Acts of extreme violence began and ended for Phillip Prosser in the nine years he spent in Roelands Mission outside Collie in the 1940s and early 1950s. Rosalie Fraser suffered daily emotional and physical abuse throughout the childhood she spent with a foster-mother and her financially struggling family during the 1960s. The mission and the nuclear family were the two institutions given responsibility for caring for Aboriginal children taken away from their families. There are similarities in their aims and operations. Both played a deliberate role in the cultural transformation of these children. They were both conveyors of white values and barriers to reconnection with the past Aboriginal culture. In both settings many Aboriginal children suffered horrific abuse. The sources of this abuse had similar origins. With probably rare exceptions, neither ‘respectable’ white families nor ‘saintly’ missionaries valued much about Aboriginal culture. Both regarded the Aboriginal child as a potential convert to christianity and white culture.
Phillip Prosser is easily established as typical of the children who went through the missions: there is a significant volume of documentary material revealing life in these institutions. By contrast, the private arrangements underpinning fostering left little documentary evidence outside of individual files which are inaccessible to the general public. Rosalie’s abuse, as we show, may have been extreme, but it was certainly not isolated.
Roelands was one of twenty-seven missions run under the auspices of the Native Welfare Department in the 1950s and 60s. Missions had had an uneasy relationship with government over the years. Under Neville their activities were barely tolerated because of his fears over lack of control of their activities. Under Middleton it became government policy to subsidise an expanding number of missions to house the increasing numbers of children taken from their families. Missions spanned the length and breadth of Western Australia. Most sizeable country towns supported a mission on its outskirts where Aboriginal families, dispossessed of their land, were fed, clothed and evangelised. However, it was in the southwestern region of the State where the purpose-run missions for children were mostly located.
Roelands was one of these missions. Three months after Phillip Prosser arrived as a five year old, he received a flogging from the Acting Superintendent of such severity its callousness can now be barely imagined.
I had my first flogging three months after I arrived in the Home by a man that stood around six feet five inches. I was accused of something I hadn’t done along with three or four other lads. It was a cold winter’s morning and we were flogged with a sewing machine strap. I was given six across my arms, turned around and flogged from my shoulders down to my legs. To get rid of the pain we rolled around on the icy ground.132
Phillip Prosser left in 1953 following a raging confrontation with another of the Home’s hierarchy. It was summer and he and two other boys had been called up to the compound about a missing piece of iron. They knew who had taken it but all three refused to ‘lag’ on their mates. For punishment, they were told to dig out a sun-dried claypan which was so hard the pick bounced back with every blow. Phillip revolted. He was told to get back to work, but he refused. The supervisor went off to get a cane and Phillip used the opportunity to arm himself with a copper stick which he hid behind his back. When the supervisor returned Phillip pulled out his weapon and an uneasy stand-off between child and adult occurred. To defuse the situation, each agreed to put down their implement. However, as Phillip went to place his copper stick on the ground, he was struck behind the ear with a painful blow of the cane:
For the first time in my life I retaliated. I latched onto his ear lobe to bite it off. I punched into him. He dug his metal tipped boots into my feet and peeled back my skin. I just went berserk but he laid into me with a split cane.
Phillip subsequently informed an area officer for the Department of Native Affairs about the incident, who managed to have him released from the Home. However, as far as he could tell, there were no repercussions for Roelands or its staff. Phillip claims documentary evidence from Native Affairs shows the incident was covered up.
It was not uncommon for ‘closed’ institutions such as Roelands to successfully maintain an ‘official’ version of their activities which conflicted with the ‘private’ experience of them. The incident involving Phillip Prosser and, clearly, a number of others like it, could never be gauged from the information received by the public about Roelands’ operations. In 1952, for example, the Superintendent, Mr K C Cross, wrote of his young charges:
Excellent reports continue to be received from employers of the young people who have left the Mission. During the year one boy entered into an apprenticeship agreement with an electrical engineer. One of the older girls has passed her entrance examination set by the Nurses’ Association … For the young people who have completed their training and are away working in various parts of the State, a Convention and a reunion was arranged during January of this year. I am pleased to report that this reunion and also the holiday periods spent by the folk at the Mission, which they call Home, proved an inspiration and a sense of accomplishment to the Mission staff as they again met the young people and noted the manner in which they have, in most cases, maintained the Mission training standard, and to some extent improved their acceptance in the community.133
From such a glowing account no one would ever have known such disturbing incidents of the sort experienced by Phillip Prosser ever occurred. However, a closer reading of Cross’ account of the preceding year might suggest that all was not as indicated. There is a lack of specific details and a clear message that young Aborigines were being driven to meet some ‘standard’ imposed by the mission. The reunions about which Cross expressed such enthusiasm appear not quite so overwhelmingly attended as he indicated. In 1950, a decade after its establishment, a press report on Roelands claimed that ‘as many as 14 old farm children return to see their friends’.134 This represents only a small fraction of those who, by that time, had gone through the place. A reunion of ex-Roelands children was organised by Aborigines in 1996. The atmosphere had a highly charged undercurrent to it. ‘You could feel the hate, the bitterness that was oozing out of the things that happened to those kids in Roelands.’135
It is the clash of these rival perspectives—Aborigines with memories of cruelty and missionaries executing God’s work—which makes any assessment of places like Roelands so very difficult. It is more than likely some Aborigines received positive opportunities due to their time in the institution. The standard of primary school teaching is remembered by Phillip Prosser to have been high and he believes children with talent were given some encouragement. But equally, there is a dark side to the work of Roelands which continues to affect many of those who spent time there. It would be surprising if this was not the case in light of the backgrounds and motivations of those who established and operated the place.
Controversy still surrounds the exact origins of Roelands Home. It was founded as an experiment by dairy farmer and prominent Church of Christ member, Albany Bell, in the late 1930s to help Aborigines grow food while living on his property. For reasons unknown, this arrangement did not work out. However, later on the Department of Native Affairs struck up an arrangement with Bell for the farm to be used to look after Aboriginal children removed from their families. The Department had a clear vision of its place in the network of institutions opening up to cater for these children. In 1947 Middleton noted to one of his officers about to inspect a family with children earmarked for removal: ‘I would personally require to see all the children involved, and doubtless they could be placed at Roelands Mission Farm if they were considered to be too dark in colour to be successfully absorbed ultimately as whites.’136
The limited expectations held for these children because of the colour of their skin probably underscored the harsh discipline used by some of the staff. At the same time, the staff were deeply motivated by their Christian faith and their commitment to the Church of Christ. Roelands Home was administered by a committee composed mainly of active members of the Church of Christ, although the present hierarchy of the Church claims it was organisationally separate from the main body of the Church. There are no documents available which shed further light on the links between the Home and the Church and, indeed, between the Home and the State Government. It appears to have been an unstated and loose arrangement between all three parties.
Controversy also surrounds the qualities of the staff and its long-serving Superintendent, K G Cross. There are indications that Cross believed himself to be motivated by human compassion for the ‘half-castes’; he saw them as outcasts in both races and believed no one cared for them. It is also claimed some Aboriginal parents urged him to take their children because they wanted them to receive an education and to be given an opportunity in white society. Other children were brought to the Home from the courts having been charged with offences. Administering to this diverse group of children required a selfless, even saintly, outlook, according to one view.
Some of the staff worked for 20-25 years because they could not stand seeing neglected and disadvantaged children, children who were not accepted in their own society. Being Christian they had a responsibility to help the disadvantaged. Who today would work in such an isolated place, look after so many children and be paid virtually nothing? People worked for 20-25 years and walked away with nothing.137
However well-intentioned the work, as experienced by the children it was quite different. Part of the problem of assessing Roelands—and other missions like it—is the need to challenge the Christian ideology which drove such people to believe they could do ‘good work’ with children taken from their families. Cross certainly had lofty, but limited ideals, for the Home. He wrote that the purpose of the mission was ‘to provide training in the Christian life as revealed in the Message of the Gospel of Jesus.’138 In other words, his first priority was conversion. In implementing this evangelical approach, some staff held a dogmatic, intolerant and even hostile attitude towards their charges. To the children this was often expressed as righteousness and cruelty. Competing with Christianity in driving this attitude was disdain for the children’s Aboriginality. At times they were treated as less than human. The practice of making examples of senior boys (thirteen to fourteen years) who had not fed or tended the animals to the satisfaction of the staff demonstrates this. These boys were sat in the dining room and humiliated in front of the other children. Each received two rusty tin plates, the smaller containing a slice of dry bread while on the larger was placed dried bracken fern and dried bran. The message was not lost on younger boys forced to watch such humiliation. Phillip Prosser explains: ‘if you don’t feed the animals properly, you’re not fit to eat either. We’ll treat you no better than the animals.’
Phillip Prosser vividly remembers that Cross and his staff viewed Aboriginal culture as pagan. He also has a clear recollection of these officers’ self-appointed role in life: ‘they were sent on a mission by God to train us into Christian society.’ This ‘training’ meant prayers morning and night and church every Sunday. Their attitude was ‘tunnel vision; they were right and we were wrong’.
Every little thing you did in their eyes was a sin and you were punished and that involved corporal punishment. They used any utensil they could get hold of. I’ve seen boys flogged with a garden hose. Another young boy nearly had his eye knocked out because he was belted with a thick belt with a huge metal buckle on it and the buckle cut him across the eye.
The staff saw physical discipline as the way to resocialise these children’s behaviour. In the early 1950s the Home housed over seventy children. The mission was built around a 1,500 acre farm which produced dairy goods, vegetables and fruit. The children’s labour was an integral part of the farm economy. It not only sustained the Home, it provided salaries for the staff. In the 1940s and 50s, government subsidies paid to missions such as Roelands were so low that, at Roelands, it is estimated they covered barely one-third of the operating costs.
It is possible to look upon the involvement of the children in the labour of the farm as part of their training and part of normal childhood chores. After all, these children were being prepared for future occupations on the land. However, the picture is more complex and disturbing. From the recollections of those who spent their childhoods in Roelands work was all-consuming. ‘In the Mission we were literally little slaves. Just work and religion’, remembers one ex-inmate. The daily routine seems to bear out the comment: up at 6 am; beds made and prayers at 6.30; chores before breakfast; breakfast at 7.30; religious teaching after breakfast; attendance at school on the Mission; chores all over again after school. Saturday morning involved still more work: filling up the wood boxes, cleaning out the pigsties and the chicken pens: ‘we were a labour force for the Mission, for nothing’, argues Phillip Prosser. He has clear memories of making up to five hundred fruit cases a day at the ages of ten and eleven while, at the same time, girls were spending all day grading fruit. This labour serviced the Mission’s export fruit business.
This work routine raises some important questions about the claim that these institutions were training grounds for children’s future occupations. In reality, these children were an unpaid labour force; they were, in effect, unwilling servants in their own institutionalisation. Their work provided the funds to enable missionaries to conduct their self-appointed roles of resocialising them. To sanction the removal of these children from their families is one part of the injustice they suffered; forcing them to work for the upkeep of the institution they were sent to, as was the case at Roelands, is little short of an outrage. On leaving the Mission most of the boys from Roelands found little more than low-paid labouring jobs, mostly on farms where it was not uncommon for them to have to sleep in a shed. However, the meticulous regime of early rising and work did perform an essential part of the cultural shift being inculcated in these children. Work, and the discipline which often accompanied it, were to be the means by which these children would abandon the ways of the ‘native’ and take up an industrious life in white society. They first had to be shown how this was done.
Christian zealotry drove the staff at Roelands to wipe out as much as they could of the children’s Aboriginal heritage. This process began the moment a child arrived. Children came to Roelands from many different parts of the State and, therefore, from different language and tribal backgrounds. On arrival, many had their names changed to disconnect them from their parents. Children were forbidden to speak in their native languages, and were severely punished if found doing so. Parents were discouraged from visiting and some children harboured suspicions that mail to their parents was censored.
The missionaries’ evangelical drive was so strong it impaired their ability to show affection to the children. Ex-inmates remember a place with ‘no love or care’. Staff interactions with children frequently spilled over into frustrated anger. Some remember being repeatedly told: ‘you’re never going to make it. You’re a liar, a thief, you’re going to Hell.’ At other times interactions resulted in outright cruelty. Girls were thrashed for loosing hair clips or ribbons. One girl was beaten when, after her stubbed toe was placed in a bowl of clean water, she described the now coloured water as ‘bloody’.
Bed-wetting incurred severe reprisals. ‘A kid who wet the bed had to have his face rubbed in it first before the sheets were taken off and washed.’ Sometimes these children would be forced to wear a sign around their necks on which was written: ‘I am a bed wetter’. Cruelty was also endured daily in the poor standard of clothing the children were issued. Commonly, they had no shoes to wear around the mission. In winter the ground could be freezing and their feet became painfully numb. During these months, Phillip Prosser remembers children walking with a stooped hunch trying to protect themselves from the biting cold, pulling the few woollen clothes with which they were provided tight over their hands.
Some of the staff engaged in sexual abuse of the children. On one occasion, a prowler was found roaming around the grounds and caught trying to break into the senior girls’ room. It was a staff member, who was recognised by his dog lying at the base of a tree he had climbed to try to avoid detection. He had a reputation of being particularly cruel. He used to carry around an old tractor pulley—about two feet long and four inches wide—with which he used ‘to flog the boys.’ Once it had become common knowledge that he had been trying to sexually abuse the girls he was sent packing from the Home. However, one of the problems that places like Roelands experienced was obtaining suitable staff. The low pay and isolated conditions made it inevitable some unsuitable people would be attracted to the place. Most were untrained and had little but professed Christian faith to recommend them.
There was little attention to the children’s emotional needs or the development of essential living skills. Girls, for example, received no education about the onset of menstruation. When it did occur, many were overcome with fear and uncertainty about what was happening to them. Some thought they were dying from internal bleeding and openly wept. Understanding about money and wages was similarly lacking. Children were forced to devise their own simple entertainments; little or nothing was provided by the mission staff. Their moments of lively interaction between themselves provide, for most, the only source of happy memories of Roelands.
The reality of Roelands as it was experienced by many of its inmates completely contradicts its public image. ‘The outstanding thing about this mission farm’, glowed the West Australian in a 1950 article, ‘is the atmosphere of happy trust.’139 Almost nothing could be farther from the truth. There was little resembling ‘normal’ childhood activities at Roelands, even by the standards of the day. Comments made by the West Australian show how easy it was for contemporaries to look at the surface features of a place—‘the tidiness of the well-stocked cupboards’—and assume this reflected the inner, emotional life experienced by the children.
Missions were only one part of the experience of assimilation for many Aboriginal children. Being fostered into white families was equally common. The white family was seen as a valuable institution in the service of assimilation because of the opportunities it presented for the acquisition of white values and behaviours. As most of the records on fostered Aboriginal children are inaccessible to the public, much of what follows was gathered through interviews.
One of the striking aspects of the system of fostering children was the diversity of family types prepared to take in children. Generalisations about motives are therefore very difficult to make, however, we have been able to detect at least four categories of families, each with distinctive attitudes to fostering. Firstly, were the wealthy elite who regarded fostering as a form of social status. In their upper-class and religious world-view, fostering Aboriginal children was a public sign of ‘goodness’ both as Christian compassion and as commitment to the perceived benefits of active involvement in assimilation. Welfare authorities sought out such families knowing the strength of conditioning Aboriginal children would be exposed to. A second category were families motivated by humanitarianism. These expressed some affinity with Aboriginal people and positively liked Aboriginal children. Such families straddled the socioeconomic divide; some were rural battlers while others were well-off professionals. Thirdly, were parents seeking to care for children, usually because they were unable to have any (or any more) children of their own. Such parents genuinely wanted more children and most did not see colour as an issue. Lastly, were struggling families whose motivation was economic gain. They were attracted to fostering because of the weekly cheque they received from the government to look after these children.
Of all the categories, it seems that many, if not most, children went to the fourth family type where they were at high risk of abuse and exploitation. In the worst cases, they were regarded merely as a commodity to be treated at the whim of the foster-parents, who were mostly outside any official scrutiny. Whatever the motivation, fostering involved a painful cross-cultural experience which has left many damaged and confused.
Rosalie Fraser is among those fostered into a poor white family. Here she suffered in every way as grievously as those children abused in missions. Now in her late thirties she can reflect on her experience with the strength which comes from having confronted and mastered a period of emotional ill-health, brought on by the lingering and intrusive memories of abuse, the depth of which is almost unimaginable.140 Rosalie’s case raises many disturbing issues about the system which administered assimilation. It underlines the extent to which Aboriginal families continued to be the subject of judgements based on race. It highlights the arrogance of a State which exercised those judgements and then failed to act in its duty of care. Rosalie’s mother had all her ten children taken from her over a period of time.
Rosalie’s removal from her family was swift and clinical. In 1961, when she was two and a half year’s old, a welfare officer visited her parents’ home in rural Beverley. The officer judged her parents unfit to care for children largely on the basis of the condition of their house, which was home to three other children. Her father, a ganger with the railways, had only recently started work. He had previously experienced difficulty finding regular employment. The family had no money saved and their State Housing home had no furniture in it. The welfare officer thought the house was unclean and the children neglected. The following day the Health Department sent an inspector who also said that it was not up to standard. All four children were removed. There was a subsequent court hearing; the parents were present but were unrepresented. The outcome was predictable. Despite acknowledging the bond between parents and children, the overriding assessment of the parents was negative: ‘they lacked responsibility.’ Many years later Rosalie’s mother explained there was nothing she or her husband could do: ‘the welfare and the police had all the power.’ It was a familiar story.
There was a sad irony for Rosalie and her sister in the events which followed. Requests by other members of her parents’ immediate family to foster the children were turned down by the Child Welfare Department because the homes to which they might go—Aboriginal homes—were judged to lack suitable space. Yet the home selected by the Child Welfare Department was anything but suitable. They were sent to a ‘lower class white family’ in Glendalough—on the ‘other side of the lake’—where State Housing owned a number of houses. The three-bedroomed house was already home to six children, and the family was under financial strain.
Rosalie has long pondered why her foster-mother became involved in their lives. Under the Child Welfare Act she was required to be licensed to take children under six years of age. However, Rosalie does not believe her foster-parents underwent any prior screening to determine their suitability because records show it was only a matter of a few days after they were removed from their parents that her foster-mother received a telegram from Child Welfare asking her to take the children.
By the early 1960s, the Department was unable to manage the system of fostering it was overseeing. The Annual Report for 1962 makes this clear: ‘In the last year there has again been an increase in the number of children being cared for by foster-parents. Several appeals have been made through the newspapers for homes for children … the response was not overwhelming.’ In other words, it was under pressure to find families, almost any family. It is possible to see how, in these circumstances, screening could rate a low priority. In Rosalie’s case the choice of family does seem extraordinary, even at face value: a struggling family in modest circumstances already straining for space is allowed to accept two more children. Rosalie thinks it is possible her foster-mother simply did not know how to turn down the Department once she was approached. However, she cannot overlook one awful possibility, that the family was attracted by the considerable financial benefits they received from the Department to foster herself and her sister. ‘When they got the money through the post every Saturday they went and did the food shopping.’
Clearly, the financial state of the family should have precluded them from fostering. The Spartan circumstances of the Glendalough household impacted directly on Rosalie and her sister in ways which made them marginalised members of the family. For years the sisters were forced to sleep in the same bed. They were treated differently from the other children in ways which were simply demeaning. The parents fully equipped their own children for school, but Rosalie and her sister wore thongs in winter and, on wet mornings, arrived wearing only an old plastic table cloth to protect their clothing. They owned no toys.
However, the material deprivation to which they were subjected pales against their experience of neglect and abuse. Before the age of five Rosalie was admitted to hospital suffering from rickets for which she received medication. If this was indicative of lack of basic care, the torrent of emotional abuse which daily poured from her foster-mother confirms the complete unsuitability of this foster family.
Every day of my life that I stayed in that foster placement I was referred to as a fucker, a boong, a bastard or a slow-learning cunt. My name was never used. I didn’t really have a name.
The foster-mother harangued Rosalie for her Aboriginality. She was told: ‘You’re nothing but a black boong, just like your mother’. This abuse was not just occasional but repeated throughout each day. ‘If we were outside we were told “get in here you black boongs.”’ On a broader level, her foster-parents openly talked about Aborigines in derogatory terms, calling them ‘dirty, no-hopers and drunks’.
The physical abuse was just as persistent and threatening. ‘At one time my foster-father insisted that we be sent to the Mount Lawley Receiving Home [for Aboriginal children] because of the abuse we were getting and because he thought she would kill us.’
The welfare system failed the girls when it allowed them to return to the family after a short stay at the Receiving Home. For years on end the house was regularly in uproar because of the abuse the sisters received from the foster-mother. Rosalie’s foster siblings were often distressed over their treatment and protested to the mother that they ‘should be gotten rid of’. One, however, did try to intervene to offer protection.
The most extraordinary aspect of Rosalie’s experience of foster placement in this dysfunctional family is the role of the Department of Child Welfare. Their failure to exercise duty of care continued throughout her placement. The family was visited, briefly, about once a year.
We were always warned prior to them [the Child Welfare Department] coming and we were drilled not to say anything. When they came everything was different. The house was cleaned up, it was made to look like my sister and I had separate beds to sleep in and we had toys put on our beds. We were told by our foster-mother that if we were asked if we liked living there we were to say yes.
On one visit a welfare officer criticised Rosalie’s foster-mother for failing to ensure the girls’ hair was brushed after which she contemptuously ranted: ‘The fucking welfare have a cheek to criticise—who else is going to look after boongs?’ However, the Child Welfare’s apparent concern for the well-being of the sisters on this occasion did not extend to careful checks which might have revealed the mistreatment taking place. On the occasional visits from the Department, the children were spoken to separately from the foster-mother, but only very briefly, and in the most superficial manner. Equally disturbing were the racial comments some of these officers recorded in their departmental files. In 1966 an entry read: ‘these were two ugly girls who had prominent Aboriginal features including broad noses and protruding lips.’ In 1970 another commented that Rosalie ‘would no doubt marry an Aboriginal person because she will find it too hard to live up to a white standard.’
From time to time welfare officers suspected that the sisters were not being properly cared for. On their files was noted clear indications all was not well in their home. They were described on one occasion as ‘two very skinny and undernourished children, small for their ages.’ There are also notes from teachers indicating the sisters were coming to school ‘unkempt’ and without proper equipment. Department files also reveal that a series of complaints were received from neighbours about the treatment of the children. Nothing was done to follow up any of these concerns.
Rosalie is understandably angry at the treatment she received at the hands of the Child Welfare Department. She wonders about the justice of a system which made harsh judgements about her parents and yet failed to show equal rigour with her foster home. She asks why the money which government paid to clothe and feed her at her foster family could not have been given to her natural family to assist them. As events turned out her own family fractured. Her father, who became so ashamed after losing all his children, disappeared after he fell behind with the compulsory child maintenance payments he had to make for the upkeep of the children taken from him. Her mother succumbed to alcoholism.
Rosalie herself became a mother at a young age and began to come under the notice of the Child Welfare authorities. For a time she suffered repeated flashbacks about the abuse she had suffered in the foster home and this finally led to a nervous breakdown. She recovered by writing out her torment in her own full account of life as an Aboriginal child in a white family.
Rosalie’s greatest sense of tragedy is the loss of her Aboriginal heritage.
The two stories at the centre of this chapter—Phillip Prosser in the 1950s and Rosalie Fraser in the 1960s—raise disturbing issues about the involvement of government agencies in the assimilation process. There is, according to some legal authorities,141 a strong case to be made that, in removing children from their families, government entered a fiduciary relationship; that is, it agreed to act for or on behalf of, or in the best interests of, these children. In the case of Western Australia, this relationship is potentially all the stronger given the legislation which made the Commissioner for Native Affairs the legal guardian of all Aboriginal children until they turned twenty-one years of age. This legal responsibility has already been tested in some recent court hearings. Sweeney sums up the findings:
In the recent case of Williams v The Minister, Aboriginal Land Rights Act, the New South Wales Court of Appeal held, by a majority, that it was arguable that the Aboriginal Welfare Board (a statutory body) was under a fiduciary obligation to Aboriginal children placed in its care. It also held the Board was arguably obliged to have ‘truly provided, in a manner apt for a fiduciary, for [the plaintiff’s] ‘custody, maintenance and education’.
Similarly, Justice Toohey in Mabo (No. 2) stated:
executive actions by the government gave rise to a policy of protection by which government, together with the particular vulnerability of Aboriginal people to the exercise of power by the Crown to adversely affect their interests, gave rise to a fiduciary relationship.142
The issue becomes the extent to which government breached its obligations under law to provide for the best interests of these children. There are strong grounds for believing this was the case with both Phillip Prosser and Rosalie Fraser. Phillip Prosser was sent to an institution which not only failed to guarantee his physical safety but which contained (even by the standards of the day) an institutionalised culture of violence exceeding the known experiences of children in State Government schools. Officials knew about the violence at Roelands. In Rosalie’s case, the foster home to which she was sent failed to guarantee her best interests in a physical and emotional sense. The persistence of this gross abuse while under the care of the Child Welfare Department, is the strongest illustration possible that government did not provide for the best interests of many of these children. Rosalie’s was one of a series of test cases brought against the Western Australian Government in the early 1990s for its failure to act in its duty of care to children removed from their families. In 1995 the Minister for Community Services, Mr Nicholls, rejected the claims, ‘fearing a flood of claims from thousands of Aborigines displaced by the Government’s ‘welfare’ department.’ Rosalie told the press at the time: ‘All the abuse we suffered as children, the department failed in its duty of care … to not even allow our parents the right to know where we were, to not let them know we were abused, when we were hospitalised, it’s wrong.’143
In both cases government agencies were neither trained nor resourced to adequately fulfil their duty of care. This, of course, exposes the sham of the State’s concern for Aboriginal children. Many were sent to places where they were infinitely worse off in a material and emotional sense than the homes from which they were taken.