CONFIDENTIAL
His Honour,
The Administrator
I find it very difficult to comment dispassionately upon the proposed aboriginal policy forwarded with your memorandum of the 14th instant. So many entirely personal factors are involved in the proposed changes that I am afraid my commentary, so far from appearing to be the well-considered judgement of an experienced official might appear to be simply the pleading and lamentation of an officer unwillingly superseded.
On the other hand, I have a personal appeal to make and I am therefore submitting my comments in two separate memoranda. In this, the first, I shall endeavour completely to unburden my soul on the personal aspects involved, so that in the second the Minister may find the discussion of the policy wholly official and uninfluenced by any personal prejudice or private opinion.
The Aboriginal Branch is to be separated from the Northern Territory Medical Service and the new Branch of the Northern Territory Administration is to be placed under the control of an officer with administrative ability and training in practical anthropology. Without, at this point, discussing the merits and demerits of this proposed divorce, one must assume that it has appeared necessary to affect it owning to failure either of the existing organization, or of the officer hitherto in charge, effectually to carry out the duties involved. If this should be so, I think the head of the Branch and the officers of it are entitled to know what charge are made against them, so that they may enter a defence.
As far as I personally am concerned, as the officer who has been in charge of this Branch for the past 11 years or more, I may direct your attention to the fact that, when I took over, aboriginal protection was a subsidiary activity of the Northern Territory Police. There was no policy, recognisable as such, either in respect of aboriginals or half-castes and the activities of the Administration in respect of the aboriginal were those routine formalities connected with the licensing of employers, the payment of employees and the haphazard issue of rations and blankets to the aged and infirm. Within two years I had given the Commonwealth a policy in respect of half-castes and a policy for the employment of aboriginals in rural districts. Though bitterly opposed at the time, through misunderstanding as to their actual nature, these policies have now been adopted, not only by the Commonwealth but by the States. It was amusing to me, at the conference of Chief Protectors of two rival States claiming the “honour” of having introduced them and joining force to urge their adoption by the Commonwealth.
Though recommended as early as 1928 and 1929, these policies did not become legally effective in the Territory until 1939. These delays were the responsibility of the Department of the Interior and the Attorney-General’s Department and can nowise be laid at our door.
Shortly after the recommendations were made we entered a period of depression from which, as far as the Territory is concerned, we only emerged last financial year. During that interval I submit that we successfully carried on the functions of the Department and, in support of this contention, I would remind you that in the previous year the work of the Branch was recognised by the conferring of Royal honours upon the Chief Protector and by the award to him of the Cilento Medal.
With emergency from the depression, the attention of the Department was directed to the necessity of announcing a definite long-range policy in respect of aboriginals. This was submitted verbally to the Minister, the Honourable T. Paterson, on the occasion of his visit to Darwin in August 1936, and subsequently embodied in a memorandum to the Department, dated 19th October, 1935. This policy was approved by the Minister and its principal details communicated by him to the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society of London. This organization published it, with laudatory comment, in the “The Anti-Slavery Reporter” and it was subsequently adopted, without acknowledgement, as the platform of the Australian Aborigines League, who submitted it to the Federal Government as original. It was also espoused by several protection organizations in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney, none of whom had previously been able to evolve it and none of whom, even now, I suggest, could adduce adequate arguments in favour of, owing to lack of knowledge of the conditions from which it evolved. This policy is now returned to me complete in broad outline for my comments, with the variation that it is considered necessary to appoint another officer to implement it.
Your attention is invited to the fact that this policy was submitted from Darwin three years ago and, apart from the work that has ben done here to put it into effect, very little has been done by the Department to assist us during that period. Even the Ordinance, enabling us to establish a Native Constabulary, so essential to proper organization during the transition period, appears to have been held up indefinitely for no apparent reason and the consequences of our impotence to control and discipline aboriginals in the town of Darwin, which has directly resulted from this omission, are now hurled at us, by the public and by officers of the Administration, as evidence of our failure in office.
I have always regarded the field of aboriginal protection as one offering scope for a life’s work of useful achievement, and I have devoted myself assiduously to it. In doing so, I have incurred the displeasure and, oftentimes, the hatred and the abuse of practically every employer of aboriginal labour in the Territory. This antagonism, unfortunately, has not been confined by its partisans to criticism of aboriginal policy, but has been translated into personal abuse, libel and slanderous stories concerning my professional ability and even my private life. Mr. H.C. Brown, formerly Secretary to the Department of the Interior, informed me on the occasion of his first visit to the Territory in 1933 that, having travelled right through it and finally come to Darwin, he was in a position to say that I was the most hated man in the Territory and that he recognised that this was because I had done my job and done it well, within the limits imposed by Department policy.
Naturally, I feel that this proposal to supersede me in this work is an indication of the lack of confidence in my administration of the Branch in the past and I feel I am entitled to ask the grounds on which that conclusion has been reached.
If it is felt, on the other hand, that I am competent enough but unable, owing to pressure of many duties, to carry on the work effectually, may I direct your attention to the fact that all the progress that has been made in the Territory and in the States during the past ten years has originated from policies submitted from this office, under unnecessarily exacting conditions of staffing. There is, for instance, at the moment but one full-time officer of the Aboriginal Branch in this office. He is a temporary officer, who has been recommended for discharge on the ground of incompetence. When the Health Branch was taken over by me it consisted of substantially the staff which it maintains now and dealt only with certain routine formalities connected with the Darwin Hospital. During the time that has since elapsed a highly organized and elaborate Medical Service has been built up and the enormous volume of work connected with it has been imposed upon the original skeleton staff, reinforced from time to time by an additional typists or junior officer, temporarily appointed. The very considerable increase in work associated with aboriginal protection has had to be undertaken by this staff as well and if these officers have at times failed in the efficient discharge of routine, this was only to be expected.
It is observed in this connection that the officer now proposed to be appointed is to be given the right to select his own staff. There are obvious disadvantages to this which I shall leave for your own commentary. I merely wish to state that if this consideration had, in the past, been given to the Aboriginal Branch, the necessity for this reorganization would never have arisen. So far from being accorded this privilege, it has not been possible for me on several occasions, even with persistent insistence, to obtain the appointment of officers to the Aboriginal Branch whom I recommended as being the only ones competent for particular positions. I may mention my opposition to the appointment of J.B. O’Sullivan as Superintendent of the Compound, which was overruled on the ground of Public Service expediency, and my recommendation the subsequent appointment of L.R. Samut and A.X. Herbert to the Compound. For the most part, this office has been the dumping ground for the unwanted incompetents of other Branches.
I should mention that the suggestion that I was to be superseded as Chief Protector was confidentially conveyed to me by A.X. Herbert late in 1936 or early 1938, before your Honour was appointed Administrator and before there was any suggestion that Mr. McEwen would take the portfolio of Minister for the Interior. At that time, with the knowledge and consent of the Acting Administrator, I wrote to the Secretary, Department of the Interior, Mr. J.A. Carrodus, and asked for a reassurance on the matter. He replied, informing me that the matter had not been considered by the Department and that he had no knowledge of it. I must conclude, therefore, that that part, at least of the policy has originated with an outside individual or an outside organization, probably not very remote from Professor Elkin.
Professor Elkin is, I am informed by Mr. Herbert, a prominent member of the Association for the Protection of Native Races, an organization of which the Secretary is one Reverend W. Morley. Reverent Morley is wholly uninformed of Territory conditions and was, for many years, supplied with information by late Fred Thompson, who persisted in sending him misleading information and bitterly destructive criticism, founded upon in accuracies and lies, with the inevitable result that Reverend Morley has become obsessed with the view that all the injustices and the hardships, abuse and oppression suffered by aboriginals are to be laid at my door. The Department has frequently endeavoured to eradicate this incorrect impression from Mr. Morley on my behalf. I suggest that it has been unsuccessful. I further maintain that the adoption of the proposal to supersede me will be a surrender to Mr. Morley.
I feel it unnecessary to do more than direct your attention to the anomaly and injustice of adopting policy which I have submitted to a former Minister and had approved, with the proviso that I, being unfit to implement it, should be discarded and replaced by another officer. I feel that, having been the Commonwealth’s scapegoat for Mr. Morley and his organization for over a decade, the adoption of the policy in its present form would be tantamount to the Commonwealth acknowledging that the policy I have given them is one which renders the provision of a scapegoat no longer necessary because it is one with which Morley’s organization is in accord. It appears to me, therefore, that the scapegoat is now to be discarded as a final douceur to his and kindred organization.
(Cecil Cook)
Chief Protector of Aboriginals
28.4.38.