The Stolen Generations

If the great majority of the Aboriginal teenagers who became wards of the board were sent into employment, why were the minority of younger children removed? As Table 2.6 reveals, the two principal reasons were because they were neglected and because they were orphans. This was true both for very young children as well as those in the primary school ages.

Orphans, as defined above, were children both of whose parents were dead, or one was dead and the other unknown to the authori­ties, or both parents were unknown. Neglected children were defined under the Neglected Children and Juvenile Offenders Act of 1905, which applied to all children in New South Wales. ‘Neglected’ applied to those having no visible means of support or no fixed abode, who slept in the open air, who without reasonable excuse were not provided with sufficient and proper food, nursing, clothing, medical aid or lodging, whose parents were habitual drunkards, or who were living under such conditions as to indicate that they were lapsing into a career of vice and crime. The Aborigi­nes Protection Act of 1909 adopted this standard child welfare defi­nition of the meaning of neglected and it thereafter formed the basis of the Abori­gines Protection Board’s own determinations about the status of children.

Babies to 5-year-olds: The majority of neglected Aboriginal children in this age group were removed not by the Aborigines Protection Board but by the State Children’s Relief Board. There were seven­teen children in this category. To be taken into care by the latter author­ity, they had to be declared neglected at a hearing before a magistrate where sufficient evidence was presented to sustain the charge. The State Children’s Relief Board normally sent them to either the Sin­gleton or Bomaderry homes, but in a small number of cases where the children suffered a chronic disease they were ini­tially sent to state hospitals or sanatoriums. The seventeen recorded in the Ward Reg­isters were those who became wards of the Abo­rigines Protection Board after they were transferred from Singleton or Bomaderry to either the Cootamundra or Kinchela training institutions. There were also twelve children aged five years or less who the Aborigines Pro­tection Board itself declared to be neglected. Another ten children in this age group were orphans. The other major reasons children this young were removed were: the mental illness of a parent, the parent’s own request, the death of a parent, or the parent’s incapability of caring for the child.

Table 2.6: Reasons for removal of Aboriginal children
aged 0 to 12, 1907–1932

Source: Ward Registers, Aborigines Protection Board, State Archives of NSW.

Six to 12-year-olds: The picture for this age group was similar, except the roles of the Aborigines Protection Board and the State Chil­dren’s Relief Board were reversed, with the former determining the major­ity of cases of neglect. Once again, the second biggest category was that of orphans. Other major reasons were: the child was with­out proper parental care and control, the child was removed at the par­ent’s own request, he or she was to be given employment, edu­cation or training, or because the child was in moral danger.

The fact that the State Children’s Relief Board remained active throughout this period in determining cases of neglect among Abori­ginal children disproves another of the claims by Read about how this policy was administered. Both Read and his organization Link-Up claimed that between the passing of the 1915 Amending Act and the new 1940 Act, the Aborigines Protec­tion Board and its officers had virtually uncontrolled authority to seize Aboriginal children at will.[1] However, the Ward Registers show in this period the majority of neglected children under six were still processed by non-Aboriginal child welfare authorities, as were a significant pro­portion of those aged six to twelve. In these cases, children continued to be brought before a Children’s Court, which decided their status on the evidence before it. The same procedures were applied to neglected white children over the whole of this period.