Dr Ros Kidd
Historian - Consultant - Writer
Aborigines and citizenship: the myth of 1967
In
1967 a national referendum produced an overwhelming vote that Aboriginal
Australians should be granted full citizenship, and that the federal
government should have ultimate responsibility for Aboriginal affairs.
The granting of citizenship is generally construed as evidence of a
political normalisation of Aboriginal status for which massive
injections of federal funds for Aboriginal housing, health, and
education, would provide the practical reality.
Today I want to give you some idea of the various components of
'citizenship' which have impacted on the lives of Queensland Aborigines,
both before, and after, the 1967 referendum. From file evidence, I will
demonstrate the construction and manipulation of these components. By
moving from the concept of 'citizenship' to the realities of Aboriginal
life under State government control, we can better assess the practical
significance of this policy milestone.
For most of this century there have been two categories of Aboriginal
Queenslanders - those who were 'under the Act', and those who
theoretically shared the civil freedoms of other Australians. The 'Act'
was legislation initially passed in 1897, and updated in 1939 and 1965.
It specifically targeted Aboriginal people and introduced the most
intensive regime of surveillance and intervention ever imposed by
governments. At the stroke of a pen, individuals and families could be
forcibly extradited from their homes and confined to Aboriginal
reserves. This was to be the fate of tens of thousands of Aboriginal
people.
Aboriginal reserve communities have been built and operated by
Aboriginal labour. Although 32 hours work a week was mandatory, there
was no regulated payment until the late 1960s. Those 'under the Act' who
did not work on reserves, were contracted out to employment where, when,
and at whatever discounted rate of pay officials dictated. Their
earnings went directly into government hands where they were subjected
to a range of levies and taxes in addition to the standard income tax
paid by all Australian workers. Under government management, which
continued until only ten years ago, Aboriginal men and women working on
missions and settlements never received legal rates of pay.
Aboriginal workers could not use their own savings without departmental
permission, and this frequently was refused. Malpractice on Aboriginal
earnings was so entrenched that the minister centralised the savings
accounts in Brisbane in 1933 in order, as he said, to minimise fraud by
police protectors. In order to intensify surveillance, wage-earners
were allotted identification numbers. And to minimise critical
inquiry, the government prevented these Queenslanders from even seeing
their bank passbooks to check on the accuracy and honesty of
transactions. This remained policy until the 1970s, and many people have
found to their horror that their balances show little return after
decades of compulsory work.
The 1897 legislation had applied to all those of mixed
Aboriginal/European parentage. But in 1934, hundreds of other
Queenslanders found themselves deprived of rights and freedoms and
placed under departmental controls. Anyone with any Aboriginal ancestry
was now targeted to be processed through a program of medico/hygiene
policing - they were hunted, inspected, and marked for treatment. Where
non-Aboriginal Queenslanders suffering disease were medicated locally,
thousands of Aboriginal men and women were seized from all over
Queensland and deported to Fantome Island. Where non-Aboriginal
Queenslanders enjoyed the benefit of the free hospital system,
Aboriginal patients had their bank accounts raided by the department to
cover costs of running the institution. This continued until the Health
department took control in 1943.
In
fact those of part-Aboriginal parentage had already lost their State
voting entitlements when the Electoral Act was amended in 1930. Outraged
protests were run in the Courier-Mail under headings such as
'Whites become Blacks'. Aboriginal department head, John Bleakley,
lamely responded that "most half-castes lacked either the interest or
the intelligence to exercise their voting prerogative". But these same
individuals, meanwhile, retained their Commonwealth voting rights, and
an energetic campaign by these electoral officers to fill voting
registers in the early 1930s exposed Queensland's restrictive strategy.
The federal government resisted pressure from Queensland to reduce
eligibility to allay "confusion and discontent" arising from the
discrepancy.
In
1939 new Aboriginal legislation was enacted in Queensland which once
again redrew the parameters of those who would fall under direct
government control. A new category - the 'half-blood' - was invented.
This had a much narrower catchment, reverting only to those of
Aboriginal/European parentage, or persons of part-Aboriginal parentage
themselves having between 25% and 50% Aboriginal blood. This released
many caught under the 1934 net, and Bleakley later admitted the changes
were politically driven.
As
members of the armed forces during the wars, Aboriginal Queenslanders
were theoretically accorded all the standard rights of other
Australians. Documents show, however, that during the second war the
department applied to the Army for control of service pay. These
soldiers then had to request permission to access their own savings; a
request which was frequently withheld 'for their own good'. After the
war, if servicemen returned to their home communities, they were reduced
to the indignity of total loss of rights, of primitive living
conditions, of chronic unemployment.
The AWU successfully argued that as commonwealth employees, the hundreds
of Aboriginal men working around Queensland on wartime manpower schemes
must be accorded full employment equality. But the department won two
concessions: there would be no access to alcohol; and the department
retained control of all bank accounts. The multiple levies on the full
wages provided a bonanza to the department.
During 1942 the department introduced a system of 'social history'
cards. This enabled head office to accumulate untested data on every
Aborigine in the State, allowing for much more efficient surveillance.
These cards were still operating in the 1970s.
There is overwhelming evidence that Aboriginal wards of state have been
condemned to live in grossly substandard housing on reserves which were
chronically starved of funds at the most basic level. Every decade, this
systemic neglect has been directly responsible for scores of fatalities
caused by overcrowded and unsafe living conditions on these government
institutions.
Conditions were generally no better for those Aboriginal families living
in the general community as theoretically 'equal' citizens, including
former wards granted 'exemption' from departmental controls. But the
department washed its hands of these people, blatantly disregarding the
colour bar which it admitted operated against Aboriginal residency in
every Queensland town into the 1960s. In its ruthless push to
assimilation, it actively conspired against the interests of
Aboriginal families, routinely denying local councils permission to
provide essential services on rural reserves, claiming this would only
encourage occupancy. It was all too easy then to have families evicted
as menaces to the health of the well-housed town citizens, to have huts
and belongings burned, and to degazette reserves to make tenancy illegal
for these homeless families.
In
1962 the federal government of Robert Menzies granted Aboriginal
Australians full voting rights in federal elections, neatly reversing
earlier rhetoric which had linked the granting of civil rights with a
standard of 'development' sufficient to exercise them. Queensland's
laws, where the rights and freedoms of any person of Aboriginal ancestry
depended on the disposition of the director, were condemned as grossly
unacceptable in this new 'liberal' climate. As were the conventions of
unpaid compulsory labour, discriminatory wages and managed savings
accounts, forced detention on reserves, censored mail, controlled
marriages, and schools lacking trained teachers.
To
claw back some political respectability, Queensland brought in new
Aboriginal legislation in 1965. This cancelled enforced confinement on
reserves so that, as new department director Patrick Killoran boasted,
every Aboriginal Queenslander would now be "born a free citizen". A new
category was created - the `assisted' Aborigine - that is, anyone with a
`strain of Aboriginal blood' living on an Aboriginal reserve, or anyone
decreed to be in need of `assistance' by a magistrate. One's place of
residence was thereby designated as the prime criterion of incapacity.
Any veneer of liberalisation was illusory. Reversal of tenancy rights
through the requirement to hold a 'certificate of entitlement', now
facilitated tighter vetting of community populations. Control of permits
to visit, or stay on, a reserve, enabled officials to eject dissenters
and deny unsuitable visitors. To take employment away from an Aboriginal
reserve was to risk permanent exile from home and relations. Wages and
savings were still controlled; people could still be deported.
Another cosmetic 'liberalisation' in 1965 was the amendment to
Queensland's Elections Act to allow, but not to compel,
Aborigines under government control to vote in State elections. A
glimmer of cultural sensitivity, perhaps? No, merely playing politics to
assuage hysterical lobbying from rural councils whose shires included
newly enfranchised Aboriginal reserve communities and who feared the
potential of Aboriginal control through voting dominance. How did the
State government respond? They simply disqualified reserve residents
from voting in local government elections.
The granting of citizenship 'rights' brought with it the danger that the
official rhetoric of 'assistance' might be undermined as Aboriginal
communities learned the extent to which those rights were violated.
After pondering this dilemma, the government protected its hold over
information by denying access to any political campaigners.
Regulations under the new Act demonstrate the intensification of social
policing as a whole range of loosely defined conducts now became
punishable offences: failure to conform to a reasonable standard of good
conduct; exhibiting behaviour detrimental to the well-being of other
persons; committing acts subversive of good order or discipline; to be
idle or careless, to be negligent or refuse work, to behave in an
offensive, insolent, insulting, or disorderly manner. Jails catered for
dissenting men, and dormitories were redefined as places of detention
for any women or children who breached discipline, who left or attempted
to escape from a community, or who failed to obey instructions in
hygiene, sanitation, or infant welfare.
But of course this climate of social coercion was not allowed to
permeate the public sphere, where, at a 1967 national Aboriginal
conference, the minister responsible, one Joh Bjelke-Petersen, extolled
the new 'liberalisation' which had, he said, removed most of the
restrictive measures while retaining certain protections. All lobbyists
and agitators were enthusiastically labelled as communist activists; and
special branch was kept busy compiling dossiers.
The federal government had, meanwhile, signed the International
Convention on Civil and Political Rights and ratification depended on
the elimination of all racially discriminatory legislation in Australia.
Queensland aggressively rejected federal pressure to lift restrictions,
especially controls on Aboriginal savings. Not surprising when documents
confirm that Treasury was profiting nicely: of the total credit pool of
$1.8m of Aboriginal money, the State had invested $1.4m in high interest
ventures and in hospital building programs. None of these benefits were
returned to the account holders, most of whom were trapped in poverty.
It
was in this climate that the 1967 referendum was passed, expanding
federal influence into the Aboriginal affairs of the States, and
releasing funding - $10 across Australia in the 1968/69 year - to
reverse deficiencies in health, housing, and education. The hierarchy in
Queensland was aghast at this potential to interfere in State matters,
and federal projects and policies have been belligerently processed
through a haze of anti-Canberra rhetoric. All options have been
exploited to entrench State policies.
Contrary to specific directives that a separate housing fund be
established, Queensland merged multi-million dollar grants through its
departmental operating account. Contrary to the prime objective that
houses be supplied on the basis of need, Queensland set a prerequisite
of stable employment for its housing tenants, and mocked Canberra's
requirement for low rents as a paternalistic discouragement of 'normal
responsibilities'. The most desperate of Aboriginal families were
thereby denied benefits of the welfare program. Ignoring guidelines
dictating that houses be finished to normal standards, cost-cutting by
the department routinely produced homes without ceilings or internal
lining, and lacking power, toilets, showers, or laundries.
In
contempt of the philosophy of Aboriginal self-determination, Queensland
exploited the housing program to accelerate its ruthless assimilationist
policy, scattering families within, and between, country towns. Families
camped in poverty on rural reserves either acceded to these dispersal
strategies or remained with relatives in overcrowded under-resourced
shanties. Meanwhile, the department brazenly masked accountability under
the vague entry 'sundry town houses'. And most years hundreds of
thousands of dollars remained unexpended, generating revenue for the
department in interest-bearing investments.
Queensland exploited the Aboriginal housing program to lever into the
private domain a network of liaison officers and domestic advisers.
These operatives were instructed, and I quote, "to monitor how they care
for their families, standard of housekeeping, work record, personal
problems and difficulties, particular abilities...and any other material
that may be of value". Homes were inspected, school absenteeism policed,
and domestic management supervised. There was great resentment at this
interference in family life. Many mothers were loathe to consult medical
and welfare personnel, fearful they would be labelled as inadequate
carers and have their children taken from them. Others spurned feeding
programs and child welfare centres as agencies of departmental policing.
And the `social history' cards at head office registered all.
In
1971 a new law was enacted. Touted as "favourable legislation" to enable
Aborigines to "participate as fellow Queenslanders", it replaced the
mandatory `assistance' category with a new network of controls. Now the
`certificate of entitlement' for reserve residence was jettisoned in
favour of a `permit to reside', making security even more tenuous. Any
`favourability' of the legislation served only to strengthen government
controls: it remained an offence not to obey all official instructions,
or to disturb the peace, harmony, or discipline of a reserve. In an
attempt to obstruct the `subversive influence' of outside informants,
managers were empowered to question any person on any matter, and could
demand for inspection any book, document or writing. This continued into
the 1980s.
Wages for workers on Aboriginal reserves, introduced only in 1968 at
half the basic wage, were now quarantined from industrial law by the
mere writing of a regulation. During the 1970s and 1980s the government
blatantly disregarded successive advice from its own legal experts that
this regulation breached State industrial law and federal
anti-discrimination legislation of the mid-1970s. While the department
was quietly settling out of court a series of union-backed litigation
against the illegal underpayment of government workers, Killoran boasted
to the media that the regulation had never been disproved at law. He
maintained this charade into the mid-1980s, when control of the
communities passed to Aboriginal councils and legal rates were paid.
This matter is currently under investigation by the Human Rights
Commission, whose verdict is imminent.
This brief sketch of the civil and electoral experiences of Aboriginal
Queenslanders indicates that 'citizenship' is not a singular status to
be withheld or bestowed. Rather there is a range of aspects of
'citizenship' which can, and have been, denied, granted, cancelled, and
manipulated. Redefinitions of categories of eligibility, tied to quotas
of ancestry or quantities of 'blood', deftly denied or endowed
particular 'rights'. When employment 'rights' were politically endorsed
- for Aboriginal soldiers or for manpower workers - the department
easily devalued the gain by refusing entitlements, particularly when it
came to control over earnings. Electoral 'rights' were similarly
fragmented - by closing off some fields of voting entitlement, and by
gagging access to political information.
Attention to the social practicalities of reserve life with its
intrusive mesh of punishable behavioural offences gives the lie to a
liberalising ethos since the late 1960s. Federal influence and federal
funds flowing from the 1967 referendum were too easily subverted to
State policy, as is evidenced by the callous manipulation of housing
availability and the intensification of social policing in the private
domain. The post-referendum bestowal of 'citizenship' made little
difference to those Aboriginal Queenslanders whose earnings continued to
be exploited to produce revenue for the government through the 1970s,
and whose savings accounts remained concealed from observation. The
bestowal of 'citizenship' did not terminate operations on the
surveillance databank of the 'social history' cards, which have only now
become accessible to individual subjects. The bestowal of 'citizenship'
did not terminate enforced deportations of those Aboriginal individuals
whose presence threatened departmental controls.
But the pathologising of individual conduct and attitudes does more than
make a mockery of 'citizenship'. It effectively deflects attention from
the systemic environmental menace which still festers today in gross
overcrowding, overflowing sewage, contaminated drinking water,
structured unemployment, and below-subsistence wages. For those who
choose to live on Aboriginal communities - constructed and operated by
government until only a decade ago - the 'citizenship' conferred in 1967
has obviously not translated into a social environment remotely
comparable to that which is mandatory for all other Australian citizens.
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