In 1965 ‘Yvonne’ arrived at Wandering Mission. She had been committed by the court ‘due to the neglect of her parents and her lack of attendance at school’. She was included as a case history in a 1971 thesis submitted for a Teacher’s Higher Certificate which examined the work of Wandering Mission.203 The details of her case highlight the difficulties in assessing the impact of assimilation. The author is at some pains to construct a ‘success story’ out of the misery of her family life. Yvonne’s father was said to have been ‘drinking fuel spirits by the time he was twenty and had over 60 convictions in police courts.’ Yvonne was described as ‘undernourished, extremely shy, frightened, self-conscious and very moody’. She had little school prior to coming to the mission. For a year she worked at the mission as a domestic, during which time, ‘she developed good tastes in personal grooming as well as dress sense.’ Through the mission she obtained outside employment as a domestic on a nearby farm. However, she left to rejoin her mother at Narrogin Reserve. Twelve months later she returned looking ‘dirty, undernourished and shabbily dressed’. She was again accepted as a domestic and not long afterwards ‘she quickly changed to a well mannered, well dressed young girl’. With the help of the Mission’s Pallotine Order she was sent to Melbourne to train as a nursing aide and, at the time the thesis was completed, was said to be doing well in her chosen career. She was assessed as capable of doing well ‘if she remains in Melbourne. Could possibly meet a suitable male and settle down in that city to a well adjusted domestic life.’
Was this an unequivocal success story of assimilation, as the writer so readily assumes? The ‘storyline’ is so apparent: mission rescues Aboriginal girl from wretched home life and gives her the skills to enter white society. We will probably never know what this young woman felt about the course her life had taken under assimilation. However, efforts to construct success stories, such as Yvonne’s, raise a number of issues. Firstly, she was being constructed as a ‘success’ only by reference to her external circumstances and, secondly, she was an atypical case. During the 1950s and 60s, when most of the children separated from their families emerged as young adults in the community, Yvonne was one of the very few who managed to obtain vocational qualifications.
Pronouncements in the post-war period ascribed a range of different meanings to assimilation. The official position, as enunciated at the Commonwealth level continued to be, as Paul Hasluck expressed it: ‘that, in the course of time, it is expected that all persons of aboriginal blood or mixed blood in Australia will live like white Australians do.’204 This position assumed a cultural transformation occurring among Aborigines but otherwise gave the appearance of a society striving for material and social equality. It suggested that, eventually, blacks and whites would live side by side albeit with blacks having dispensed with their culture. Some well-intentioned people of the time found this an attractive ideal. It was seen to be an advance on the policy of segregation. It probably explains why some young people like Yvonne were show-cased as success stories. However, as debates within Western Australia show, assimilation was understood by most people in the 1950s and early 60s to involve a much more predetermined set of outcomes. As the Commissioner of Native Welfare wrote in his 1958 Annual Report:
the policy and the term assimilation postulates a state of mind, our mind, in regard to natives being a people apart—it appears therefore to be a term aligned with the policy referred to elsewhere as ‘apartheid’. In its effect it may even be worse because the notion of apartness leads to a belief that we have the right to decide whether they as natives are entitled to share with us certain rights and privileges which we regard and jealously guard as being our birth right.205
Hence, assimilation was never really designed to produce many ‘Yvonnes’—young Aborigines with an education who could compete equally with whites. There remained an unspoken assumption that assimilation would still confer to white society the ability to exercise social control over the Aboriginal population. This control would be all the more effective if Aborigines could be stripped of their culture. Hence, assimilation involved an explicit understanding about the place of Aboriginal culture. This was acknowledged by the Superintendent of Tardun Mission outside Geraldton who in his 1956 Annual Report to the Commissioner explained the difference between ‘integration’ and ‘assimilation’.
We [the mission] use the term ‘integrate’ designedly, in preference to ‘assimilation’, the term now in current use. ‘Integration’ implies the existence of two separate elements which must be moulded to an homogeneous whole at the same time as retaining their individual identity. ‘Assimilation’, on the other hand, means the absorption of one of the elements, in this case the natives, and their ultimate disappearance.206
These comments make the purpose of assimilation during the 1950s, and much of the 1960s, quite clear. At the very time large numbers of young Aborigines were coming out of missions and foster homes to live in the general community, they confronted a society which legitimised racial inequality and cultural destruction while it left the racial attitudes of white society intact and unchallenged. It therefore imposed a double tragedy on those children, now turned young adults, who had been separated from their families. It not only stripped them of their heritage, but it thrust them into a society which never intended to receive them as anything other than inferior beings. Thus, another generation of Aborigines remained firmly marginalised.
Not surprisingly, the missions tried hard to convince themselves they were working towards the social equality of Aborigines. In 1956 the Superintendent at Roelands Mission published figures on the post-release outcomes of the sixty-five children who had finished ‘their course of training’ since its establishment in 1941. These purported to show seventy-eight percent were living ‘in standards equal to the white community’, while twenty-two percent have ‘gone back to camp conditions.’ Of the latter group, nine percent were girls who married husbands who could not provide them with any other accommodation; four percent were ‘subnormal and represent special cases’ while nine percent ‘have of their own choice drifted back into camp life.’ Of the larger group, nearly half were domestic and farm workers; a quarter were in ‘trades and professions’ while just under a quarter were married females.207 In other words, according to the superintendent of this mission, his efforts had met with significant success. However, his figures are almost meaningless. The categorisation used, that most were living ‘in standards equal to the white community’, is too vague to make much sense. Which white community? The very poorest or the moderately affluent? Most likely, missions felt the pressure to justify the continued funding they received by placing their work in some sort of vague, unthreatening, but favourable light.
The general pattern of what happened to most of these young people is clear. Lady Jessie Street pointed to the problems as early as 1957 when, in the course of her tour around Australia visiting Aboriginal settlements, she wrote of the mission children in Western Australia.
When they leave school, neither the Mission nor the church to which denomination it belongs take further responsibility for these young people. This is a most difficult period for them. They have led a dependent, sheltered life in boarding school … When they leave school many of them have to return to aboriginal camps without any facilities. They have not only to adjust themselves to this but as they are unskilled and untrained and coloured they find it difficult to find work. They awaken to the fact that they are regarded as inferior because of their dark skin. They go to towns, as they must to get jobs, and as they can’t get proper accommodation on account of their colour they are exposed to all sorts of danger. Many of these young people are exploited and demoralised by the bad elements among the whites against which police seldom take action.208
There could be no more concise summation of the realities of assimilation as it was experienced by hundreds of Aboriginal young people. Each of the issues Jessie Street raised—the discrimination, the lack of accommodation, and the difficulty in finding work—are worthy of detailed examination for in them we see the reality of assimilation at work.
At the core of assimilation, as it was understood and practised in Western Australia, was the retention of white attitudes of superiority and political control. State Governments of the period, backed by wider community attitudes, practised massive discrimination against Aboriginal people that was intended to restrict their social advancement. Indeed, Frank Gare remembers the fierce political opposition to Aboriginal advancement throughout the 1950s and 60s. While the occasional minister may have been sympathetic to proposals for Aboriginal social advancement, governments were not. This opposition, and its consequences, were well understood among sections of the educated elite. The members of the 1958 Special Committee chaired by Frank Gare summed up the second-class status of Western Australian Aborigines.
In accordance with Section 10 of the Federal Nationality and Citizenship Act, 1948-1955, every aboriginal person born in Australia is a citizen of the Commonwealth. Western Australia, however, has enacted special legislation which deprives aborigines and most part-aborigines of some of the normal rights and privileges of citizenship, even though it does not absolve them from most of its responsibilities—including taxation. Under this legislation, one of the influential principles of democracy—that there shall be no taxation without representation—is denied the native living in Western Australia. The State Electoral Act deprives him of the right to vote in State elections, and … disqualifies him from voting in the Federal sphere. In addition, the Licencing Act, the Firearms and Gun Act, a number of other Western Australian Acts and even the Native Welfare (Administration) Act itself, all impose restrictions of varying degree on natives as distinct from other persons. It is obvious, therefore, that although natives in Western Australia may be citizens of the Commonwealth, they are not full citizens of their own State. They suffer under the further disability that the State-imposed restrictions automatically disqualify many of them from certain very important benefits under the Federal Social Services Act.209
This body of legislative discrimination, much of which remained in force until the mid to late 1960s, had the effect of entrenching stereotypical attitudes among both whites and blacks, as the Special Committee recognised.
It has the inevitable result, among other things, of implanting in too many minds, native and otherwise, the belief that anyone officially classed as a ‘native’ must be an inferior being. Anything more calculated to destroy the self-respect and self-confidence of such a people would be difficult to imagine.210
One of the core assumptions behind assimilation—that Aborigines could be kept in their place—extended to a reluctance by most governments to provide proper services to them and to grant them civic rights. When, in July 1964, new legislation came into effect removing much of the legal discrimination against Aborigines, the Commissioner noted in his Annual Report that it was passed against a background of considerable social anxiety, of ‘fearful and gloomy prophecies of widespread, serious social disorder’, which many believed would accompany legal equality.211
Keeping Aborigines ‘in their place’ meant curtailing their social advancement through government sponsored measures. Frank Gare recalls a proposal he backed in the early 1960s to build education hostels for young Aborigines in the bush. When he told his minister of the proposal, the minister said: ‘If I am going to get these through Cabinet, you’ll have to design hostels that cost half the price of a country high school where white kids go to school.’ As Gare explains: ‘So we put it to Public Works and they designed cut-price hostels. It was the only way we could get it through Cabinet.’
Backed by community opinion hostile to the integration of Aborigines, governments, throughout the 1950s and 60s continued to drag their feet in providing housing for Aboriginal people. This meant that young Aborigines coming out of the missions were forced back into the same cycle of poor housing that most had experienced prior to their removal. Many went back to the reserves. Reflecting the continuing preference for segregation of the races, governments continued to expand the reserve system. Their number increased from thirty-six in 1949 to sixty in 1959 and rising to seventy in 1964.212 For those young institutionalised Aborigines who went back to live in these reserves, conditions remained primitive. Lack of funds from government meant that, by 1959, twenty of the reserves were still without basic water and toilet facilities and only a modest start had been made on housing.213 Many of the children lacked an electric light to do their homework. Some District Officers from the Native Welfare Department deplored the housing situation facing Aborigines. ‘With better facilities for living’, the District Officer for the Southern District wrote in his 1958 annual report, ‘both on and off the reserves—the lot of the Native People should be considerably ameliorated. But unless the provision of Government finance keeps pace with the needs of the native community and the plans for their advancement, this will remain a pipe dream.’214
The double-bind many Aborigines were trapped in became apparent in the early 1950s when the Department of Native Welfare and the State Housing Commission sponsored about one hundred Aboriginal families into conventional suburban housing which failed disastrously. Within a few years, seventy-five percent had been forced to relinquish their properties. The financial commitment involved for rent or purchase payments ‘was too much for their insecure economic status.’215 The Department of Native Welfare expressed dejection in trying to assist these people into housing, reporting in 1957: ‘Every consideration has been shown to these people by the State Housing Commission and this office, but in very few cases has the response been worth the effort.’216 The failure of the scheme fuelled the critics of assimilation. Aborigines were now believed to be incapable of living in the white way. New moves to deal with the housing policy emerged out of the failure of this scheme. These were based on the old desire to maintain segregation: ‘until the economic and social standards of the Aborigines reached a level acceptable to the white community, a transitional housing scheme should be provided.’217
Far from being designed to promote future social equality, the transitional scheme helped perpetuate Aboriginal marginalisation. Under this scheme, basic houses were built on the reserves grouped around communal facilities. They were designed as an introduction to more sophisticated housing. In reality, the policy could not disguise the harsh reality; these houses were ‘little more than rural black slum ghettos’, as Henry Schapper vividly described them in his 1970 study of Aboriginal affairs in Western Australia.218 Most had neither heating nor water for ablutions; inside the houses there were few possessions other than clothing, blankets, cooking and eating utensils. ‘All are utterly inadequate for hygienic family living’, wrote Schapper.219 In the mid 1960s, ‘Brian’ was removed from the Wagin Reserve. His home consisted of ‘an old corrugated iron shack’, divided into three rooms with ‘dilapidated plaster board.’ The ceiling was only two metres high and, while there were spaces for windows, there was no glass and no electricity.220 From these primitive and unpromising conditions, which reflected the ongoing community drive for segregation, Aborigines were supposed to learn the art of ‘civilised’ white living.
When they were deemed suitably experienced, Aborigines could move from the ‘primary transitional’ stage on the reserves, to a ‘standard transitional’ home in a country town. A final stage saw the transition to a conventional suburban house. This scheme gave authorities ongoing power to make judgements on Aboriginal people over their progress through the gateways to white living. By 1967, nearly twenty years after its commencement, the bulk of the building activity had been in the primary stage: 487 primary transitional houses had been built; 251 standard transitional houses and only 35 conventional houses.221 In fact, evidence collected by the Aboriginal Welfare Council in the mid 1960s indicates that shire council’s objection to the erection of transition houses in country towns, creating serious difficulties for the building program.222 These objections were driven by community opposition which feared the presence of an Aboriginal family next door would greatly depreciate property values. One such complainant suggested that ‘Aboriginal families should be placed in an area where all the homes were rented and this would not affect people like themselves.’223 Thus, the reserves remained for many Aboriginal people a place of gloomy impoverishment.
Greatly adding to the problems of poor housing were the bleak employment prospects, especially for young people. In 1964 the Minister for Native Welfare was forced to acknowledge ‘the acute unemployment position of teenage natives in south-west towns’.224 The situation for young people who had gained little, or no, vocational training at missions, was made worse by their lack of access to technical training during most of the 1960s. As late as 1967 only twenty-seven Aboriginal boys were undergoing apprenticeships in any one year.225 The Aboriginal Advancement Council of Western Australia lobbied government to improve its training efforts for young Aborigines. ‘Re-training and rehabilitation of Europeans’, the Council argued, ‘are undertaken on an increasing scale. Why not raise the standard of skill among the hundreds of Aboriginal men who have missed the opportunity of apprenticeship in their young days through no fault of their own?’226 However, throughout the 1960s, government efforts, through the Department of Native Affairs, continued to be focused on providing agricultural training to Aboriginal youth. In other words, they were being trained for jobs on the land as farm labourers, a source of employment that had been declining for years.
In 1967 the Department of Native Welfare became concerned at the ‘vexing problem’ of unemployment among Aboriginal youth, and surveys were conducted in regional areas ‘to establish whether an employment market exists for them’.227 A 1968 employment survey undertaken in Geraldton pinpointed the problems: ‘Low education and training standards have made it impossible to place natives in the past. Of several applications for any vacancy, the Aboriginal applicant is generally the least qualified. Even for manual jobs, qualifications are becoming increasingly important.’228 Contrary to the rhetoric behind assimilation, there is no evidence that Aborigines ‘trained’ in missions had greater advantages in the labour market than those who had remained in their communities. In terms of skills, they were largely indistinguishable. However, the failure of missions to prepare children for an employment future in white society was never the subject of critical examination until Henry Schapper drew attention to the issue in 1970. In his study of Aborigines in Western Australia he wrote that missions lacked skills and resources for the task.
The result is that it is hardly possible for Aborigines on these missions to learn properly the skills and discipline of sustained work, the skills of household management, and to acquire adequate levels of hygiene, diet and health. Because of these inadequacies and because the school curriculum and methods of education are not geared to the needs of environmentally disadvantaged children, the formal education of school children on mission settlements is largely irrelevant.229
Many Aborigines, especially in the South-West, were only too aware that they were effectively locked out of the employment market. In 1966 a group of Aboriginal prisoners in Fremantle Gaol set down their thoughts to prison authorities on ‘Why Noongars Can’t Get Good Jobs Outside’:
1. Because they are unskilled labour.
2. Because they should get more help from Native Welfare from the time they leave school.
3. Because all the money supposed to be spent on Natives is spent on building little two-roomed houses throughout the country.
4. We think the Native Welfare could have done better by building hostels for teen-age boys and girls.
5. Boys should learn carpentry and cabinet making—also metal work like plumbing, engineering etc.
6. Girls should learn secretarial work and nursing etc. (As it is all they do is run around the streets making a bad name for themselves.)230
These comments show an acute awareness among the prisoners of the marginalised position of Aborigines in society, and particularly the problems facing the young. They reveal a desire for a better future. Little, however, was done to help provide it. The 1974 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Affairs was forced to concede: ‘Opportunities for gainful employment have declined markedly in recent years and it seems to be expected that this decline will increase rather than decrease with the passage of time, as the work load becomes more that of machines than of men.’231 Two decades of assimilation had succeeded in ensuring few Aborigines competed with whites for employment.
With especially bleak prospects in country towns, Aborigines drifted to Perth in the 1950s and 60s. Here, they congregated in East Perth, a small locale of cheap rents, shabby houses and noisy social interaction. It had the city’s seediest wine bars. By the 1960s most people regarded the place as a slum. Many of the houses in which Aborigines lived had been condemned, but not demolished. The only study of East Perth during these years made a number of very interesting observations about the lifestyle of its residents.232 Jeanette Kidd found a close-knit, if chaotic, and frequently dysfunctional community. Most of the Aborigines who inhabited the area originated from the missions, drawn to the place to be with their own kind. They were indifferent ‘as to whether the rest of the community accepts them.’ However, they carried with them the legacy of their mission days. ‘One downfall of mission training’, Kidd observed, ‘is the children lead a sheltered life, free from experiences they may meet in the city. And when they come to the city looking for employment and a different way of life, many of them are completely lost.’ Here was the full realisation of the consequences of assimilation.
Life was precarious for the Aborigines of East Perth in the 1960s. Unemployment was rife. The men drifted from one poorly paid job to another. Families were continually falling behind in their rent, and landlords showed little sympathy. ‘Landlords evict the part-Aboriginal tenants almost as soon as they fall behind in their rent, regardless of the circumstances.’ When this happened families moved in together, exacerbating overcrowding. Lack of shower and toilet facilities affected standards of health. Girls became pregnant in their teens, but relationships were unstable.
Husbands in general show tendencies towards being unable to accept the responsibility of finding permanent employment to support their families. This makes the wife’s task very difficult since not many part-Aboriginal women in East Perth are able to find employment due to lack of education and training.
Some young women, recently arrived from the missions, were forced into prostitution. Their clients were the white men who prowled the streets at night. Some had illegitimate children. Drinking and drunkenness were common. Kidd described the habit as an ‘escape from the reality of life which the natives feel they have no part in.’ However, drinking brought Aborigines under the glare of the police and arrests for drunkenness, vagrancy, and neglect of children were regular occurrences.
The children of these mostly ex-mission adults bore the legacy of their parents’ background: problems of adjustment were being transmitted to the next generation. Poor school attendance, the lack of ongoing male influences in households and general poverty made many prone to juvenile crime, the incidence of which was slowly on the rise in the area. These youth, Kidd reported,
find the society hard to live in, mainly due to the fact that their environment makes it hard for them to adjust and conform. Surveys have shown that Aboriginal youths have no close ties with the ‘father’ image, which could contribute to their apparent lack of responsibility. There is a high incidence of minor crime which results mainly from boredom or lack of security. Car-stealing is common.
These families were trapped in their poverty. ‘Most natives in East Perth’, Kidd wrote, ‘wanted a better class of home, but these were not available’. Native Welfare was keen for the State Housing Commission to launch a rehousing scheme for East Perth but finance was not forthcoming. However, the problem of poverty was more complex than lack of housing. Kidd’s study highlighted, but did not fully explore, a crucial aspect about their backgrounds. Missions had left them without the range of social and vocational skills to make the fullest use of their lives. However, Kidd had come closer than anyone else in understanding the link between ex-mission inmates’ tragic backgrounds and their life of unrelieved poverty.
The extent of disadvantage among the Aboriginal community of Western Australia in the mid 1960s was graphically illustrated in a set of data compiled by Henry Schapper in his book Aboriginal Advancement to Integration. Contrasting their experiences with European families Schapper found one in three Aboriginal families had someone who was unemployed, compared with only one in ten in European families. Educational disadvantage was even greater with only one family in fourteen who had a member with a junior certificate or higher qualification, compared to Europeans with more than one per family. The extent of welfare discrimination was equally stark. One Aboriginal family in three had a child under the notice of the Child Welfare Department, compared to one European family in thirty-four. However, experience of the legal system between the two races showed the largest gap of all: one Aboriginal family in three had a family member committed to gaol while, for Europeans, it was one in seventy-one. The gap in the rates for juvenile convictions was also large: one in four families for Aborigines, compared to one in nineteen for Europeans.233
Compounding the marginalised status of Aborigines in the 1950s and 60s was the existence of widespread community racial prejudice. It is especially hard to measure the extent of racism during the 1960s because it was not, at the time, the subject of systematic study. Undoubtedly, signs of positive changes in some quarters towards acceptance were evident. The state school system, for example, began to take seriously the disadvantage of Aboriginal students in schools and employed specially trained teachers. International trends towards more accepting racial attitudes in general filtered through to influence the educated section of community opinion. However, at other levels, racism towards Aborigines remained entrenched.
Assimilation acted as a facade to perpetuate deeply ingrained racial attitudes. Whites who were disdainful of Aborigines had their views legitimised by the existence of this very policy. Leading advocates of assimilation had long maintained that Aboriginal culture was inferior and unstoppable historical forces would eventually wipe it out. This was the very point Paul Hasluck made in the Federal Parliament after the States and the Commonwealth reaffirmed their commitment to assimilation in the early 1950s. The ‘blessings of civilisation are worth having’, he told the House of Assembly:
The world today … is coming around again to the idea that inevitable change can be made for the better. We recognise now that the noble savage can benefit from measures taken to improve his health and nutrition, to teach him better civilisation, and to lead him to civilised ways of life. We know that culture is not static but that it either changes or dies … The native people will grow into the society in which, by force of history, they are bound to live.234
No matter how well intended the motives behind such ideas, they were not calculated to inspire acceptance or tolerance for Aboriginal people. The essence of assimilation was the belief in the superiority of white society. It is no great leap from this position to one which seeks to isolate the ‘inferior’ culture. In country towns throughout the South-West segregation was still widely practiced. At Wagin, for example, the local council erected ‘whites only’ signs on the lavatories and the rest rooms. In 1963 the Sunday Times investigated this discrimination and found that it was being driven by poor housing, poor hygiene and drunkenness. A member of the Wagin Native Welfare Committee explained to the paper that: ‘If there is any segregation it is purely because of a need for hygiene’. This ‘hygiene bar’ was the explanation given by the local cafe owner for refusing entry of Aborigines into her shop. Complaints about abuse of alcohol were also widespread among whites, in particular the frequent sight of Aborigines found drunk in the streets.
Such complaints must be placed in their broader context. Whites were caught in an ongoing and vicious cycle of prejudice. The poor living conditions imposed on Aborigines fuelled the stereotypes which prevented them achieving social acceptance. Some whites could see the process at work. They could acknowledge the causes of the degradation but, seemingly, not to the point of incorporating this understanding into their social attitudes. Social conditions for Aborigines had barely changed in half a century. Maintenance of hygiene was difficult on the reserves and probably impossible in the worst of the ‘humpy’ tents: ‘The humpy has no electricity or cooking area and has an earthen floor covered mostly with ants’, reported the Sunday Times about one such structure on the Wagin Reserve. This was home to a family of ten including six school children. It had only four makeshift beds for the entire family. The occupant ‘said she had been refused a house by the Native Welfare Department because she did not have a priority.’ No action was taken by the local health inspector to condemn any of the humpies on the reserve because ‘only Native Welfare Officers are allowed in the area’.235
Drunkenness had obvious wider causes. Apart from a desire for escapism, legal restrictions meant that alcohol had to be consumed before returning to the reserve or Aborigines faced the risk of prosecution. The Wagin publican knew it was ‘a vicious circle that causes so many of them to be found drunk in the streets.’ Another publican confirmed that: ‘The native has little incentive generally. If he is not working he should be employed by the Native Welfare at the reserve instead of roaming the streets and collecting rations and social service.’
Wagin was by no means an isolated example of poor race relations. Gnowangerup earned the reputation during the 1960s as an ‘Aboriginal-hating town’ with attitudes equivalent to those in the American Deep South.236 Aboriginal opposition to the segregation of the town along racial lines erupted in 1963 when the Superintendent of the South Division of the Department of Native Affairs was called upon to investigate discrimination against Aborigines at the local cinema. It had only been several years since they were admitted at all and, under the prevailing arrangement, a separate block of seats was set aside for Aborigines even though the proprietor had the right to refuse entry to any person not suitably attired. In other words, even those Aborigines who were thought respectable enough to admit to the cinema, were still forced to sit in seats reserved for them only.237 One of the local service stations refused to serve Aboriginal customers, a practice challenged by one Aboriginal family returning from holiday in Albany in 1972. Driving a 1967 Ford Fairlane and towing a ‘fashionable’ caravan, the family was told by the owners when they entered the restaurant that ‘they did not serve Aborigines in the restaurant.’238 Geraldton was another town where discrimination was widely practiced. A local firm of furniture retailers had ‘a blanket refusal to assist Aborigines with finance irrespective of favourable credit rating.’239
The treatment accorded Aborigines in country towns in the early 1960s and 70s was a reflection of wider racially intolerant views. The ‘No’ vote in the 1967 Aborigines referendum was higher in Western Australia than in any other State: 17 percent in urban areas and 22 percent in rural areas. This contrasted with 12 and 17 percent respectively in South Australia and 7 and 14 percent in Queensland—two other states with high percentages of Aboriginal people living in them.240 ‘A feature of the Western Australian vote’, commented the West Australian straight after the result was known, ‘was the strong “No” vote in the Federal electoral divisions of Kalgoorlie, Canning and Moore, where the number of Aborigines is higher than in other divisions.’241 This reluctance to concede the basics of citizenship to Aborigines, in the rural areas especially, indicates the remaining depth of racial antipathy.
The experience of decades of segregation had left its legacy. In the late 1960s a deep racial divide continued to separate most whites from Aborigines, each living in isolation from the other. This was clearly manifest in those few institutions where the two groups unavoidably came together. Schools in the late 1960s saw the entry of larger number of Aboriginal children but this was not accompanied by any breakdown in social barriers. Robert McKeich, a sociology lecturer and former state school teacher in Western Australia, studied the social interaction between Aboriginal students and staff. He found that the school environment failed to put the students at ease and that they were subject to constant teacher reprimands. This was not only a significant cause of school failure among the group, it perpetuated and reinforced their social isolation. Aboriginal students preferred their own company and tended to segregate themselves. Teachers, on the other hand, McKeich found, were ignorant of basic background information on Aboriginal students. ‘They tend to play part-Aboriginal educational problems “by ear”, develop stereotyped reasons for retardation, and, with few exceptions, eventually give up any real endeavour to help these children.’242
Prisons also formalised racial barriers to social integration. A 1969 study found that Aboriginal inmates employed ‘mechanisms of exclusion and segregation’. They placed an emphasis on their Aboriginality to strengthen group boundaries using Aboriginal ‘dialect’ to swear at prison officers and to exclude other prisoners from conversations. ‘On the sports field,’ the study found, ‘or in other spheres of recreation, Aborigines tend to participate as a group, usually against “white” prisoners.’ This ‘closing of the ranks’ frustrated prison staff who regarded the ‘Aboriginal problem’ as an insoluble one. Consequently, ‘the staff are accused of apathy and lack of interest in Aboriginal welfare.’243
Such barriers were the inevitable result of the racially inspired policies of segregation. They hid even more overtly hostile attitudes which, from time to time, surfaced in public debate. An astonishing outburst of racism was published in a 1971 edition of Western Australia’s Local Government Journal calling for full racial segregation in Australia. While the journal was a private publication, and not affiliated with the Local Government Association, it was a long-standing publication disseminating much of the news about local government throughout the State. The author of the article, Mr R Hewitt, who had been editor of the journal for thirteen years, evoked the views officially held a generation earlier. It was impossible, he argued, to:
reconcile the totally different national characteristics of the Nordic-type whites and the aboriginal blacks, you still have the danger of miscegenation, with blacks married to white bringing grey children into the nation, or, worse, a flood of illegitimates of indeterminate colour … The aborigines are being urged to adopt the white man’s ways and to live in the white man’s houses. But the white people resent it.
Hewitt went on to call for the introduction of apartheid, along South African lines.
Whether the South African system will work in this country, or will even be considered in light of the prejudice that has been fanned up against it, is hard to say, but the idea is worth studying as it represents an alternative to the present method of trying to make the black mind grasp the essentials of white man’s living.244
Interviewed by the press after the publication of the article Hewitt declared: ‘why not give the blacks a tract of country and let them rule themselves. We can select some leaders from among them to guide their development and destiny.’
It is easy to dismiss Hewitt’s comments as an isolated outburst from a racial extremist. Just how much support his call for apartheid would have received in the early 1970s is impossible to estimate. However, it should be remembered that the majority of Western Australians had grown up with segregation in the form of the Reserve system for which strong support still existed in the community, especially in country areas. There were places where this system was not all that far removed from apartheid.
The nature and extent of racism towards Aborigines became the subject of academic interest in the early 1970s. Explaining the nature of racist attitudes was the focus of Ronald Taft’s 1970 study of ‘Attitudes of Western Australians towards Aborigines.’245 This was a ground-breaking study, providing the first comprehensive picture of racism and its extent, in the State. Reviewing data from opinion polls undertaken in 1954 and 1961, Taft showed that ‘States with the largest Aboriginal population had the least favourable attitudes towards spending of more money on Aborigines.’ In his own study, Taft conducted in-depth interviews with 286 people in three different settings in Western Australia: a provincial city of 5,000 people with a bad record of racial conflict; a provincial town of 1,500 people and the city of Perth. Colour prejudice was found to play a significant part in overall attitudes towards Aborigines. While extreme racial prejudice was reported to be limited to six percent, or less, of the population, about one-quarter of the respondents would not accept a part-Aborigine as a family friend and one-fifth would not accept one as a table companion in a cafe.
At one level the results were positive, suggesting that ‘the trend is for increased feelings of tolerance for Aborigines and greater advocacy of their civil rights’. However, the underlying image held of Aborigines remained unfavourable, particularly in the provincial city and the town featured in the study. Among the examples given were the following:
Smalltown male, aged 50-59 years, brought up in Smalltown. He has had a great deal of contact with Aborigines, having played with them as a child, worked with them and employed them. He has a very unfavourable image of Aborigines and strongly favours their segregation. He reached 7th grade at school and is now a truck driver. He would admit neither part-Aborigines nor full-bloods to any single category of social distance.
Bigtown male, aged 50-59 years, brought up in a Western Australian country town, and has had ten years of education. He has had Aborigines as customers for many years in his capacity as a publican and has an extremely unfavourable image of them … he favours their segregation from Whites in several spheres of life.
Bigtown female aged 20-29 years. She has had a great deal of contact with Aborigines as customers in the shop where she works. She came from a farm where Aborigines were employed … she has an unfavourable image of Aborigines in general … It seems as if her various life experiences have left her with some very specific attitudes in general.
Taft’s conclusions were significant and clear cut. Attitudes towards Aborigines were unfavourable, the most frequently mentioned qualities attributed to them being: wasteful with money, unambitious, lazy, dirty and slovenly, drunken, unreliable, and superstitious. These attitudes were held despite widespread support in favour of granting them civil rights. Taft found the driving force behind attitudes towards Aborigines was the extent to which a person had been subject to an unfavourable socially accepted stereotype about them and whether this image was accepted or rejected.
If he lives in Bigtown he will be continually subjected to an unfavourable stereotype and this will dominate his attitudes unless his own personal experience counteracts it. If he lives in the more favourable environment of Perth or Smalltown, it is likely that his image of the Aborigines is less subject to immediate environmental pressures, and is more closely related to his experience.
Stereotypical attitudes towards blacks very frequently translated into overt discrimination which young Aborigines, coming out of the missions, faced along with all others. In 1971 Professor Leonard Broome, an American sociologist visiting the Australian National University, made a systematic study of census data which gave ‘the first true indication of the hopelessness of the Aborigines’ employment prospects in a climate of economic and educational black poverty.’ The figures showed only two percent of Aboriginal workers occupied the top seven occupation groups. In the press the study was reported as ‘nothing less than an indictment of practicing racism.’ Professor Broome told the media that ‘Australia has run Aboriginal “welfare” on the cheap and it has got what it paid for’.246
A unique study into discrimination towards Aborigines was undertaken in 1972. This was sponsored by the Public Interest Research Group and involved the deployment of sixty students from the University of Western Australia’s Law School to visit thirteen country towns in the South-West to interview key people in the white community as well as selected Aborigines.247 The Report documented the attitude and actions of each of the main sections of white population. It showed an interconnected web of discrimination and negative attitudes blocking acceptance and advancement of Aborigines.
Shire councils came in for harsh criticism from the Research Group. While Aborigines were permitted to use shire facilities, ‘natives were under closer scrutiny than whites’ when using them, even though ‘on the whole they did not abuse them.’ However,
With one exception, the Shire Councils in the towns that were visited, had contributed little or nothing towards helping Aborigines. The individuals on the Council interviewed mirrored this action by generally displaying either apathy or antipathy towards Aborigines.
Police in country towns came into frequent and close contact with Aborigines and exercised a controlling influence over their activities. In some of the towns visited by the law students police refused to answer all the questions asked, claiming the information was classified. In other towns cooperation was more forthcoming. This attitude was a reflection of the town’s broader relationship with the Aboriginal population. In towns which enjoyed relatively good Aboriginal living conditions and little racial discord, police were more tolerant than in towns where these conditions were not met. At much the same time as this study, the State Labor Government expressed its concern about relations between police and Aborigines. Allegations of plainclothes police ‘creating fear in Aborigines by badgering them’, were made at a public forum by Mr Arthur Tonkin, a Member of the Legislative Assembly.248
The Public Interest Research Group also showed Aborigines were grossly over-represented in the prosecution rates in country towns. These varied from as high as ninety percent of all prosecutions to as low as about one half, but in no cases were there fewer prosecutions than against whites. The proportion of successful prosecutions was even higher, ‘since there was almost 100% success rate for Aboriginal prosecutions in every town’. These shocking figures seem to indicate the magistracy itself practiced discrimination. In a few of the towns visited, magistrates were interviewed. They ‘seemed to have either a patronising or even prejudicial attitude against Aborigines.’ Problems with the relations between the magistracy and the Aboriginal community were raised in a separate forum. In 1969, Carnarvon’s stipendiary magistrate told a conference of Justices of the Peace that such was the prejudice against Aborigines among magistrates in the north of the State that those who knew themselves to be prejudiced should disqualify themselves from sitting on cases involving Aborigines.249
In their visits to schools, the Public Interest Research Group found relations between whites and Aborigines to be a complex mix of partial acceptance and underlying discrimination. On the positive side, Aboriginal children were well integrated into school life and played an active part in school activities, especially sport. However, Aborigines usually formed their own sub-groups within each school. Teachers were generally less negative about Aborigines than much of the general population, but few took any active role in helping them. Most of the Aboriginal children left school at the minimum leaving age of fifteen and most often before qualifying for their Junior Certificate. ‘Not one instance was given of an Aborigine in one of the schools that was visited being educated beyond this standard.’
Both country doctors and priests were found to vary widely in their attitudes towards Aborigines. In some cases they showed genuine interest in Aborigines while others avoided contact. Some doctors in particular, ‘seemed to have opted out of trying to alleviate the problem [of poor health] and had become almost totally apathetic towards them.’ In a few cases doctors had developed very negative attitudes, referring to Aborigines as ‘the lowest scum of the earth’:
We were told that a doctor in one town had declined to treat two native children on the grounds that they did not require it, but that when taken to another doctor, they were immediately hospitalised. Other similar allegations were also received.
Similarly, priests ‘tended to be either patronising or apathetic’ or both, in their relationships with Aborigines. In most towns where there was two priests; ‘only one of them usually had much to do with the Aborigines’. However, the practical support offered by priests could be crucial in assisting Aborigines to negotiate the welfare and legal systems.
The picture of discrimination towards Aborigines painted by the Public Interest Research Group, together with the studies carried out by academics, is indeed grim. However, one area ignored by all commentators was the prison system. In 1966 prisoners at Fremantle prison complained to the Native Welfare Department that a system of segregation was in place at the prison. ‘Why can’t Native Welfare stop this segregation in gaol’, the prisoners complained:
Because of segregation the yard is a breeding ground for trouble, and because of this also a Native seldom in a lifetime gets to have a proper sensible conversation with a white man. Assimilation could well begin in prison … as well as gleaning news from white men, Natives might also gain a clue or two on how to speak and express themselves better.
These comments show a strong desire on the part of the Aboriginal prisoners for racial harmony. It is extraordinary that they could be expressed in such a demanding environment and amid overt discrimination. Among their complaints, Aboriginal prisoners highlighted the fact that they had no supervisors in their yards, a situation which led to the outbreak of fights. They protested the overcrowding in cells for Aborigines.250 Complaints surfaced again in 1972 when five Aboriginal prisoners in Fremantle gaol signed a statutory declaration alleging racial intolerance and discrimination. ‘In the declarations the prisoners tell of fights between whites and Aborigines and say that warders have made it possible for whites to bash Aborigines.’251
It had become fashionable to explain the social degradation suffered by most Aborigines as a ‘culture of poverty’.252 This was an American-inspired concept to explain persistent and unrelieved poverty among disadvantaged groups. As Schapper argued in his influential book:
This is not the poverty of merely being without adequate income. It is way-of-life poverty. Aborigines are born into it, reared in it, and remain in it. They are psychologically attuned to it and are probably reasonably content in it. Their poverty is inherited and self-perpetuating.253
There is no evidence that these assertions are accurate ones. In fact, when people bothered to listen to Aborigines, the desire for better housing and opportunities for their children was widely heard. Some had achieved these conditions and were held up as examples of assimilation being achievable.
In 1970 Henry Schapper surveyed the current conditions of Aborigines and noted five major problem areas. Most Aborigines appeared to suffer from emotional depression; they did not understand the meaning of school experience; children were socially isolated and many adults had not developed the values of responsibility or dependability. Consequently, family failure was common.254 His concluding comment reads almost as a throwaway line: ‘Many children are institutionalised and without appropriate models for stable family formation.’255 While the difficulties Schapper identified were the result of complex processes of colonisation, the impact of removing children from their families was the common thread connecting all of them. By the 1960s two generations of families had been removed, as Trish Hill-Keddie’s family story outlined at the beginning of this book shows.
By the 1970s new thinking about the Aboriginal ‘problem’ was exercising the minds of officials. The 1974 Royal Commission highlighted the destructiveness of assimilation. It acknowledged that the religious convictions of missionaries broke down traditional Aboriginal culture. It stated there was no satisfactory replacement for Aborigines in Christianity, and it affirmed the role missions had played in destroying the Aboriginal family. When it came to the policy of removing children from their families, one brief but pointed acknowledgement was made. The practice was, the Commission wrote, ‘the result of policies designed to weaken the race’.256 It was a legacy of almost unbelievable social tragedy but the full realisation of its impact had not yet begun.