четверг, 1 ноября 2012 г.

The good, the bad and the ugly

One family which owned several stations in the Kimberley region of WA was concerned about the future of Aboriginals, only recently advanced to the level of serfs, if they were forced onto the fringes of towns and within reach of white vices but without any practical skills to adapt. They ceded parts of their leases to the local people, then ceded a little more to allow a government school to operate away from the town, then ceded even larger slabs of their leases, encouraging the state government to step in and provide proper housing.

Thousands of Aboriginals ended up living on the fringes of towns as a result of this wage decision. Without housing or proper amenities or any chance of keeping themselves ‘presentable’, their rejection became complete.
The Kimberley was not only a remote area: For most of the region the sole industry had been the pastoral industry, so there were few towns with any infrastructure at all. Some towns were no more than a general store and a pub.

As happened when Aboriginals were first forced onto reserves or missions, people from different clans and language groups were thrown together on country that was not their own, and the whole of their social fabric was in tatters.
Some station owners forced people off passively, by refusing to give them transport to find firewood, and no longer providing rations or any other assistance.

One station owner waited until ‘his’ Aboriginals were away at a picnic race meeting, bulldozed their humpies and possessions and shot their dogs. When they came back, he simply told them they had 48 hours to clear out.

Needs claims

Many pastoralists moved Aboriginals away from the vicinity their homesteads, onto other sections of their property, ceding a portion of their lease to Aboriginals as ‘needs claims’. This reflected the fact that a lease is not ownership, that Aboriginals were still entitled to stay on their land to live in the manner they always had [allowing for the disappearance of a great deal of their natural food sources or water].

These removals were a physical signal to governments that pastoralists no longer accepted any responsibility for Aboriginals, though it meant that there was still a pool of workers nearby if needed.

Once again, whitefellas get it terribly wrong

As traditional Aboriginal life had adapted so well to station life, the displacements following the equal wages case were almost as destructive in spiritual and cultural terms as the first displacements caused by white settlement.
Perhaps the only difference is that Aboriginals were now less likely to be shot.

Before the equal pay decision, station children were still learning to be traditional Aboriginals with all the freedom, relationships, skills, practices and values of their forebears. They were still valued members of their own community. If moved on as a result of the equal wages decision, the prospect of a future was suddenly snatched away. They were now required to live an alien life, learning about new authority figures, attending white schools, and being restricted in their movements by a whole new set of social assumptions.

For many other Aboriginals unlikely to be ‘hired’ as skilled stockmen - older Aboriginals, women, or mothers - equal wages robbed them of their access to country, and a chance to contribute to their station dwelling community by performing regular tasks such as tending gardens, sweeping, chopping firewood, or passing on laws and traditions which required access to country.

Few skilled Aboriginals were westernised enough to consider being cut off from their own communities, just so they could stay on stations and work for wages.

For all Aboriginals who had lived through the killing times and the worst of the child theft, who had had a [short lived] taste of equality during World War II, the outcome of the equal pay case could only confirm their suspicions there was no place for them in a white world and, if there was, they would be crazy to want it.

вторник, 30 октября 2012 г.

After Neville


1936
Leprosarium at Derby opens, offering the first live-in care in WA. Sufferers of leprosy are no longer mandatorily shifted to Northern Territory.
1941
To minimise the spread of leprosy, WA’s northern Aboriginals are prevented from travelling south beyond the 20th parallel [the ‘Leper Line’]
1941
the federal government makes child endowment payable to ‘detribalised’ Aborigines
1942
[federal] age and invalid pensions extended to Aboriginals
1944
[federal] unemployment and sickness benefits extended to Aboriginals
1944
WA Native (Citizenship Rights) Act provides a Clayton’s form of citizenship available to Aboriginals
1948
Bateman provides a report on Native Affairs. He recommends a new policy of assimilation and supervision, but with separate education for Aboriginal children.

SG Middleton, the new Commissioner for Native Affairs ushers in an era of reform. Nothing moves quickly, but by the mid 1950s things are improving.

In 1954 a new Native Welfare Act was passed in Western Australia.
  • Aboriginals were no longer barred from towns and cities;
  • penalties for ‘cohabitation’ were removed;
  • Protectors could no longer demolish camps, move residents on or restrict them to one area;
  • Police could no longer force Aboriginals to leave a town for loitering or for being poorly clothed.

The next major steps forward in Western Australia were taken in 1972.

Mary Bennett and H B Moseley

In 1933, Mary Bennett read a paper “The Aboriginal Mother in Western Australia’, to a women’s league gathering in London. The British were scandalised by reports of Aboriginal slavery, and the scandal created headlines back home. Not for the first time, the WA government was under pressure to enquire into the condition of the state’s Aboriginals.

The Royal Commissioner of the new enquiry, H B Moseley, dismissed complaints about pastoralists’ treatment of Aboriginals as isolated incidents.

With respect to Aboriginal wages in the Kimberley region he reportedly said
“as he never had any money and would not recognise it if he saw it, he [the Aborigine] is not deprived of anything.”
To support this argument, he pointed out that Aboriginals had been paid wages in the Pilbara for some time, and had only developed an insatiable desire to spend their money.

In 1936 the 1905 act was replaced with a new Native Administration Act, written with a great deal of input from Neville. In exchange for increased responsibility for any destitute Aboriginals on their station, pastoralists were given strict control of Aboriginal wages.

By the end of the 1930s there were 40 segregated native camping reserves in the state. Neville remained in charge of Aboriginal Affairs until 1940.

Frederick Aldrich

In 1920 the state was divided along the 25th parallel of latitude into two administrative districts.
Frederick Aldrich was appointed Deputy Chief Protector of Aborigines, and responsible for administering the southern portion of WA.

Instead of rounding up Aboriginals and removing them to settlements when white people complained about Aboriginals in their towns, Aldrich saved money by gazetting native camping reserves, including Albany, Gnowangerup, Katanning, Pinjarra, Williams and York.
New reserves were added and some were shifted further out of towns as more and more Aboriginals struggled to eat during the depression. By 1937 Aboriginals who weren’t already permanent residents needed a pass to go into Perth.

понедельник, 29 октября 2012 г.

A O Neville

When he was appointed Protector in 1915, Neville took over a system which was already more or less segregated. The whites, originally not too shy about creating a mixed race population, now had a better ratio of males to females, and had decided to shun their darker skinned relatives.

Neville did not set out to actively harm full blood Aboriginals, though he certainly did neglect them.

I suspect what he saw was that although full blood Aboriginals were supposed to disappear through a process of natural selection, the half-caste population was not likely to disappear: The ‘problem’ would not go away and must be dealt with. He set out to make the most of the segregation already in place, perhaps believing assimilation would be preferable to annihilation.

While no state can reasonably claim that its hands are clean, Western Australia was the most blatantly racist in its determination to take mixed race children from their families.

As part of his plan for miscegenation, Neville closed ration depots, cutting funding to missions so they would concentrate on religion rather than providing accommodation or education.

Perhaps as a side effect of Neville’s focus on half-castes, pastoral stations became de facto ration depots and welfare bodies for any Aboriginals not targeted for assimilation.
Pastoralists were not required to pay wages, nor was their treatment of Aboriginals properly monitored.

Western Australia. Part 2

By the 1920s, vested interests were each pushing for something different:
  • Pastoralists looking for cheap labour wanted Aboriginals rounded up onto stations;
  • Churches wanted Aboriginals segregated from whites partly to protect them and partly because this would help them Christianise Aboriginals;
  • The labour movement wanted Aboriginals kept away from white jobs;
  • Everybody wanted land so nobody wanted Reserves set aside for Aboriginal only use.

In the heavily settled south west of the state, the government created native camping reserves. Much like what happened under apartheid in South Africa, Aboriginals were far enough away from towns, and close enough to farms which might occasionally need workers, to suit everybody except Aboriginals. There were no amenities to speak of, so it’s no surprise Aboriginal children were not allowed to attend white schools.

Western Australia

Western Australia’s approach to Aboriginal welfare had been a little different from the approach of the other states, and not just because if was the home of A.O. Neville.

In some ways, early WA legislation relating to Aboriginals was enlightened, in others it was not so good.

One significant proclamation made in 1850 stated
‘nothing contained in any pastoral lease shall prevent the aboriginal natives from entering upon the lands comprised therein, and seeking sustenance in their accustomed manner’
[The significance of this will be clearer when I do actually talk about the results of the equal pay decisions.]

In 1905 The Aborigines Act ignored an enquiry recommendation that Aboriginal pastoral workers be paid in cash, and everything seemed to go downhill from there.

Western Australia Before Equal Pay

While Aboriginal stockmen were granted equal pay in the Northern territory with a starting date of December 1968, Western Australia did not follow suit until 1972.

When I first set out to write about the consequences for Aboriginals of these equal pay decisions, I began to wonder why things were so much worse in Western Australia than in the Northern Territory. Hopefully, this little detour will provide some clues.

четверг, 25 октября 2012 г.

The new award

For all this, Pastoralists were quite aware of the likely disruption the award would cause. Instead of a part wage plus keep for a bunch of people, Aboriginals would now get one wage, and have to spread it around.
This is probably the opposite of what many Aboriginals were hoping for - they were hoping bosses would acknowledge a reciprocal obligation; Aboriginals would do their share of the work, and the bosses would make sure all the dependants have decent clothing and accommodation, and that kids would have a chance to start school and so on.

What the case summary shows is that Pastoralists, Unions and the Arbitration Commission alike had all made an effort to understand the reasons for Aboriginal economic and social practices, to understand the various stages Aboriginals were at in adapting to the whitefella world, and the probable impact of equal pay. (The decision certainly makes interesting reading for anyone who wants more detail of Aboriginal progress in the 1960s than I am offering here.)

Despite the arguments of the Pastoralists, the world was changing and by now there was no way Equal Pay could be denied. Different basic wages for different races were not an option. In handing down his decision, Chief Justice Kirby made it clear that awarding Aboriginals equal pay would create welfare problems and other government departments would have to step in and deal with them.

“The introduction of award coverage for aborigines will therefore come into operation on 1st December 1968... The intervening period will enable the parties [to consider] questions such as accommodation and rations which may require change when aborigines are covered by the award.”

Kirby’s intention was to allow time for Pastoralists to make adjustments to their labour force, allow time for responsible government departments to plan housing, infrastructure, and rationing arrangements for those Aboriginals who might no longer have a place on stations in the future, and allow time for Aboriginals to decide how they would adapt to the changes.

A Queensland Trades & Labor Council Pamphlet

Before this decision was made there were around 600 Aboriginals employed in the Northern Territory pastoral industry, but a total 4,000 Aboriginals dependent on these jobs.

The consequences of this decision were felt in two main ways:
  • it led to the displacement of thousands of Aboriginal people
  • it precipitated more strike action, culminating in the famous Wave Hill walk off, setting in chain a whole swag of land rights problems.

Going Walkabout

Just one of the examples Pastoralists gave of Aboriginals unreliability was that they had a ‘habit of going walkabout’. For thousands of years Aboriginals survived by working only when they were hungry, and not all Aboriginals were keen to put in the extra effort white bosses expected.

There was a time when a white boss might be told, by an Aboriginal worker ‘we're going walkabout’. This is, more than anything, a polite Aboriginal way of explaining the unexplainable, of saying “we’re leaving for a while and we are not going to tell you where we are going or why’.

It wasn’t the ‘can’t-be-bothereds’ that drove Aboriginals to go bush from time to time, but secret business, sacred or family business, or a sorry time. These were not matters Aboriginals could or would freely discuss with outsiders.

The white perception that this leave-taking was purposeless was so widespread the expression ‘to go walkabout’ became part of the Australian language. If some thing 'went walkabout' it was lost or missing (like my car keys, maybe). Any person who ‘went walkabout’ was someone whose mind wandered because they lacked focus.

No one bothered to include Aboriginals in these wage negotiations.  Given a chance, they might have pointed out they were reliable. The station work was seasonal and when required Aboriginals worked their buns off, often existing on rations that were not nourishing.

If given a chance they might have pointed out that no sane white person would bother doing more than their wage justified. They might have asked how anyone sitting on a horse not yet broken in could ‘go slow’.

On the other hand, some Aboriginals were more westernised and more suited to station work than others.
In many instances, it was an Aboriginal person who allocated Aboriginals to tasks, because they knew who could work with whom (based on relationships), who was free or who needed to go away for some reason, and so on.
Pastoralists wanted workers they could deal with directly, who would be literate, and had a 24/7/52 desire to work hard.

Australian wages

When it comes to wages in Australia:
  • The basic wage is supposed to be a living wage; enough for a man, his wife and two children to live in ‘frugal comfort’.
  • An award wage is a basic wage plus an allowance for special skills or qualifications required in an industry.

When equal pay was discussed in a hearing of the Arbitration Commission in 1965, pastoralists complained they could not absorb increases in the Aboriginal wage. They not only wanted any wage increase to be phased in over a number of years, they insisted there should be an award allowance reducing the pay of Aboriginals who were slow, unreliable, or less skilled than other workers.
While some awards allow for slow workers, the idea there is that the employer would apply for permission to pay a lower wage to an individual, not a whole class of people, and certainly not to such a large number of people.
The Commission decided it was all or nothing - if Pastoralists wanted to only hire the best workers at the award rate and not employ others at all, then that is how it would have to be.

All references to Aboriginals were deleted.

The new Assimilation Policy

The new Welfare Ordinance reflected a shift from the era of ‘Protection’ to a new era of ‘Assimilation’.

The old Protection era focused on the idea of ‘breeding out the colour’ of half-castes, or miscegenation.

The new policy of Assimilation was defined by Minister of Territories Paul Hasluck in 1951:

“Assimilation means in practical terms, 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. The acceptance of this policy governs all other aspects of native affairs administration.”

Under this policy, not just half-castes but full blood Aboriginals would be free – so long as they were no longer ‘Aboriginal’ in any way other than colour.

Hasluck was actually a voice of sanity in many respects, believing that some Aboriginals would need more help than others, and that absorbing Aboriginals into mainstream Australia would take time.

We might (quite rightly) interpret the Ordinance as patronising and interfering, or even promoting exploitation. It certainly showed whites were determined Aboriginals should abandon any trace of Aboriginal beliefs, practices or identity, so a cultural form of genocide was to continue.
On the other hand, if it had been implemented by people of good will and in the right spirit, the Ordinance might have been more constructive than it turned out to be.

New Northern Territory Ordinances 1953

In 1953 the Aboriginals Ordinance was replaced by the Welfare Ordinance and the Wards Employment Ordinance.

These new laws were thinly disguised as race-neutral documents.
In theory,
  • they would also apply to any white children made wards of the state;
  • Aboriginals would no longer automatically be deemed wards of the state, only becoming wards if the state decided they needed help;
  • Aboriginals who had merged with the modern world need no longer apply for an exemption in order to achieve the full benefits of Australian citizenship.

среда, 24 октября 2012 г.

Acts relating to Northern Territory Aboriginals

1. An Act (or Ordinance) is passed by government which
  • delegates authority to someone (such as a Protector) or some organisation (such as a Department); and
  • sets out who it affects (e.g. ‘an Aboriginal native of Australia; or a half-caste who lives with such Aboriginal native or lives …’); and
  • outlines the basic intent of the Act and what types of decisions should be made (e.g. decide how much an apprentice should be paid). 
2. Regulations are then made which set out the decisions of the delegated authority (e.g. Aboriginal stockmen should be paid 5 shillings)

3. The Regulations are printed in a Government Gazette (that is, they are ‘Gazetted)

A ward is effectively a child of a guardian (responsible ‘parent’). Under the Aboriginal Ordinances this would be ‘the State” or ‘the Protector’. The guardian then makes decisions a parent would ordinarily make relating to the ward’s welfare, managing the ward’s money and so on.

Initially, Protectors had to prove in each case that someone should be made a ward, but as there were so many cases, some Ordinances made all Aboriginals wards (under certain conditions). A ward would then have to apply for exemption from wardship.

…all of which reminds me of the contract scene from ‘A Night at the Opera’ 

Referred to by some as the “stud book”, a Register of Wards was kept by the Administrator of the Northern Territory. The idea was that any Aboriginal not listed must have applied for an exemption from being a ward.
This gazetted list was full of duplications, omissions and inaccuracies, reflecting the confusion caused when a person might have several different names, be identified by the wrong person, or move freely from one place to another.

The Northern Australian Workers Union (NAWU)

For quite some time the NAWU supported the White Australia Policy.

It’s an open secret that nobody liked the Chinese, not even that great melting pot America:

On anti-Chinese immigration in USA:  Justice Harlan, in Plessy v Ferguson 1896, said Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens…[but]  There is a race so different from our own that we do not permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the United States. Persons belonging to it are, with few exceptions, absolutely excluded from our country. I allude to the Chinese race.”

Just as the USA had restricted Chinese immigration, Australia sought to keep the Chinese out of Australia.
There were massacres of Chinese diggers on the goldfields. 

*Contemporary accounts show reasons the rest of the population's attitudes to the Chinese were negative include:

  • Opium smoking was widespread [and some Europeans became addicted];
  • Drinking;
  • Gambling;
  • Brazenly offering to sell 'disgusting and filthy' pictures to Europeans;
  • Spread diseases such as leprosy [e.g. 27 cases in the Bendigo area];
  • Wasting water/ refusing other diggers access to water;
  • Unwillingness to convert to Christianity;
  • It was very rare for Chinese men to bring women with them.

Until the mid 20th Century, wowsers fought a long and dogged campaign to enforce their strict, pure, Christian standards on the rest of the European community. The opium smoking, drinking and gambling were not just degenerate vices, along with plain bad luck on the diggings these vices left many Chinese without the money they needed to survive and were believed to encourage all kinds of thievery and trickery.
Opium dens brought about the downfall of far too many European women. The shortage of Chinese women no doubt exacerbated this effect, but shortages of women had long been a problem in the Australian colonies so jealousy may have been an added factor in the undercurrent of mistrust.

One report in The Argus newspaper said
'... that all the vices which have been noticed are those which must be expected to flourish among a population composed wholly of males. The history of some of the Australian colonies, cursed with convictism, in which not the least evil was the disproportion of the sexes speaks eloquent of the social and moral plagues which such a state of things brings.'
[Readers should read into this what they will!]

An important idea - restated by Pauline Hanson in Parliament in 1996 - was the danger that Australia would be swamped by Asians. The principle objection in both eras is not to differences of race per se, but to the perceived unwillingness of newcomers to assimilate. In the 1850s more than in the 1990s this was obviously the case, the threat of separatism was that Europeans now settled in Australia, who had found a country with values that suited them, might lose that type and quality of life. Unable or unwilling to adopt Chinese values and their way of life, they might ultimately have to migrate from Australia .*

Away from the goldfields, many Chinese stayed and succeeded by managing to merge into the background.

Despite their willingness to treat Aboriginals as outsiders, the Union had long been aware of how badly Aboriginal stockmen and other pastoral workers were exploited.
In 1932 one member of the NAWU said of the conditions Aboriginals worked in on stations,

“A slave owner would not allow his slave to be decimated by preventable disease and starvation the same as these people are in the country or bush. If there is no slavery in the British Empire then the Northern Territory is not part of the British Empire, for it certainly exists here in its worst form.”

Despite this acknowledgement of Aboriginal reality, the Union had boycotted business owners in the past for hiring Aboriginals – not because of their colour but because of the threat to white jobs and wages.
This threat had been exacerbated by the depression of the 1930s when a large number of white men were unable to find work while Aboriginals, at least, were guaranteed rations.

The union was also worried because Aboriginal stockmen far outnumbered white workers in the Territory, and it would be impossible to visit hundreds of stations to sign them all up as union members.
Communication would be a problem, and there was a risk station owners might exert an undue influence on Aboriginal members.

After World War II the Union changed its position and worked with Aboriginals towards having the laws relating to Aboriginals changed.
Although the Union initially resisted the idea of equal pay for Aboriginal workers, by 1948 they had a change of heart – only to be told the Arbitration Commission had no power to act on Aboriginal rates of pay in the Northern Territory.