Dr Ros Kidd
Historian - Consultant - Writer
Bearing Witness: personal, historical and legal implications of
revealing the records
of
Aboriginal administrations.
There is little dispute that the original landholders of this nation
have been marginalised in our history, subtracted from our economy,
isolated from our society, sidelined from political processes. One of
the world’s richest cultures, although without written records as we
perceive them, even the voices of Indigenous people were stifled by
those who assumed the power to speak of and for them.
I
think it’s a wonderful irony that it is the written records of the
‘guardians’, amassed in frightening detail through decades of the most
meticulous surveillance, that are now bearing witness to the thousands
of lives previously submerged in our national consciousness. These
records are testament to those long-lost voices which might finally be
heard, calling us to account for our past, our present and our future.
How we deal now with this resource and this responsibility is of immense
importance to our delayed coming of age as a nation. So significant do
I regard this issue, and so extensive its implications, that I barely
know where to start in speaking of it today.
I
suppose as the first person to comprehensively study file holdings in
Queensland, I should sketch in my background. In 1989 I chose to focus
my PhD thesis on Aboriginal administration in Queensland precisely
because I suspected that political claims and media spin were less than
the whole story. At that time little was known about how the machinery
of government operated to control Indigenous Queenslanders throughout
the twentieth century. And even less was known about how this system
was experienced by those who endured it.
It
took me two years of phoning and writing to get access to records
controlled by the Aboriginal department. In the meantime I spent months
extracting information from files available at state archives, and
months copying correspondence from Anglican and Presbyterian holdings.
But nothing prepared me for what I faced at the Charlotte Street offices
of the department: a windowless basement full of largely uncoordinated
material in boxes whose minimal labelling often did not match the
material therein, a compactus elsewhere whose similar chaos turned out
to include an assortment of files whose rightful restoration to state
archives was delayed by declarations that they had already been
returned, and several huge cartons of paperwork which I assumed
comprised the ‘file these’ holdings; there was also a mountain of
information already stored at archives but largely unexamined. In this
context it is not surprising that policy makers at the time admitted
no-one really knew what their predecessors had been doing.
In
the last ten years, however, the staff have done a monumental job: files
have been properly identified and catalogued on databases, access policy
streamlined, and much previously restricted information is available for
selective or public scrutiny. Most importantly, there is now an active
policy to enable and assist Indigenous people to investigate for
themselves the documents compiled on their families, communities, and
country. I don’t know how you handle these matters in other States, but
here in Queensland, in 1990, a lady seeking information about her
grandmother had to sit in an open-plan room while an officious white
male declared in a booming voice for all to hear, that her grannie had
been ‘a bit of a naughty girl’ in her youth. My sense of shame and
anger has never left me. That moment made me realise that if the
operations which generated these records were inhumane, then the
continued retention and misrepresentation of the evidence is a
replication of that abuse.
The removal of thousands of Aboriginal children from their families, the
incarceration of thousands of Aboriginal families in government
institutions and remote reserves, is the biggest social experiment in
our history. Here in Queensland, into the 1970s, any person of
Aboriginal heritage could be declared a ward of state, losing all rights
over their own and their children’s lives. A network of police
protectors monitored your domestic life and controlled your employment,
generating masses of information which was consolidated into files kept
on every individual. But there was no way of knowing what was written
about you, and these files remained secret into the 1990s.
The catastrophic effects at a personal level have only seeped into
public awareness since the Bringing Them Home Report in 1997. An
estimated 2300 children were institutionalised in Queensland alone, as
well as countless families isolated from their relatives, often for
life, and thousands more – children as well as adults – also effectively
‘taken’ from their families as contracted labour. These records are a
stark reminder to today’s reader that the terror of the children was
matched by the anguish of those left behind. One grief-stricken father
wrote to the chief protector in 1907 from Deebing Creek mission,
pleading for the return of his young son who had been indentured to a
man in Sydney: ‘The boy ought not to have been taken away without our
sanction … We have lost one girl through this kind of work, and
therefore have had enough. Although black in colour, our hearts go
after our boys and girls, as naturally as the whites.’ The authorities
rebuked the parents for attempting to frustrate the child’s best
interests, and advised the mission superintendent to discourage
correspondence between parents and child. That damaging silence could
now be softened somewhat if descendants could read that exchange.
It
is in reading the records of the time that we realise how frequently
those powers to remove people individually, but also in groups, were
exercised for political expediency. In 1913, for instance, more than 60
people were taken from around Kuranda in north Queensland because they
were starving and destitute – or so it says in the department’s
Annual Report. The records however give quite a different story:
local police said food was plentiful, ten men were in employment, and 49
of the group were described as strong. So who benefited? The fledgling
Mona Mona mission which had, to that point, failed to retain any
families for its farming and building programs, and which the government
was determined to promote. Within a year the mission was crippled by
drought, and for all of its history lack of funding has underwritten
substandard conditions and massive infection loads for its unwilling
residents.
I
think that this all-too-common discrepancy between fact and public
rhetoric has far more significant implications in the field of
Aboriginal affairs than any other arena of governance. First, because
the dictatorial and monopoly powers of Native Affairs or Aboriginal
Affairs departments enabled breaches, abuses and negligence to endure
almost unchallenged over decades. Second, because of the almost
totalitarian suffocation and distortion of Indigenous agency and
potential. Third, because the quarantining of file evidence into the
present permits a continuation of political and historical
misrepresentations, allowing so many of today’s spokespersons and
politicians – who have never read the evidence – not only to remain
fixated in the rhetoric of past agendas, but to persuade so many of the
public that other paradigms are perverse.
So
they still argue that forced relocation of children and families to
reserves and institutions was done with the best intentions and as a
‘protective’ strategy, thereby coralling dissent into the twin dead-ends
of statistics (how many thousands of removals makes a generation) and
semantics (why a philanthropist is not a racist). I see these
rhetorical strategies as diversions intended to preclude critical
examination of the outcomes of those interventions. Indeed the
worst social conditions imaginable continue today on communities which
were controlled by governments until less than two decades ago and among
those who have been permanently dispossessed by government decree.
Quarantining of the evidence endorses the orthodoxy that these
circumstances characterise some insoluble Indigenous problem,
whereas we are now learning from the records that starvation, sickness,
substandard conditions, under-education, impoverishment and despondency
have been the common experience in every decade for almost all of those
taken into government control ‘for their own good’. It is the records
which demonstrate that these circumstances are indicative of government
management – or more commonly mismanagement – of Aboriginal affairs
portfolios for almost one hundred years.
For example, the department’s Annual Report for 1919 states that
the high influenza death toll at the Barambah was due largely to the
‘sheer superstitious fright’ of many of the ‘natives’. It does not
mention that most of the 600 people in this government settlement still
lived in bark gunyahs which iced over inside during winter, that
infectious patients were treated in an open-sided shed, that dormitory
children slept on the ground on a single blanket, that many suffered
from the vitamin-deficiency disease of beri-beri and that the doctor
rarely visited.
And this massaging of the facts, this patronising rhetoric, has
implications far beyond the events of the time. Because not only does
it seemingly corroborate the philanthropic rationale of people then who
didn’t want the facts to puncture their potency as ‘protectors of the
less fortunate’ and people today who remain determined to capitalise on
that Teflon stance, but it also demeans and diminishes those who were
forced to endure it. It is the winners who have dictated the terms and
constructed the public records. Access to those records which have not
yet been made public, or only partially so, will allow the statements of
thousands of other voices to be heard and considered. Not only will
this provide an overdue corrective to our ‘whitewashed’ history, but it
will be immensely important to Indigenous pride and Indigenous agency
for today and for the future.
A
more recent example is the 1983 press release where the department
director informed us that eleven workers at the Yarrabah community,
despite ‘rejecting their former positions’, had been reinstated in their
jobs because they had obviously ‘not realised the significance of their
actions’. And how many readers nodded sagely over their morning cereal
at the wisdom and fatherly indulgence of this powerful bureaucrat. Only
recently did access to file evidence reveal the real sequence of events:
the workers went on strike demanding legally-due award wages, the
director ordered they be stood down, the Industrial Court demanded their
reinstatement and ordered the department to double rates to match the
minimum wage. But in an environment, only twenty years ago, of
practically closed communities, it was the government spin which was
carried by the media. As is still so often the case today.
I
did think, before I actually had to put text to the title I submitted a
fortnight ago, that this talk could be sectioned into personal,
historical and legal. But of course it can’t. The correspondence and
reports of Indigenous administration are always either directly
generated by private lives or impact upon those lives at an intensity
most of us, thankfully, have never endured. And everything that
happened, perhaps most significantly because so much was withheld or
misrepresented to us, is now more than ever a part of our historical
learning curve. Those incidents I have already mentioned must give you
pause to rethink what you thought you ‘knew’ about Indigenous capacity,
about bureaucratic power, and about government probity.
I’d like now to say a few things about native title research, and again,
I can only speak from personal experience. It offends my sense of logic
that governments which exercised so enthusiastically their power to
remove people from their own landscape across generations, and sought to
wipe out cultural transmission through proscription, punishment and
pedagogy, should now say that they will only confer recognition of links
to country on those who somehow prevailed despite this punitive
eradication campaign. It offends my sense of judicial impartiality that
those who are so vehemently fighting to deny recognition – the
governments who are defending themselves against native
title claims – retain control of all the records which claimants must
request in their search for supportive evidence. This makes the process
of legal ‘discovery’ a fraught field. Because in general – given the
closure which has pertained almost to date – it is only government
officers who even know what those records are and what they might
contain, so claimants are relying on employees of the government to
produce the evidence which can then be used against it.
Leaving aside the integrity, the aptitude, the skill of those officers –
and I have only the highest regard for people I have dealt with here in
Queensland – there remains the fact that if governments choose not to
adequately resource these research and records sections, then claimants
are severely disadvantaged in their capacity to access available
evidence and therefore suffer a severely diminished probability of
success in their native title claims. This inequity is magnified when
we consider that governments have accumulated data for their own
exclusive use for around two hundred years, and that most of the ‘native
title’ funding dollars are expended on government defence of claims and
in resourcing the Native Title Tribunal: only a fraction is available
for the legal, and as importantly for the evidentiary, knowledge to
support native title claims.
There is a further dimension to the accessing of personal data beyond
the reaffirming of fractured families and the regaining of rights to
country, and this is the retrieval of evidence for private or class
actions against the State, particularly over missing wages and misused
Trust funds. Queensland boasted the most efficient system of
compulsorily contracted labour and state-controlled wages and savings
and it appears Western Australia operated similar systems. New South
Wales, Victoria and South Australia certainly indentured
institutionalised children and retained control of their earnings until
the age of twenty-one, and it appears many young adults were underpaid
or deserted the system but never reclaimed their earnings. Questions
have also been raised over child endowment paid by the federal
governments since the early 1940s and apparently intercepted by, or with
the sanction of, the States.
Perhaps more explicitly than with native title claims, legal actions to
force a full accounting for decades of financial management render file
evidence a contested field. As both proprietors and controllers of
official files, it is disturbingly easy for governments to invoke
confidentiality or public interest immunity to restrict access to the
higher level financial decisions and reports which have so drastically
impacted on individuals under their control. In Queensland, merely by
invoking Cabinet confidentiality, truckloads of files can be closed for
thirty years although never brought to direct discussion in Cabinet.
It
is deeply disturbing that the agency which must defend itself against
charges such as negligence or breach of Trust not only retains all the
evidence but controls access to it. And a lifetime of closure, where
even today very few people know what the files can offer, provides an
unhealthy environment for deliberate or unintentional
misrepresentation. So in 1996 we have the Borbidge government asserting
in the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission that underpayment
of Aboriginal employees until 1986 did not breach federal
anti-discrimination legislation; yet file evidence showed governments
during that period had been advised to the contrary and discussed the
illegality of their policy at the highest level, not once but several
times. Only when that documentation was provided to the Commission, in
defiance of government attempts to exclude it, did claimants win their
case.
It’s not just the financial abuse which rankles, it’s how historical
distortions continue to trivialise and marginalise Indigenous
experience: the government argued in the HREOC Inquiry that people were
not doing real work, that they lived in a welfare setting, that for an
Indigenous community, it was better to have lots of low-paid jobs.
That, let’s face it, the government knew what was best for these
people. In fact, as we now know, by simply deciding to ignore State
and Federal law the government saved itself an estimated $180 million
during the decade to 1986. Is it any wonder these communities are so
impoverished?
The need for vigilance over official statements remains as urgent today
as ever. The Beattie government has currently offered around 16,500
potential claimants up to $4000 each, a $55.4 million package for all
those who may have suffered loss of wages and savings under previous
regimes. The government claims this is a generous gesture of
reconciliation, yet we know it has already spent over $1.5 million
preparing to defend itself against 4000 potential litigants. Minister
Judy Spence claims all funds were regularly audited, yet the files
abound in constant criticisms over official misuse and negligence, often
endemic over decades. She claims all private savings accounts were
acquitted, yet there is abundant evidence that frauds and failure to
secure due wages drastically eroded balances. The government demands an
indemnity against future litigation from those who accept the $4000, yet
it refuses to provide every claimant with a copy of their records.
Without access to their files, how are people to make an informed
decision as to their best interests? If the government is not fearful
of the evidence, why is it demanding an indemnity? Without knowledge of
the facts of this long-term financial scandal, how is the public to
recognise political spin for what it is – an attempted low-cost closure
of mismanagement which may have cost Aboriginal wards of state upwards
of half a billion dollars?
Governments will continue to sell themselves and their predecessors as
benefactors for those who are ‘somehow less fortunate’ than ourselves,
and until the wealth of file evidence is exposed the public will
continue to believe it. That file evidence clearly demonstrates there
is no ‘somehow’ about Indigenous misfortune: it is the outcome of
decades of marginalisation, under-resourcing, and programmed social and
financial deprivation. For most of the twentieth century governments
across Australia recorded that deprivation – and the fatal consequences
– on thousands of documents: they knew exactly what they were doing,
they knew exactly how people suffered, yet they continued.
I
mentioned earlier that the continued retention and misrepresentation of
these records replicates the inhumane abuse of the ‘protection’
regimes. If I thought there was any possibility of being taken
seriously, I would argue here that all files relating to Indigenous
administration be stored and managed by a neutral body of experts.
As
a historian it is my duty to investigate and publicise the evidence so
that we can properly understand our past, increasing and extending our
knowledge in new conceptual dimensions despite those who seek to contain
it in outmoded paradigms. For those of you in records management, it is
your duty to assist access to those files without fear or favour,
honouring always the privacy of individuals whose lives are etched so
painfully upon them. As I have said elsewhere, these records are not
the birthright of temporary politicians to conceal or control for short
term advantage. These records are our history, they are our heritage,
they belong to all of us. It is our duty to bear witness to past
realities, freeing those long-lost voices to be heard, so that we can
move honestly into our future.
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