The Stolen Generations

Given the reputation of the Moore River Settlement and the unenvi­able place it has earned in the national psyche through the film Rab­bit-Proof Fence and the SBS television series First Australians, one might expect that, by now, everyone interested in the subject would know how many stolen children passed through those terrible gates. Strange as it might seem, none of those who have condemned Moore River have provided any numbers to back their claims. Neither the Bringing Them Home report nor the academic historians and commentators Anna Haebich, Russell McGregor, Robert Manne and Raimond Gaita have told how many children were forcibly removed there.

The truth is there were not very many. In 1934, when the state’s Aboriginal population in the settled districts was 19,000, the com­pound housed only 134 children. Of this group, 54 girls and 41 boys were divided by age into two classes and taught in the school, 14 children were of kindergarten age and taught in a separate class,[1] and another 25 girls were employed in the sewing room.[2]

The majority were children of parents who lived in the camp and, though sleeping in the dormitory at night, spent some time with their parents most days. If they wanted their children to go to school, or if they wanted to live in the camp’s cottages rather than tents or make­shift shelters, parents had to surrender their children to the com­pound. Although the camp was off limits at night to compound children, the staff did not prevent their coming and going in the day­time. There was no fence between camp and compound, only open space and bush, so the separation of children from parents would have been impossible to police anyway.[3] And despite the rules, some child­ren who went to the compound school in the daytime still lived and slept at night with parents or relatives in the camp.[4] None of these could properly be labelled ‘stolen’ or even ‘removed’ from their parents.

However, there were some children who were orphans or other­wise ‘unattended’ by parents or relatives who were required by law to go to Moore River. These were the only possible candidates for the category of ‘forcible removals’. In March 1934, there were 64 unat­tended children at the settlement, all sent there since January 1930.[5] Some of these had arrived in 1933 as part of an emergency intake when a group of 87 adults and children from the fringe camp at Northam suspected of harbouring an epidemic of scabies were sent to Moore River to be quarantined until free of the disease.[6] In more normal periods, there were actually fewer admissions of unattended children. In 1931, when the girls who featured in the book and film Rabbit-Proof Fence were sent to Moore River, they were three of only four children admitted that year.[7]

Table 8.2: ‘Unattended’ children sent per year to
Moore River Settlement, 1915–1940

Source: Annual Reports of Chief Protector of Aborigines, 1915–1940. No annual report from 1919 appears to have survived. The State Library of Western Australia holds ether the original typescript or printed versions of all remaining reports. After 1936 the report was called the Annual Report of the Commissioner of Native Affairs, Government Printer, Perth.

Notes to Table 8.2: From 1915 to 1920, unattached half-caste children were normally sent to the Dulh Ggunyah Orphanage, Victoria Park, run by the Australian Abori­gines Mission. When Dulhi Gunyah closed in 1919, it held 19 unattached children who were transferred to the Carrolup Settlement.

The number for 1920 is my estimate from that annual report, which said the Moore River Settlement received 45 additional inmates of all ages and: ‘Quite a number of half-caste children were admitted from different parts of the state.’

Notes to Table 8.2 continued: The number for 1922 is my estimate of the number of unattached children transferred to Moore River when the Carrolup settlement closed in 1922, and includes the 19 sent to Carrolup from Dulhi Gunyah in 1919.

The number from 1930­–1934 is from Neville’s evidence to the Moseley Royal Commission, 3 May 1934, transcript p 603. They included the four removals to Moore River in 1931 recorded in Annual Report of the Chief Protector, 1931, p 12.

Numbers for 1925, 1926, 1937 and 1938 are my estimates. Reports for those years gave the totals of both parents and children sent to Moore River, which were 20, 16, 17 and 46, respectively, but provided no separate figure for children. To estimate the latter I divided the total by two.

In 1939, the report said 15 women and children were sent to Moore River. I estimate 8 of these were children, plus another 10 children were sent from outside the south-west districts.

In 1940, the report said 19 women and children went to Moore River. I estimate this as 10 children.

Although the individual files of the settlement’s inmates were not available for my examination under the policy of the State Records Office of Western Australia to reserve them for people who claim a family connection, the Chief Protector’s annual reports (of which the State Library of Western Australia has an almost complete set) usually recorded the number of Aborigines removed that year under Section 12 of the Aborigines Act and/or the number of removals of child wards of the Chief Protector. The figures I have compiled from this source are in Table 8.2. As I observe in the notes to the table, I had to estimate several of the numbers, particularly when the only total given that year was a combined figure for both parents and children. In these cases, I estimated the number of children by presuming they made up half the admissions. The table records a total of just 252 unattended children removed to Moore River over a period of 25 years, or an average of only ten children a year. Even if some remov­als were not recorded in the annual reports, it is very unlikely that this would distort the true picture very much. Even if we arbitrarily doubled the total, it would still not fit the story purveyed by aca­demic historians, television producers and the Human Rights Com­mission, all of whom talk not of hundreds of forcible removals in Western Australia, but of thousands. On the evidence of the available records, their version is out by more than a factor of ten. It could not possibly be true.

These children were the only possible contenders we know of who might have been members of the Stolen Generations at Moore River. However, because there were so few of them, and because orphans, abandoned, destitute, abused and sexually vulnerable children were Neville’s first priority, all of them were most likely to have been removed for reasons of child welfare no different to those applied to white children, then and now. In response to one of his critics at the Moseley Royal Commission, Mary Bennett of the Women’s Service Guild, Neville pointed out that he only had resources to remove genuine welfare cases, and that even within this category there were still many he had to leave in fringe camps against his better judge­ment. In light of the misrepresentations by academic historians and, in particular, the deception practised by the Bringing Them Home report,[8] I will quote Neville’s defence of his removal practices at some length.

I say emphatically there are scores of children in the bush camps who should be taken away from whoever is looking after them and placed in a settlement, but on account of lack of accommodation, and lack of means and additional settlements, I am unable to exercise the power which the Act definitely gives me in this respect. If we are going to fit and train such children for the future they cannot be left as they are. …

In every camp there are half-castes and coloured children that we have never given any thought to remove, except in general with their parents, and do not wish to do so now. The witness evidently forgets that a num­ber of these children are definitely orphaned, or their mothers have gone off with someone else and definitely left them. We had one who was picked up in King’s Park as a baby, and another who was abandoned by the natives on the Goldfields. Then in other cases the natives have asked for the removal of children, and even adults. Again, native parents have placed their children with us deliberately, being quite satisfied to do so …

We do not take infants from their mothers. The minimum age is six years, and generally not then. If we have to do what is unusual, viz. take a child from its mother, it is because the mother is not fit to look after it. Again others that have been recommended for removal are left in the bush because they have attained certain years and to attempt to train them would be little use.[9]

The Rabbit-Proof Fence story gave the impression that large numbers of children were removed from distant parts of the state to Moore River. This was a view shared by Neville’s political opponents at the time, but was untrue. In response to charges made to the Moseley Royal Commission by the Labor member for Kimberley, Aubrey Coverley, that Neville should not be removing half-caste children from the north of the state to Moore River for training,[10] Neville gave figures for the number of children sent there from the Kimber­ley district up to 1934:

[I]n my time (18 years) only about a score of half-caste girls have been removed from the Kimberleys, and a few boys, and with the exception of three girls recently arrived from Moola Bulla, none since 1927. During the same time numbers have entered the missions within the Kimberleys and more recently some 40 children have been gathered at Moola Bulla station, so you will see that the department cannot be accused of anything like wholesale removals of children from the far North.[11]

Moreover, this account was not simply a momentary defensive out­burst to rescue his position from attack. The same story appears con­sistently across the years in the fine print of Neville’s annual reports on the activities of his department. For instance, during 1936 and 1937, the years when Robert Manne assured us ‘genocidal thought and administrative practice touched’,[12] Neville reported as follows:

1936: Removals under Section 12: The total number of removals to institutions or reserves under Section12, that is, by warrant issued by order of the Minister or by arrangement with the child Welfare depart­ment, was three men, seven women and 30 children. Actually, 15 war­rants were issued by this Department covering 26 persons. The families removed to Moore River Settlement included two widows and eight children, having four respectively, and another woman with three chil­dren who had deserted her husband but who has since rejoined him tak­ing the two youngest children with her. Seven children abandoned by their parents, orphans or living in undesirable surroundings, were taken in charge of by the Department. Eleven others were removed from homes where the conditions were unfit for them.[13]

1937: Women and Children: Fourteen warrants under section 12 were issued for the removal of 24 persons, 17 of whom were women and chil­dren destined for Moore River Native Settlement. Of these some were sent in because of health reasons and mainly because of the condition of the children’s eyes which required prompt attention, and the others due to the undesirable conditions under which the children were living. Resi­dence at Moore River in the case of most of these is likely to be only temporary.[14]

In short, the available historical sources are telling. Moreover, there is no good reason to disbelieve them or to treat what Neville wrote as a cover-up for evil motives. Just about the last thing he could ever have imagined was that one day his record would have to answer to left-wing historians who accused him of genocide. In short, Neville did not remove half-caste and other part-Aboriginal children to any institution in the south of the state simply because of their Aborigi­nality. Under his regime, the number of children removed was very small and removals were grounded in the same principles of social welfare that applied to white children.