28th April, 1931.
Reverent W. Morley,
Hon. Secretary,
Association for Protection of Native Races,
SYDNEY.
Dear Sir,
My attention has been drawn to a small publication issued by your Association dealing with the halfcastes in this Territory. Since it purports to be an authoritative statement one wonders why the comments of better informed persons were not invited and included.
Your foreword states that your Organisation has, in recent years, been specially concerned with the status and condition of aboriginals in North and Central Australia, and suggests that there is urgent need for more humane methods of care and control. Statements of latter nature are easily made, but are you in a position to substantiate them? I venture the opinion, after perusal of your pamphlet, that you have not the foggiest notion of what has been done, or is being done, for the aboriginals in Commonwealth territories.
Throughout the foreword written by yourself, Sir, one can recognise the tendency to belittle Commonwealth Administration and to vaunt the States’. This is prominent feature of propaganda in organisations such as yours which, centred far from the scene of actions, appear to accept official statements for knowledge of State administration and to rely upon the falsehoods and perverted half-truths of irresponsible correspondents for information regarding the Territories. One has no reason to doubt the sincerity and singleness of purpose actuating your Association in its activities on behalf of the aboriginal, and for that reason I am confident you will welcome the comments I propose to make, bitter though some of them may appear to be, for you will thereby be enabled to examine your position and determine whether your policies are not in direct conflict with the best interests of the aboriginal.
It is not generally recognised that the Commonwealth in the administration of this Territory, is at a serious disadvantage as compared to the States.
- The Federal Government is vested with certain powers and duties in respect of the whole of Australia and for its purposes funds are raised from the tax payers of the States. Local administration within a State is a function of the State’s Government, which raises sufficient revenue for the purpose from tax payers within its own boundaries. Whereas the States are populous and ordinarily affluent, the Territory is neither, and funds for local administration here must be drawn from Commonwealth revenue. The demands upon the Federal Government by southern tax payers must render it a matter of no little difficulty to provide sufficient funds for services which the latter do not see and for which they often do not recognise the necessity. The States, on the other hand, can provide these services under the eye and with the approval of their own citizen tax payers.
- A second difficulty confronting the Commonwealth is that of adequate staffing. Conscientious officers in this Service are subjected to misguided criticism, malicious misrepresentation and charges of incompetence and corruption which would break a heart of stone. Can the best service be expected from any officer, however honourable and proof to threats of blackmail, who is required to devote a considerable amount of his time to refuting groundless charges levelled against him and his subordinate officers?
- The State have been concerned in local administration for varying periods approximating to a Century; the Commonwealth for some twenty years only, during part of which time the exigencies of war added considerably to the difficulties about detailed.
Notwithstanding these difficulties, the Commonwealth has acquitted itself well during this brief period. It has been the first to recognise the necessity of the following improvements in Aboriginal policy:-
- The establishment of a properly organised medical service for aboriginals.
- The control of employment and aboriginal migration to minimise the dissemination of such plagues as tuberculosis, venereal disease and leprosy.
- The elevation of halfcastes to white citizenship.
- The equipping of its responsible officers with a knowledge of anthropology, and
- The establishment of native courts.
In all these the Commonwealth has taken the lead, and, in most, the States have not yet followed. Will your Organisation still insist that the Commonwealth should remodel its system on State lines?
Several Organisations akin to your own profess a predilection for the confinement of aboriginals on Reserves, taking the activities of the State of Queensland as their guide. Such enthusiasts overlook the fact that the Territory of today is in the constitution of its population a replica of the State some half century ago. At that time Queensland had a scattered while population in contact with native tribes such as we have today. The policy of the State in these days was laissez-faire. Armed sorties of enraged whites were permitted, and occasionally even authorised, to shoot down whole tribes of defenceless natives, man women and children. Many aboriginals were poisoned by the admixture of arsenic with their flour issues. One aggrieved white, whose name is still a byword in Central Queensland, is recorded to have, unhindered by the Police, religiously kept an oath to shoot at sight every aboriginal who came his way. Opium was a routine issue by well-meaning employers to their aboriginal employees. No action whatever was taken by the State until the wearing effect of the opium, the decease of their youth and the influx of more efficient white labour eventually drove the natives off the stations to herd in squalid camps outside the townships, there to exist as best they could on the proceeds of theft, beggary and prostitution. Then, and then only, did the State make a humanitarian virtue of social necessity by uprooting the bedraggled remnant from the country that had been the corner stone of their social organisation to herd all together in settlements where the same and degradation to which white cruelty and official apathy had reduced them would no longer be publicly apparent. The Commonwealth has no such unenviable record.
Precisely, why should the Commonwealth, which is attacking the problem at a much earlier stage than did the States, adopt as its policy the hopeless expedient to which Queensland, after years of inaction, was driver by sheer necessity. The Commonwealth has endeavoured to permit aboriginal tribes to remain intact upon their own hunting grounds and to become, by absorption into the pastoral industry, adapted to white settlement and white employment gradually and at their leisure. The natives on stations are happy, well fed and healthy. Why is it desirable, at this stage, to disrupt their social organisation and destroy their happiness by confining them to reserves? The State of Queensland has practically no experience of aboriginal protection in the phase and at the stage in which it is being dealt with by the Commonwealth. Why, therefore, should its executive officers be supposed to be equipped with an extraordinary vision in the problems confronting this Territory?
The State of Western Australia is, to a certain extent, similarly situated in North Australia and its aboriginal system in the north west is not greatly different to, though not as advanced as, that in the Commonwealth territories. Platitudes concerning the aboriginal problem in the Territory are common enough. What evidence have you that the Commonwealth, working upon a different system to that employed by the States, under the same circumstances is acting upon an inferior one?
The Halfcaste problem has received deeper consideration and more advanced and enlightened treatment in the Commonwealth Territories than in any part of Australia. The Commonwealth which you must recognise is trustee of White Aboriginal Policy, has viewed this matter nationally, and has framed its policy accordingly. Difference of circumstances as between Territory and State has again required special policy. In the States, the Halfcaste is negligible as a factor of population in a white community with equal distribution of the sexes. In the Territory, however, the preponderance of coloured races, the prominence of coloured alien blood and the scarcity of white females to mate with the white male population, creates a position of incalculable future menace to purity of face in tropical Australia, and the Federal Government must so regulate its Territories that the multiplication of multicolour humanity by the mating of Half-caste with alien coloured blood shall be reduced to a minimum. Half-caste females in centres of population where alien races are prominent unfortunately exceed males in number. If this excess is permitted to mate with alien blood, the future of this country may very well be deemed to disaster. The Commonwealth has therefore endeavoured to elevate the halfcaste to he standard of the white, with a view to his ultimate assimilation, encouraging the mating of white male and halfcaste female, thereby gradually eliminating colour and reduce on contributory factor in the breeding of Halfcastes.
Will you, Sir, with no knowledge of local problems, make so bold as to say that the Commonwealth is wrong?
Briefly, the Halfcaste policy in this Territory embraces the collection of all illegitimate halfcastes, male and female under the age of 16 years for housing in institutions for educational purposes. Those with predominance of white blood are placed in separate institutions where they are reared as whites, in associate with white children. All receive the statutory State School Education available to white children. On completion, the girls are taught domestic arts, and dress and clothing making, to fit them for a higher station as the wives of higher grade halfcaste males, or whites. The boys are trained in the pastoral industry by allocation to Stations, who are required to train them as white apprentices until such time as they reach the age of 21 years, when they automatically attain full white citizenship. On leaving the Home, the girls are placed in specially selected private homes, where they are cared for and trained by the ladies who employ them, and who are held responsible for their moral and material welfare.
In face of this, will you, Sir, venture to reiterate the unfounded statement made on page 3 of your pamphlet –
“Under the most favourable conditions of control and care their lot is still a very pitiful one; they are disowned and despised alike by black and white races. By the fact of colour they are practically, if not legally, debarred from such employments as would tend to their development. Even though there may be preponderance of white blood, as in quadroons or octaroons, they are still classed as aborigines and controlled as such”.
In pursuance of its policy of elevating the standard of the Halfcaste, the Commonwealth Government recently enacted certain legislation governing the employment of halfcaste youths on stations. Prior to this enactment, halfcaste youths were employed by station managers for stock work without rewards, herded in camps with aboriginals, there to develop with outlook of the aboriginal until such time as they become of age to be employed under the conditions governing the employment of full bloods. The regulations required that all conditions of employment including reward and accommodation for halfcaste youths should be those to which whites of the same age were legally entitled. These were the regulations which, to their lasting discredit, certain authoritative Missionaries, allying themselves with the exploiting pastoralists, condemned as undesirable, impracticable and unprecedented in the States of the Commonwealth. These are the same regulations to which you refer in a statement now appearing over your signature, as a scheme which may provide useful workers for stock owners, but which can do little to raise the condition of the apprentice or make him a self-respecting and intelligent citizen. By what process of reasoning can you reconcile your championing of the Halfcaste or your allegation of Commonwealth neglect, with your contempt for such a revolutionary piece of legislation directed towards the amelioration of his lot.
Unfortunately, the practical application of this policy has run ahead of the financial means of executing it, and much of a highly derogatory nature is heard of the Half-caste Home Darwin. Nobody recognises the necessity for certain improvements there, more acutely than the Commonwealth Government, but the disabilities existing have been very grossly exaggerated. The charge of overcrowding is the commonest to be made. It is not generally recognised that each halfcaste child has 300 cubic feet of air space on a latticed verandah permitting continuous and free ventilation in all weathers. For your guidance as to the adequacy or otherwise of this provision, I list certain regulation minima prescribed by legislation in other States and countries.
It should be borne in mind in connection with the English figures that the low air temperature in England does not permit the rapid change by ventilation possible in Darwin, so that the low standards prescribed are even less hygienic in comparison to the provision at the Darwin Home than they themselves indicate.
Meantime, the children are removed from the evil influence of the aboriginal camp with its lack of moral training and its risk of serious organic infectious disease. They are properly fed, clothes and educated as white children, they are subject to constant medical supervision and in receipt of domestic and vocational training.
The Commonwealth recognises the necessity for certain improvements in housing conditions, which the desperate condition of the country at present makes impossible, but meantime these children are far better situated than they would be either in aboriginal camps or upon any Mission.
You do not appear to realise that the interference of kindred organisations to your own has been largely responsible for the fact that a new Home has not been erected. The money for this purpose was actually available in 1928, and the plans were submitted by the Minister of the day to a body of Missionary and other organisations interested in the welfare of the aboriginal. This body, in its wisdom or otherwise, without any knowledge of local conditions, disputed certain minor details of the plan and urged the Minister to reconsider the matter. The Minister therefore decided to await receipt of the Bleakley report before reaching finality. This report was not available until 1929, when it was again submitted to a Conference of Welfare Organisations. In the meantime, the finances of the country had so far become embarrassed that the opportunity for providing the money was lost.
On Page 5 of your pamphlet, you state that your Organisation has by deputations and otherwise urged the Government to adopt what you described as Mr. Bleakley’s policy in respect of Halfcastes, but with little result. I state, without the slightest hesitation, that the policy which you attribute to Mr. Bleakley, and which your summarise on Page 4, is not a new policy enunciated by that gentlemen, but his endorsement of the policy already framed for this Territory by Commonwealth Officers. In confirmation of this statement, I direct your attention to the following:-
- A statement by Mr. Bleakley on Page 9 of your pamphlet indicating that Halfcastes in Queensland are treated as aboriginals – a policy of despair justified on the unfounded assumption, disproved time and again in this country, that very few Halfcastes succeed if separated from aboriginals. The adult of any race is the product of his childish environment. If, as in Queensland, he is reared in an aboriginal camp, he must continue as aboriginal throughout his life, and therein lies the explanation of Queensland’s failure to make white citizen of him. If, as in North Australia, he is reared as white, the reverse is true, and Mr. Bleakley’s allegation is not substantiated.
- A statement by Mr. Bleakley on Page 9 of your pamphlet indicating that Halfcastes in Queensland are treated as aboriginals – a policy of despair justified on the unfounded assumption, disproved time and again in this country, that very few Halfcastes succeed if separated from aboriginals. The adult of any race is the product of his childish environment. If, as in Queensland, he is reared in an aboriginal camp, he must continue as aboriginal throughout his life, and therein lies the explanation of Queensland’s failure to make white citizen of him. If, as in North Australia, he is reared as white, the reverse is true, and Mr. Bleakley’s allegation is not substantiated.
I appeal to you, as a man of culture, to weigh the facts thoroughly, and to determine without prejudice whether in your precipitate action in publish such unfounded remarks in what purports to be an authoritative document, you have not placed yourself in an extraordinary false position.
Since moreover so much of condemnation is heard from Missionary organisations, you may be interested to know that throughout the period of my experience here, totalling some 5 year, there has not been a single baptism or confirmation of any Halfcaste in the Darwin Home. These children and adolescence have not been visited in sickness, and have received no spiritual consolation before death. They have had at the hands of Missionary or other clergy no consolation or advice in time of tribulation, and it says much that when in need they have sought those very officers of Government which the Missionary and clergy so unanimously abuse.
In conclusion, may I state that the whole publication under discussion betrays a lamentable ignorance of the subject, and this has led you into a hopeless inaccuracy of statement. What value is to be placed on any judgement or recommendation which you may make when such are founded upon utterly false premises? May I express the hope that in future your activities may be guided by a sounder knowledge of the problems which you concern yourself.
Yours faithfully,
Cecil Cook M.D.
CHIEF PROTECTOR OF ABORIGINALS