Dr Ros Kidd
Historian - Consultant - Writer
Work and wages – National Perspectives
During most of the twentieth century, in every Australian state and
territory, one group of people has been subjected to physical
confinement and bureaucratic supervision on a scale otherwise applied
only to the criminally culpable or the mentally deficient. Yet in
almost every case these people had committed no crime. Without due
process and without right of appeal they, and too often their children
and grandchildren, were sentenced in perpetuity. For most people escape
from this internment was conditional on walking away from family,
country and culture. This was your reality if you were of Aboriginal
descent.
There are many people today – our prime minister among them – who argue
that this no longer matters; that this is old history; that it was a
long time ago and an era of different values; that we should not
criticise well-intentioned policies implemented by well-intentioned men.
Well I have news for people who hold this claim. This is not old
history: in many states these policies of control and confinement
continued into the 1970s. And even by the standard of different values,
those who wielded their powers behind the scenes to achieve their minor
and major objectives knew that the terrible human toll of malnutrition,
sickness, destitution and preventable deaths belied their public
declarations of ‘benevolent protection’.
Why are governments still getting away with this myth? Because so few
of us know about their carefully crafted decisions so scrupulously
recorded on an embarrassment of files. It is time that the agencies
which introduced and maintained this massive social experiment were
questioned on its failed outcomes. Because it is governments which
institutionalised poverty, hunger, destitution, sickness and death to a
degree literally unheard of in our ‘free’ country; it is governments
which charted their failures and hid those records from the public; it
is governments which must now be made accountable for the deeds of their
office – deeds whose cost haunts and shames our nation today.
Tonight I thought I would speak briefly of how I come now to spend my
time and energy speaking about the evidence regarding Queensland’s
administration, and then I’ll turn to policies nationally. What I’m
hoping is that it will assist some of you today to realise what you
might find on files here, how to search for it, and the implications of
what you will discover.
I
first attended university in Queensland in 1984 as a terrified
mature-age student who hadn’t written an essay or researched an
assignment in 25 years. Five years later I chose to investigate
Aboriginal administration in Queensland for my PhD thesis because I knew
nothing whatsoever about it, and I was less than convinced by the
rhetoric of politicians and the attitudes of the media. I knew
Aboriginal people had been subjected to extraordinary controls from
around 1900 to the 1970s in Queensland, and I wanted to understand what
it was like to be trapped in this system. In compiling my work I soon
realised that this massive social experiment should never have been
implemented; it should never have been maintained over multiple decades
given the vast evidence of abject and deadly failure throughout its
duration.
So
let me briefly sketch the system in Queensland. Between 1897 and 1971
the Queensland government enacted laws so it could declare any person of
Aboriginal descent a ward of state, confine them to a mission or
settlement reserve, control their work, wages and savings, take control
of their children. In establishing and maintaining this regime of
controls the government became legally accountable for the health and
wellbeing of every Aboriginal child and adult in its care; it had a
legal duty always to act in their best interests.
Under this system around half the state’s Aboriginal population was
detained on government reserves, many for generations. Here they lost
all rights and responsibilities over the lives of themselves and their
children who were commonly taken from them and confined in dormitories.
People who escaped to search for work or freedom were routinely hunted
by police and forcibly returned, often to imprisonment on bread and
water.
So
what did I learn from the files about what it was like to be trapped in
this ‘protection’ regime? We’ll look first at the realities of this
‘duty of care’, and then at the controls over labour and wages.
Government refusal ever to adequately fund missions and settlements made
life precarious for the thousands of people removed ‘for their own good’
into government ‘care and protection’. In the 1930s on the government
settlement of Palm Island the death rate was over 6%, with most of the
ill and elderly slowly starving to death. Rations at the hospital were
so meagre that the matron illegally took money from patients’ bank
accounts to buy food. A visiting doctor reported that most babies who
were not breast fed died from malnutrition; his demands that rations be
trebled and fruit juice provided to children were rejected by the
superintendent as too costly.
In
the 1940s at Yarrabah mission the elders were dying and many others were
too weak to work because of malnutrition and illness; all patients sent
to Cairns hospital were registered as badly malnourished. Testing
showed that drinking water was unsafe for human consumption; and it was
said that defective sanitation ‘would lead to prosecution’ in any other
circumstances. Yet the government refused the increased funding
necessary for improvements.
At
the government’s showpiece institution, Cherbourg, many families were
still living in leaking tin shacks with coconut-frond walls in the
1950s. The ‘better’ – although unlined – two-room huts held up to 19
people and the doctor cited heat exposure as the cause of several infant
deaths. Houses lacked water for food preparation or even to wash
hands. It was worse on church missions where the government grant was
less than $8.50 per person per week in today’s value. Despite pleading
that the food allocation was less than 50 cents per day – insufficient
to meet the official ration quota – requests for funding increases were
refused.
A
1960s medical survey of conditions on missions and settlements revealed
that malnutrition was the key factor in deaths of 50% of children under
three and 85% of children under four; and half of all neonatal deaths
and 47% of all deaths under sixteen years were from gastroenteritis or
pneumonia, or both.
In
the 1970s at Palm Island there were 165 homes for 1300 people – most
lacked fridges, cupboards or beds, and the store routinely ran out of
milk and fresh food. The substandard living conditions were blamed for
the massive infection loads of inmates. During a deadly epidemic of
gastroenteritis and salmonella caused by malnutrition, the clinic
registered 75% of child outpatients as severely underweight. Parents
petitioned parliament saying they could not feed their families on 58%
of the basic wage. In the 1980s, when the government handed control of
communities to Aboriginal councils, houses at Woorabinda still had wood
stoves and cold water, with the majority described as in ‘dire need of
repair’; families at Pormpurraw and Palm Island were still living in
condemned houses because nothing else was available.
This information is from a range of files: correspondence and reports on
missions and settlements and, especially from the Presbyterian archives,
dozens of boxes of letters written by mission superintendents over the
years; head office letters relating to budgets and expenditure; doctors’
monthly reports; health department inspections – particularly after
health scandals hit the media; reports by hygiene officers; and annual
reports from the institutions to the department and from the department
to parliament. Similar documentary sources would have accumulated in
every state – whether they have survived, whether you can get access,
is, of course, another story, and I think Andrew Wilson and Tom Gara
will have valuable information on that question. With regard to
research in this field, I have found that the greater your variety of
sources, the richer the tapestry you can weave – and in that I include
detail and depth, colour and contrast, and, most importantly,
perspective.
Let me now turn to the labour and wages system, since this is the focus
of legal actions in Queensland today, and also will be the subject of a
national Report presently being developed. From 1904 workers’ wages went
directly to the police protector apart from ‘pocket money’ – varying
between 15%-75% – retained by the employer for distribution during the
work period. The government was warned constantly – right through to
the mid-1960s – that its system failed to ensure pocket money was ever
correctly paid.
Many men, women and children from the settlements were contracted out to
labour on pastoral properties or as domestic servants for 51 weeks out
of 52. Girls reaching puberty were routinely dispatched. During a
scandal in the 1930s about sexual assaults of these children the
government decided it would be too costly – both in lost wages and in
increased maintenance funding – to alter the policy. Most families in
rural areas were also subjected to the government’s labour contracts –
in the late 1950s the department admitted, confidentially, that child
labour was still common.
From 1910 the government took levies from wages of workers based on
reserves, and from 1919 from wages of all other workers. From that date
until the late 1960s, despite being more highly valued than their white
counterparts, pastoral workers were contracted out at 66% the white
wage, although records show actual payments were often less than half
that amount. All labour on missions and settlements was done by
Aboriginal workers who worked full-time in return for meagre rations;
the few prized workers were given a couple of shillings a week. Forced
labour contracting continued until the late 1960s, and controls over
wages into the 1970s, although for years after, many people were too
demoralized to request freedom from financial management. As people got
to see their bank books after decades of labour and intercepted wages,
many found to their horror that little or nothing remained.
It
was not until 1968 that the Queensland government introduced a wage
economy on its reserves, setting initial payments at 50% the state’s
minimum wage. In 1979, with the wage parity at 72%, legal advice
obtained by the government in the face of a union-backed challenge
stated that the government was breaking state and federal law in
underpaying its Aboriginal employees. Nevertheless, on several
occasions in the early 1980s, the Queensland Cabinet discussed, and
continued, its illegal conduct. It was only when Aboriginal councils
gained control of communities from late 1986 that legal wage rates were
paid, although the government refused to provide for this in the wages
budget. Indeed since 1982, when Cabinet registered its refusal to
budget for wage increases, costs were met through mass sackings of
workers – over 1500 in the decade to 1985 – with consequent massive
shortfalls in building and maintenance programs; on several occasions
essential services were threatened. High level bureaucrats warned this
attrition would increase alcoholism, violence and community upheaval –
and then they stood by and watched it happen.
In
1996 seven Palm Island workers, led by elder Mr Kitchener Bligh, finally
brought the government to account for its under award wages policy in a
Human Rights Commission Inquiry which found the government had
‘deliberately, knowingly and intentionally’ underpaid these workers on
account of their race, and proposed payment of $7000 to each claimant.
The coalition government of the day spurned the findings but capitulated
when action was started in the Federal Court. The subsequent Labor
government, having futilely fought and lost several further actions,
made $25 million available to pay out each person employed since the
1975 commonwealth Racial Discrimination Act – I believe costs for this
are already over the $30 million mark.
Following my evidence for the Palm Island case I have worked for several
years to compile evidence on the wider mismanagement of Aboriginal wages
and savings, a campaign now known as the Stolen Wages. This evidence is
compelling: failure to safeguard pocket money payments despite decades
of warnings; failure to combat police fraud and refusal to implement
auditors’ recommendation to allow workers to see their financial
records; seizure of bank interest by the government; spending of
unemployment levies to maintain reserves and on capital works; seizure
of trust monies during the depression and failure to cease improper
dealings despite consistent warnings from auditors; failure to pass to
beneficiaries monies held from deceased estates; interception of child
endowment and its misapplication to cover department responsibilities
and also, on more than one occasion, for capital works; misuse and
negligent accounting on the Aboriginal Welfare Fund during its 50-year
history. The government was still operating on this Fund in the early
1990s; around $8 million remains which the government is desperate to
disburse. It expresses frustration that ‘Aboriginal people’ can’t make
up their minds as to how this will be done; in fact, of course, people
suspect if the Fund had been honestly used and competently maintained
there should be several hundred million dollars for distribution and
they want a full investigation before the Fund is dissolved.
The Stolen Wages – the amount of money which was wrongly taken or lost
from Aboriginal earnings and enterprise – is likewise a ballpark figure,
a figure which quantifies Aboriginal poverty today: their own money,
which the state used for its own benefit. Faced with mounting legal
actions the Beattie Labor government has offered – ‘in the spirit of
reconciliation’ as he puts it – a pool of $55.4 million in payments of
$2000 or $4000 to each claimant, conditional on them signing away all
legal rights to pursue justice on any aspect of this appalling regime of
controls. We are currently fighting to have this indemnity retracted.
People are actually not seeking large amounts, but they do want an
honest settlement which acknowledges the value of their work and the
pain of their deprivation.
Does this work have relevance to people in other states? Here I have to
admit I am out of my depth, so I’m hoping you’ll be charitable and
concede that the gaps in my all-too-potted summaries represent
challenges for researchers to exploit. It would seem, and indeed
bureaucrats frequently boasted, that Queensland had the tightest
controls over wages and savings of any state or territory – a boast I
fervently hope is now coming back to haunt them – but I think probably
Western Australia, particularly in the south, had similar controls.
While I am not sure if there were ‘protective’ procedures in place to
monitor adult wages and savings in southern states, direct control of
labour and wages certainly occurred – through the pitiless system of
apprenticing out the thousands of children seized as wards of state.
Here the southern states came into their own, rounding up lighter
skinned children for training in Homes and dormitories, and forcibly
closing mission stations and evicting tenants to sink or swim in the
wider community. Here, their marginalisation from employment and
accommodation entrenched the poverty and destitution which made them
targets of State Childrens department zeal to ‘rescue’ their children
for a ‘better’, ‘whiter’, life. In most states, into the second half of
the twentieth century, Aboriginal children could be banned from schools
at the request of local school boards; and lack of schooling was another
trigger for child removal. Until 1972 in fact, NSW schools could refuse
to enrol Aboriginal children and could segregate their classrooms.
Laws in WA provided for labour contracts from 1886, but these were not
compulsory and made no mention of cash wages. From 1874 any Aboriginal
child could be institutionalised and apprenticed to work from age 12 to
21, although after 1886 they were sent out even younger. From 1905 the
chief protector was guardian of all children under 16 years, and after
1909 his permission was not needed to take children under 8 from their
parents. Between 1915 and 1920 over 500 people, that is one-quarter of
the population in southern WA, were removed to missions and stations
from where children could be sent out to work.
Successful lobbying by pastoralists rendered the 1905 Aborigines Act
mute on labour and cash wages although by 1915 department file cards
often included employment details, and part of the wages of younger
wards went into Trust accounts, money which most never saw again. Wages
were commonly paid south of the Pilbara from around 1915, but in the
Kimberleys, despite an Aboriginal labour force of over 2000 in the
1930s, wages there were not fixed by law until 1967. Statutory removals
by the Welfare Board continued until 1954 but guardianship was not
revoked until 1963 when Board controls over Aboriginal earnings and
property also ceased.
Development of the Northern Territory was similarly dependent on unpaid
Aboriginal labour, and although the 1910 Act allowed for payment of
wages into a trust account via the police or the protector there was no
compulsion for cash payment. When the commonwealth took control in 1910
a new Ordinance stated all wages must be paid in cash, but calls for a
minimum wage were dismissed out of hand and many pastoralists paid no
cash wages for another 30 years. A Report in 1928 slated this
convention, noting also that rations were frequently withheld as
punishment and there was much starvation and sickness; in this context
it is horrifying to note that the convention of pastoralists
distributing rations for the commonwealth continued until 1966.
Between 1910 and 1957 the NT chief protector was legal guardian of all
Aboriginal children under 18 years; children were sent to town compounds
and government stations and then apprenticed out. While apprenticed
boys were free from 18 years of age, after 1918 unmarried girls and
women were controlled till death and could be sent to work for no wages
and had no rights over their own children. By the 1930s, when workers
were still paid in rations or by ‘value’ through the station stores,
most boys on pastoral stations were retained for labour but girls were
exiled to church missions or state Homes for employment training. For
town-based workers, 40% of the wages went directly to Trust accounts and
after 1934 individual bank accounts could be opened for balances greater
than ₤2. In 1948 the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration
Commission refused an application to bring Aboriginal workers under the
pastoral award because it would ‘interfere’ with arrangements between
pastoralists and the NT administration. Removals of children, now from
as young as three months, continued post-war, and from 1953 the director
of welfare was guardian of all wards and controlled their property.
Cheap labour continued in the pastoral industry into the 1970s.
The Indigenous populations of SA, NSW and Victoria were much fewer and
white expansion into rural areas more complete, bringing with it closer
oversight by policing and administrative agencies. The relative
lawlessness of the remote regions of WA, NT and Queensland, tied as it
was to limitations of finances and personnel, was not so marked in
southern states. Wage and employment discrimination occurred through
the ‘equality’ of the marketplace rather than by decree. So that while
legally workers could claim the going rate of pay and conditions, in
practice they had to accept what they could get.
From 1890 policy in New South Wales was to remove ‘half-caste’ children
by ‘persuasion and threats’ and by 1909 the Aboriginal Protection Board
controlled over 300 children and could apprentice them from 14 years of
age, controlling their wages and banking. From 1914 the Board directed
that from age 14 all boys on government stations be sent to work and all
girls removed to training Homes before apprenticing as domestics. Under
these summary powers of removal, 1200 children were taken between 1912
and 1938, almost 80% were girls sent out to domestic service. The
Australian Women’s Mirror ran an ad in a 1940 edition under the
banner: ‘Try an Abo Apprentice’. In 1936 the Board gained control of
all children in the state, and any child who refused employment could be
institutionalised and apprenticed out until age 21, after which, with
family ties completely severed, most children had no option but to
continue their servitude. In 1961 there were still 300 wards of the
Board and removals continued with little change until 1969.
In
Victoria, after 1886, ‘half-caste’ children from age 13 could be
apprenticed. Parents who refused to condone this were ejected from
government stations and denied rations; they were also denied mainstream
welfare support, leading, inevitably to greater uptake of children on
grounds of ‘neglect’. By 1957 there were at least 68 institutions in
Victoria processing Aboriginal children. The Board’s statutory powers
over children ceased in that year but it could notify police and
mainstream child authorities to have children removed, effecting an
increase in the uptake of Aboriginal children into state care. In
all states, as discriminatory legislation was wound down, mainstream
agencies stepped in.
South Australia was founded as a ‘free’ colony in 1834 and ten years
later a protector was appointed as legal guardian for every ‘half-caste’
and ‘unprotected’ Aboriginal child who could be apprenticed out from a
‘suitable’ age – usually a euphemism for under 10 years. From 1856 to
1881 the protector’s position was inoperative and most reserves were
leased to settlers; during this time kidnapping of children for servants
was unchecked. From 1909 ‘neglected’ children – a definition which
included sleeping in the open – were picked up under mainstream laws and
trained for work. The protector argued in 1909 that all Aboriginal
children were neglected and in 1911 he was nominated legal guardian of
all children and could direct their removal. His preference was for
state training institutions rather than mission dormitories. The
secretary of the State Childrens' Council told the 1913 Royal Commission
that children should be removed from birth.
The 1923 Act widened powers to process any Aboriginal child in SA ‘as
if’ they were neglected although this was suspended a year later after
vehement protests. From 1939 it was possible to gain exemption from
state controls and open a personal bank account and receive some
commonwealth benefits – although this was conditional on ceasing all
family contacts with non-exempt persons. ‘Freedom’ to compete in the
wider community brought increased surveillance and greater likelihood of
child removals under mainstream welfare laws. Only in 1951 did state
schools in SA open to Aboriginal children. The Boards’ guardianship of
children ceased in 1963 but child removals did not decrease due to
widespread poverty.
All states acted as bankers for state children, whatever their colour,
and there are many former wards who declare today that they did not
receive their pocket money portion during the work period, or that final
balances were underpaid or unpaid on cessation of their indenture. For
these people, a search of inspection reports relative to their work
locations, of ledger cards in their names, of cash books relating to
their work period, of correspondence relating to their period of
control, and of Trust accounts held by the Board or the department,
should all produce evidence. Also worthwhile would be general
correspondence relating to policies and practices, formal inspections of
the Boards or departments, and Annual Reports to parliament.
There is one other avenue where monies due to Aboriginal families have
been intercepted by the states, and this is the matter of child
endowment, and, in many cases, of social security benefits. Child
endowment was paid by federal governments after 1942; it was passed to
the states for distribution, and proved to be a cash bonanza compared
with meagre budgeting for Aboriginal needs.
In
the cases of WA, NT and Queensland, the word ‘rort’ springs to mind:
these states cut back on their previous expenditure on rations and
support, thereby using this private supplement as public revenue. In
the NT, as in Queensland, department bureaucrats planned how to divert
child endowment monies to capital works which were patently state
responsibilities – in the former case for construction of schools,
dormitories and hospital clinics, in the latter for buildings such as a
recreation hall and transit hostel. It was only after 1960, in Victoria
and NSW, that payments went directly to pensioners.
Although supervision of child endowment payments to families ceased in
southern WA by 1950, ten years later distribution of child endowment by
northern pastoralists was still uncontrolled. In 1964, according to Dr
Anna Haebich, social security benefits still provided 40% of mission
incomes in the NT and far exceeded state support to pastoralists acting
as ration stations. In the 1970s, the northern missions in WA were
still receiving massive bulk child endowment payments. One last point
I’d like to make here, and that is that the provision of child
endowment, as with the provision of better housing from the 1970s,
brought with it an intensification of surveillance on mothers and
families as a multiplication of agencies inspected, monitored and
reported on home management skills, and this intensification brought
with it an increased collection of children into the mainstream
‘welfare’ system.
The preceding brief interstate summaries are mostly drawn from two
texts: Bringing Them Home, the Report of the National Inquiry
into the separation of Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander children from
their families, and Broken Circles, Anna Haebich’s seminal work
on national removal policies. Any inaccuracies are my own. Even so, I
hope I have opened for your attention two main streams. First, how
current our history is, how seamless is the past with the present, how
compelling it is to investigate and understand the process in order to
understand where we are today as a nation, and as individuals within
it. And second, I hope I gave you some sense of the range of social
issues which remain unfinished business in the big justice picture of
fiduciary duty, and also of the specific areas of financial
accountability which are open to challenge – and hopefully resolution –
in the closer focus of existing trust laws.
These records belong to all of us – they are not the property of
temporary politicians. We must use them to bring truth to the history
of our past, authenticity to the policies of the present, and justice in
the immediate future.
BACK HOME
|