Dr Ros Kidd
Historian - Consultant - Writer
Discovering Whiteness
Ten years ago when I first started researching the activities of
Queensland’s Aboriginal department I had several aims: to acquire for
myself a knowledge of government operations during the twentieth
century; to do a thorough job in accessing the widest possible range of
information; and to come up with new ways of conceptualising practices
such as exile to reserves, separation of children from their families,
and forced labour. In particular, I wanted some sense of how Aboriginal
families experienced these and other aspects of a century of ‘care and
protection’.
This talk today is about my journey of discovery. I started off as a
middle-class middle-aged woman researching for a PhD thesis and ended
up, after reading hundreds of files and thousands of documents, sitting
in a room surrounded by paper and thinking: What if this had been me?
How would I have coped? What does it mean that I now have this
knowledge?
The complexity of this suffocating system of controls, the scope and
depth of unbelievable deprivation, absolutely beggars belief. Here’s a
brief background.
Since the turn of the nineteenth century, in Queensland and around
Australia, each state gave itself total power over Aboriginal lives. As
settlement appropriated all the fertile land Aboriginal families were
deported even from dry areas; it was claimed their presence near
waterholes or rivers frightened the cattle. Carted off to missions and
settlements according to the provisions of carefully crafted
‘protection’ laws, people died of diseases and starvation because the
institutions were invariably located on useless land and the government
refused to provide funds sufficient for survival. People who escaped to
look for food and work were hunted down and returned in chains. On
reserves work was compulsory and unpaid until the late 1960s, rations
and housing condemned as pathologically substandard, and the whole sorry
mess handed to Aboriginal community councils in the late 1980s. And now
these conditions are largely blamed on poor council administration and
misplaced ATSIC priorities.
Every employed Aboriginal in Queensland was contracted by the government
for 51 weeks out of 52, with or without his or her family. To refuse
such separation was to be beaten or banished, usually to Palm Island.
Some never saw or heard from families again. On the backs of this
workforce of between 4000 and 5000 men, women and children, the
Queensland pastoral industry developed and prospered. Surveys showed
that Aboriginal workers were often regarded as more skilled than whites,
but a gentlemen’s agreement struck in 1919 between government and
pastoralists set Aboriginal pay at 66% the white rate for the next 50
years.
That was the stated procedure. But in some years workers actually
received as little as 31%, and never, during its control of private
wages that only ceased in 1970, never did the government ensure even
this money was received by the worker. The government maintained a
system blighted by fraud; it extracted levies from pitiful earnings; it
misused and mismanaged trust funds; it seized around 80% of private
savings to generate revenue for the state on the facile pretext that the
money was ‘idle’ and ‘surplus to needs’. Account holders, some with
considerable finances of which they were kept totally ignorant, lived,
and died, in grinding poverty. Now we begin to understand the despair
and destitution of today.
What most appalled me was the sheer bloody mindedness and perversity as
decade after decade power compounded power, entrenching a punitive
system for the sake of maintaining controls, in the face of mounting
evidence of outcomes patently contrary to publicly stated aims. What I
found most offensive was the realisation that during all of these years,
when the causal factor was so clearly the pernicious system itself and
the men who implemented it with such dogmatic determination, it was the
people who were blamed, misrepresented, maligned and discounted as the
root cause of their own damnable circumstances. As is still so often
the case today.
If you are driven from country which has sustained you for generations,
if you are denied access to rental housing or casual accommodation, if
those of you in work are denied the cash you are earning, if you are
thereby struggling in shanties without the clean water, sanitation,
shelter, food, clothing and schooling that is mandated for all other
Australians – how does it feel to be told it is your failure to
provide a good home environment that alerts authorities to the need to
‘rescue’ your children from your negligence. How does it feel to know,
from experience, that you might never see your little ones again? To
realise, from the cold hard facts of your position, that you can’t
afford to follow to be near them? To know, from bitter experience, that
the authorities will neither listen to your protests nor respect your
heartache?
What does it mean for ourselves as Australians to know now, as surely as
I know from the evidence, that these children who were taken into
government ‘care and protection’ – and the adults they became – were
trapped, across many generations, in conditions as bad, and often worse,
than those from which they were deemed to have been ‘rescued’. Here are
some sketches of conditions on government settlements. On Palm Island
in the 1930s nearly every baby died who was not breastfed, because the
only alternative was arrowroot and condensed milk. Here the doctor
asked head office whether it was ‘worth while trying to save them’ by
providing vitamin-enriched formula. At Cherbourg, the government’s
showpiece institution, the walls of the dormitory were described as
‘literally alive with bugs … beds, bed clothing, pillows and mattresses
are all infested ... all pillows were filthy because the previous matron
withheld pillowslips to save washing’. In the 1950s malnourished
dormitory children succumbed to tuberculosis because, as the expert
reported, they slept several to a bed in overcrowded and badly
ventilated barracks. The government was warned that the encaging of
large numbers of children and unmarried women behind barbed wire and
locked doors was artificial, unnatural and pernicious, but dormitories
continued to be used, even into the 1970s, as places of detention.
For around 70 years the Queensland government simply ignored its own law
requiring every child be given a regular education. As early as 1905
the chief protector had obtained advice from the crown solicitor that
Aboriginal children were not exempted from this basic right. Yet
the government had no intention of providing standard teachers,
classrooms or learning resources for these wards of state. Until the
1950s lessons were limited to half a day so children could work in the
afternoons; they had to make do with cast off and outdated materials
from the white schools, with unpaid native monitors as teachers. Only
in the last few decades has orthodox schooling been provided. Yet the
public was told Aboriginal children were intellectually backward.
And in the wider community it was the atrocious conditions on the
department’s own reserves, where basic amenities were deliberately
vetoed on the grounds that they might encourage people to reside there,
that were reported, time and time again, as the sole grounds that
children were refused access to local schools. The department even
denied local councils permission to erect necessary amenities, and
dismissed white lobbyists as socialist meddlers. From the 1960s, in the
name of assimilation, it sanctioned the eviction of families and the
destruction of their huts ‘on health grounds’ – conditions for which the
department was itself responsible – when it knew no alternative
accommodation was available. In the 1970s, as federally-funded low-rent
houses proliferated, families trying to help each other out risked
eviction as departmental agents warned against overcrowding and
‘unsuitable’ visitors.
I am horrified and ashamed to read the machinations of this pitiless
system. I am ashamed to know that many families with large bank
accounts had to go cap in hand to ask permission to make small
withdrawals, permission that was frequently refused. Shame turned to
disgust now I know that the government knew of, was consistently warned
of, widespread frauds by both employers and police, but always refused
to implement the simplest check – namely that people see some record of
what was being done to their own savings. Disgust turned to anger now I
know that the government itself was taking money from savings for trust
accounts it misused and purloined, it engineered ‘consent’ for
deductions to pay for improvements on departmental reserves, it seized
the bank interest, and, in the late 1950s, it simply wrote itself a
regulation so it could invest hundreds of thousands of pounds of those
savings in development projects of regional hospitals when Aboriginal
patients were dying of cross infections in the under-resourced and
inadequately staffed equivalents.
I am horrified and ashamed to have lived oblivious to such calculated
inhumanity. I am also diminished. My sense of myself as a member of a
just society is fractured as surely as if I had stepped on a landmine.
I am horrified at how late it was in life that I came to learn the
terrible realities endured by Aboriginal families at the hands of
governments. And this knowledge is very confronting: because I’m one of
the millions of Australians who have never gone hungry, I have never
been cast adrift from my family, I have always had a roof over my head,
a warm bed, my wages in my hand to spend on my needs.
It’s not just a case of ‘adding in’ this untold history. This evidence
cannot be characterised as a few awkward last pieces to be fitted in to
an almost-completed national jigsaw – as our prime minister seems to
suggest. This is not simply a matter of adjusting the colour and
contrast of a two-dimensional representation of our ‘development’ from
the primitive to the modern.
What this evidence reveals is a submerged operational dynamic within our
national psyche. The diminishment and degradation of Aboriginal agency
in Australian history is the diminishment and degradation of us all.
Knowing only part of our history, our identity is open to manipulation
and distortion. Embracing the true content and outcomes of government
management of Aboriginal lives will replace much of the ‘whiteness’ of
our identity with the multi-colours of reality. White explorers did
not, like conquering heroes, ‘open up’ the outback and pave the way for
‘civilisation’; they were watched, guided and often rescued by those
whose country it was, those who knew it infinitely better, those who
moved and endured lightly on the landscape. White miners, stockmen and
settlers did not ‘pioneer’ life in the bush; most remote properties and
towns were dependent on the labour of thousands of Aboriginal men, women
and children, more than 1000 working full time by 1880 in Queensland
alone. Time and time again in the twentieth century pastoralists stated
they could not survive without cheap black labour.
These facts are indicative of more than history untold; they also
represent debts unpaid. Debts of acknowledgement, debts of regret, and,
in practical, accountable terms, financial debts. In Queensland alone,
calculations show Aboriginal labour, unpaid and underpaid in the
pastoral industry and in developing the communities, to be more than a
billion dollars in today’s value, just calculating from the 1940s. In
Queensland today the state admits it has profited from this
forced labour; but while this profit amounted to around half a million
dollars weekly the state is currently offering about $55 million, ‘in
the spirit of reconciliation’ as they put it, ‘so we can move on’.
That’s $4000 for some workers and half that for others. For decades of
work.
But this is not some unfortunate blight on our past to be ‘whited out’
with an amount the departmental budget can comfortably accommodate. My
argument is that their wages and savings, denied or missing or
misappropriated, are their legal right; they are not within the province
of the government to bestow ‘in the spirit of reconciliation’. These
workers helped build each state. Aboriginal workers, Aboriginal
families, are integral to our nationhood, not a late addition.
It would seem, in our present political climate, that we have a fight on
our hands to reclaim this dynamic – our multi-coloured past and
present. Well, so be it. History is far too important to leave to the
whims of temporary politicians. And this is a good fight, a purifying
fight, a fight to claim truth for our nation and our identity.
My personal belief is that it is also a unifying fight. We can stand
together and work for truth in our history, for the expansion rather
than the contraction of our knowledge, for the inclusion rather than the
ostracism of our brothers and sisters. We can demand acknowledgement
and dignity for those denied it by our forebears and, sadly, by many of
our peers; we can be enriched by their stories, their experiences, their
culture.
And I have found, without question, that I also am empowered through
this fight to disseminate knowledge and to win justice. I am still only
5’ 1”; but I am taller, stronger, and richer through my friendships and
this shared struggle. I am fighting because to know is to be indelibly
implicated: the choice is to walk away or to take action – literally,
for truth and justice. My reward is to look my children and
grandchildren in the eye and say – Yes, I learned of it; Yes, I am
ashamed and disgusted; and Yes, I am doing all in my power to change it.
BACK HOME
|