Dr Ros Kidd
Historian - Consultant - Writer
The protection regime: rhetoric and reality
The starting point of my 15-year project was this: since governments in
Queensland controlled every aspect of Aboriginal lives, then the mess
we’re in today can only be understood by analysing what those
governments did. History doesn’t just unfold: history is a narrative of
the dynamics of power – in this case, how the government used the power
it took for itself to run the lives Aboriginal Queenslanders in the name
of their ‘protection’. What I’d like you to keep in mind is the
difference between rhetoric and reality.
In talking about how Queensland exercised those controls I’m
particularly interested in how successive laws and regulations defined
the subjectivity of men and women: what they could become in terms of
their private and their working lives. Today I’ll speak of the
management of women’s sexuality, and the management of economic
potential.
The Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act
was enacted in Queensland in 1897 and enabled governments to take
control of all aspects of Aboriginal lives. People could be deported to
missions or settlements and detained there for life, or they could be
contracted out to work for 12 month periods. The state had the power to
deny marriages to non-Aboriginal men and had the power, since the
Industrial School and Reformatories Act of 1865, to send any
Aboriginal child to an institution for training and employment.
The protection regime was implemented to bring under control relations
between Aborigines and Europeans. Interaction between the races was
characterised by blatant abuses of contemporary laws encouraged by a
shameful disinclination of authorities and the courts to extend
available civil protections to Aboriginal people. It has been estimated
there were over 2000 people working on stations and in the sea trades
around Cape York by the end of the nineteenth century. They were rarely
paid apart from scant food and shelter, and were commonly subjected to
physical and sexual abuse. To retain ‘trained’ workers – or easy access
to their wives and daughters – many employers punished men who quit
employment, or at times had ex-workers arrested and returned under the
Masters and Servants Acts, or fostered an induced addiction to
opium, a legal drug until 1905.
The
rhetoric of protection, indeed the rationale for intervention, was to
save Aboriginal people from their own inadequacies: to save them from
opium addiction, to save females from their ‘overripe’ sexuality
(identified as the trigger for inter-racial intercourse), and save
adults from a wasted life of indolence by teaching them the value of an
industrious life. I won’t spend time on the opium aspect today, except
to say that import duties on the drug were a key component of the
state’s economy, that multiple licences for its sale continued in the
first years of last century despite intensive lobbying by the chief
protector, Dr Roth, for its prohibition. In 1904, for instance,
Queensland imported over $2 million (today) of opium and Cooktown had 20
licensed outlets. Queensland ceased importation only after Roth
persuaded the fledgling federal government to ban the drug except for
medicinal use.
In 1897 the politicians argued strongly that part-Aborigines living
with, or as, Europeans should not be subjected to intervention by the
state, and girls living with ‘trustworthy’ white families were initially
excluded. This escape clause brought a rush of people seeking to exempt
children allegedly ‘brought up as one of the family’, many of whom Roth
said were worked like slaves, mostly unpaid, frequently assaulted and
then evicted, pregnant and destitute. Although outside the 1897 Act,
the girls could be arrested under the Reformatories Act and sent
to the missions. Roth argued exemptions should not be issued unless the
girl herself understood she would be denied this protection.
Non-Aboriginal girls, of course, had protection under the Criminal Code
which put the legal age of consent at fourteen years; but this depended
on proof of age, and few Aboriginal children possessed birth
certificates. Assaults on children were ‘continually going on’,
according to Roth, even on those as young as six. He was frequently
called as medical witness to assaults of children under fourteen where
charges could not be laid. Attempts in 1899 to change the law so that
the onus of proof of age lay with the offender were defeated by
parliamentarians claiming a man could ‘easily mistake’ the maturity of
Aboriginal girls because they ‘ripened’ much earlier in the tropics.
One MP pointed out that the age of consent in some southern states of
America was seven years. An amendment Act in 1901 stated that if a girl
had reached puberty then she had reached the age of consent and charges
could be laid for assault. This Act extended state control over every
Aboriginal female, to include children and wives of workers in the
notorious Cape York sea trades.
The trade in domestic servants was a major component of Aboriginal
employment policy for much of the twentieth century. John Bleakley,
chief protector from 1914 until 1941, wrote his version of Aboriginal
administration, and gives some idea of the rhetoric. Domestic service,
he wrote in 1961, ‘was a heaven-sent opportunity for native girls to
secure a good home with food and clothing, and receive motherly care and
domestic training.’ He goes on to say that ‘large numbers’ of girls,
some as young as ten, were sent to work in Brisbane under control of a
female protectress, a policy which also saved the state the cost of
their upkeep on a reserve. Bleakley was not convinced this was the
right policy – not because girls were overworked, underpaid, and
vulnerable to sexual assault – but because they fell for the glamour of
the city, or became discontented or lonely or homesick. And they went
out in the evenings without proper supervision, and we know where that
leads to! Pregnancies! Just on ten per cent of girls sent to domestic
employment in 1914 fell pregnant. Bleakley’s solution? Concentrate
employment in the country away from the city lights.
There
was a disproportionately skewed uptake of women and children from rural
environments into state controlled reserves where girl children were
separated into dormitories. On some missions this was a life sentence
from which marriage alone provided escape. The government streamed far
greater funding to its three settlements, knowing missions had
insufficient resources to bridge the gap. So conditions at the
government’s showpiece institution, Cherbourg, reveal the ‘best’ of
official care and protection. Here in the 1930s they crammed 100 girls
into a locked, barred, and unlit room for ten hours a night, sleeping
seven or eight together on the mattresses on the floor with only a
blanket for warmth. In 1941 dormitory life was described by officials
as dreary beyond imagination, a deadening routine which ruined any
benefits of schooling. School finished at grade four. At Doomadgee
mission, even in the 1950s, a health specialist wrote that girls were
kept in virtual slavery; locked up at night behind barbed wire after
working on the farm all day. ‘It is completely futile and artificial
and unnatural to enclose, or rather encage, women, and expect any sort
of normal psychological balance on their release’, she said, describing
the effects of such institutionalisation as pernicious.
Girls and unattached women were incarcerated because of their
sexuality. Once they reached puberty – otherwise categorised as
‘marriageable age’ – it was government policy, although not followed by
the missions, to remove the problem by contracting them out to work.
Yet the department was always aware of what Bleakley described as ‘grave
dangers’: the girls ‘fell prey to unscrupulous men’, or they aspired to
improve their lives, thus making themselves ‘unfit
for their only legitimate future — marriage with men of their own race.’
Girls of fourteen, who had never left the community and never spoken to
a white person except in trembling deference to the officials, were
given a spare set of clothes, some shoes and a small suitcase, and sent
hundreds of miles to remote properties where there might be no other
Aboriginal faces to comfort them. If they fell pregnant they were
returned to the settlements and then re-employed, leaving their babies
in the dormitories or on occasions taking the infant with them, their
wages reduced accordingly.
In the 1930s the governor of Queensland visited Cherbourg and was
wrongly informed that 95 per cent of 353 girls sent to work fell
pregnant. And he knew who was at fault: ‘the
blame must rest, to a very large extent,
on the native girls, who, by temperament, and a desire to have a child
by a white father, encourage white men in every way.’ Bleakley
conceded that the ‘moral welfare’ of domestics was important but he
admitted that ‘an
equal if not greater danger exists from the temptations to immorality on
the Settlements themselves’. So the government, which had arrested and
confined the girls on the grounds of securing their safety, decided it
was better economics to risk assaults than forego ₤1460 ($85,650) a year
in wages and carry the extra support costs of ₤478 ($28,000) to keep
them on the settlements. The policy stayed in place into the 1970s.
I’d like to turn now to the broader economic imperative which underwrote
the systematic impoverishment of those trapped in state ‘protection’.
This had two dynamics – the deliberate under funding of the
institutions, and the confiscation of Aboriginal financial entitlements.
The ‘care and protection’ of people deported to missions and settlements
was the responsibility of government. It is distressing to read the
evidence from the government’s files of the conditions people were
trapped in, and more horrifying to realise it knew the circumstances but
decided not to act. In the 1930s at Palm Island the visiting doctor
reported the death rate was over six per cent and most of the ill and
elderly were slowly starving to death. Rations for hospital patients
were so deficient the matron took money from their savings accounts,
without their knowledge, to buy provisions. Most of the babies who were
not breast fed died of malnutrition. In the 1940s at Yarrabah mission
malnutrition was so bad elders were dying and adults were too weak to
work, the drinking water was unsafe for human consumption, and a health
inspector from Cairns said sanitation was so shoddy it would trigger
prosecution if it were not a government institution. Yet the government
refused to increase funding to upgrade it.
In
the 1950s at Cherbourg dozens of families still lived in leaking tin
shacks with coconut-frond walls, the ‘better’ timber and tin huts were
unlined and housed up to 19 people, and were blamed for deaths of babies
from heat exposure. There was no water to the houses, or for food
preparation or washing of hands. Disease was rife. In the 1960s a
medical survey showed malnutrition across the institutions was the key
factor in 50 per cent of deaths of babies and toddlers, and 85 per cent
of children under four years. On Palm Island in the 1970s doctors
blamed massive infection loads on the overcrowded and substandard living
conditions; surveys showed few homes had fridges, cupboards, chairs,
tables or beds. The government was paying its workers less than 60 per
cent of the basic wage, and it knew 75 per cent of child outpatients
were found to be severely underweight. In the 1980s, families on the
government-run communities of Pormpurraw and Palm Island were living in
houses which were officially condemned, because no other shelter was
available. Many families at Woorabinda still depended on wood stoves
and had no hot water.
So
the officers charged with securing the welfare of people it had deported
to these institutions were well aware people sickened and died, but the
government refused to provide the funds necessary to maintain basic
conditions. Meanwhile the rhetoric – then and now – is to blame inmates
for community dysfunction. Regulations in the mid-1940s introduced a
raft of disciplinary measures. Complaint was deemed an offence against
‘good order’ on the reserve and people who spoke out were simply
transferred to other reserves, without due process or right of appeal.
By-laws demanded residents ‘observe habits of orderliness and
cleanliness’, everyone was ordered to keep huts neat and tidy to the
superintendent’s satisfaction, community police and councillors were
ordered to monitor and prosecute anyone who failed to observe these
by-laws. Hygiene inspectors were appointed to police homes and
surroundings, report ‘dirty and untidy’ families who were then brought
under closer surveillance and subjected to surprise inspections. Nurses
from the new Baby Welfare centre could enter any house, checking
bedding, cupboards, food storage etc and demand women attend weekly
classes.
These measures clearly show the intensification of personal
surveillance. Taken out of context you might say they were a reasonable
response to communities characterised by disease and malnutrition. And
this remains the government line. But what this personal attack
conceals, of course, is the deadly environments created and maintained
by government refusal to provide standard living conditions. In the
1950s, at the height of this personal surveillance, a doctor reported
from Cherbourg that conditions were so bad it was a miracle babies
survived infancy and childhood; a miracle they didn’t suffocate as
people slept four and more to a bed; a miracle they survived their diet
of damper and syrup three meals a day; a miracle they survived the
unwashed filthy bedding, leaking and overflowing toilets, dirt encrusted
kitchens. The Director General of the Health department wrote
scathingly that no-one could learn hygienic habits if no basic
facilities were available to them. In the 1960s an inspector made the
same point: he said it was fruitless teaching girls domestic science at
school when most homes lacked running water, safe sanitation and basic
household goods.
I
want now to look at the other side of this entrenched poverty:
employment and finances. I’ll look first at rural employment and then
at workers on government reserves.
From 1901 the government set a minimum monthly wage of about $46 today
for workers in the sea trades and half that for those on the mainland.
The government took the right, through its network of police protectors,
to retain or sell Aboriginal property. Regulations in 1904 listed wage
rates for children under 12 years, amounting to $5.80 a week.
When Bleakley took over as chief protector in 1914 he expanded the
compulsorily contracted workforce, increased minimum wages, and demanded
every worker’s wage be paid direct to local protectors, thus increasing
government holdings of Aboriginal earnings from around $875,000 to
almost $4 million in that year alone. But workers could only access
their money by asking the protector, and people, even with large
savings, were routinely refused. The government knew police fraud was
rife from as early as 1904 when it introduced thumb printing to reduce
it; and it knew frauds continued. Yet it refused to allow people to
see any record of their accounts – until 1969!
In 1919 the
government lobbied to exclude Aboriginal workers from the Station Hands
Award, striking a deal with the pastoral industry to freeze Aboriginal
wages at 66% the white rate. This was despite a raft of testimonials
over several years confirming many employers thought Aboriginal workers
were equally or better skilled than their white colleagues. Workers
were responsible for maintaining their families on this fractional wage;
failure to do so trigged removal to a reserve. A public service inquiry
in 1922 revealed that head office did not supervise the 8000 rural
savings accounts and police practices were so unreliable the
commissioners insisted workers be allowed to appeal dealings on their
accounts. The government rejected this recommendation.
Also in 1919, the
government imposed a tax on Aboriginal earnings, taking 5% from single
worker’s wages and 2.5% from married worker’s, although of course it
didn’t inform workers of this confiscation. This levy went into a new
trust fund, the Aboriginal Provident Fund which was supposed to provide
for sick or unemployed workers. But the inquiry showed that the
government had stripped large amounts from the Provident Fund, and from
a second trust fund of unclaimed wages and deceased estates held for
workers’ dependents, diverting the money to construction on the
settlements, funding for missions and costs of compulsory deportations.
An inquiry in 1932 found that ‘the opportunity for fraud existed to a
greater degree than with any other Governmental accounts’. The chief
protector again admitted there were no real controls over official
dealings on private accounts, and again rejected the recommendation that
workers be allowed to see what was done with their money. The
government was again exposed for raiding Aboriginal money: during and
after the 1929-32 depression years, it simply transferred around $3.5
million out of the two Trust funds ‘for departmental purposes’,
rendering the deceased estates’ fund technically insolvent.
In 1933 the government centralised the bulk of workers’ savings in
Brisbane, ostensibly to ‘minimise fraud by members of the Police Force
who are Protectors.’ But it immediately sidelined over 80% of these
private monies – almost $15 million – into investments to raise revenue
for Treasury. This earned interest of $320,500 in 1933 alone, money
which legally belonged to account holders. The government continued
this manipulation of bulk savings until 1970.
The government ran its contract-labour system for 70 years. It gave
employers the right to pay into workers’ hands between 30-80% of wages.
Decade after decade the government was warned workers were not getting
this ‘pocket money’, yet it never fixed the system. The 1932 inquiry
stated it could be ‘reasonably assumed’ that workers were cheated. In
1943 protectors described the system as a farce and a direct profit to
employers, in 1956 they said it was useless, futile and out of control,
with workers ‘entirely at the mercy’ of employers who simply doctored
the books. In contempt of this knowledge, the government rejected
auditors’ calls for external inspectors as ‘too costly’. In the
mid-1960s it admitted pocket money was probably not paid ‘in many
instances’. And the financial loss to workers? The pastoral workforce
numbered between 3000 and 5000 people in the 50 years to 1968.
Potentially an average of 50% of their wages may never have been paid;
that’s many millions every year that the government knew was not
paid ‘in many instances’.
In 1956 a department survey confirmed the pastoral industry was entirely
dependent on Aboriginal workers, particularly in remote areas where
white stockmen were rare. The inspector said the entrenched mentality
was to pay ‘as little as possible for Aboriginal workers’, while ‘white
men of markedly less ability and industry receive higher wages and
better living conditions than Aboriginals who are better workmen’.
Records show the government frequently failed to demand even the 66%
wage parity. Rates for the 4500 workers fell to only 31 per cent in
1949 and 59 per cent in 1956 – millions more dollars ‘stolen’ through
government negligence. Only after 1972 did Aboriginal pastoral workers
get equal wages and control over their own labour. For the first time
elderly family members and wives who had been compelled to work for free
on the stations could refuse to be exploited.
I want to turn attention now to the missions and settlements, keeping in
mind that ‘care and control’ of reserve inmates was a government
responsibility. There were over 8500 people confined on reserves
struggling to survive on rations when the government introduced cash
economies in 1968. But it set the wage for its 2500 employees at only
$116 per week, less than half the minimum wage, and most of this was
withheld for ‘amenities’. Living costs were dramatically higher on
these remote communities. The government knew school absenteeism soared
because many lacked food for children’s lunches, it knew people could
not afford even the grossly discounted rent for new commonwealth houses,
it knew houses were therefore dangerously overcrowded.
In 1972, when it was paying its employees 58% the basic wage, the
government knew poverty was so dire many families survived on bread and
syrup, most
homes lacked cupboards or beds, few could afford refrigerators, and the
electricity supply was so inadequate families were routinely refused
permission to buy them. A medical survey at that time showed deaths of
children under five from gastroenteritis and pneumonia were 34 times
that of white children, due to ‘massive infection loads resulting from
substandard living conditions’. Sickness and death were quite clearly
grounded in deliberate financial deprivation by the authority charged
with their ‘care and protection’.
After passage of the Racial Discrimination Act in 1975 it was
illegal to under pay workers on the basis of race, a fact the government
simply ignored. In 1978 premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen demanded the
federal government cover the costs of bringing community wages to award
levels, threatening to retrench 850 workers at the risk of
‘massive social problems’ from unemployment and ‘other factors’. When
this demand was refused the Queensland government resolved to freeze
wages funding. As pay rates rose massive sackings drove workforce
numbers
from around 2500 in 1976 to under 800 a decade later, frequently
jeopardising essential services. And the government sat by and watched
the ‘massive social problems’ unfold.
From at least 1979 the Queensland government had legal advice that its
policy to under pay Aboriginal employees breached State industrial law
and the federal RDA. By illegally short changing the very people it was
mandated to ‘protect’ the government effectively stole almost $187
million from these workers between 1975 and 1986, in full knowledge that
this underpayment was illegal, and in full knowledge of consequential
dire poverty. Rightful payment of this money to community workers would
have dramatically altered living circumstances and prospects, then and
now. After losing a case in the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity
Commission in 1996, the government in 1999 made available $7000 for each
worker underpaid in the 1975-1986 period. This deal terminated in
January 2003 after payments totalling almost $40 million, a massive
profit for the State.
Wages missing through
police fraud over the decades, savings lost through incorrect
calculations of levies, government misappropriation from trust funds,
bank and investment interest seized by the government – these are all
part of what is now broadly termed the Stolen Wages. In addition,
although I haven’t had time to speak of it today, is workers
compensation not properly claimed or fully distributed, deceased estates
not paid to descendants, and child endowment improperly seized and
illegally spent. A separate matter, although equally blighted by
negligence and misappropriation, is the Aboriginal Welfare Fund, which
currently holds around $9 million and which the Beattie government is
desperate to distribute before too many questions are asked.
In May 2002 premier
Peter Beattie announced an offer of $55.6 million to bring closure to
the fight for Stolen Wages. People older than 56 years would get $4000
and those between 50 – 56 would get half that, as full and final
payment. Beattie admitted there were 4000 potential litigants waiting
in the wings and that the government had already spent over $1.5 million
preparing its defence against legal challenges. He admitted it was
impossible to know how much people were owed and he quoted my estimate
of at least $500 million in question. Yet he said the $2000/$4000 would
right past wrongs in a fair and balanced way, and was made ‘in the
spirit of reconciliation’. Families of deceased workers are prevented
from claiming for their elders and people have to sign away their legal
rights if they take the payment, but Beattie promised there would be a
parliamentary apology. He said it was a win for the taxpayers and for
indigenous people. He was half right.
(To keep this ‘generous gesture of reconciliation’ in perspective,
you’ll be interested to know the government had just offered over $6500
in addition to two weeks’ pay for every year’s service to persuade up to
3000 public servants to take voluntary retirement. This followed
payments of $50,000 each to retrain 200 underperforming teachers.)
A coalition of indigenous organisations formed to fight the rushed
process, the lack of proper consultation and the paltry amount. There
was a street march in Brisbane and a petition to parliament urging the
government rethink the amount and the process. We circulated two stolen
wages fact sheets to potential claimants and the general public, setting
out the historical and financial background of government mismanagement
during the twentieth century. In January 2003 the government put out a
tender for legal practitioners to act as independent legal advisers to
oversee the signing of indemnities. But it limited applications to
those lawyers who had ‘demonstrated willingness to work cooperatively
with departmental staff’. And it still refused to supply all potential
claimants with their personal documentation. The promised parliamentary
apology was further downgraded: the Deed of Agreement itself now
constituted the written apology by the state.
Marcus Einfeld QC,
former federal court judge and foundation president of HREOC in
Australia, said the process effectively blackmailed people to accept the
offer, and he confirmed our objection that lawyers could not provide
competent legal advice to clients who lacked financial records. Terry
O’Gorman, president of the Australian Council for Civil Liberties, also
attacked the ‘independence’ of advice provided only by
government-approved lawyers, and he warned that lawyers providing only
the government line could themselves be sued if they didn’t advise
claimants to seek independent legal advice.
In mid-2003 we
launched a postcard campaign which personalised the fight for justice
through references to two underpaid workers. Funded through a range of
unions and ANTaR, tens of thousands of the postcards have been
distributed nationally and internationally, a campaign Beattie later
admitted had been politically damaging. Subsequently the government
claimed all the savings accounts had been paid out in the early 1970s,
and this could be clearly traced because accounts were audited every
year. Yet it knows full well the Stolen Wages fight has never been
about the residue remaining in accounts in the 1970s. It is about the
dimensions of loss preceding that date. Not surprisingly the government
does not reveal the decades of constant and trenchant criticisms by
auditors which I spoke of earlier. Currently we are running a
state-wide survey to publicly pressure the government to drop the
indemnity, include descendants of deceased workers and negotiate on any
residue remaining in the initial commitment.
My focus over recent
years has moved into the legal sphere where governments don’t control –
and will be held to – terms of debate from a higher realm, namely the
courts of law. But can we get the government into court? Can we make
it accountable under legal definitions of equity, liability,
responsibility, duty of care? This has never been done in Australia.
The under award case was brought in the HREOC as a breach of the
Racial Discrimination Act. Mabo of course tested native
title, and cases in the Northern Territory and NSW tested, and failed to
prove legal grounds, for breaches of government’s duty of care to the
stolen generation.
A key aspect of both
these Australian cases, and one which interests me greatly, is the
notion of fiduciary duty. This is a duty which arises because a person
or entity holds power over another sufficient to affect the interests of
the second party. It is because of that power differential that the
fiduciary, and in this instance I’m thinking the government, has a legal
duty of trust. If this is found to be a ‘true’ trust then there are
several requirements: always to act in the interests of the beneficiary,
never to profit from the trust relationship, never to hold a conflict of
interest, to keep full and accurate records, and to provide on request a
full account for all trust property. Many relationships import a
fiduciary duty, but it seems that true trusts mainly arise relating to
finances and property.
In the first part of this lecture I sketched how the government had
taken control of Aboriginal lives from the turn of last century,
whittling away people’s rights over their own labour, wages, savings,
family and circumstances of living. So I don’t think there’s any doubt
that the government stood as a fiduciary to those people it took into
control ‘under the Acts’. While I think governments should be held to
account for failing their duty of care on the reserves – substandard
schooling, rations, health care, shelter etc – I am leaving this to one
side for the moment to concentrate on finances and property, because
these are areas which legal opinion suggests will present much higher
chances of conviction.
There is certainly evidence that the government failed to act in the
best interests of the beneficiaries: it knowingly maintained a system
under which people’s wages were defrauded not only be their employers
but by the government’s own agents, the police protectors. It took
levies from wages and
arguably did not use that money entirely for the beneficiaries
interests. It contracted people out at much less than their skilled
entitlement. It intercepted and misused child endowment and pensions.
It failed to properly distribute deceased estates. In fact, at almost
every point where the government exercised its financial prerogatives,
it failed to secure the best interests of the Aboriginal people it had
forced into dependency upon it. The government has also failed to keep
proper records of its transactions on Aboriginal monies: it is this
primary breach of a trustee’s duties which prevents many people from
claiming the reparations. And perversely, it is this very fragmentation
of records which governments – in both Queensland and NSW – invoke to
suggest we can never really establish what went on. This is grossly
misleading. Three major collections of financial data could be
presented without delay for an investigative assessment of loss and
liability.
So what are our chances in the courts? As I said, no case such as this
has ever been brought in Australia. But of course that needn’t stop
us. Indeed this is precisely the focus of a book I’m working on,
courtesy of a research fellowship from the Center for Public Culture and
Ideas, here at Griffith. And we do have international precedents. Very
briefly, I have been watching with fascination a case in the US brought
by 500,000 native American plaintiffs against the federal government for
misappropriation and negligent dealing on their private earnings. This
class action includes past and present accountholders. It commenced in
1996 and has been through several stages in the court process and the
plaintiffs have won every stage against an amazing background of
government obstruction and contempt of court process. In September 2003
the judge demanded the government account for every cent it had
controlled back to 1887 when the trust commenced. And where proper
distribution cannot be documented, that amount will not be deemed to
have been paid; the fragmentation of records does not diminish
accountability but confirms liability. The US government’s own
assessment of its liability is an astounding $AU50 billion.
So I am working towards several goals. I want to see a comprehensive
court dissection of just how governments handled the powers they assumed
and the finances they seized from the very beginning. I’d like to see
that played out, over several weeks, in the TV and print media. I’d
hope these revelations will re-educate the average member of the public
to understand just how Aboriginal poverty and despair was inflicted
through deliberate practices of governments which even today refuse to
admit their callous abuses of powers and responsibilities. I’d like see
court orders for an independent assessment of all trust fund management
back to the turn of last century to chronicle all the sins of omission
and commission. I’d like an actuary to determine – just as would happen
for any other institution – the levels of loss and the amounts of
restitution.
I hope this talk has given you a better understanding of the rhetoric of
protection, whether in ‘rescuing’ families from unsafe surroundings and
confining them under government care on the reserves, or in controlling
work contracts and private savings so that people were not cheated of
payment commensurate with their ability and enjoyed full use of their
savings. I think I have shown that the reality was very different, both
in the past, when the systems were operational, but also in the present,
when the government will not acknowledge the vast amount of Aboriginal
monies lost and stolen under its stewardship, nor the government role in
crafting the substandard communities of today.
And these historical realities of past and present also leave a legacy
of distorted prejudices relating to the capacity of Aboriginal men and
women to effectively manage their family, work and financial
responsibilities. In fighting for justice on the Stolen Wages we are
fighting against this ongoing distortion of reality.
Contacts
ANTaR:
www.antarqld.org.au (3844 9800) – to download the postcard, survey,
or volunteer
Ros Kidd:
www.linksdisk.com/roskidd - for background information on
history and Stolen Wages
US case:
www.indiantrust.com - for the historical and legal background
to the class action
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