The Native Problem Why Is It Unsolved?

_{Lieut.-Col. C.E.A. Cook, C.B.E. M.D., etc. of Commonwealth Department of Public Health, Canberra; Chief Medical Officer and Chief Protector of Aborigines, Northern Territory, 1927 – 1939. Published in Australian Quarterly December 1950}

“The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly

 is to fill the world with fools.”

Herbert Spencer.

From time to time the Australian people ponder the unhappy lot of the aborigine and speculates upon his future. A promising enthusiasm for his salvation is quickly quelled as study reveals the complexity of the obstacles in the path, and hope of resolving the “native problem” is deferred, not without reluctance, not with despair.

This “native problem” may be considered as that formidable and diversified array of embarrassments confronting both races at all points of contact owing to the mutual incompatibility of their respective conceptions of ordered life. The fundamental incongruities of the native life-pattern prevented its harmonious assimilation intact into the fabric of the white social order. On the other hand, ravelling that life-pattern down to complete loss of identify has proved no more successful in permitting facile integration.

A considered discussion of this problem with pretensions to being comprehensive would fill a bulky volume. No more will be attempted here than to sketch the economic and social influences which have evolved it.

A fundamental difference between white and native society is to be found in the attitude to property. The white man in his dealings with the native has consistently disregarded this divergence in viewpoint and has neglected to contend with it in plans for native care. The inability of the native to integrate securely into the white community may indeed derive exclusively from this inconsistency. 

The white race originating in an environment of long bleak unproductive winters could only survive by developing an economy which comprehended the erection of shelters, the accumulation and storage of food and clothing, and the artificial increase of the necessities of life by seasonal cultivation and animal husbandry round permanent settlements. It was inevitable that a race so nurtured should develop an intense acquisitiveness dictating the exploitation of nature to yield an ever-increasing wealth of food and comforts and the tools for their production, storage and transport. Living in massed communities in elaborate dwellings upon permanent sites the white man feeds and clothes himself by cultivation of the soil, the herding of livestock and the labour of innumerable machines. To conserve water, to provide power, to enhance production, to facilitate transport and to improve convenience he undertakes the modification of the environment by engineering projects great and small. He seeks by unremitting toil to amass capital – reserves of the necessities and the means of producing them – intent upon attainment of an even higher standard of living.

In a more equable climate and in a land devoid of animals and plants akin to those domesticated by early man elsewhere, the Australian native underwent no such evolution. His economy used nature as presented to him by the environment without modification or development. He indulged in no agriculture, pastoral pursuit or industry, he domesticated no animal but the dog, he wore no clothing, built no dwelling, made no settlement, conserved no water, stored no food, evolved no means of aided transport and used no tools. His mode of life as a migrant hunter wandering from water to water demanded complete freedom of movement for himself and the assured immunity of the terrain, its fauna and its flora, from interference or destruction. Cultivation of the soil, use of a permanent dwelling and similar static interests binding him to one locality had no place in such a civilisation, whilst the accumulation of personal property could only encumber him and impair his mobility. The native philosophy is not acquisitive – it eschews the amassing of capital in any form. In inhibits the development of and eradicates the impulse to frugality, thrift and productive enterprise which together are the mainspring of white civilisation.

This indifference to wealth is incompatible with easy adaptation to white commercialism. It will therefore be of interest to inquire how it has affected racial relationships and to see what attempts the white race has made either to develop a new philosophy in the native or to modify the social order the better to accommodate the old.

It was inevitable that in the early days of settlement the isolated white pioneer would seek to enlist the native in his service. Not only had he insufficient labour resources for his projects but he was alone in a strange and inhospitable land surrounded by an elusive and barbaric people of unpredictable temper. Friendly they could impart to him invaluable local knowledge, assist him with his tasks, in some measure protect him from neighbouring hordes and give him the comfort of human society in his loneliness. Hostile they could at will plunder his stores, burn his camp, disperse his herds, and murder him or leave him to perish in the wilderness. Were they importunate in seeking gifts from his stores refusal might precipitate a raid. The prudent and profitable course was to exchange stores for services no matter how trivial.

There was; too, for the grazier another value in regular issues of food even to those from whom no service in return was forthcoming. There were no fences in the country over which his stock was depastured. The migration of natives from water to water in the dry season when permanent supplies were few and far apart harassed and dispersed his cattle, impairing their condition, aggravating the difficulties of mustering and exposing them to theft. There were obvious advantages in inducing the natives by gifts of food and tobacco to spend the dry season camped near his homestead, there to share in ration issues and to provide a casual labour pool.

For the native, too, there were incentives toward accepting employment. It afforded him an opportunity whilst feeding on new, satisfying, and readily-prepared foods to study at close hand and leisure this odd intruder and his even stranger animals.

In the result a large number of natives was supplied with meat, flour, sugar, salt, tea and tobacco in return for the essential labour of some and the stimulated employment of others. These with their dependants camped more or less permanently near the homestead. So developed a symbiosis which has determined the economic relationship of the two races and the course of native social change.

The morality of this simple form of contract has often been challenged. Charges of “slavery”, “forced labour” and the less explicit but equally opprobrious “exploitation” have been levelled against it. It has, however, served both races well for many years and in some localities still provides with official approval the basis for the remuneration of native labour. It might be well, then, to digress a moment to examine the charges.

Basically labour has value only as a means to gratify a want, and for the vendor of labour this value varies inversely with the intensity of the want. For the primaeval native, the needs essential to a full and normal life were accessible without labour as we know it. On the other hand our own community is so organised that satisfaction of the basic wants of living – food, clothing, shelter, education – can only be obtained in exchange for labour, the earning power of which is arbitrarily fixed by a formula relating working time to he purchase of a standard level of existence. Strictly, therefore, the baseline of economic equality between white and native is represented when the former is constantly employed at the basic wage and the latter is living untrammelled and unemployed in its own country.

The native valuing his time upon the food yield of a hunting day and freely choosing as a preferred alternative to the hunt some hours of service to the white man in exchange for a more highly valued ration must be conceded to be seeking a profit for himself and to be absolutely free. The reality of this freedom he repeatedly demonstrated by ceasing work abruptly, unpredictably and for indeterminate periods whenever his reassessment of values decided him to return to the bush.

It may fairly be contended that the native employee was entitled to the full commercial value of his services and that whether he sought it or not a dividend on the nett profit of the enterprise sufficient at least to bring his earnings to the basic wage was his moral right. In point of fact in most cases the natives collectively actually received full value for the labour performed. The feeding of unemployed dependants, the unnecessary employment of large numbers in trivial and token tasks to avert temptation to pillage or to foster goodwill, and the general unreliability of the labour force entailed for the employer an outlay usually substantially in excess of the cash wages equivalent of the few productive workers.

This system, however, could only escape suspicion of “exploitation” as long as the native’s choice remained free from any suggestion of duress. As white enterprise extended, as the native became more and more accustomed to his service and as certain influences began to disintegrate the tribal social structure there developed stresses which with increase force and urgency impelled the native to seek and continue in employment notwithstanding progressive deterioration in the relative value of his reward. Such were 

1. expansion of white settlement denied waters, depleted game and made tribal life more arduous and less attractive;
2. employment diverted from hunting and foraging the tribe’s most efficient providers and the retention of children round settlements impaired their training in native skills. The tribe was soon confronted with a feeding problem making it increasingly dependent upon white bounty;
3. the new wants created in the native by his association with the white became stronger and more insistent with the passing years. At first the delights of horsemanship and the mastery of strange animals may have attracted most but eventually the taste for beef, flour, sugar, tea, and tobacco, the comfort of a blanket, the luxury of soap became dominant needs.

For the white, too, as time passed, settlement extended and industry developed, there arose an insistent demand for a more disciplined and reliable labour force. Admittedly in the pastoral industry where work was seasonal, employment could be arranged at intervals to the mutual agreement of both races, but in other vocations, particularly in towns, continuity of service was essential. The native practice of ceasing work without notice occasioned the employer considerable embarrassment and financial loss.

For the dual purpose of protecting the employer and inculcating a sense of responsibility in the native, employment was organised on a basis of legal contract. The native, through a Protector, undertook to continue in service for a stated period, the employer to feed, clothe and house him and to pay him a small wage, portion of which was credited to a Trust Account and liable to forfeiture to the employer should the employee fail in his undertaking. In practice the loss of the intangible credit balance proved no deterrent to the native lured by nostalgia to the bush. It became necessary for Protectors to permit only short term contracts which it was likely the employee could patiently endure. The Trust Account failed, too, in inculcating thrift. Paid out as stores at the time of ceasing work, the greater the accumulated credit, the greater the encumbrance embarrassing the native resuming life as a migrant hunter. Much of it was therefore dissipated as gifts to relatives and friends and the native derived from it no lesson in the value of thrift as a safeguard against want.

In face of this development the original purpose of the Trust Account was ultimately abandoned. Current withdrawals in cash week by week were permitted with the employer’s approval and soon it served only to assure that the employer actually paid some wage. Later still it has in certain areas been completely discarded in favour of cash payment of the whole wage, the competition for labour associated with increased white and diminished black population rendering unnecessary any official precaution to ensure payment.

The introduction of cash payments occasioned unexpected abuses. The native, traditionally accumulating no property, could have no use for a portable equivalent. He had therefore, no conception of the value or purpose of money. Money is valueless unless related to a want. For the native introduced into white society wants were initially the necessities of life. These, food, clothing and accommodation, he received in full in return for his labour under the legal employment system. To use his cash wage he must acquire new wants. In towns the cinema provided one and taxicabs another, but unprincipled persons were not slow to create and exploit others less innocuous – gambling, alcoholism and opium smoking. These costly indulgences demanded of the addict far more than his weekly cash pittance, but once acquired could not be denied. He must have more wages, he must be paid in cash, his gambling and the after effects of his drug addiction took him more and more from his work and his efficiency became impaired. Ultimately, his employment lost or abandoned, his addictions prevailed against return to the bush and to get money he was constrained to procure for prostitution. It may confidently be asserted that no single factor has played a greater part in the degradation of the native than premature payment of a cash wage.

Meanwhile influences less obvious to the white man were effecting irreparable damage to the social organisation of tribes whose youths of both sexes engaged themselves in white employment.

1. Employees were perforce frequently required in the course of their tasks to visit localities or incur associations in defiance of tribal sanctions, and to absent themselves from important tribal ceremonies. The elders at first resisted these breaches of tribal law but as economic pressure intensified, they became acquiescent. The destructive effect of these incidents upon tribal discipline was considerable, creating, as they did in the youthful, a disregard for tribal sanction, and in the elders, their trustees, uncertainty in their own authority and a despair for their survival.
2. New proficiencies in the novel crafts of the white man gave the youth a prominence and notoriety in the tribe beyond his years. The white man’s favour, too, conferred new opportunities for influencing the fate of individuals and groups and the youth acquired a tribal authority proper only to the aged.
3. The better to retain valued labour of both sexes employers often gave in marriage mutually-attracted youths and girls in defiance of tribal marriage law. These renegades, for their own psychological and physical security, must publicly defend the relationship by protesting the supremacy of the white man’s law and fostering defection from the restrictions of tribal custom. Economic pressure again exerted its influence on the elders to acknowledge the legitimacy of such unions, thereby further imperilling tribal stability, their own authority, and their personal self-esteem.
4. Preoccupation of the adolescent in white employment prevented appropriate training in the native culture and his traditional progressive initiation into the degrees of manhood.
5. The white man’s enterprise incidentally frustrated performance of ritual and adherence to tradition. The native’s community with nature extended into and formed the basis of his culture, social organisation and philosophy. All these were inextricably integrated into the environment, any change in which must inevitably affect native civilisation. Throughout the tribal area were sacred sites, physical features of totemic or ritual importance, secret shrines and the like. The elimination of these by the road-builder, their submergence following the damming of a watercourse, their destruction in clearing for homestead, stockyard or cultivation, all inevitable results of white expansion, inexorably demolished the framework of the native and social structure.
6. The betrothal and marriage code could not survive partial native depopulation whether occasioned by migration, by disease or by diversion of youth to employment in remote localities. Mourning and inquest ritual were frustrated by white medical and hospital practice, infanticide and ritual killing were penalised by white law, ceremonial wife exchange was inconsistent with white prejudice but lent itself to disastrous exploitation by the procurers. Eradication of them imposed by the extension of the new order was impossible without impairment of stability of the framework of the native society.
7. The general deterioration in the tribal attitude to native law and customer, actively fostered in his own interest by the white man, dismayed the elders and engendered a reluctance to impart the secrets which constituted the fundamental bond of tribal identity and ordered behaviour. This omission in turn contributed to their displacement to a position of relative unimportance amongst their own people.

The economic and social influences operating in conjunction with uncontrolled disease produced chaotic disintegration of native society in the areas of densest white settlement. This calamity was a matter of little concern to the white man until an increasing number of consequential personal annoyances came more and more urgently to his notice. In the absence of a collective appreciation of their origin or a formulated civic approach to their abatement these irritations caused a variety of reactions in the community according as the individual responded with impatience or with sympathy.

Governments, having no considered policy founded upon precedent, experience or scientific rationale with which decision could be justified and uninformed criticism confounded, were viciously assailed from many quarters. The problem was so complex and so novel that none was experienced in all its phases and most who concerned themselves with it were personally interested in a particular facet.

In such a situation the more consistently vocal, confidently critical and plausibly authoritative are apt to be mistaken for experts. Where there is no acknowledged authority to guide, there must be a tendency for political expediency or administrative convenience to surrender to the bitterest critic.

Two influences most felt were the humanitarian and the academic. The former, vocal through the Churches and philanthropic organisations, demanded repair of the damage done and protection of the “unspoilt” native from the effects of white intrusion. These groups, however, had no clear conception of the integral components of the problem and no rational proposal for its solution. They suffered the handicap, too, that for first-hand information, if not for funds, they largely relied upon individuals in contact with the native and not always impartially disinterested.

The academic view was expressed by the Anthropologist. The remedy insistently advocated by this group, at first with the support of the Churches, was the creation of inviolable reserves where surviving tribes secure from contact with the white settlement around them could continue intact and maintain their own civilisation unchanged. This proposal avoided the major problem – the fate of the bedraggled and pauperised remnant of broken tribes whose lands were already alienated. It was concerned only with preventing new tribes traversing the same path. Its exponents presumptuously arrogated to themselves the native’s indisputable right to choose for himself between adherence to barbarism or transition to the new civilisation. Its cardinal objective of isolation could clearly not be achieved as it was impossible to prevent native migration into and out of the reserve with the inevitable inculcation of new and disturbing wants. Nor indeed could complete isolation be tolerated by Government, involving as it must unchecked dissemination of communicable disease and inviolable sanctuary for the law-breaker. The suggestion, too, was inconsistent with policies of national security which would not permit the economic loss and military risks entailed in large tracts of neglected wealth and unoccupied land in vulnerable areas. The proposal received its coup-de-grace when the Churches, tardily realising it mean the exclusion of Missions, withdrew their support. 

Whatever their initial approach, Governments eventually accepted as a broad principle of policy the encouragement of Missions to remote tribes and establishment of departmental native settlements to accommodate the detribalised. The purpose of the former was to initiate a measure of white civilisation in tribes out of contact with white settlement, and to prepare and fortify them for ultimate contact with an assimilation into white society. The departmental settlements were to be principally concerned with rescuing and sheltering the waifs and strays of tribes already destroyed. Both were to afford medical aid for all, some elementary education for the young, and asylum for the aged and infirm.

Even after many years’ effort, results have been disappointing. The end product of Mission activity, speaking generally, is a native no more adapted to command life in a white society, no more stable and no less disoriented than his fellow evolved under uncontrolled association with the white population at large. To understand this failure it is necessary to study the methods employed on Mission and Native settlements to achieve their purpose.

With regard to Missions, there has been no continuity of policy or purpose over the years. It has been unusual for successive superintendents over any length of time to sustain in the face of heartbreaking frustration more than a tepid interest in any activity other than propagation of the Gospel. Attention given at any one time to education, hygiene instruction, medical care, agriculture, pastoral pursuits and other activities has shown wide variation according to the whims or capacity of the individual missionary, whilst over a period emphasis shifted irrationally with successive changes of staff.

Sites were not always wisely chosen. The permanent crowding of large numbers of natives upon a restricted area imposed a heavy strain upon the natural resources of food and water. Efforts to supplement the former by irrigated cultivation commonly resulted in failure of water supply and garden alike. Cassava, pumpkin and sweet potatoes were the principal crops grown. These foods, having a heavy cellulose content, masked their dietary inadequacies, assuaging hunger and discouraging supplementation by more adequate foods. The diversion of native youth to Mission duties deprived the people of their best providers and it became almost universal practice to issue a substantial ration of imported food, mainly flour, oatmeal and sugar. Unconscious of the dietetic deficiencies of the Mission ration natives became habituated to the consumption of an inadequate and unbalanced diet which lowered resistance to infection and in extreme cases occasioned mortality from deficiency disease. Meanwhile the art of living on the country was gradually lost whilst there developed a more insistent demand for and a greater reliance upon alien foods which could only be obtained through white agency. So far from being taught self-sufficiency in a white community, the native lost his capacity for independent existence and had substituted for it a condition of dependence.

Girls were almost invariable reared under the dormitory system. For an early age they were brought under close Mission supervision, sleeping in dormitories, wearing clothing, attending school and chapel services and receiving all meals from the Mission kitchen. Under this regime they continued until marriage, and were with varying degrees of assiduity and success raised to a moderately high standard of civilised living, acquiring in addition to an elementary education, pride in a clean and tidy appearance, proficiency in needlework and domestic arts such as the preparation of European style foods, housekeeping and laundering, and the habit of maintaining a standard of personal and domestic comfort quite alien to their origins.

With boys, methods were somewhat different. Although most Missions reared the boys under the dormitory system also, their arrival at the age of puberty introduced social problems most readily resolved by their removal from the Mission precincts until they were old enough to marry. Some missions met this problem early by leaving the boys in the camp and admitting only girls to dormitories.

The opportunities for the training of boys in gainful crafts were strictly limited on Missions. Even when stockwork, timber work, agriculture and mechanical trades were available, and few Missions could offer more than one or two of these, the standard of achievement was necessarily determined by the scope of the work undertaken and the qualification of the missionary as a preceptor.

Their earlier release from dormitory supervision prevented boys reaching or maintaining a standard of living comparable to that of the girls even where their education was longest continued. At marriage, therefore, the girl perforce entered upon an existence of low social and hygiene standard little different from that of the camp. For this her mission training had quite unsuited her.

Speaking generally then, the end result of Mission training was too often a youth unqualified for comfortable existence either in a native or a white society, a prey to multitude of newly-acquired wants which his limited abilities and impaired efficiency would not permit him to satisfy in the environment into which he was discharged. The choice confronting him lay between a sub-standard existence as a permanent dependant of the Mission or life as a social outcast gleaning precarious livelihood as an unskilled labourer on the fringes of white settlement.

Of Government Settlements little need to be said except that they too were often characterised by the siting, management and feeding deficiencies discussed in relation to Missions. However, as they were primarily concerned with accommodation of natives already degraded by the new order, these influences were of less significance. Devoted as they were to the detention, if possible without distress, of the aged and infirm, destitute, unruly and diseased, and those whose penury, petty misdemeanours or squalid habits had led to their removal thither to hide them from the offended eyes of respectability, they soon resorted to a policy of liberal feeding which served only to pauperise its recipients. The newer policy of establishing stations conducted on this principle in the territory of hitherto unspoiled tribes, on the pretext of assisting them to withstand bad seasons, threatens these too with rapid and final extinction.

Finally mention must be made of the important role played by bad hygiene in the degradation of the native. The migrant hunter avoiding throughout his life all semblance of settled existence underwent his evolution free from the communicable infections which have plagued fixed communities for centuries. Secure in this freedom he developed with impunity practices incompatible with safe survival in permanent communities, but acquired no natural resistance to infections disease. He learned nothing of the purpose or practice of sanitation – the safeguarding of water supplies, the safe disposal of human wastes, the protection of food – nor did he comprehend the nature of infection.

Suddenly settled by the white man in primitive camps without warning of the dangers of community life or guidance in avoiding them, his careless insanitation rapidly produced conditions imperilling the health of both races. This squalor (actually quite alien to him) was so invariably associated with his camps near white settlement that it came to be regarded as an ineradicable characteristic of him.  Consequently in greater part of the more temperate regions of this continent where the rising tide of white colonisation has submerged all but tiny remnants of the native race, the survivors exist in many areas more as outcasts than as Australian citizens. They live in improvised huts built from waste material on the fringes of towns beyond the limits of the municipal water, sanitary and lighting services. Aversion to the inevitable squalor of their dwellings, distaste for their necessarily bedraggled and dirty appearance, suspicion of vice and fear of disease together inspire in their white neighbours a repugnance which finds expression in a demand for their exclusion from schools, public conveniences and the general wards of hospitals. Nevertheless many are employed at the prevailing award rates of wages and in those the low standard of living, often far below that permitted by their earnings, fosters dissipation and intermittent employment, a survival of the native communal spirit ensuring that the idle will always be sheltered and fed by the employed.

Vividly in contract with the failure of the generality of natives to secure for themselves a stable foothold upon the white social structure are the successes of individuals of their race who have enjoyed special opportunities in upbringing, whether in mission, settlement or in private homes. The advancement of these may be attributable to some special genius or it may simply demonstrate that the various methods by which the white has attempted civilisation of the mass have been unsound in principle. Study of this possibility may reveal a more promising approach.

Throughout this review of the course of native volution under white dominance it must have been clear that ever-present obstacle to his adaptation has been his failure to acquire first the white man’s attitude towards the conservation and increased production of wealth and second the capability to live comfortably and with self-reliance in fixed communities.

Both these qualities, usual in the white, are utterly alien to the native. If they have merely been suppressed in his evolution by the peculiarities of his terrain which fostered the nomadic hunter rather than the peasant, they may conceivably be developed by appropriate stimuli. If their absence is to be explained by a definite deficiency in his genetic inheritance the outlook for his future in a civilised community is indeed gloomy. This doubt can only be resolved by sustained exposure to environmental influences calculated to develop the attributes in question.

Throughout his association with the European the native has been carefully and systematically sheltered from the very influences necessary to his new evolution. Habituated to providing the day’s wants by the unaided exertions of the day his experience in white society has been permitted to perpetuate this practice notwithstanding its incompatibility with the new economy. In the early free employment and later under the organised contract, the means of subsistence day by day, he found, were to be obtained by a daily service. On Missions and Settlements if he could not conveniently provide for himself from the environment by the methods familiar to him he could make good the deficiency day by day by rendering a service. The product of his labour was never tangibly his. If he worked for wages, his contract always provided that he be fed, clothed and housed by his employer and the purpose of money and the importance of capital in white society were never brought home to him. If he dissipated his earnings or abandoned employment he need never starve – he could return to his native life or avail himself of the ever-offering opportunities for indigent rationing made available by the white man. Never has he learned to live with self-reliance in the white community – always he has been in a position of complete dependence there. Never has he learned by bitter experience, the only efficient mentor, the fundamental economic facts of the new order. In short, the white man’s philanthropy may largely have been responsible or defeating its own purpose. If the native is to successfully achieve integration into the general community he must evolve under the environmental stresses from which he has hitherto been sheltered.

This will involve complete recasting of native administration policies in considerable areas of this continent, and one basic change must be education in the relation of productive work to the accumulation of wealth and improvement of the living standard. As a generality, amongst tribes in early contact, payment for service, particularly with subsistence should largely be abandoned and for it substituted engagement in productive enterprise of present and future capital value – animal husbandry, agriculture, reafforestation, the native’s sustenance being recognized as a charge upon his equity and the product of his labour being exclusively his own, for the improvement of his living standards and the maintenance of his dependents, young and old. Simultaneously, he must be taught the principles of sanitation and the responsibilities of community life.

Note everywhere will such a policy be possible of application but adaptations of the basic principles of self-reliance should be possible to devise for universal trial. It must be remembered that genetically the native may not be adaptable and a fine discrimination must be exercised to decide when economic pressures may be permitted full play and when they must be relaxed. Whatever the difficulties, no other approach is logical and present methods can claim no result to warrant their continuance.

The wide range of the problem, the diversity of its impacts on major interests of the white community – health, economic, social, industrial and defence – the complexity of the factors affecting each, make it improbable that in each of the several States and Territories over many years a public service organisation will provide at upper levels the administrative ability and the comprehensive technical competence to attempt resolution of the problem with a uniformly high standard of proficiency. It may well be found desirable to entrust the task to a composite body of experts who together can provide the special attributes required.