2
Creating The Poverty Of Aboriginal Children

Following the end of the Second World War, important changes occurred to the policy of removing Aboriginal children from their families. International forces compelled government officials to re-shape the reasoning behind its continuation. The defeat of the Nazis and the world-wide denunciation of their horrific crimes against humanity forced politicians and scientists to publicly distance themselves from a belief in racial policies. As one recent historian of racism has commented, ‘after the death camps and the Holocaust it became nigh on impossible openly to espouse belief in racial superiority’.62 The Western Australian Commissioner of Native Affairs in his Annual Report for 1945 conceded that ‘today it is considered that any human being is entitled to consideration irrespective of the colour of his skin’.63

Thus, white Australians’ vision for ‘breeding out’ Aborigines had to be rethought. The official policy now became known as assimilation. To white elites this meant ‘educating and training the natives in order to fit them into our own economic and social life.’64 The situation for Aboriginal children hardly changed. A central plank of assimilation remained the removal of children from their families and their placement in missions and foster homes. Here it was expected they would be fitted into the lower end of the white social structure ‘under conditions similar to our own’. In other words, they were no longer to live as Aborigines.65 The planning behind this cultural transformation continued to be motivated more by fear of Aborigines than by any genuine humanitarian concern for the children.

The adoption of assimilation also brought changes to the means by which children were removed. The old practice of indiscriminate rounding up had become unacceptable. The broader changes in racial thinking made it necessary to find ‘non-racial’ justifications and ‘legal’ mechanisms for the practice to continue. Thus, the unacceptable living standards of Aboriginal families was emphasised. Henceforth, Aboriginal parents would be punished with the forced removal of their children for failing to rear them according to white standards. The Commissioner, in his 1945 Annual Report, added an important qualifier to the new standard of racial tolerance: acceptance of an Aborigine depended upon their preparedness ‘to live under civilised conditions’.66 The Department of Native Affairs together with the Child Welfare Department became the arbiters of the new standards within the judicial framework of the Children’s Court. However, the attitudes behind assimilation and the use of the courts to decide the fate of Aboriginal children opened up a number of troubling issues.

In the post-war era when these changes were being planned, Aborigines were still widely regarded as racially inferior and a potential threat to social stability. Removing them, for whatever reasons, carried the benefit of stripping away their culture. In the immediate post-war period, few questioned whether Aborigines desired to be offered this opportunity to become like whites. In 1957 social activist and progressive, Jessie Street, raised one of the few voices of dissent against this racial planning. After an exhaustive tour of Aboriginal settlements around Australia she wrote a report in which she questioned the appropriateness of assimilation on cultural grounds. ‘Is there any evidence at the present time’, she asked, ‘that Aborigines, with very few exceptions, wish to live as whites?’ She worried about the loss of Aboriginal culture and especially their communal way of life which, she argued, was incompatible with the competitive individualism of white society. Moreover, the Aboriginal concept of ‘success’ was, she felt, too different and unlikely to be valued: ‘Among the aborigines the material success of the individual means more of everything for the tribal community … but it is regarded by many uninformed whites as further evidence of the lack of a sense of responsibility on the part of blacks instead of evidence of their innate generosity.’67

Jessie Street’s comments exposed the extent of the cultural change which assimilation sought to impose on the Aboriginal population. Children were to bear the brunt of this cultural transformation, the need for which continued to be justified in racial terms. Those living in the southern part of the State, the ‘half-castes’ as contemporaries categorised them, remained the key target group. Contemporaries continued to worry that the children would pick up the cultural values of their black parents if they remained with them. As Neville had recognised, ‘Seldom were the lighter coloured children treated other than as natives.’68

Assimilation, as it came to be understood in the post-war years, was first detailed in the 1948 parliamentary Report on Survey of Native Affairs, conducted by Western Australian magistrate, F E A Bateman. His report showed how the new policy was driven by long-standing racial attitudes and fears. Most of Bateman’s views, and those of others who supported them, were a reworking of pre-war attitudes and prejudices towards Aborigines. However, it is important to see them in their new context to emphasise the point that the foundations of assimilation were laid in racial theory.

Bateman certainly echoed the stereotypes about ‘half-castes’ which had been circulating for half a century. ‘The average half-caste in the towns’, he reported

is an undesirable type, idle, unreliable, fond of drinking and gambling and generally useless. In liquor they are noisy, obscene, disorderly and often violent. In the majority of instances they move from town to town, never remaining settled in one spot for very long and living on the various native reserves adjacent to the towns.69

There were 1500 ‘half-castes’ in the south of the State at this time and when Bateman, like others before him, projected his understanding of their current problems into the near future, he found a ‘definite menace’, requiring an urgent resolution. The appalling conditions endured by most Aborigines in the southern part of the State, where most lived on ramshackle reserves on the outskirts of towns, compelled Bateman to consider the fate of the children. He firmly believed an unbridgeable gulf separated Aboriginal family life from whites. Any attempt to raise the status of the children in such circumstances was ‘absolutely hopeless’ and would only ‘prolong the native problem for generations.’ The key difficulty, as Bateman saw it, was that any good done during the day at school was immediately reversed the moment the child returned home to its parents:

How possibly can children progress when after the day’s schooling is over they are forced to return to the disgraceful verminous conditions of native camps, where six or seven children together with their parents and perhaps an adult relation or two and more often than not a dog, occupy on a communal basis a shack, inadequate in size and constructed of old kerosene tins and bags.70

Not only were the physical conditions of Aborigines threatening their children’s future, but Aboriginal culture was widely seen by white officials as frustrating children’s ‘sense of responsibility’ and stimulating ‘that urge to ignore moral standards as laid down by us’, leading them ‘to yield to those pleasurable impulses the flesh is heir to.’71 The belief in white superiority which lay behind such views underpinned a disdainful attitude towards Aboriginal culture generally and in particular to the perceived lack of any culture whatsoever among the ‘half-castes’. Some of the most florid examples of this outlook can be found among the letters and diaries of Department of Native Affairs inspectors and patrol officers who wrote regular memos to the various commissioners. One such memo written in 1952 glorifies ‘we whites’ who are ‘controlled by hundreds of years of Christian background.’ It mattered not to the author that ‘we do not believe or accept a word’ of this background; it ‘still acts as a guide or control of our living.’ ‘Half-castes’, brought up ‘by their mothers with the Aboriginal background’ have lost these restraints ‘in their contact with civilisation’.72

A O Neville, in his book published in 1947, provides some additional insights into the way in which the concept of race was used to construct the ‘problem’ of Aboriginal children in this post-war period. The children growing up on the reserves, he argued, acquired ‘a warped outlook difficult to eradicate’. This, he believed, was the fault of their ‘coloured’ parents: ‘The bad habits of the grandparents and parents are bequeathed to the children … The elders are indifferent to the lack of improvement in the children. What was good enough for them is good enough for the children.’73 Thus, ‘the children are still the main problem.’ Neville’s solution was unchanged, but it is important to highlight his reasoning. On the reserves, he wrote, ‘you will find a bright spot due to the fact that some mother has worked at one time in a white employer’s house and has there learnt the rudiments of cleanliness of person, care of children, and the protection of foodstuffs.’74

In canvassing solutions to these perceived problems of ‘half-castes’, Bateman rejected an obvious answer: to improve the living conditions on the reserves. ‘Even if the present economic condition was such to make this possible’, he reasoned, ‘there is considerable doubt as to whether this would bring about a satisfactory solution.’ In these, and later comments, Bateman reflected the prevailing community views on race. Describing all the adults as ‘beyond redemption’, he believed that ‘these types if provided with a new home would have it as filthy as a native camp in a matter of weeks.’ Such thinking made drastic solutions appear reasonable. Henceforth, Aborigines should be

subject to our own law regarding neglected children. If white parents neglected their children the children are removed from their control. The same action should be adopted in respect to the native children. The welfare of the children is the only thing which should be considered and the fact that the parents are likely to be heart-broken for a few weeks should not influence the administration any more than the fact that white parents in similar circumstances suffer grief. Those native parents who will not make any effort to improve their conditions and help their children are not fit to retain them. I feel sure that the fear of losing their children would be a tremendous spur for those borderline cases … and compel them to do something for themselves and their children.75

The filth and lethargy which they allegedly tolerated were, in his mind, all of their own making. Moreover, they were disinterested in their children’s schooling and wandered carelessly from town to town, ‘exposing them to all kinds of harm.’ Such children were ‘neglected a thousand fold more than any white child deemed to be neglected under the Child Welfare Act.’ Their perceived absence of worth as people is revealed in his assessment of parents; any grief at losing their children would only last ‘for a few weeks.’ Bateman’s proposed solution had a familiar ring: segregate the children in institutions and fit them to take their place in white civilisation. So pleased was he with his conceptualisation of the problem and his diagnosis of the remedy, he relished its potential to do good: ‘I feel that it would be advantageous for all native children to spend some time at these children’s institutions’. In outlining his scheme, Bateman was reflecting current practice within the Department of Native Affairs. Neville’s successor as Commissioner of Native Affairs, F I Bray, was convinced that ‘no substantial progress is possible unless children are separated from their parents and cared for in dormitories.’76 Here was the longstanding and entrenched view of whites—reformulated for a new era.

However, there is an extraordinary shallowness about Bateman’s approach to defining the problem of Aboriginal child poverty. He, and countless others like him, were unwilling to properly confront the reality of Aboriginal life, and to acknowledge the role governments and ordinary people had played over the years in creating and sustaining the very poverty about which they now moralised. Most Aboriginal people—and especially those in the south of Western Australia—did live in abject poverty and this poverty did, very frequently, restrict the life chances of their children. However, Bateman not only failed to acknowledge the causes of Aboriginal poverty, he overlooked the abiding strength of the family in Aboriginal culture, despite the impact of severe material deprivation. Moreover, he chose to ignore the real desire—against impossible odds—of many Aboriginal people to improve their life circumstances and the chances for their children. These were rarely listened to, and certainly not by Bateman. His legacy was to further extend the use of race as a political means to control and oppress Aboriginal people, but this time under the guise of humanitarian concern.

Neville and Bateman reflected the views of the wider community. Erected around them was a framework of logic which justified drastic action. They neutralised the inhumanity of removing these children by claiming a higher moral concern: ‘half-castes’ were inferior parents; their children were being damaged; only by taking them into the ‘superior’ care of white society would their future be guaranteed. Solid as this framework of logic appeared to them it was held together by a fabricated theory on race. The justification for removal—that these children were wilfully neglected—was a facade. When the circumstances of Aboriginal poverty are carefully examined, it is clear that this was a deliberate imposition by government, widely supported by the community. Contrary to the moralizing, Aboriginal children in the post-war era were taken from their families for reasons over which they had no direct control.

Indigenous people everywhere who are dispossessed of land are prone to social and economic marginalisation. Such a process occurs from the beginnings of colonisation. In the twentieth century, the descent of Western Australian Aborigines into poverty was entrenched by the passage of the 1905 Aborigines Act, the impact of which has been well documented elsewhere.77 Briefly, and in respect of the Act’s effect on the future living conditions of Aborigines, any Aborigine who was not in lawful employment could be removed to a reserve or expelled from any town or municipality which had been declared a prohibited area. Reserves expanded in number from the 1930s, and well into the 1960s, existing on the outskirts of many country towns.

Usually, the outcry from locals protesting the ‘nuisance’ from natives compelled local authorities to establish a reserve, which only ever offered temporary control of land to Aborigines. In these reserves, also known as camps, Aborigines congregated in family groups as dispossessed and displaced people, effectively denied any opportunity to enter the mainstream economic life. Governments spent virtually nothing on establishing or maintaining these reserves, a fact that was reflected in the low levels of spending on Aboriginal affairs. Western Australia had the lowest spending of all the States: in 1935, the government spent little more than one pound per head on Aborigines; New South Wales spent £5.5.3; Victoria—£13.4.4; Queensland and South Australia—£5.10.10.78

Few white people had bothered to become acquainted with these poorly serviced reserves and to understand the lifestyle and the problems of the people who lived on them. West Australian journalist, Paul Hasluck, was one of the few who had and his detailed portrait, while not free of the racial biases of the time, offers a most comprehensive portrait of these communities. His work, originally published as a series of newspaper articles was subsequently bound as a small book, Our Southern Half-caste Native and their Conditions.79 Hasluck’s richly informed observations help to expose Bateman’s later report as the product of cultural blindness and racial stereotyping.

Hasluck did not mince words in describing the appalling living conditions on the reserves. ‘Most half-castes,’ he wrote, ‘live in habitations rather worse than the poorer class of suburban fowlhouse.’ He identified three types of living quarters. The most basic were the mia-mias, traditional dwellings which, in the camps Hasluck visited, were built with five or six poles erected to make a pyramid. Around the windward side of the structure were strewn old bags, blankets or bushes. Inside, a whole family slept on the ground. A step higher were ‘rude tent-shaped huts’ made of bags and kerosene tins which had been flattened and opened out. In wet weather a cooking fire was made inside. Thirdly, the ‘superior sort of hut’ was made more substantial by the addition of old timber and galvanised iron. These had a chimney ‘of sorts’, a door and two or three compartments separated by hanging bags.

Hasluck tried hard to see through the prevailing myths and stereotypes about these people. He observed that families living in the more substantial huts went to considerable lengths to keep their places clean and tidy. He also noted that the status of Aborigines in the white community as a ‘bad lot’ was far from accurate:

Farmers who had employed half-castes for many seasons, the police, the local protectors and a few school-masters who had anything to do with their children—that is, people who were in constant touch with them—gave them a much higher character than did the people who ‘would not tolerate them anywhere about the place’ and who presumably seldom met.

As well, Hasluck encountered communities founded on the strength of the family unit. Although legal marriages scarcely existed, ‘most unions so simply made in the camps seem to be lasting’ and these couples were ‘devoted to their children’ for whom they had strong aspirations: ‘most of them were very eager for their children to go to school.’

However, Hasluck found that Aborigines faced an impossible task in realising these ambitions. By the late 1930s, Aborigines living on the reserves had been reduced to a marginalised workforce of odd job labourers. A common means to earn money was the picking of ‘dead wool’ which involved wandering around the paddocks until a dead sheep was found and then, squatting beside the carcass, plucking the wool from it by hand. Snaring foxes and rabbits for their skins occupied some, while a few were hired as a semi-permanent casual labour force on the farms, contracted to perform seasonal work at hay carting and shearing times. However, the money earnt from these varied odd jobs was never sufficient to make Aborigines independent of government rations.

Hasluck reserved his harshest criticisms for the failure of governments to ameliorate the hardship and privation endured by the reserve dwellers. ‘It is impossible to find evidence’, he wrote,

that in recent years the Government has taken any positive action to better the conditions of the people living on the reserves … They have given no education to the children, no encouragement to the families to do better, and have offered no means of improving their living conditions.

Virtually none of the reserves were connected to town water or sewerage systems making it difficult to encourage cleanliness. It was clear that government intended these people to be marginalised and impoverished.

Conditions for some Aborigines brightened considerably during the Second World War, demonstrating a crucial point which contemporaries mostly chose to overlook. With access to regular employment at award wages, Aborigines could avoid the poverty which led officials to justify the removal of their children. Nevertheless, it was never the intention of government to allow Aborigines into the economic mainstream. However, labour shortages, due to the war effort, created unprecedented employment and high rates of wages for many Aborigines. The Annual Report from the Department of Native Affairs for 1945 noted that the ‘detribalised native people are now in better economic circumstances’. They had plentiful employment, higher earnings than in previous years and, ‘as they are drawing Child Endowment as well, many of them are trying to improve their social conditions.’80

The upward trend in favourable circumstances faltered after the war ended. In the southern part of the State, many Aborigines continued to receive award wages but most could only find part-time employment.81 The operation of the work permit system for employing Aborigines was a further impediment to obtaining regular work. This system required any employer to take out a permit with the Department of Native Affairs to hire any Aborigine of ‘more than quarter caste’, and for any period of more than one month, except those who held citizenship. It absolved employers from the provisions of the Workers Compensation Act, enabling medical expenses incurred while working to be met by the Department. However, the main purpose was to exert control over the lives of Aborigines. Employers were expected to lodge a proportion of Aboriginal wages with the Department for banking in a Trust Account. The permit system had two detrimental effects on the employment of Aborigines. Firstly, it was a bureaucratic inconvenience to farmers wishing to employ Aborigines on a casual basis. ‘It is extremely annoying,’ wrote one Beverley farmer to the local Native Affairs District Officer in the early 1950s,

to have to keep on applying for permits for natives casually employed. There are many occasions when a native could be employed for a few days but farmers don’t give them the job because they have to go to the trouble of getting a permit.

Secondly, in a labour market being opened up to migrants, permits created an unnecessary additional cost to farmers, making Aboriginal labour unviable. This was acknowledged by a Bunbury Patrol Officer for the Department of Native Affairs in 1951 when he wrote:

Just about every employer of labour has Compensation Insurance covering two or three men. He pays his premium each year … I don’t think that after he has paid that premium he is going to employ a native and pay another twenty five shillings for a permit.82

The permit system not only acted to restrict Aboriginal employment, for some it operated as a form of bondage, a fact acknowledged by the Commissioner for Native Affairs who, writing in his 1953 Annual Report, acknowledged: ‘Under current legislation a native is under the supervision of a police officer or Protector and may not absent himself from his service or quit his work without reasonable cause. Thus he is not permitted to barter his service or change his place of employment.’ Apart from receipt of a small wage, there is not much difference between this system and slavery.

Downward pressure on wages paid to Aborigines followed a 1947 Arbitration Court decision on farmworkers employed in the South West Land Division. Clause 13 of the Award made provision for ‘the less efficient class of native worker’ and, in consequence, a reduced wage. A memo from the Secretary of Labour to the Commissioner for Native Affairs preceding the decision provided the justification for the new discriminatory measure. ‘Natives are generally less efficient’, he wrote, and belong to the ‘sub-economic group’ compared with ‘white men’. Therefore, they ‘must be dealt with more generally as less efficient workers’.83 In his 1954 Annual Report, the Commissioner of Native Affairs acknowledged that: ‘By and large natives are still a sub-economic unit of our community, living in sub-standard conditions, dressed in the raiments of civilisation, but mere caricatures of the white man’.84 In other words, all Aborigines were ascribed a characteristic based on their race.

Racial attitudes were, at times, quite explicit in the post-war drive to reduce Aboriginal wages. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in Bateman’s report. After castigating the ‘half-castes’ in one breath for their failure to uphold white standards and care for their children he went on to justify the necessity to lower their wages. The contortions of his reasoning are worth examining. Rejecting the rationale for Aborigines to receive the same wages where they clearly performed equal work, Bateman explained:

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 prejudice 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.

Middleton foreshadowed one of two approaches: either, the introduction of amending legislation to give his Department power ‘to take children away in such circumstances and put them into institutions’, or the utilisation of existing legislation to do the same. In fact, Middleton would have been aware that the practice of removing children to missions for reasons of non-school attendance had been occurring in country districts since at least 1945.113 The Department’s determination to pursue this policy was cruelly ironic. Many, if not most, schools did not welcome Aboriginal children, but it was the parents and their children who were to be punished for their failure to attend. It was not until the early 1950s that full responsibility for the education of Aboriginal children was accepted by the Education Department. Even then community hostility remained. Alan Kickett clearly remembers, as a young Aborigine growing up at Roelands Mission, an incident at Bunbury High School in the mid 1950s. He described in interview the attitude of the school’s head master at the beginning of one year when the bus carrying the mission children arrived at the school. He tried to prevent the children from attending the school saying ‘the school was for whites only’.

Similar discrimination faced Aborigines granted citizenship rights. In 1944, the State Labor Government succeeded in passing a Bill through Parliament allowing Aborigines to apply for citizenship. Previously, the rights extended to Aborigines had been limited to the granting of a certificate of exemption under the Native Administration Act; that is, they were no longer bound by the repressive provisions of the Act. Even this limited freedom carried strict racial guidelines. Aborigines granted exemption were barred from associating with other Aborigines who had not been given this status, including members of their own families.114

The State Government was eventually forced to concede legal status to a limited number of Aborigines. To those living settled lives and holding down responsible jobs, as well as to the four hundred who had enlisted for war service, the Government was prepared to grant full citizenship. However, the privilege demanded a harsh concession from Aboriginal people. In granting citizenship, the State’s parliamentarians insisted it should contribute to the process of eradicating Aboriginal culture. To be granted citizenship an Aborigine needed to be able to satisfy a magistrate that ‘he has adopted the manners and habits of civilised life.’ A stringent test applied. An applicant needed to provide evidence that ‘he has ceased from observing his tribal habits for at least two years and has lived since in accordance with the standards of the white race.’115 This tight restriction, it was argued, would ‘open up more clearly the transitional path from native circumstances to white standards’.116 Or, as Hugh Leslie, Member of the House of Assembly explained: ‘The intention of the Bill is to cause a definite segregation of the native from his relatives and friends’ so that he will ‘be able to lead a life of white citizenship.’117 Thus, Aborigines in Western Australia were forced to choose their cultural identity: they could be Aborigines or citizens, they could not be both.

This record of racism occurred in the face of Australia’s nominal commitment to the principles set out in the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights. In the mid 1950s, this had become ‘so often quoted but seldom practiced where natives are concerned.’118 So immersed were the vast bulk of Western Australians in racist attitudes towards Aborigines that, any attempt by the authorities to advance coexistence between the races was fiercely opposed. In 1949 Middleton worried that most residents ‘would never accept our policy of assimilation with any feeling other than hostility’. He was certain that ‘this tragic fact’ of ‘bitter class [sic] feeling is manifest … in even the high level of senior public servants, party members, local authorities etc.’119 Why, then, did the policy persist? Partly because it had become accepted at the State and Commonwealth level, but also because it was still being driven by the fears of elites. Those who thought through the issues as they perceived them remained convinced that, without assimilating the Aborigines, the State faced threats to its future welfare. In July 1950 Middleton went on ABC Radio and lashed out at community attitudes. He pinpointed the deeply ingrained public fear widespread during and after the war that Aborigines, because of the ill-treatment they had received, would link up with a potential Asian invader to Australia.

It’s time that white people in the south realised the danger of their attitude towards natives. They despise them and refer to them as ‘niggers’. This sort of thing made the native very bitter … the attitude of white people … has turned the natives into a fifth column.120

In playing upon public fears, Middleton hoped to shift public attitudes. Former Commissioner for Native Affairs in the 1960s, Frank Gare, explained in interview that: ‘People did not want to admit that Aborigines had been ill-treated but they knew they had. Anyone who was conscious that Aborigines had lost their country to these British invaders feared that they might welcome some other invader to fight off the colonisers.’

Future social stability, then, depended on assimilating Aborigines into wider society, but on white terms, according to white values. The continuing removal of children was the key to this policy. According to white officials, they needed to be taken out of their poverty-stricken and culturally inferior Aboriginal environment and trained for their assimilated role in white society. They needed skills and, above all, attitudes to fit them for this role.

Officials had a simple but clear-sighted view on the resocialising process for Aboriginal youth. To take their place in society they needed to be offered a strong dose of Christian religion. The prevailing view about Aborigines well into the twentieth century held that, as the Cyclopedia of Western Australia expressed it, they were ‘lTow in the moral scale’; their sense of ‘right and wrong is not so strongly developed’, with a conscience ‘that is little more than rudimentary’.121 ‘Half-castes’ presented a different version of the problem. Neville put the case as strongly as anybody. Detribalised Aborigines, he argued, had drifted entirely away from the spiritual beliefs of the ‘bush blacks’. Few had learned anything to replace these beliefs so that, collectively, they were ‘in great need of spiritual teaching.’ Neville lamented the failure of Aborigines to emulate the American negroes who lapped up an adopted religion like mother’s milk … and what spiritual relief they enjoyed.’122 For Aborigines, Christian ethics had to be grafted on.

Resocialising the youth also necessitated the development of vocational skills. But here again racial thinking predominated. The widely held view was that Aborigines lacked intelligence for any occupation other than unskilled labour. ‘The mental characteristics of the native are comparatively of a low order’, asserted the Cyclopedia of Western Australia.123 This view took deep root in the public’s mind. The near universal opinion, born of ignorance or sheer duplicity about the impact of Aboriginal living conditions and the differing styles of Aboriginal learning, was that Aboriginal children were not capable of being educated beyond year 3 or 4 of primary school. ‘There are some who maintain’, Bateman argued ‘that the half-caste child has equal ability to the white but this is not borne out by the facts.’ What were these ‘facts’, according to Bateman? Principally that ‘every teacher I have discussed this matter with held the same view’. Teachers daily witnessed the sight of Aboriginal children ‘of 11 or 12 years of age in the 3rd or 4th standards side by side with white pupils eight or nine years old.’124

According to this thinking, Aboriginal youth could only aspire to the lowest rungs of white society. ‘The view is widely held’, reflected the Under Secretary of the Premier’s Department in 1950, ‘that native youths in this State should be absorbed into rural industries because their intelligence quotients preclude consideration of any other occupation for them.’125 Education was therefore deemed relatively unimportant, as was induction into the skilled trades. However, the ultimate testimony to the racism behind the policy was acknowledged by the Commissioner of Native Affairs in his Annual Report for 1945. In a frank admission, clearly designed to placate community concerns about the policy of assimilation, he wrote: ‘So far as education is concerned, our aim is to educate the children of detribalised natives who live in or near the white centres of population, and our object, too, is to subsequently bring them into employment which will not bring them into economic or social conflict with the white community.’126 (Italics supplied) In other words, the official architects of removal intended to limit the degree of assimilation of Aboriginal children in order to prevent them competing with whites for skilled jobs.

This explains much about the subsequent development of the policy, and why successive governments ignored key parts of the Bateman Report. In articulating his view for post-war assimilation, Bateman tried to set high standards for government. For assimilation to work, he reasoned, missions would not only have to improve the effectiveness of their operations, but government must also lay down a ‘positive policy’ to oversee their work. Bateman believed evangelism must go hand in hand with practical training and every effort had to be made to ensure Aboriginal youth were given full opportunity ‘to play their full part in the uplifting of the native race.’ Racially inspired his vision may have been, but it was not to be had on the cheap.

Mission workers should be carefully chosen and the Superintendent if possible should have anthropological training. Teachers including educational, technical and agricultural, nurses, etc., should be specialists and not as at present obtains in some instances persons of poor capacity who have heard the call and find something agreeable to them in mission activity.127

Bateman’s call for a purposeful direction for assimilation was not heeded, with tragic consequences for children in missions and foster homes. This failure to fully implement assimilation, however undesirable it may have been, exposes the motive of the policy-makers. Assimilation was not intended, as is often claimed today, to be ‘in the best interests of the children.’ Rather, it was pursued largely as a convenient cover to continue with pre-existing policies aimed at the social and economic marginalisation of Aborigines. Removal and institutionalisation of children denied them their culture, as did the efforts to prevent contact with their families. Moreover, the lack of provision of adequate education and training ensured most would pose no future threat to white interests. If the ‘best interests’ of these children were uppermost in the minds of policy-makers, Bateman’s recommendations on the quality of care needed for them would have been followed through in tangible ways. It was not.

Lack of political interest in the provision of care for these children did not stop the presentation of this scheme as a humanitarian mission; one designed to rescue Aboriginal children. Missionaries, especially, were prone to this justification. R Mitchell, from the United Aborigines’ Mission at Kellerberrin, articulated how the act of removal could be justified as a higher moral good. ‘Where parents fail to measure up,’ he argued, ‘then they should be compelled to place their children in the care of Missions, always bearing in mind that the object is not to destroy the parents’ affection for the child, but for the necessary welfare of the child itself; a system such as this would be just and fair to everybody, one to which no one could raise any objection.’128

The use of the court system to achieve these ends raises some of the most troubling issues about the entire process. There is great uncertainty as to when the practice of indiscriminate rounding up of Aboriginal children actually ended and the practice of charging the children with neglect in a Children’s Court began. Ostensibly, S G Middleton was appointed by the State Government to implement the Bateman Report. However, by this time the practice of removing children had become deeply entrenched within the Native Affairs Department and he encountered fierce opposition in his attempt to introduce a package of sweeping reforms to the structure and operations of the Department.129

In any event, the new legalism of using the courts for the removal of children amounted to another manifestation of injustice for Aboriginal families. Just as the 1936 Act had done, the mobilisation of child welfare legislation to charge children with being neglected gave legal authority to the practice, an authority which in most cases it did not warrant. The practice of charging children with neglect was a stipulation of the 1947 Child Welfare Act and was applied to all children. As one parliamentarian explained during debate on the measure: ‘we are trying to make a charge that a child is neglected by its parents and is destitute and a second charge that being a neglected child it is definitely guilty of an offence.’130 This was the mechanism chosen to give the State power to overcome the problems associated with abandoned children and to control children’s subsequent living arrangements. Although applying equally to Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal children, the former were particularly vulnerable to its application. In fact, there are a number of grounds upon which most of the children taken from their families after 1948 could be regarded in the same category of ‘stolen’ as those children taken before this time.

Firstly, removing Aboriginal children because they were neglected was a convenient means to ignore the deeper issues of disadvantage among Aborigines, and especially those living in or close to urbanised areas. There is no doubt many Aboriginal children were materially deprived and that some may have been raised in families which were dysfunctional in some way. Frank Gare’s recollection of one case in the early 1960s is a reminder of the difficult situation facing authorities.

I remember a case in Geraldton in which a couple—who were living in town—but who were fond of drinking put a child to bed one night and rolled on top of the baby, smothering it. That was a case where we should have acted and saved that child’s life. If we had acted and taken that child she would now be in her late 30s and, in all likelihood, complaining about being one of the stolen children.

The real issue, however, is not how many cases of this type there were but whether it was a just policy to remove Aboriginal children, considering their institutionalised disadvantage and that little or nothing was being done to prevent the underlying circumstances leading to their removal. In 1967 the Commissioner for Native Affairs in his annual report belatedly acknowledged this reality. ‘The unfortunate environment’, he wrote, ‘in which so many have to live, makes nearly all of them more prone to child welfare problems than the other sections of the community.’ In Port Hedland, the Commissioner explained how disadvantage led to an upward rise in the number of children brought before the court for neglect. Families had been moving from the southern regions of the State in search of employment but ‘they find themselves without homes and the wherewithal to support a family, thus leading to the neglect of their children.’ In cases such as this, there is no indication parents were inadequate; they were simply denied the means to meet the needs of their children. Thus, the Child Welfare law was used to legitimise the broader failure of government policy.

In the post-war era, the removal of Aboriginal children continued to occur in a discriminatory fashion. While most governments throughout Australia created a distinct legal framework for the welfare of white children, generally through the Child Welfare Act, welfare provided to Aboriginal children was not only different but was subsumed under Aboriginal-specific legislation. Thus, in Western Australia a law for the welfare of children was enacted in 1907, however it would be another four decades before Aboriginal children became a legitimate concern of the Child Welfare Department. Even then, Aboriginal children continued to be treated first under the ‘native’ welfare legal regime, in preference to general child welfare provisions. This situation remained until the early 1970s.

At the ground level, assimilation perpetuated a value system of discrimination among officials charged with its implementation. According to a former employee of the Child Welfare Department, the Native Welfare Department had established a mentality towards Aboriginal people based around twin principles; a disregard of the Aboriginal family as an institution, and the need to have Aboriginal children in institutions. This manifested in a practice of threatening some parents with the Child Welfare Act, thereby obtaining their consent under pressure to have their children placed in institutions. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s most continued to be sent to missions where they were subjected to the practices of stripping them of their cultural background and limiting, or denying, contact with parents.

Child welfare legislation was not applied impartially. The general child welfare law of most Australian states required that a child be found to be ‘neglected’, ‘destitute’ or ‘uncontrollable’ before he or she could be removed from their parents. The expectation that such requirement would apply equally to all children was not borne out in practice. As the Human Rights Inquiry found, these terms ‘were applied by courts much more readily to indigenous children than non-indigenous children as the definitions and interpretations of those terms assumed a non-indigenous model of child-rearing and regarded poverty as synonymous with neglect.’131

There are additional concerns about the nature of the court process. The reliance on evidence obtained from police and departmental officers to secure convictions is wide open to potential miscarriages of justice and especially in light of the cross-cultural issues involved in such complex legal proceedings. Even Bateman acknowledged the hostility police displayed to Aborigines. He went further, claiming their role as agents of the Department of Native Affairs was an undesirable one. Aboriginal parents were nominally given the right to attend court hearings but they were not supplied with legal counsel.

Significant community pressure throughout the 1950s and 1960s to have children removed was brought to bear directly and indirectly upon the magistracy. According to a former employee of the Child Welfare Department, sections of the business community disliked the presence of Aboriginal children around commercial areas and initiated contact with the Department to have certain children removed. Magistrates did not always scrutinise the reasons behind these removals.

Court proceedings were open to abuse. Aboriginal parents were represented in some instances by welfare officers, usually the female, from the Department of Native Welfare. These officers were apparently employed to act in a more sympathetic manner with Aboriginal people. But, however well meaning individual officers may have been, the conflict of interest involved in the Department both prosecuting and supposedly defending Aboriginal parents creates an obvious denial of natural justice. It is extremely doubtful Aboriginal parents felt they possessed either the power or the knowledge to intervene effectively on behalf of their children. Aboriginal people had been subjected to the tyrannical power of the Native Welfare Department for more than half a century. In this time, a ‘departmental culture’ had taken firm root. Native Welfare officers typically talked down to Aborigines and treated them as inferior and subservient. None of this is surprising given the power that legislation conferred over the lives of these people, but such an imbalance of power undermined the ability of individual parents to defend their right to retain their children.

There are few records on the operation of the Child Welfare legislation which can throw more light on the operation of this law. Records are in the form of personal files and are inaccessible to the general public. However, the Commissioner of Native Welfare during the 1960s, Frank Gare, explained to us in interview the practices during his time.

A child could be charged with being neglected if its moral or physical welfare was in jeopardy. Well we forgot about the moral business. This just meant that they were behaving in their Aboriginal culture. And we said if a child’s life is in jeopardy we would have to take action—but no less—their life had to be in jeopardy. And this meant that the cases brought before court were very few … The patrol officers of the Department got feedback all the time from the police who always knew everything going on in a country town. And if two parents were spending all their time in a pub they know that the kids are neglected. They see kids hanging around pubs for hours on end waiting for their parents to come out. They know that back home there is a baby waiting for Mum—that would be brought to our attention, if we hadn’t picked it up ourselves. We would then start watching that family. Judgements were made about children’s poor living conditions but not in isolation. There would have to be some other factor, usually associated with alcohol. I can’t recall a case that we took to court just because the camp conditions were poor. It wasn’t enough and it was too prevalent; they practically all lived in those conditions.

These may be important qualifications as to how the scheme operated in the mid to late 1960s when an evolving awareness about the removal of children began to become apparent. The extent to which Gare’s explanations applied during the 1950s is harder to establish. In any event, court processes which rendered children as being neglected in his period were still subject to potential flaws. The case of Rosalie Fraser outlined in Chapter Three suggests court proceedings left much to be desired. Moreover, there is evidence—discussed in Chapter Six—that some magistrates openly held prejudicial views about Aborigines as late as the 1960s.

Assimilation as practised amounted to legal discrimination against Aboriginal people. The foundations of the policy lay in racial theories and the policy itself was little more than a mask to perpetuate the ongoing desire among most whites for segregation. Officials, like the community at large, had convinced themselves of the inferiority of Aborigines and of the self-inflicted nature of their poverty. They rationalised that children could only benefit from being separated from their families and sent to isolated missions to be brought up as whites. It occurred only to a very few to challenge this set of racial beliefs.