A Life Together, A Life Apart: A History of relations between Europeans and Aborigines

By Bain Attwood

There are not too many histories of Aboriginal reserves that have something good to say of them. But the Burrage children, Winifred, Alan and Elsie, recall the world of their childhood as a happy one. They recount how their Anglo-Australian parents toiled on reserves with genuine caring and an unsentimental sense of duty.

A Life Together, a Life Apart is a collaborative autobiography and an oral narrative as well as a history. The vivid recollections of Winifred Burrage, Alan Burrage and Elsie Stokie form its centrepiece.

In an introductory essay Bain Attwood sketches the background to the reserves, and discusses the different histories we have of relations between Europeans and Aborigines in Australia. In the final section he scrutinises the form of oral history and contemplates the nature of historical knowledge. The result is a passionate representation of the virtues of History.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Jan 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9780522864960

Book preview

Attwood

Preface

During the last decade the production of ‘Aboriginal history’¹ has been dominated by Aboriginal retellings of their past, so that we now have a range of such texts at our disposal. These historical narratives—as well as academic studies which attempt to understand relations between Aborigines and Europeans from what Henry Reynolds has called ‘the other side of the frontier’—emphasise Aboriginal agency, Aboriginal perspectives and Aboriginal understandings. By comparison, this text or at least what lies at its centre— the testimony of Winifred Burrage, Alan Burrage and Elsie Stokie, whose parents, Charles and Elsie Burrage, managed or taught on Aboriginal reserves in New South Wales in the period between World War I and World War II—is akin to a historiographical tradition which is more concerned with European ideas, attitudes and actions.² Such an account is unusual inasmuch as few histories are now so determinedly or self-consciously eurocentric, and because it is probably the only one in the last few decades which is told by Europeans who had extensive contact with Aborigines in ‘settled’ (rather than remote) Australia.³

Yet while the second part of this book, which comprises the Burrages’ narrative, provides invaluable historical testimony regarding European Australians' thought and action in the early decades of this century, it also constitutes an important source concerning Aboriginal life on government reserves at this time. Simultaneously, the Burrages’ narrative is a history which challenges the picture conveyed by recent academic studies and Aboriginal life stories and autobiographies, some of which are considered in the initial section of the book where I also trace the historical background to the period. By and large these histories emphasise conflict between Aborigines and Europeans and the oppression of the colonised, and attribute responsibility to government officials and their fellow colonisers who are either characterised as doctrinaire or unsympathetic, or as cruel, even evil, men and women. By contrast, the Burrages’ story tells of accommodation between Aborigines and Europeans—of the intimacy, albeit distant, which existed in the enclosed worlds of Aboriginal reserves, and the nature of the everyday life in which such relations were embedded—and represents their parents as superintendents who were intelligent, understanding, and benevolent.

Yet while the Burrages’ history questions other historical texts, it is not presented here as a ‘master narrative’ which shows how things really happened in the past, and thus seeks to displace Others’ stories. As I discuss in my reflective essay, which constitutes the third part of this book, all stories told about the past are interpretative, and, therefore, necessarily partial and limited. The Burrages’ account and my essays are offered in this spirit.

Other Histories

I

Charles and Elsie Burrage managed or taught on three Aboriginal reserves in New South Wales between 1917 and 1940, a period which coincides with what has been called the protectionist era of government policy and practice in south-eastern Australia. Whereas in the nineteenth century Aborigines had been forcibly dispossessed of their country by European settlers, in the twentieth century they were to be controlled by the state and its agents through discriminatory legislation and intervention in their lives. Government policy and practice was underpinned by racial ideas which dominated European Australians’ thinking at this time; as Andrew Markus has written, ‘most . . . saw Aborigines as a relic of the stone age, as a lower order of humanity, possibly even subhuman’, and many believed that they would die out.¹ Consequently, from the late nineteenth century, colonial or State governments assumed legal responsibility for the indigenes at the same time as they denied them basic human rights such as freedom of movement, custody of their children, and control over personal property.² All the mainland States enacted legislation and created special bureaucratic units to administer Aboriginal affairs, and increasingly conferred upon these regulatory powers, until protective and restrictive control reached a climax in the late 1930s.³ Yet there also existed important variations in government policies and how these were implemented, and so it is necessary to discuss the particularity of New South Wales during the Burrages’ time.

The nature of government policy and practice in New South Wales in the inter-war period had its origins in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. After years of neglecting Aborigines dispossessed by the European invasion, the state was at last persuaded to adopt a more systematic approach. In the 1860s and 1870s government had come under pressure from missionaries like Daniel and Janet Matthews, the Rev. J. B. Gribble, and their humanitarian supporters in the Aborigines Protection Association. Unlike most colonial Australians, these churchmen believed that Europeans, as the ‘superior race’, had a Christian duty toward Aborigines, and that the latter were capable of being ‘christianised and civilised’. This process of transforming Aborigines, the humanitarians maintained, could only be undertaken on segregated mission stations under the superintendence of kindly, paternal missionaries, who would ‘domesticate’ and ‘raise’ Aborigines through religious instruction and secular training, inculcating the virtues of hard work, thrift and sobriety.⁴

At the same time, government was also called upon by white settler communities to remove Aborigines from their presence, or at least reduce the growing ‘part-Aboriginal’ population. These demands were the expression of both a growing respectability (as the frontier days receded and local communities changed in their character) and a deepening racism. They also reflected increasing Aboriginal impoverishment and resultant ‘vagrancy’, which was a consequence of structural changes in the rural economy in many areas after the 1850s that reduced the demand for Aboriginal labour and diminished traditional food sources.⁵ Increasingly, then, government realised that it would have to act in order to prevent worsening poverty among Aborigines, if only to contain the potential threat Aboriginal fringe-dwellers allegedly posed to white communities and to ensure they would not become a burden on the state.

In response to these different pressures, the New South Wales government finally established a new authority, the Aborigines Protection Board, in 1883. This marked the beginning of sustained intervention in Aboriginal affairs in this State, and although at first the Board did not have its own programme of action, by 1900 it was clear that its main focus was upon both developing reserves—crown lands assigned for use by Aborigines but without granting any right of tenure—and instituting an apprenticeship system for boys and domestic service for girls, as well as providing limited relief to Aborigines in need. The number of reserves increased from eighteen in 1883 to 145 in 1903 and nearly 170 in 1910, and, while many of the early reserves were gazetted either in response to Aboriginal demands for land,⁶ or as a result of missionary endeavour, most of these were the result of Board initiative. The reserves, located in rural areas, either in out-of-the-way places or at some convenient distance from townships, were small (between two and three thousand acres in size but often much less), and on poor land.⁷ They were of two kinds: those where Aborigines lived quite independently except for sporadic or nominal oversight, usually by the police, which were known as unsupervised reserves; and those where Aboriginal communities were supervised by resident full-time officials, which Europeans called stations and the Aborigines often called ‘missions’.

By 1914 there were eighteen stations under the Board’s authority, and these came to monopolise its administrative effort.⁸ The purpose of the unsupervised reserves and, more particularly, the stations, was always unclear, however, because they were assigned various roles which were often incompatible. First, reserves were seen by humanitarians and others as a means of segregating remnant Aboriginal populations, and thus protecting them from the pernicious effects of contact with Europeans in the form of unscrupulous employers, rapacious men, disease and alcohol. In this sense, reserves were to function as asylums for Aborigines, especially the aged, the infirm, children, and women. Second, and more positively, the same advocates of reserves envisaged stations as either more or less self-contained and self-supporting village communities under white paternal supervision, or as places where Aborigines would independently live and pursue some pastoral or agricultural activity while they mostly worked in outside employment. This accorded more closely with the aspirations of many Aborigines, and in a number of notable instances, such as Cummeragunja, prospering Aboriginal farming communities took root in the late nineteenth century,⁹ at the same time as in more remote areas of the State many Aborigines, living on and off unsupervised reserves, continued to gain employment in the pastoral economy and supplement their wages with traditional food sources, thus enjoying relative economic and cultural independence.¹⁰ Third, stations were regarded as reformatories where able-bodied Aborigines, especially the young, could be socialised for later integration into the general community. Aboriginal children or youths were to be given an elementary education which would equip them to be members of the working class. Fourth, reserves were looked upon by many white town-dwellers as a means of removing unsightly, unhealthy and disorderly Aborigines from their midst. In this respect, reserves were like concentration camps. Fifth (and probably least importantly), reserves acted as cheap labour depots in the capitalist economy. They were places from which mostly male Aborigines could be drawn by local employers when labour was temporarily required and to which they could later be returned when their services were no longer needed. In this sense reserves served to subsidise the cost of labour since the employer need not provide for the maintenance of the workers’ dependants.

Once the Board developed a coherent policy, it sought greater powers to implement this and to more effectively control the State’s Aborigines, who numbered less than 7000 at this time. These powers were finally granted by government in 1909 when the New South Wales Parliament passed the Aborigines Protection Act. Under the Act, the Board was ‘to exercise a general supervision and care over all matters affecting the interests and welfare of Aborigines’. It could compel Aborigines to move from any township, and expel from a reserve any Aborigines ‘guilty of any misconduct, or who . . . should be living away from such reserve’. It was an offence for Europeans to enter an Aboriginal reserve without permission of the Board, or to lodge or wander ‘in company with any aborigine’. The Board had the power to apprentice any child and could remove children if a magistrate found them to be ‘neglected’, that is, having ‘no visible means of support or fixed place of abode’. The regulations under the Act were comprehensive, giving managers of stations powers to maintain ‘discipline and good order upon reserves’. And in 1915 the Board was granted more extensive powers over Aboriginal children through an amendment which stated that any child could be removed if the Board alone believed that this was in the interests of the moral or physical welfare of the child. Three years later, the Board sought a further amendment in order to change the definition of an ‘Aborigine’ from ‘full-bloods’ and anyone else receiving aid or living on a reserve, to ‘any full-blood or half-caste who is a native of New South Wales’, thus giving it power to deal with all Aborigines in the State.

As in the 1880s and 1890s, the Board’s objectives remained various, but it increasingly emphasised the goal of ‘merging’ some Aborigines—those designated as ‘half-castes’, ‘quadroons’ and ‘octoroons’—into the white population. The Board believed that such Aborigines were increasingly residing on reserves and receiving government aid, and thus becoming a burden upon the state, while Aboriginal children on reserves and elsewhere were ‘growing up in idleness and vice’ because of their association with Aborigines.¹¹ The solution to this problem, the Board reasoned, was twofold: first, only ‘full-bloods’ and those in need should be allowed to reside on reserves and/or receive rations; all other, that is lighter skinned, able-bodied, adult Aborigines should be expelled from reserves, and be instructed that they had to earn their own keep. This policy of dispersal, Peter Read has argued, aimed ‘to drive as many Aborigines as possible into the white community’.¹² Second, Aboriginal children and youth should be separated from their kin, and placed in either special educational institutions, apprenticeships, or service, or at least provided with education on the stations, where they could be ‘properly trained to future spheres of usefulness’ and consequently ‘merged’ into the white population.¹³ The Board considered that ‘a continuation of this policy of disassociating the children from camp life must eventually solve the Aboriginal problem’,¹⁴ reflecting the thoughts of its inspector, Robert Donaldson, who believed that ‘in the course of a few years there will be no need for the camps and stations; the old people will have passed away, and their progeny will be absorbed in the industrial classes of the country’.¹⁵ Aboriginal children were to be educated for this future according to a special syllabus, introduced formally in 1916 but foreshadowed by actual practice over the preceding two decades. It was a simplified course of study, restricted to the three R’s and emphasising manual training as well as outdoor activities such as gardening and nature study.¹⁶

In adopting this policy, the Board was undoubtedly impelled by its knowledge that the Aboriginal population was increasing rather than decreasing, and its fears that the state would have to support such a group permanently, but there was more to it than this. Heather Goodall points out that the Board was ‘even more alarmed . . . by the fact that the non full-blood section of the Aboriginal population was growing and at the same time maintaining its identification with Aboriginal culture’. As Goodall notes, ‘fostering racial and cultural minorities was contrary to all Australian governments’ policies, and the New South Wales Board felt it had to act’.¹⁷

In the racial thinking of the day, culture and ‘blood’ were correlated, the degree of Aboriginal ‘blood’ (or biological inheritance) being held to determine the nature of the person (rather than environmental or cultural factors). It was believed that Aborigines of full descent would soon die out as their genetic inheritance meant they were unable to survive contact with ‘a civilised race’. While these ‘full bloods’ were deemed to have no future, those of mixed descent were considered to be capable of advancement, especially those who had more ‘white blood’ than ‘black’, the so-called ‘quadroons’ and ‘octoroons’—contemporary scientific thought was less sanguine about ‘half-castes’.¹⁸ In this it was assumed that these ‘part-Aborigines’ were a transitory phenomenon, one which would disappear as they were ‘absorbed’ into the white community.¹⁹

From 1910 the Board set about trying to implement its new policy. Hundreds, even thousands, of Aboriginal men and women were prohibited from remaining on or entering into reserves; thinly populated reserves were revoked, and much land was sold (the amount of reserve land was halved between 1910 and 1928); and the Board abandoned or undermined economic activity on several stations (including Cummeragunja).²⁰ Furthermore, many Aboriginal children were removed from their families and communities, and either placed in special homes—the Board established the Cootamundra Girls’ Home in 1911 and the Kinchela Boys’ Home in 1924—or in foster care. Between 1909 and 1938, it is estimated that approximately 2000 Aboriginal children were separated from their families by the Board.²¹

Yet one can question whether the Board pursued its dispersal programme either vigorously or consistently. In the 1910s and 1920s it administered its policy with regard to economic fluctuations and their consequential impact on Aboriginal employment, while the removal of children by the Board’s inspector and the police was sporadic and random in nature.²² One of the reasons for this was that there remained a contradiction in the Board’s policy: however much it was committed to dispersing Aborigines to facilitate their integration into the general community, it also recognised that it had a duty to ensure that they were not too badly impoverished, and so continued to support the existence of stations or unsupervised reserves to which Aborigines could return when they did not have employment. It also had to contend with the opposition of Aborigines themselves, and, more importandy, white communities who campaigned to exclude Aboriginal fringe-dwellers from local towns and their institutions. And however much the Board aspired to transform Aborigines, the government was parsimonious in the extreme, and hence there were always too few staff and too little money for the Board to implement its policies as it might have wished. Finally, the Depression put paid to the policy of dispersal, as there was a massive increase in the number of unemployed and poverty-stricken Aborigines moving on to reserves.

In this context the Board decided to reverse direction and again draw or force Aborigines on to reserves, adopting what it called ‘a policy of concentration’.²³ While it undoubtedly did so in the interests of ‘the general community’,²⁴ and to reduce government expenditure,²⁵ it also seems that the Board once more believed this would be better for Aborigines. In order to segregate them on reserves, the Board demanded greater power to ‘transfer’ Aborigines from fringe camps and smaller reserves and to detain them on the larger reserves, and in 1936 the Aborigines Protection Act was amended to provide the Board with the power to apply to a magistrate in order to move to a reserve anyone with an ‘admixture of Aboriginal blood’ who was living in unsanitary conditions.

With this change in emphasis in the Board’s policy, the stations increasingly assumed the character of multi-purpose institutions, intended, Jeremy Long notes, ‘not simply to care for a single category of needy or handicapped person, or to provide temporary accommodation and sustenance for a class of people, or to provide a defined course of training, or to provide work for the unemployed, but to do several or all of these things’.²⁶ All these aims could probably never be achieved, let alone during a period when the number of Aboriginal residents on reserves increased almost fivefold, and the government vote to the Board declined by 30 per cent, from ￡11 14s per head in 1925–26 to ￡7 16s in 1937–38.²⁷ In fact, living conditions on most if not all stations steadily worsened during the 1920s and 1930s. Most houses were in a state of disrepair, and there was overcrowding. On at least some stations, sanitary conditions were appalling. Food was also inadequate; the government rations were insufficient for a healthy, growing child, and many Aboriginal children suffered from malnutrition. The schooling children received was also invariably poor as most were taught by managers who had neither the time nor the training and expertise for the task. In legal terms, there was greater racial discrimination; Aborigines on reserves had never been eligible to receive old-age pensions and the maternity allowance, but family endowment, introduced in 1927, was later denied to Aborigines in the sense that most recipients received it in the form of food and clothing orders, improvements to houses and so on, instead of money.²⁸ Aborigines’ freedom was limited in other ways as well; for example, they had to report to the manager when they left or entered a station, and they could be expelled for violating any of the numerous regulations which managers were supposed to enforce. Managers had enormous powers on the stations, and, not surprisingly, since they tended to personify the Board, these managers often became the target of all the enmity Aborigines felt towards the Board.²⁹

When appointing a manager, the Board’s requirements were that the person be a suitable married man with ‘the essential qualifications [of] honesty, morality, kindliness, firmness and some degree of business acumen . . . [and] able and willing to participate personally in the work of the farm and to be possessed of a thorough working knowledge of cultivation, etc’.³⁰ One study suggests that the Board tended to select men on the basis of their experience in positions of authority, and that those used to exercising discipline—former prison warders, army officers and policemen—found ready employ in the Board’s service³¹ (and most managers and matrons spent long periods in the Board’s service).³² By the late 1930s the Board recognised that more was required than these attributes, and so stipulated that the manager needed to have ‘a good education’ and that his wife should be a qualified nurse.³³ It was yet to concede that its appointees should have ‘a good working knowledge’ of Aborigines’ ‘habits and problems’, as a government report was to recommend at this time.³⁴ Indeed, it would seem that very few of the Board’s managers had much prior experience of Aborigines, although a small number had knowledge of other ‘natives’.³⁵

Managers and matrons were very much thrown on their own resources as they were remote from the Board. While government regulations stipulated their duties, neither formal training nor instruction manuals were provided, and some managers did not even have a copy of the Board’s regulations.³⁶ Furthermore, the visits of the Board’s inspector were too infrequent and fleeting to mitigate this situation.³⁷ Consequently, managers rather than the Board defined their role as they saw fit, and there would have been much diversity in the application to and execution of their duties.³⁸

Managers and matrons had a wide range of tasks. They ordered and distributed rations, taught the children and kept the school records, organised work on the station as well as found employment for die men in the local district, administered medical aid to the sick and ensured good health and hygiene, maintained Board property, regularly furnished reports including financial accounts, and disciplined Aborigines who infringed the Board’s regulations. As well as these responsibilities, managers and matrons were also supposed to play a missionary-like role: the Board enjoined them to improve the Aborigines’ ‘mode of living’, raise ‘the moral and social tone’, exercise ‘sympathetic discipline’, and so on. Their role as agents of social change tended to be displaced, though, by the more practical duties required of managers and matrons. It is clear that there were enormous demands upon the men and women who filled these positions, particularly those men who held the dual position of teacher-manager, and even with the best will in the world it was a herculean task to perform. In the 1920s and 1930s, the workload increased markedly, and it became quite apparent that many of the Board’s employees were taxed to their limits, if not overwhelmed, by the arduous nature of their jobs, and that others were singularly unsuited to the work.

Despite their worsening plight during this period, and the fact that racial ideas and policies became more entrenched than ever before, the 1920s and 1930s saw a renewed public interest in and concern about Aborigines, and signs of new directions in thinking. Growing criticism of government policy and practice was expressed by Aborigines themselves, by churchmen and philanthropists, and, in particular, by the leading Australian anthropologist, A. P. Elkin. According to Elkin as well as to other activists, Aborigines were fellow human beings and had the capacity to advance in ‘the scale of civilisation’. What was required, in Elkin’s view, was an informed scientific understanding of Aboriginal culture, and European trusteeship to