The Stolen Generations

What did the Aborigines Protection Board do with the children once they were separated them from their parents? Once again the popular image created by historians turns out to be misleading. The biggest single destination for separated children was not an institution for Aboriginal children, as the historians would have us believe, but the workforce. A total of 337 wards, or 43 per cent of those for whom we have records, were placed in jobs. Another 32, or 4 per cent, were not removed from Aboriginal people but were placed in the charge of the manager of the Aboriginal station where they lived or of a nearby station. In other words, almost half of the children made wards were not removed to any kind of institution. Table 2.2 shows where the board sent them.

Note that this is a table of first destinations only, not all eventual destinations. Some institutions, in particular Bomaderry, sent a num­ber of children on to other institutions when they grew older. With these kind of transfers, the total number of children in the Ward Registers who eventually attended the Cootamundra home increases to 230, and the total number who went to Kinchela increases to 45.

AGE AND FIRST DESTINATION OF SEPARATED CHILDREN

The most revealing data about what the board was doing at this time come from a comparison of the age of the children removed and where the board first sent them. Table 2.3 shows one thing very clearly: the three largest groups of separated children were those aged thirteen, fourteen and fifteen years old. These three age groups alone made up the majority (54 per cent) of all wards. Why was this? Were these the best ages at which to eliminate their Aboriginality, or to make them forget their families and their Aboriginal traditions, or for any of the other genocidal reasons that Read and his colleagues have proposed? The third column that shows where they went is telling. The board did not consign the majority of these ages to Cootamun­dra or Kinchela or to isolation in other institutions. Instead it found them jobs. Of the 377 wards in the 13-, 14- and 15-year-old age groups, a total of 221 or 65.6 per cent of them were placed directly into employment.

Table 2.2: First destination of Aboriginal wards, 1907–1932

Source: Ward Registers 1916–1928, Aborigines Protection Board, NSW State Archives. The total is less than all wards (800) because some files did not identify destination.

* Angledool 2, Brungle 1, Brewarrina 17, Euraba 2, Roseby Park 2, Terry Hie Hie 1, Urunga 6, unnamed station 1

** Boys’ Home Camden 1, Glebe House 2, Mittagong Homes 2, Ormond House 2, Sydney Rescue Society 1

The girls were sent into jobs as domestic servants. The boys were sent into the agricultural and pastoral workforce. Both sexes usually had the formal status of apprentices, which meant their employers were supposed to teach them on the job. Girls boarded with their employers’ families in city homes or on country properties. Boys lived with the other hands on pastoral stations and farms throughout New South Wales. The board appointed officers throughout the state to arrange these placements. It called them ‘home-finders’. They were also to resolve any conflicts or grievances that arose, and to handle requests from either employer or employee for an apprentice to be re-located.[1] This program was known as the ‘board­ing-out system’.

Table 2.3: Age at separation and first destination employment, wards of NSW Aborigines Protection Board, 1907–1932

Source: Ward Registers 1916–1928, Aborigines Protection Board, NSW State Archives.

As apprentices, both Aboriginal children and their white counter­parts came under the Apprentices Act of 1901, which legally bound them to an employer for four years. Once this term was up, and if they had turned eighteen, they were free to go where they liked. Hence, rather than being removed from their parents for the whole of their childhood, the great majority of Aboriginal teenagers were away from home for four years while they were boarding with their employers. In fact, during their employment, it was not uncommon for youth to go back and forth between their employers and holi­days with their families.

Take the case of a girl from Brungle Abo­riginal station, near Can­berra, who was apprenticed to households in Summer Hill and Coogee in Sydney. She had become a ward, according to the file, because she ‘desired to enter employ­ment under Board’. As part of her work history, her file recorded:

Spent 3 weeks holiday with parents at Abor. Stn. Brungle ― returned to situation [her job] 4/3/37. Returned to Abor. Stn. Brungle 29–11–1937.[2]

Another girl who entered service in June 1928 was taken home by one of the board’s female officers for a holiday with her parents in December 1929.[3] There was no requirement for the clerks and officials who filled out these forms to record personal details like holidays, which meant they usually went unrecorded, but there is enough information in the files to show the practice was not unusual.[4]

Anyone familiar with rural life in Australia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would recognize this pattern, for it was a common experience of a great many white children at the same time. The ages of thirteen, fourteen and fifteen were those when most children in country New South Wales at this time joined the workforce. Most white children who lived in rural areas were never educated beyond primary school. Although the official school leaving age was fourteen, many left during the year they turned that age, which meant their actual leaving age was thirteen years plus some months. At the time, high school was the province of a minority, mainly in the cities. The Aboriginal wards of the board went into the workforce at much the same age as white children. Similarly, appren­tices of both races lived with their employers while they gained the required skills.

In other words, in establishing this system the board was acting like an employment agency for a disadvantaged clientele (much like the employment firm run, as I write, by Thérèse Rein, wife of Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd). Chapter Three discusses this role in more detail, but here it is worth emphasizing what the Ward Register data on age distribution and the first destination make quite clear. The typical Aboriginal ward in New South Wales at this time was not a baby removed forever from loving parents to be reared in a soulless institution, but a teenage apprentice in the workforce, living away from home for four years or less, much like his or her white counter­parts.