THE Stolen Generation was a sorry chapter in Australia’s history. Its misguided and destructive outcomes can be acknowledged in the new Government’s proposed apology. For the Australian people to embrace the intent of this symbolic gesture, it needs clear articulation of what it was and what it wasn’t.
It was a policy that loaded me on an army truck at four years of age in the 1940s, and prohibited me from any contact with my mother for 10 years. It took me away from a loving, nurturing bush family in the bountiful environment of the Gulf of Carpentaria. It transported me 3000km south to a convict-built institution near the Blue Mountains.
It stripped me of my culture, my language, and my connections to land that stretch back through my ancestors for thousands of generations. It was called assimilation, and it was an open act of cultural genocide delivered often through fear, abuse, incarceration and deprivation.
The Stolen Generation should not be confused with co-existing policies which assisted remote-region Aboriginal children to attend schooling with their parents’ participation and consent. Nor should it be confused with the removal of Aboriginal children from dysfunctional families under welfare policies. Children at risk, of any generation, should never be a trade-off to political correctness. Importantly, while there was a deal of cruelty from some, the debate should not demean the well-meaning efforts of many good-hearted people, who were charged with implementing an abhorrent policy.
I hope it is the members of the Stolen Generation themselves who will be called on to help determine the intent of the Prime Minister’s gesture. I hope his apology to those who were culturally dispossessed will take his symbolic acknowledgment a step further and commit the nation to practical ways of getting a better appreciation of our shared cultural inheritance. There is much for all Australians to gain.
John Moriarty
Cammeray, NSW
Published in The Australian, December 19 2007
My father died very recently, on Wednesday 10 October. The following day the Prime Minister announced his claimed conversion to symbolic reconciliation. The day after that, in an interview on ABC Radio, he drew a distinction between saying sorry and an apology. He said that saying sorry was an expression of sympathy, for example "I'm sorry that your mother died". He said that an apology was something different - a formal acknowledgement of blame and responsibility.
I accept and agree with the distinction that the Prime Minister has drawn. I think it is a useful one. I am not particularly interested in "sorry". I am interested in the exercise of separating those bad things for which the Commonwealth had no responsibility, from the ones for which it had exclusive responsibility. And I am interested in getting an apology for the matters in the exclusive responsibility category.
Between 1911 and 1978 the Commonwealth - and the Commonwealth alone - ran the Northern Territory. The legal and political entity which Mr Howard heads up - and the legislature of which he has been a member for 33 years - is the same legal and political entity which took my father away from his family and culture, leaving no return roadmap. The Commonwealth had exclusive responsibility for what happened to my father -and other Territorians like him. The apology I seek is a Northern Territory - specific apology for that matter.
I want to stick for a bit with the unfinished business of my father's childhood, before I move on to discuss the current Commonwealth Intervention in the Northern Territory. I think it is important and relevant because the Commonwealth's record during the long period of its earlier Northern Territory Intervention inevitably influences to some extent my attitude to the current one. Perhaps more importantly, the values and principles which motivated the Commonwealth back then, continue to motivate the Commonwealth's principal decision-maker today.
I guess the first thing to absorb is that no matter how strange and unfamiliar non-Aboriginal people may find central Australia now, back then - in the thirties - it was a different world, certainly a different country. Backtracking a little, Leichhardt had disappeared into thin air some time after 1848. In 1864 the telegraph line opened up a tentative north-south corridor of notional white presence, but it was hardly a credible assertion of sovereignty. As in many other parts of Australia, the real business of colonisation was privatised, left to pastoralists, miners, or even dingo trappers, who tried to carve a marginal frontier existence for themselves in harsh and unpromising country.
For the most part right up until the transfer of administrative responsibility from South Australia to the Commonwealth in 1911, Aboriginal tribes carried on relatively oblivious to the encroaching new order. It was a benign neglect born of necessity-the South Australian authorities of the time could not have comprehensively subjugated and regulated the Aboriginal population even if they had wanted to.
But by the early 1930s large cattle station domains had been established across the Centre, Alice Springs was a permanent town, and the Commonwealth mounted police patrolled regularly throughout those parts of the region to which the cattlemen and miners had laid claim. Large numbers of Aboriginal people now lived either on pastorally unproductive but accessible land designated as Aboriginal reserves, or on the fringes of station settlements. Aboriginal people were under the thumb. The 1933 Coniston Massacre was just one demonstration of that.
The new colonial order was reflected in contemporary legislation. There had already been a generic South Australian act which purported to control and regulate Aboriginal people in the same sort of manner as was being done in other jurisdictions. But in 1918 the Commonwealth introduced a much more detailed and rigorous regime, which would be enforced on the ground by mounted police - the proxy foot soldiers of the early Native Affairs bureaucracy. Many of them were former soldiers, still scarred from the First World War. The legislation was called the Aboriginals Ordinance, and it authorised the physical removal and detention of any Aboriginal or "half caste" - the actual term used in the legislation-from pretty much anywhere in the Territory. It also allowed for the establishment of "Aboriginals Institutions" for the purpose of warehousing the removed "half castes".
Regardless of any ancillary or collateral welfare considerations pertaining to any particular case, the removal power was primarily used for the purpose of separating children of mixed race descent so that they could be assimilated.
At this point in Australia's history, the Aboriginal tribes in central Australia were a newly subject people, to whom settler language, culture, and morés were foreign. Scarcity of resources and other economic imperatives had forced many of them to interact strategically - or in other cases in circumstances of abject submission - with the vanguard of white colonisation. That vanguard was almost exclusively male and made up of settlers and government men.
The government men who Aboriginal people came into contact with were mostly the mounted police officers who determined how far the Federal Government's writ would run in the heart of the continent. A small number of Aboriginal people succeeded in living with a foot in both worlds, working as stockmen or police trackers if they were men, or in different roles if they were women. The Commonwealth had, with some degree of success, undertaken the "stabilisation" stage of its first Northern Territory Intervention.
It was into this strange and unwelcoming environment that my father was born. The paucity of records about his childhood is in my view a crime, one that will continue to haunt my family. But that documentary vacuum is the norm not the exception in relation to Aboriginal people of Dad's age who were removed and institutionalised by the Commonwealth under the Ordinance.
As best we can piece it together, in particular with the past assistance of my Aunty Elsie Hayes, Dad's father may have been a mixed-race stockman called Jack Woods Perrurle, an Anmatyerre man who is mentioned in the writings of Strehlow, and who attempted to raise a family with an Aboriginal woman from the Ti Tree area called Dolly Penangke. But Dolly was not Dad's mother and we don't know who was. All we know for sure is that Dad was taken from somewhere in central Australia to the Commonwealth-run Central Australian "Aboriginals Institution" called "the Bungalow".
I want to pause here and ask you to imagine what it would have been like for my father - not just as a child, but throughout his whole life - to not know from what family and what place he was taken, let alone for what purported reason.
For any white child in the Territory to be taken into Commonwealth care back in the thirties, the authorities needed to make an application to a court under the State Childrens Act of South Australia, one of the many pieces of South Australian legislation that continued to apply in the Territory after 1911. There would have been a hearing involving the adducing of evidence, and some kind of a transcript. Dates, and places would have been stated, and the child's parents identified. It is hardly a surprise that, in later life, my father's mechanism for coping with this void was to turn his heart and mind against any thought of recovering what he had lost. Despite numerous urgings by his children and others, my father never went back to Central Australia.
It is with a heavy heart that I dedicate this speech to him. So what sort of a place was the Bungalow? The first version of it was established near the Police Station in Alice Springs, and it attracted critical comment from journalists and other concerned citizens. With a view to trying to reduce the Commonwealth's administrative burden, then Prime Minister Stanley Bruce wrote in 1927 to his South Australian counterpart to see whether South Australia would take the lighter skinned mixed race children slated for removal-'quadroons' and 'octroons' as the language had it then. He said:
"They could hardly be distinguished from ordinary white children ...If these babies were removed, at their present early age, from their present environment to homes in South Australia, they would not know in later life that they had Aboriginal blood and would probably be absorbed into the white population and become useful citizens".
The words sound harsh and discordant today, but in my opinion they are not really all that different from those of the current Prime Minister, with his fixation on "one Australia" and the culture and values he wants to impose through his new citizenship test. The Bungalow was moved from Alice Springs to Jay Creek in 1928. It was then brought back to Alice Springs in 1932, where it was located at the Old Telegraph Station. We don't know for sure, but it is likely that after his removal it was to Jay Creek that Dad was taken. Here is an extract from a letter about conditions at Jay Creek written to the then Commonwealth Minister for Home and Territories in 1929:
"The accommodation provided for them exhausts my power to paint adequately. A rough floor of burnt lime and sand to make a form of cement has been laid down. A very rough framework of wood was put up, and some dilapidated sheets of corrugated iron roughly thrown over it. There are no doors or windows. A more draughty, ugly, dilapidated place one could hardly imagine. I think the children would be less liable to colds in the open than in the disgraceful accommodation provided for them. And that is not the worst. Boys and girls of all ages from one year old to sixteen are herded in this so-called room whose dimensions are about 24 feet by 50 feet. At present there are 48 children in the institution. The girls and boys are mixed indiscriminately. The children are issued with two blankets and lie on the floor. One small stove has to cook bread for over fifty people. They apparently have never had fruit or vegetables. The ration scale has been deplorable ...the scale is meagre in the extreme. The only lighting is two hurricane lamps. The children have no games or amusements of any description. Cooking utensils are practically nil. There are six bowls and twenty towels to serve everybody".
In the same year when this letter was written, a middle-aged husband and wife couple, the Freemans, were hired by the Commonwealth administration as part of the first Intervention to manage this particular "Aboriginals Institution".
In March 1934, Mr.Freeman was accused and found guilty of sexually assaulting a number of the girls at the Bungalow. My father was one of the unfortunates who were detained in the Bungalow in its earlier years. Charles Perkins was placed there a fair bit later, more towards the end of its ignoble history. Both my father and Charles were sent from the Bungalow to comparatively much better places: in my father's case to the Methodist Mission on Croker Island; and in Charles' case to St. Francis College in Adelaide.
Excerpt from ‘Whose National Emergency? Caboolture and Kirribili? or Milikapiti and Mutitjulu?’ (Speech delivered at the Charles Perkins Oration, 23 October 2007, Sydney)