Dr Ros Kidd
Historian - Consultant - Writer
Aboriginal Protection in Queensland
Introduction
What were the implications of being declared a ward of state under the
"protection" of Queensland’s Aboriginal department? First and foremost,
you lost almost every right for yourself and your family, rights which
are, for the rest of us, so basic as to defy listing: the freedom to
live and work where you pleased, the right to marry according to your
choice, the conditions of your baby’s birth and whether that birth was
even registered, whether your child was taken from you and confined in a
dormitory, the right to provide adequate food and safe water for your
family’s health, the choice to keep your growing children with you
rather than have them sent to contracted employment for 12 months at a
time, the right to choose your place and type of employment and the
right to receive an equitable wage for your labour, the right to retain
the monies earned by the sweat of your brow and to use these to better
the conditions of yourself and your loved ones, the right to reasonable
comfort and reasonable shelter; in short, the right to make your own
life choices in line with the choices of all other Australians.
In
the short time available to us today, I want to give you some idea as to
how such a system came into operation, and more importantly, how it
functioned. I want to give you enough knowledge to seriously doubt many
of your preconceptions, and I want to challenge your understanding of
race relations in Queensland.
When white settlers moved into Queensland last century there was bitter
conflict as the Aboriginal occupants fought to stay on their land. The
death toll among Aborigines has been numbered as high as 20,000 people,
and countless more fell to starvation and disease. Families were
destroyed as women and children were kidnapped as sex objects, and it
was common practice to capture adults and children and "break them in"
as servants. By 1886 more than 1000 Aborigines were in permanent work
around Queensland. Without this labour force, which doubled in the
following 20 years, outback Queensland may never have been developed;
few white men had the skills or were prepared to endure the risks of
pastoral work in remote areas, and the promise of Aboriginal servants
did much to persuade white women to join their men on stations and
emerging outback towns.
But this vast network of Aboriginal workers was unpaid in any real sense
of the word. Most survived on a few food scraps and cast-off clothes, or
relied on food-gathering skills in their extended families. All too
commonly, however, compliance and dependency were induced through the
supply of alcohol and opium, the latter a legal drug in Queensland until
1905. The police were commonly implicated in the culture of abuse and
exploitation - records show some officers did a brisk trade in captured
Aboriginal children, others also kept women for their own use, many
turned a blind eye to the vendettas and killings as whites acted to
clear Aboriginal families from land allocated for farms and stations,
and too many officers earned their stripes as sergeants in the native
police, a murdering machine feared by Aborigines throughout Queensland.
The 1897 Aboriginals Protection Act
In
1897 the Queensland government passed a law aimed specifically at
imposing a legal framework of controls over all aspects of inter-racial
relations. Significantly, however, this framework enclosed only the
Aboriginal half of the equation. The Aboriginals Protection and
Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act prohibited the supply of opium
or alcohol to Aborigines, it allowed for areas to be set aside as
reserves restricted for the use of Aborigines, it introduced a whole set
of limitations and controls on the employment of Aboriginal men and
women, and it initiated a network of police "protectors" to inspect,
monitor and record every facet of the lives of local Aboriginal
families. Most importantly, it decreed that almost any person of
Aboriginal parentage could be declared a ward of state at the behest of
these protectors, who also held the power to subsequently remove any
Aboriginal individual from their family and home country for confinement
on any nominated government settlement or church mission. For nearly 100
years, merely to be an Aboriginal person in Queensland was to live in
fear of being seized "under the Act".
Now most existing historical texts have focused primarily on the horrors
of last century. Writers such as Henry Reynolds have put before the
public, in painful detail, not only the widespread killings, which
continued well into this century, but also the organised and committed
resistances by which Aboriginal groups sought to repel attacks, to
maintain links to their country, and to assert their right to survive
the unwanted occupation. Much has been written about the role of the
native police, and the failure of the legal system to stem these abuses.
And these works are invaluable. However, I felt that racial oppression
through denial of land and culture might not exhaust explanations of the
deplorable circumstances of so many Aboriginal people today. It seemed
to me there might be other information, and other lines of inquiry,
which could be more useful in understanding what had been going on,
particularly in this century.
So
this was the starting point for my five-year research project. I wanted
to position myself differently: rather than standing outside
government operations and opposing or condemning them as racial
oppression, I wanted to stand inside government operations and
critically investigate these on their own terms. Exactly how did
Queensland governments execute the duty of "care and protection" over
thousands of unwilling wards of state until the late 1980s? By
using thousands of internal letters and reports, could I tease out the
thinking behind the countless adjustments and redirections in policies
and practices from the earliest days of the colony to recent times?
Could I analyse government operations to show how they measured up to
their own intentions and claims? What could I learn by standing inside
these activities as they were unfolding?
Problems with law
For instance, when we consider the first years of the Moreton Bay colony
from the 1840s, documents show that a major concern of government was
how to extend the processes of law into this new northern colony. The
logistics were almost insurmountable: they had to appoint local men as
justices of the peace and police magistrates, but they knew many of
these men were aligned with vested landholders, or were landholders
themselves, and were likely therefore to be biased against Aboriginal
groups on their land. Many of the local magistrates turned out to be
villains, but few ‘good’ men would take on the job. The problem of
‘rotten’ police was also acknowledged, particularly white officers who
allowed the native police under their control to run rampant. And all
too often ex-police moved into positions as police magistrates - and
took their prejudices with them. Indeed lack of funding, and a
consequent inability to attract educated and reliable men, was a
continuing problem for the police department into the early years of
this century.
Government and judicial personnel were also well aware that Aboriginal
people were severely disadvantaged in a legal system which operated in a
language they might not know and with concepts, such as swearing an oath
before the christian god, which excluded their participation. And during
the last century many adjustments were indeed made to foster fairness
before the law, including the provision, from the early 1840s, of
interpreters and legal assistance, and changes to the taking of
testimony, principally in 1884, to allow for a commitment to tell the
truth rather than swearing an oath before god. So you can tease out and
examine a whole range of issues relating to the treatment of Aboriginal
people before the justice and legal systems in terms of the aims and
failures of governing, which might not find space for consideration in a
more drastic ‘racial oppression’ framework.
Why set up reserves?
When I looked at the latter part of last century and the early years of
this, I asked myself why did it even seem sensible to introduce a law in
1897 to set up Aboriginal reserves and then forcibly relocate thousands
of Aboriginal families onto them in succeeding decades? I knew the
conventional answer was that it was to get Aborigines out of the way of
white expansion except for the few who were useful as cheap labour. But
when you look at the correspondence within government, you find
that the attitudes and concepts applied to what was called the
‘Aboriginal problem’ were the same as had been circulating since the
1850s with regard to a perceived necessity to remove white youngsters,
deemed to be at risk physically or morally, and to confine such
individuals in reformatories and industrial schools. Here they were
given only the basics in reading and writing before being sent out,
from the age of 10, as cheap servants in homes, businesses or farms.
In fact in Britain, by 1900, one in every 230 juveniles under 15 years
of age was under reformatory control.
Indeed the provisions of the 1897 Aboriginals Protection Act closely
resemble many of the provisions in existing reformatory legislation - to
‘rescue’, confine, retrain and reposition those who were said to be
unable to manage their lives competently in general society. So the 1897
Act was entirely consistent with measures which had been operating in
the white community for nearly 50 years, and its provisions relayed
similar aims and used similar mechanisms of social control. Although we
judge it an extreme regime from our 1990s perspective, in the 1890s
removal, retraining and underpaid servitude was common practice. We can
identify the aims of government to take control and re-shape these
"problem" groups, and certainly the push to place as many men and women
out to contracted work as the market would bear, explains why thousands
of Aborigines were sent as workers to remote pastoral properties. The
double economic benefit - cutting costs by reducing dependents on
reserves, and gaining access to workers’ income - was an added
attraction of this strategy.
Controlling the workforce
Indeed control of the Aboriginal labour force, crucial as
it was to all aspects of pioneering and development around Australia,
was a major focus of the Aboriginal legislation and subsequent
regulations. I have already alluded to the deplorable exploitation of
these workers. Under the terms of the 1897 Act alcohol and opium were
prohibited for Aborigines, employers were vetted by local police
protectors to prevent abuses and exploitation, and token wages were
payable for the duration of the 12-month "work agreements". Orders were
given for those who were unable or unwilling to work, and unable to feed
themselves and their families, to be removed forcibly to government
settlements or church missions where rations, shelter, and protection
were provided. That was the theory.
Unfortunately the reality was terribly different. The department’s own
records show inspections were rarely made of work and conditions. When
complaints arose - about unpaid wages or physical or sexual abuse - it
was the boss’s word against the Aboriginal, and police routinely sided
with the bosses. In 1927, for instance, when workers at Wrotham Park
station refused to sign for another year because they hadn’t been paid,
the local "protector" plied them with alcohol, threatened them, and then
locked them overnight in the poisons shed. Ultimately the Aboriginal
department investigated and found the Aboriginal complaints proven;
however the police department refused to take action, and then claimed
victimisation when details were leaked to the press. To call these
compulsory work contracts "agreements" is ludicrous: the only choice was
to sign or risk jailing or confinement on a different government
settlement away from family and friends.
Where the money goes
To
minimise cheating, so it was said, all Aboriginal wages were paid
directly to the local police protector, except for a small sum of
"pocket money" during the work period; although internal records show
that for the whole duration of this scheme, that is until the late
1960s, the department was well aware there was no system to ensure the
pocket money was ever properly paid. The department was also well aware
that police were cheating Aborigines of their wages: in 1930
thumbprinted and witnessed dockets were made mandatory for all
transactions - specifically to minimise police fraud. In 1933 the bulk
of Aboriginal savings was centralised in Brisbane, again to lower the
incidence of fraud and embezzlement, and I’ll return shortly to those
bulk savings.
Suffice to say here Aboriginal monies were never safe from illegal
pilfering. But they were also not safe from "legal" pilfering. Because
the department took multiple levies from the monies in its control, as
well as confiscating the bank interest, and none of this with the
permission of the account holders who had absolutely no knowledge of
these raids on their savings, because the department refused ever to
allow workers to see any record of what was happening with their money.
Meanwhile, you could only get access to your wages through the police
protector, who frequently refused permission for you to spend even the
smallest amount.
Not coincidentally, the inability of Aboriginal people to access their
own savings swelled the amount in government control to unbelievable
levels. In 1933 this savings nest-egg was nearly $14million in today’s
value, but over $12million of this was withheld by the government and
used in revenue-raising investments. A further sum of more than
$1million today had accumulated in the Trust funds courtesy of the
multiple levies on Aboriginal savings. These trust monies, which were
levied to ensure the welfare of the rural workers and their dependents,
were instead shuffled around for expenditure on various departmental
projects. During the depression years, for instance, more than $5million
had been taken directly to bolster consolidated revenue. Those who were
legally the beneficiaries of this amount, whose already discounted wages
had been further levied to produce this huge sum, were meanwhile living
in abject destitution. I’ll leave to your imagination the difference it
would have made to Aboriginal lives in the 1930s, or indeed throughout
the whole of this grubby financial deprivation which continued to the
late 1960s, had these particular workers retained their own earnings -
which would have totalled around $20million in today’s terms - for their
own benefit, like all other Australians.
Before leaving the plight of these pastoral workers, whom the minister
acknowledged, in confidence to his colleagues in 1962, were the mainstay
of the pastoral industry being as skilled and as competent as whites,
you might be interested to know that since 1919 Aboriginal wages were
pegged at only two-thirds the white rate. Yet year after year the
department failed to keep abreast of wage increases for white workers,
leaving Aboriginal drovers, musterers, fencers, cooks, cleaners and
child minders desperately disadvantaged. In 1950, for instance, the
department was hiring out this captive labour force at two-thirds the
1938 rate, effectively at only 25% of the wage set by law as payable
to their white equivalents.
I
might add that wives of pastoral workers were compelled to provide 12
hours free labour every week, although no one vetted these hours, and
child labour was prevalent and unpaid. Theoretically department approval
was required for employment of any child under 12 years of age; in
practice a blind eye was turned. In a 1958 conference between the
department and the United Graziers’ Association the department head
freely admitted that child labour was common, that many were brought in
for medical treatment for broken arms and legs. He suggested perhaps
"undersized and weedy" children should not be put to hard labour, and
added: "We try to look on these people as human beings"! And this is the
man charged with the welfare of these Aboriginal wards of state! I could
mention here that his predecessor was refused a salary comparable to the
head of the state children’s department, on the grounds that the state
did not think the welfare of Aboriginal children was as important as
that of white children.
Wards of state on Aboriginal reserves
Now although the department routinely failed to ensure the thousands of
pastoral workers received their legal wage rate, and equally routinely
utilised Aboriginal savings and Trust funds to raise revenue which
offset expenditure, the thousands of people confined on the dozen or so
missions and on the three government settlements received no financial
return for their labour for the first half of this century. Most of
these communities were established on land considered useless for white
development, all were drastically - and arguably criminally -
underfunded, and all were places of starvation, preventable sickness,
inadequate amenities, grossly overcrowded housing and compulsory unpaid
work. Aboriginal groups did not sit about under the trees with their
hands out for rations while white work gangs built and ran the
communities for them. All the missions and settlements were established
and maintained by Aboriginal labour; without this input over all the
decades of this century there would be no communities on Aboriginal
reserves today.
The culture of labour was not only implanted from childhood onwards, it
was enforced through punishment and withholding of scarce rations. It
was compulsory for every able-bodied individual to perform at least 32
hours work each week in order to receive rations - a little tea, sugar,
flour, sago, tobacco and a piece of soap. On most missions and
settlements large numbers of children of school age were taken from
their parents and confined in the dormitories. They were given a few
hours’ daily schooling but until the 1950s this was generally in a bark
and tin shack, where lack of windows and lighting meant the structures
were completely closed, dark and airless during rainy weather. Only the
basics of sums, spelling and scriptures were taught. There were no
trained teachers, no real desks or chairs, only outdated textbooks and a
few slates and chalks. Until the late 1950s few Aboriginal children on
these government institutions were educated beyond grade four.
Apart from these few hours’ instruction, school children were prepared
for a life of labour. Boys learned to clean and weave palm fronds for
the thatch houses, to strip bark and clear scrub. Those with any
aptitude were instructed in basic carpentry, machinery and farm work.
The girls learned sewing, cleaning, washing and cooking; their childhood
and youth was spent in meeting the needs of up to 300 dormitory
children, as well as the clinics and aged homes.
From the age of 14 many of the young girls from the government
settlements were sent to work - alone, frightened and extremely
vulnerable - on cane farms and remote pastoral properties, usually
without a youngster to talk to or a black face to comfort them.
Youngsters were often worked 16 or 20 hours a day; the girls at cleaning
and washing, cooking and child minding, and many also worked illegally
at horse work and fencing. For the boys it was early morning milking and
yard chores, farm work, fencing, droving, mustering, branding -
continual work, prevalent physical abuse, no choices and no reprieve.
Even the boys were not safe from sexual assault. It was policy to send
this forced labour contingent out year after year, on a 12-month work
term, with only a week or two with their families between contracts.
Often girls who fell pregnant were sent back out to work, with their new
babies, and at a reduced rate; many suffered the agony of being
separated from their children, who were kept to be raised in the
dormitories while they fulfilled their role as useful income earners.
In
contrast, few of the missions exploited their labour forces in outside
employment, wary of the "contamination" from sexual encounters and
alcohol, and from contact with workmates who might enlighten these
contracted employees as to the extremity of their exploitation. More
practically, retention of able-bodied workers, particularly of boys and
men, was absolutely critical for the development and maintenance of
these institutions. Indeed by the late 1920s the head of the department
boasted that all work on the reserve communities was carried out by
"native labour". This included house building, water supply, crop
production, road building, airstrips, clearing and ringbarking land for
cultivation, farming livestock for milk and beef, operating power
houses, sawmills, machinery sheds, doing boat building and maintenance,
as well as teaching, nursing, clothes making, baking, and domestic
service to white staff, to name just a few work areas.
During the war years thousands of Aboriginal men from the reserves
worked on farms and properties in positions vacated by enlisted
soldiers. Because this was a federal initiative all workers were paid
award wages. But, like the pastoral workers, they never saw this money:
it went directly to the superintendent of their mission or settlement,
and from it was taken income tax and a levy of around 20% towards
running costs of the institution. Even the remainder was not theirs to
spend: because the money was kept in a settlement trust fund from which
bulk sums were committed to revenue-raising investments. All they got
was vouchers for the community store, where fresh food and milk was
rarely available, where groceries were routinely past their used-by
date, stores which ran, on average, on a profit margin of up to 40%.
Even after years of continual labour, families were frequently told
their was no money left in their accounts.
By
1950 a few key personnel on each community were paid a token few
shillings, around $12 today per fortnight, as "incentive". So deprived
were the missions and settlements that it was a battle merely to
survive. Records chronicle food shortages so dramatic that inmates had
to be sent bush to forage; they show chronic malnutrition and endemic
skin diseases and hookworm infestation; they show water supplies that
routinely tested unsafe for human consumption; they show derelict and
grossly overcrowded huts; and dormitories, hospitals and school
buildings declared dangerous for occupation. Of all these institutions,
filled as they were with thousands of suffering individuals, only Palm
Island had a permanent medical officer, and that only because he also
was in charge of venereal and Hansen’s disease patients cleared from all
over Queensland and banished to nearby Fantome Island. This was the
reality of life under the government’s "care and protection".
Profiting from poverty
In
the 1960s, as old age, invalid and widows’ pensions were made available
to Aboriginal people, the government encouraged missions and settlements
to withhold this money, mainly because the pensions were significantly
greater than the pitiful cash payments currently paid to workers. This
continued a pattern of deprivation which had actually commenced before
the 1920s with the withholding of maternity allowances, and brought
undreamed profits to these institutions after child endowment was
allocated in 1942. It was the department which instructed the missions
and settlements how to have mothers sign over this cash entitlement
which was meant to improve child and maternal health, so that it could
be appropriated as part of institutional revenue. In fact internal
records reveal that the department plotted to keep all child endowment
for its own distribution purposes, but, after deciding it was publicly
unacceptable to do this on the missions, which were well known as places
of hunger and destitution, it simply reduced mission grants by an amount
equivalent amount, effectively forcing them to use private pensions for
public expenditure.
It
was not until 1968 that a wage system was introduced in place of the
rations for this compulsory labour force, allowing community residents
cash to spend on their needs. Several community managers urged payment
should at least equal the basic wage, and some reported that several
workers were eligible for award rates. But the head of the department
set the level at only 30% the basic wage, which, in reality, was the
calculated minimum for family survival. Families were thrown into
crisis; prices at the department-run stores were often double those of
nearby country towns; most families found it impossible to meet
essential needs; surveys showed large numbers of malnourished children;
sickness and premature death continued. At this time the government was
sitting on almost $17million of Aboriginal money, while those whose
earnings and labour had generated this bonanza were living, and dying,
in poverty.
During the 1970s a commonwealth-funded building program produced new
houses on all communities, real houses with tap water and electricity;
but those families who were most in need were unable to afford the
hugely subsidised rentals, because - by department decree - community
wages were so low. Overcrowding and community upheaval intensified, as
families inevitably had to double up in undersized and derelict older
housing. At Yarrabah, for example, surveys showed many homes sheltered
between 14 and 20 people, yet commonly lacked fridges, food cupboards,
cooking utensils, hot water or even wash basins. Homes with more than
ten occupants averaged had only one bed between three people, some had
only four mattresses and four chairs. How could families eat properly
and cleanly standing up or sitting on the floor every day,
lamented the hygiene officer. And floorboards rotted, because mothers
were forced to hose out the houses daily in the dusty dirty
environments.
During the 1970s and early 1980s, as federal and union pressure was
applied against the Queensland government to force payment of legal wage
rates to its Aboriginal employees, the government retaliated against
each grudging increment by slashing an equivalent number of jobs from
these struggling communities. At this time the average community wage
was still only 72% of the state’s basic wage, and the savage job cuts,
which saw more than 1500 workers thrown out of work in the period
between 1975 and 1985, all but destroyed the social fabric on these
communities. There were not enough workers to maintain and repair rental
properties; building programs stalled as the state government squeezed
wages; and managers on several communities protested more than once that
essential services - water, power, sanitation - were in crisis.
In
human terms the outcome of this merciless strategy was appalling.
Families fractured as many women decided they were better off on a
pension than struggling to feed their families on the portion of the
minimal wage which their husbands gave them, and told their men to
leave; other men who had succumbed to alcohol and violence also found
themselves banished as wives reluctantly refused to continue living in
fear and tension. Bereft of family, bereft of work, bereft of dignity,
and hooked on alcohol, a floating population of males cadged beds from
friends and relatives but had no real place to call home. The worst
aspect of this, to my mind, is that it was all premeditated.
Correspondence shows that premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, in trying to
force the federal government to fund the increase to award wage rates,
had threatened from the beginning that he would sack workers rather than
commit any state finances to this legal wage requirement. He warned
prime minister Malcolm Fraser this would cause "massive social
problems". When Fraser pointed out that state wage rates on state
institutions were a state responsibility, the Bjelke-Petersen government
held to its hard line funding freeze. And Aboriginal communities paid
the price.
At
this time, as the records show, the Queensland government was profiting
by the equivalent of $15million each year by underpaying
Aboriginal workers relative to the basic wage, or $29million each
year if it had paid award wages where due. Just commit your
imaginations to those figures for a moment, and picture what difference
that would have made each year if these particular government
workers had been paid the wages which were their legal due. Since as
early as 1979, when the government fended off the first legal challenge
on this matter by settling out of court, it has known such underpayment
is illegal. Since at least 1982, which happens to be the first evidence
I found, the government discussed on several occasions that such
underpayment was in breach of its own industrial laws and contravened
federal racial discrimination legislation. But it has fought, and
conceded, about six separate actions on this matter, the last as
recently as 1996, when it wasted nearly $1million in a failed attempt to
avoid compensation of $42,000 to six Palm Island workers. Other cases
are in the legal pipeline today. As is a massive class action of more
than 600 people which challenges the government over entrenched fraud,
mismanagement, misuse and misappropriation of Aboriginal wages, savings
and Trust monies.
Conclusion
Many people today say that to acknowledge Aboriginal pain is to wallow
unnecessarily in guilt. But when governments claim the moral high ground
for so-called "well-intentioned" practices of the past they are in fact
invoking a collective social amnesia. They are hoping that a century of
poverty, hunger, sickness, despair, under-education and under- or
non-employment will continue to be blamed on those who were trapped,
unwillingly, in the most comprehensive regime of controls ever imposed
in this country. But guardianship which continued into the late 1980s
cannot be masked as a "well-intentioned" policy of the past. Today’s
circumstances are an outcome of carefully crafted and deliberately
implemented practices which continued to the present. We know trust
funds were spent on development projects on missions and settlements, we
know the bulk of private savings was withheld to raise revenue for the
department, we know child endowment was diverted to capital works, we
know only a small portion of pensions was passed on to the elderly, to
widows, to invalids. We know the government deliberately compromised the
social fabric of Aboriginal communities in a bloody-minded determination
not to put a single cent towards paying its Aboriginal employees the
legal wage.
So
when we hear talk of "extra" money going to Aboriginal communities
today, of positive "discrimination" in funding to address appalling
health and housing and living conditions endured in so many Aboriginal
communities, be well aware that this money is not "for Aborigines". It
is to redress deficiencies in government management. It is to redress
money withheld - both through intention and through negligence - during
a century of government control. Acknowledging the truth of the past has
nothing to do with self-defeating guilt. It is about living honestly in
the present. Surely the body which controlled all aspects of Aboriginal
lives for all of this century must be questioned as to why its
guardianship created and sustained the worst outcomes on all social
indicators for those people who they decided to call "wards of state"?
It
is the operations of governments which have dictated the possibilities
and limitations of Aboriginal lives. And we must now question these
operations. We must ask why children who were removed from their
families and homelands "for their own protection" were then
institutionalised in dormitories which were well known as health risks?
Why were they given schooling which was well known as substandard, why
were youngsters sent out to work on remote properties where it was well
known they were prey to sexual and physical abuse? Why were families on
reserves fed rations which were well known as medically inadequate? We
must ask why people who worked all their lives were deprived of the bulk
of their savings, and why they are then somehow blamed for living in
overcrowded poverty. What other agency of "care" would claim the right
to walk away from 80 years of failure in its duty? And insist that those
whose lives were so dreadfully damaged have no right to question their
actions, that they are vindictive in exposing the scandals, that they
are ungracious to seek an apology.
It
seems to me there is a clear opportunity - or should that be
responsibility? - for all of us to stand together and demand
accountability from our governments for what they have perpetrated in
our names and for what they have hidden from our knowledge. We can stand
together and refuse to accept a distorted and partial version of the
realities of Aboriginal experiences, and we can reinstate these
experiences to their true position - precisely as outcomes of government
mismanagement over many decades and not, in what seems to me to be
almost a doubling of denial, not to impute that present circumstances
derive primarily from inabilities of Aboriginal families to function
effectively.
Each one of has a choice. Governments are counting on our ignorance and
indifference to mask their failures and deceptions. Surely now, as we
move into the new millenium, we should stand together and honour the
truths of our painful past, we should expose wrongdoings executed under
the protections of official powers. We should understand that these
things happened, and armed with this knowledge, say Never again.
I
think this is what history - and reconciliation - is all about.
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