A paper given by Dr Cook to the A.N.Z.A.A.S Conference in Adelaide 1969, extracted from Berndt’s edited proceedings of the conference
From the time of Phillip it has been the acknowledged policy and objective of Australian governments to foster the friendship and co-operation of the indigenous inhabitants, and to extend the protection of the law to all those disposed to accept it. The policy espoused was spelt out in the instructions given by the South Australian government to F.E. Goldsmith on his appointment as Surgeon Protector on Finniss’s staff at Adam Bay in the Northern Territory. He was to foster friendly relations between the races, learn the language and study the culture of the tribes in contact. With the knowledge so won he was to advise the surveyors on the selection of reserves exclusively for native occupancy in areas with abundant water and game. He was to ensure the native’s comprehension of the rights and responsibilities of the individual under British law, and to enlist his collaboration in law enforcement. Where contact between the races was closer and more sustained, he was to prevent the molestation of native women and their debauching with liquor. He was to foster trade and encourage employment, policing the scrupulous discharge of obligations to the native. As Protector, he was also to issue supplies as relief for the sick and needy, taking care to give no relief to the able-bodied, except as payment for a service rendered’, in this way avoiding patronage in one race and dependency in the other.
Early frustrations were derived from the fundamental differences in adaptation which had marked the evolution of these two types of Caucasian, now fated to live together. One, the hunter and gleaner, had chosen to adapt himself to the environment, changing little and integrating his life and culture into nature as he found it; the other, me farmer and engineer, has been indefatigable in adapting the environment to himself and insatiable in the pursuit of change. Difficult as it must be to reconcile these differences in social outlook, there remains the disturbing thought that in the traversing of such divergent paths of evolution, factors of natural selection may have favoured in the ‘white’ and prejudiced in the ‘black’ the capacity to tolerate and survive in environmental change.
Unfortunate incidents evolving from suspicion and fear in one race or the other early impaired relations and confronted governments with new difficulties. Although these may have permanently prejudiced racial friendship, I do not believe that they negate an enduring European goodwill. I must admit to some impatience with the pharisaical attitude which presumes to judge an earlier generation in the context, and from the greater security of a later. It is now explained that the spear-brandishing horde suddenly confronting Moore at Risdon in 1803 had no more sinister purpose than the hunting of kangaroo, and his violent reaction is popularly quoted as symbolizing the European attitude to the Aboriginal, and smugly condemned as unwarrantable butchery. Today his critics can, with safety, adopt this pose, but he had the advantage of no such assurance. As a young, inexperienced officer in charge of a hastily formed settlement, removed from and out of touch with his commander, imbued by training with a high sense of responsibility for the safety of his detachment and its supplies, his decision may have appeared to him unavoidable. Years later, on the other side of the continent and in even greater isolation on the Adelaide River, Manton found that the price of friendship was tolerance of theft and looting which his little party could not afford. Inevitably, his reluctant decision to protect his camp by armed sentries led to bloodshed on both sides.
These were the days when the ‘white’ man lived virtually alone, among a strange people of unpredictable temper; a time when for either race survival might depend upon prompt reaction to a suspected threat; when courage was bravado and tactical ingenuity treachery, according to the racial prejudice of the observer. Indeed, incidents of interracial mistrust and conflict have persisted for many years after it might have been thought the races were at last permanently reconciled. Even as recently as the early years of my association with the north, the spearing of Europeans was commonplace. Among those to lose their lives in this way were four young men personally known to me in widely separated localities along the northern coast. For the murder of none of these four could friends of the Aboriginal demonstrate a justifying motive.
From the outset, the objectives for native policy open to government may be said to have ranged between two opposite extremes. At one end was unqualified laissez faire, giving full play to influences of natural selection in the adaptation of the Aboriginal to the new environment. At the other, complete segregation on inviolable reserves where he could, in isolation, continue his mode of life and culture, without interference, in perpetuity. The first of these must be acknowledged as more consistent, not only with Aboriginal evolution but also with the principles of human rights as we profess them today, since implicit in the second was denial of the right to leave the reserve or, having done so, to return to it.
All the Australian colonies may be said to have commenced with the first, experimented with compromise in the imposition of restrictions as remedies for hardship or to prevent abuses soon found to be inseparable from it, temporized with the second and abandoned it, finally attempting a system of protection designed to ease the native’s transition into ‘white’ society. This system can be conveniently studied as it evolved in the Northern Territory from the basic instructions issued to Goldsmith and later Surgeon-Protectors.
As the little settlement expanded, it was found that the native was exposed to factors of depopulation unsuspected by those who framed the policy. Parasitic and dietary anaemias, malnutrition, and epidemics of infectious disease followed uncontrolled association with Europeans and Chinese under primitive’ conditions of sanitation. Deaths from acute and chronic respiratory disease, typhoid, dysentery, malaria and tuberculosis rapidly decimated the small population in contact. Venereal disease impaired fertility, reducing an already abnormally low birth rate, and alimentary and respiratory tract infections and malnutrition raised the level of infant mortality. Deaths from disease soon represented a rate of depopulation adequate to decimate complete tribes without any assistance from the rifle or poison to which today it is popularly ascribed. In centres of population the Aboriginal, paid a money wage, could indulge his taste for gambling, liquor and opium. Penniless, he could get money for this by the prostitution of his women. South Australia had provided no legal head of power to assist the Protector to give effect to his decisions or apply the policy outlined. Pleas by successive Protectors and Government Residents for legal power to regulate employment, order behaviour, control movement and safeguard the welfare of both races in the conditions of their association were repeatedly rejected by the South Australian parliament. The undiscerning critic might cite this as evidence of the government’s failure to give effect to the high principles of its announced policy, yet, in the context of the time, it discloses an uncompromising resistance to bureaucratic infringement of human rights, however cogently argued as necessary for native welfare. Powers to regulate employment, for example, were refused until 1910 on the ground that they might facilitate exploitation by limiting the native’s bargaining power. Special provisions required to control prostitution, beyond those set out in criminal law, were rejected as an insult and a grave reflection upon the morality of Aboriginal womanhood. Even in the field of medical administration, the policy of laissez faire had its advocates. In 1871 Bishop Salvado of New Norcia mission recommended that the sick should be abandoned to the tribe, because in the bush they could readily survive injuries which would be fatal to a European, but in hospital would succumb to respiratory infections from which the ‘white’ would recover.
The compelling urgency of the Aboriginal’s accelerating progress toward depravity, degradation and extinction finally decided the South Australian parliament to provide the Protector with some of the legal powers sought, and an Aboriginal Act was passed in 1910. The Northern Territory was transferred to the Commonwealth in the following year and this law, amended and extended from time to time as the Aboriginal Ordinance, served as the legal basis of Aboriginal protection until replaced by the welfare ordinance. The Commonwealth appointed as its first Chief Protector, Professor Baldwin Spencer of Melbourne who, as a Special Commissioner, had studied the Northern Territory Aboriginal problem and framed Commonwealth native policy. This, as he set it out, was to encourage the native to lead his own life on reserves and to control his employment by the licensing of employers, the fixing of a minimum wage partly payable to a trust account, and by embodying conditions of employment in a written agreement. All licenses and agreements and all pastoral leases were subject to the overriding condition that the Aboriginal retained the unrestricted right to roam at will over his tribal lands, except any proclaimed in his own interest to be a prohibited area. The prohibited area was a device to exclude natives during prescribed hours, or at all times, from localities which no longer retained any cultural significance for them and which were considered to present some real physical or moral danger.
Offences against the Ordinance were punishable by fine and/or imprisonment, and it may be remarked that an Aboriginal was scarcely likely to be able to exercise the option of a fine. Baldwin Spencer criticized other aspects of the laws as they applied to the Aboriginal. He early pleaded the injustice of applying them to ‘uncivilized’ natives living under a code which only too often demanded commission of the offence. He emphasized the danger of accepting pleas of ‘guilty’, and even the acceptance of evidence, when the diversity of dialects demanded the use of ‘pidgin’ English or an interpreter, or both. His alternative was to give the Chief Protector power to banish the offender to work for a term in an island reformatory. A later Protector claimed that this form of punishment ‘worked wonders’. ‘Free’ in a strange country, fear of traversing the country of another tribe effectually discouraged any attempt at escape.
Interrupted first by World War I, and later by political disturbances, activity was renewed in the northern half of the Northern Territory (the Territory of North Australia) in 1927 with the formation of the North Australia Medical Service, of which the Chief Medical Officer held the office of ‘Chief Protector of Aboriginals’. Emphasis now was placed on the detection, cure and prevention of disease, and the raising of nutritional and living standards. The control of employment was directed toward the furtherance of these purposes. The impossibility of effectually policing localities to which Aborigines resorted for gambling, liquor, opium and prostitution, and where they were exposed to infection with tuberculosis, leprosy and venereal disease, led to strict use of the prohibited area clauses. Today the principle of the prohibited area is open to criticism as a gross infringement of human rights on the ground that it denied the native freedom to move at will in his own country. In fact, at this stage of Territory development, natives living and working in the vicinity of a prohibited area were practically all from tribes to whom it was alien ground- ground on to which before its occupation and development by Europeans and Chinese, they would never have dared to intrude. There remained now no element of tribal culture demanding or warranting their entry. The abuses of the prohibited area attach rather to persistence in its use long after the circumstances which originally prompted it have ceased to exist, and its application to a class of people for whom it was never intended.
It was during this period that, under pressure from anthropologists and others, the Commonwealth experimented with the inviolable reserve. The concept here (frankly the Australian form of ‘apartheid’) was always suspect in principle. In effect, the ‘white’ arrogated to himself the right to decide that the ‘black’ should be given no new opportunity to change, either in his own environment or in ‘white’ society. It meant, if it were to be successful, that no European influence should reach into the reserve, and no Aboriginal should emerge from it. Either of these breaches, by inculcating new concepts and wants, would disturb the equanimity of the native, prompting him to leave the reserve in quest of the new civilization. It was suspect, too, in that an acquisitive ‘white’ society would be unlikely to respect its inviolability in perpetuity if mineral and pastoral wealth were to continue undeveloped by either race. At the time of the proclamation of the first of these inviolable reserves in the Northern Territory, the Chief Protector warned that even if the demand for economic development did not defeat the objective, the Armed Services in the event of war would unquestionably reject any claim for inviolability if the establishment of observation or defence posts within the area were considered necessary. Both these forecasts have been vindicated.
On the reserve the native himself evinced no appreciation of the opportunity for segregation. With increasing frequency, larger and larger bands moved out, traversing long distances to visit centres of ‘white’ settlement and to remain there until repatriated. In spite of constant patrolling of the northern coastline, large numbers welcomed illegal intrusion by Japanese pearling crews, cohabiting with them ashore and on their vessels. Of recent years, the founding of government settlements to supplement the civilizing work of established missions has acknowledged rejection of the principle of inviolability.
Toward the close of the century, a new component of the Aboriginal problem began to disturb Surgeon Protectors in the North. Goldsmith drew attention to the increasing number of mixed-blood children and pressed for their removal from the camps, to be reared in hostels where they could be given an elementary education and technical training, permitting them to take a place in industry. The issue was still one of debate when Baldwin Spencer, speaking for the Commonwealth administration, expressed the opinion that they could never be admitted into the ‘white’ community. He preferred that they should be reared on reserves with their mothers as if they were full bloods. As all children of an Aboriginal female were by definition Aborigines for the purposes of the Ordinance, the rearing of mixed bloods as full bloods would be automatic unless special measures to effect some change were taken. Stretton, a former South Australian Protector who followed Baldwin Spencer as Northern Territory Chief Protector, favoured the integration of the mixed blood into the ‘white’ community. In the late twenties, Bleakley, Chief Protector of Aborigines in Queensland, was commissioned by the Commonwealth to report on this and other aspects of the native problem. He recommended the Queensland policy of leaving the mixed-blood child in the camp to be reared as an Aboriginal. Bleakley’s policy was rejected by the Chief Protector in North Australia in favour of the social integration of the mixed blood into the ‘white’ community. Mixed-blood children were removed from the camps to hostels to be reared as Europeans, even though this meant taking them from their mothers at an early age. Supplementary measures provided for the apprenticeship of boys, the training of girls in European households, and the raising of the standard of living and education of both to that of the ‘white’. A special housing scheme was developed to provide cottages of European standard for occupation by mixed-blood couples, and girls of mixed blood married to ‘white’ men. Progressively increasing numbers of both males and females were exempted from the provisions of the Ordinance. As a result the Northern Territory today does not share the mixed-blood problem confronted in other states. Indeed, in the major states the so-called Aboriginal problem is little more than the problem of the mixed blood and this, unfortunately, has been used by some to create racial conflict as a political tool. Three or four generations may separate the mixed blood today from his closest Aboriginal ancestor. Reference to him as an Aboriginal-a legacy of the Protection Law which so defined him-contributes materially to misunderstanding of the factors preventing his easy integration into the community. Considering that his genetic inheritance is no more than 50 per cent Aboriginal, and that his cultural inheritance and environmental experience have for more than two generations been predominantly European, his social maladjustment is surely to be acknowledged a ‘white’ rather than an Aboriginal problem.
Early generations, born to Aboriginal mothers, inherited a wurley and walkabout existence. Pari passu with the increasing density of the ‘white’ population and social development of the area, the numbers of mixed blood increased as those of full blood declined. Later generations, now mainly of mixed blood, tended to concentrate in sub-standard camps beyond town limits-the so-called ‘fringe dwellers’. For the children, schooling gradually became accepted as part of the new life, but it was intermittent, attendance at anyone school depending upon the length of stay of the mother in the district. This in turn was uncertain, being affected by changed or seasonal employment of the mother’s consort, or change of consort. School inspectors were usually reluctant to harass children from the camp for truancy or non-attendance, and many left school even before primary education was complete. As the child lived with the uneducated in a wurley beyond the town limits, unprovided with light, space or convenience for study, disturbed by the nightly frolics or debauchery of the home and its environment, homework was impossible and officially acknowledged to be so. At school he could not compete even with a child of average intelligence. The teacher must either ignore him or retard the class to accommodate his slower progress; to either alternative his leaving school prematurely would be preferred
The product of this environment confronted a vicious cycle of unemployment, poverty and vagabondism. Without even basic education, untrained for any special task, shifting camp unpredictably, he was acceptable only for casual or seasonal employment-the latter itself demanding mobility. With no continuity of wage he could establish no home or other solid foothold in the ‘white’ community, .and without this foothold opportunities for employment were minimal. To facilitate the relief of distress it was inevitable that such people continued subject to the provisions of the Aboriginal Protection Law. Yet this in itself, by branding them as of a category subject to special wage provisions, ineligible for union membership, unequipped for and unreliable in employment, made it even more difficult for them to get work. As Aborigines, too, they became subject to restrictions on movement and behaviour-reasonable enough when designed for their tribal ancestors making first contact with an alien community, hut now serving only to mark a discrimination which inspired increasing resentment. This outcome appears to have been avoided in the north by closer attention to the circumstances of the individual, and the progressive relaxation of restraints as his adaptation progressed.
In conclusion, I would comment on interracial relationships which the Press of today so insistently presents as bad, and as a standing reproach to the European. If we except the tragic clashes precipitated by panic, or planned as calculated revenge-and for this both races must share responsibility-interracial relationships have in general been friendly and the attitude of the average European has been one of goodwill. This generation’s vaunted interest in Aboriginal welfare is no new virtue in the European-early settlers, in spite of provocations we are spared, were no less solicitous for the native’s survival. Failure to translate this solicitude into successful practical measures for his easy integration into ‘white’ society may be attributable not so much to the illwill and neglect to which it is fashionable today to ascribe it, but rather to well-intentioned but misdirected interference with biological evolution. An early hesitancy to interfere at all was followed tardily by the zealous application of restrictions on behaviour and movement designed to correct abuses, avert the consequences of folly and relieve distress. To the extent that these were successful at all, they reared the Aboriginal in a world of unreality, denying him opportunities for progress and frustrating his adaptation by sparing him the responsibility of decision and sheltering him from the con- sequences of error. Embodied in acts and regulations, these measures of protection acquired the sanctity and permanence of the law. Administered by a Public Service seized with the importance of precedent, unresponsive to change and rigid in interpretation, they soon became outmoded in a rapidly changing environment but continued immutable as the law of the Medes and Persians, creating abuses instead of remedying them.
Let us profit by past mistakes and put an end to the fiction that the mixed blood is an Aboriginal. Here are two separate problems in adaptation; if we continue to regard them as one, both will be mishandled. Let the mixed blood, proud of his European as well as of his Aboriginal ancestry, learn that acceptability must precede acceptance, and that his position in society and society’s attitude toward him are not to be determined by his inheritance nor by his colour, but solely by his own efforts to qualify for acceptance. Let us avoid applying indefinitely to the full blood the sheltering protection that has brought his mixed-blood descendant so little help and so much stultifying frustration.
Clearly, recriminations can serve no good purpose. Today’s tendency to self -flagellation and parade of a guilt complex in the ‘white’ is no more warranted than is a sense of neglect in the ‘black’. Worse, by evoking in the former a return to over-protection it may prejudice biological evolution and, by implanting in the latter an enduring resentment which ascribes all his misfortunes to ‘white’ intolerance and indifference, it can permanently vitiate racial relationships.