The Stolen Generations

By the late 1920s, the government’s policy of removal had become more strict and purposeful. Under the direction of Dr Cecil Cook, the Chief Protector of Aboriginals from 1927 to 1939, policemen gathered up chil­dren ‘from Port Keats to the Petermann Ranges’ for placement in the Bungalow, Kahlin or the church missions.

 The policy became more strict because the white people of the Ter­ritory feared that they would be outnumbered by the growing part-descent population. They believed that part-descent children might ‘resort to savagery’ if left in the Aboriginal camps or ‘drift to become a menace to society’.

Dr Cook believed that the best way to prevent such problems was to eventually eradicate the part-descent population. He thought this could be achieved by removing part-descent girls from Aboriginal camps and edu­cating them to a standard which would allow them to marry white men.  

¾ Rowena MacDonald, Between Two Worlds, 1995[1]

The written records and photographs which make up this book together create a compelling picture of the benevolent inhumanity of man to man ¾ a part of history which we need to know to better understand our present.

¾ Justice Robert French, President Native Title Tribunal, 1995, cover endorsement for Rowena MacDonald’s Between Two Worlds

In 1993, to mark the United Nation’s International Year of the World’s Indigenous People, one of the many programs sponsored by the Australian government was an exhibition about Aborigines compiled from records in the Australian Archives. It opened at the Australian Museum, Sydney, in October 1993 and then toured every state. It was the first national tour staged by the Archives and, for an organization that previously had only limited public contact, its most adventurous promotional exercise ever. It appointed a staff of twelve to research and mount the exhibition. The Archives subsequently described the project a great success. It visited fifteen venues around Australia and was seen by half a million people.[2]

To meet the demand generated, especially from schoolteachers, in 1995 the Archives published the archival documents, the curator’s text and the exhibition’s photographs as a book entitled Between Two Worlds. Author of the book and curator of the exhibition, Rowena MacDonald, said when she got the job she found it hard to decide the content. Until 1967, when a referendum changed the constitution to allow the Commonwealth to make national laws for Aboriginal people, the states had most responsibility for legislation and manage­ment of Aboriginal affairs. Consequently, the individual state archives, rather than the national archives, held the great bulk of pre-1967 government records. The one place where the Commonwealth did have direct responsibility in this period was the Northern Territory. MacDonald approached academic historians seeking suggestions for Territory themes her exhibition might pursue.

She soon came across Peter Read who persuaded her not to try to cover the whole of government–Aboriginal relations in the Territory but to focus the entire display on the Stolen Generations. She subse­quently appointed Read the project’s ‘curatorial adviser’, and he guided its development every step of the way. MacDonald wrote:

During initial discussions, Dr Peter Read, a historian at the Australian National University, suggested that the story of the government-run ‘half-caste’ institutions documented in these Northern Territory records might make a stimulating theme. Throughout the development of the exhibition which saw his original idea eventually realized as Between Two Worlds, Dr Read provided guidance, encouragement and invaluable expert advice.[3]

Unfortunately for the reputation of the national archives, as well as taking Read’s ideas and advice MacDonald also adopted the historical method he used in his own work on the Stolen Generations. That is, she only selected documents, or fragments of documents, that sup­ported her case, while ignoring those, even from the same source, that questioned or contradicted the line she decided to take. She reproduced apparently embarrassing quotations from government officials out of their historical context. She avoided publishing statis­tics of child removals that were available in the archives which would have questioned her case. And she embedded within her work an interpretation that grossly distorted the extent of removals, the cli­mate in which this took place, and the intentions of those who did the removing.

For example, MacDonald began her discussion of Commonwealth intentions and policy by placing the following quotation at the head of one chapter: ‘No half-caste children should be allowed to remain in any native camp.’ This was half of a sentence taken from a report written in 1913 by the anthropologist Baldwin Spencer, the first Chief Protector of Aboriginal in the Northern Territory. It appeared to support a policy of permanently removing half-caste children from other Aboriginal people. Out of context and framed within a presen­tation about Stolen Generations, the quotation distorted Spencer’s meaning completely. His report had previously made clear what he meant by ‘aboriginal camps’ when he criticized the alcoholism, drug abuse and prostitution of camps on the edge of white settlements. The solution he advocated did not involve removing half-castes from other Aborigines. Rather, he wanted to put them on reserves segre­gated not from one another but from the Territory’s white and Asian populations who were supplying them with alcohol and opium. In a sentence MacDonald did not quote, Spencer’s report recom­mended his preferred policy for half-castes:

I have, after consideration of all the facts, come to the conclusion that, except in individual and exceptional cases, the best and kindest thing is to place them on reserves along with the natives, train them in the same schools and encourage them to marry among themselves.[4]

The three paragraphs at the start of this chapter, which are from Chapter Five of Between Two Worlds, provide a further illustration of how the exhibition misled its readers. MacDonald’s portrait of police sweeping the Northern Territory in the late 1920s to stem a rising tide of half-caste children that threatened to swamp the white popu­lation was a gross beat-up. She avoided saying precisely how many of these part-descent people were actually rounded up. Yet the infor­mation about the very limited extent of removals at the time was fully available to her. Her exhibition included a reproduction of a small part of the report to the Prime Minister about the Northern Territory prepared in 1928 by the Chief Protector of Aboriginals in Queen­sland, John William Bleakley.[5] Other pages of the same report, which she declined to reproduce, told a very different story.

Bleakley began with an estimate of the total population of Abori­gines in the Northern Territory in 1928. There were 21,000 Abori­ginal people, of whom 800 were half-castes, both adults and children. As Table 10.1 below shows, of the half-castes, only 200 were inmates of government institutions or missions. Of these, 132 were children, held predominantly at three places, the Half-Caste Home at Darwin (64 children), the Bungalow at Alice Springs (52 children), and the Anglican mission on Groote Eylandt in the Gulf of Carpentaria (16 children).

These half-caste children constituted a mere 0.6 per cent of the Aboriginal population of the Territory at the time, and only a fraction of the then white population of 4500. The alarmist scenarios created by MacDonald’s text ¾ the ‘resort to savagery’ and the ‘menace to society’ ¾ might impress schoolchildren on a museum excursion but no one who saw the actual figures involved could take them seriously.

Moreover, while these institutions did increase their total intake in the 1930s, the growth was not dramatic. The numbers in the Half-Caste Home in Darwin went from 76 in 1928 to 116 in 1936. In 1937, after a cyclone destroyed the original buildings, the home was relocated to a new site on Bagot Road, Darwin. In 1938, its peak year for attendance, it housed 153 residents, of whom 121 were female.

The Bleakley report was by no means a whitewash. It spoke frankly about some of the very poor conditions under which some half-castes were housed. After he inspected the Bungalow at Alice Springs, Bleakley immediately agreed:

(a) the buildings are unsuitable;
(b) the present site is also unsuitable;
(c) immediate removal is highly desirable.[6]

At the same time, conditions at the Bungalow came under the scru­tiny of the journalists from southern newspapers, especially the Bulle­tin in Sydney and the Daily Mail in Brisbane. There was no doubt the conditions there had become appalling. Press photographs showed inmates sleeping on the ground in poorly ventilated cast-iron sheds, with not enough blankets to go around on freezing central Australian winter nights. This was one thing that Rowena MacDonald’s book did get right.[7]

The criticism stung the authorities into closing down the dilapidated premises and moving to a temporary site at Jay Creek. At the same time, most of the half-caste boys at the Darwin home were transferred to other temporary premises at Pine Creek. Two years later, in 1933, when the Bungalow returned to Alice Springs and to new premises in the former Telegraph Station, its numbers increased from 52 to 114, of whom 28 were boys from Pine Creek. By 1938, the Bungalow housed 127 half-caste children.[8] They were a long way short of outnumbering the white population.

The new accommodation at the Bagot Compound in Darwin could not have been all that bad. During the Second World War, the government evacuated its Aboriginal population and the Australian Army requisitioned the buildings for use as a military hospital and as barracks for units engaged in the defence of Darwin.[9] In other words, under wartime conditions, Australian defence forces accepted the same standard of accommodation the authorities had provided for Aborigines.

Table 10.1: Aborigines at government institutions and
religious missions in the Northern Territory, 1928

Table 10.1 Source: J. W. Bleakley, The Aboriginals and Half-Castes of Central Australia and North Australia, Report, 1928, Parliamentary Paper (Australia), number 21 of 1929, pp 12, 14, 26.

* Separate numbers for children and half-castes at the Kahlin Compound were not published in Bleakleys’s report.

** The majority at the Bungalow were half-caste children but some were older and of workforce age. Bleakley said twelve of the inmates, ‘between the ages of 13 and 30’ should be sent out to employment (page 17).