the damaging concepts in this so-called new Aboriginal society—discrimination against their own people.
With their mothers, grandmothers and other blood relations behind an invisible wall of silence and obscurity, all traces of their existence vanished. All links to their traditional, cultural and historical past were severed forever.
No one imagined or perceived at that time what repercussions and effects this would have on future generations, and what a fatal impact it would have on the Aboriginal people of Western Australia who were deprived of their history and their values. These light-skinned institutionalised, ruralised people were living under what we know now to be a misconception that they were superior to their fullblooded relations, whom they despised and were ashamed to own. This proved that the indoctrination and conditioning had succeeded on one level at least. These half-caste or part-Aboriginal children would never choose a husband or wife whose skin colour was darker than theirs.
All memories of the past will be forgotten. Rejection of their own culture is permanent. The process of reshaping their lives has just begun. They will become children and indeed persons with no past, the new people of tomorrow, the new breed of children to be known as the Settlement kids.