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NSW and the ACT - Assimilation 1927 - 1975
from Bringing them Home Part 2 Tracing the History

New South Wales responded to the national consensus on assimilation at the 1937 Commonwealth-State conference by reconstituting the Board around the new goal and renaming it the Aborigines Welfare Board in new legislation introduced in 1940.

The problem that the Government has to meet and the community has to face in regard to the Aborigines can be estimated by realising the fact that there are some 10,000 people of full or mixed aboriginal blood … About 50% of the aborigines are camped on stations and reserves which are controlled by the Government. The remainder are living independently of the board … It has no effective control under the present law. They are quite independent and free to live according to their own wishes. In many cases, they are living in close proximity to towns, in much the same way as the unemployed lived during the worst years of the depression, and in that regard they are a great annoyance to the community (Parliamentary debates on the 1940 Act quoted by NSW Government submission on pages 37-8).

The 1940 Act did not give the new Board the same administrative removal powers. To remove a child the Board now had to proceed under the Child Welfare Act 1939 and establish to the satisfaction of a Children’s Court that the child was ‘neglected’ or ‘uncontrollable’. Once removed, however, the child became a ward of the Board (which was not the same as a ward under the Child Welfare Act) and subject to even greater control by the new Board. Two systems of regulation and administration thus operated side by side: one for non-Indigenous wards under the control of the Child Welfare Department and one for Aboriginal wards under the control of the Board.

The Board was given explicit power to ‘establish … homes for the reception, maintenance and training of wards’. Aboriginal children who left their employment or a ‘home’ were guilty of an offence and punishable by the Children’s Court. Punishment could include forfeiture of rewards, isolated detention, corporal punishment and fatigue duties. In the pursuit of assimilation Aboriginal parents were prevented by law from contacting their institutionalised children. It was an offence to try to communicate with any ward ‘who is an inmate of such home’ or to enter the home.

The new Board also placed Indigenous children from the Australian Capital Territory, although their removal continued to be governed by the 1905 Neglected Children and Juvenile Offenders Act until 1954, even though that Act had been repealed for NSW. From 1954 until 1968 Indigenous children in the ACT were removed under Commonwealth legislation, the Commonwealth Child Welfare Ordinance 1954, but placed in institutions or foster care in New South Wales. ‘Given the Territory’s location in regional NSW and the continuation of NSW administration, there was no real distinction between the ACT and the rest of NSW’ (ACT Government interim submission page 15).

‘The welfare’

In theory at least the court process in the Child Welfare Act 1939 provided safeguards against the kinds of discretionary separations that the Board had previously engaged in. However, since the Children’s Courts were located far from most Aboriginal communities and no legal assistance was available to parents, they were effectively prevented from contesting removal applications.

In that time we had nobody. No-one to talk for us or anything … We had to just go there … and … if we wanted to say something then, in court, it was too late. They said it was already finished. And then, bang, they’re gone. That was it (quoted by Wootten 1989 on page 15).

In any event the definition and interpretation of ‘neglected’ and ‘uncontrollable’ in the Child Welfare Act impacted adversely on Indigenous families. ‘Neglect’ was defined to include destitution and poverty was a constant feature of most Aboriginal people’s lives. Aboriginal lifestyles, adopted from choice or necessity, such as frequent travelling for cultural activities or seeking employment, resistance to non-Indigenous control and child-rearing by extended family members were regarded by courts as indicative of neglect. Aboriginal children who refused to attend school were labelled ‘uncontrollable’ as were Aboriginal girls running away from situations of sexual abuse or becoming pregnant. Yet until 1972 school principals could and did exclude Aboriginal children from schools on the ground of ‘home condition’ or ‘substantial (community) opposition’ (NSW Government submission page 57).

If parents could be ‘persuaded’ to consent to the removal of their children the Board did not have to show that a child was neglected or uncontrollable.

Because [my mother] wasn’t educated, the white people were allowed to come in and do whatever they wanted to do – all she did was sign papers. Quite possibly, she didn’t even know what she signed … The biggest hurt, I think, was having my mum chase the welfare car – I’ll always remember it – we were looking out the window and mum was running behind us and singing out for us. They locked us in the police cell up here and mum was walking up and down outside the police station and crying and screaming out for us. There was 10 of us. Confidential evidence 689, New South Wales: woman removed in the 1960s and placed in Parramatta Girls’ Home.

By the late 1930s it was clear the Board’s institutions could not cope with the number of children being removed. As the Board did not have the funds to establish new institutions but remained firmly committed to its policy of child removal, alternative arrangements had to be made. From 1943 Aboriginal children deemed ‘uncontrollable’ by the Children’s Court became the responsibility of the Child Welfare Department. They were usually sent to a State Corrective Institution such as Parramatta Girls’ Home or Mt Penang.

During the 1940s and 1950s the Aborigines’ Welfare Board and the Child Welfare Department worked closely together to place Indigenous children. A child’s skin colour often determined the type of placement made. Lighter coloured children were sent to institutions for non-Indigenous children or fostered by non-Indigenous families.

In 1950 the Board advertised for ‘foster parents … for 150 Aboriginal children’. By 1958 116 wards had been fostered, 90 of them with non-Indigenous families (Read 1983 quoted by Link-Up (NSW) submission 186 on page 65). In 1960 over 300 Aboriginal children were in foster homes and another 70 or so were in Cootamundra and Kinchela (Link-Up (NSW) submission 186 page 65).

Until 1963 the Board was still exploring the possibility of constructing more institutions to house all its removed children. In that year it was finally decided not to proceed with another institution because they encouraged segregation and, moreover, they were too expensive.

Adoption was another method of removing Indigenous children from their families. Mothers who had just given birth were coerced to relinquish their newborn babies. Those whose children had already been forcibly removed were pressured by Board officials to consent to adoption. The Child Welfare Department processed the adoption but relied on Board officials to obtain the mother’s consent. The Child Welfare Department did not check to ensure that Indigenous mothers understood they were being asked to agree to the permanent removal of their child.

Most of us went to Crown St. Hospital. That’s where my son was born, and then we went back to the hostel with the baby. Once we were there, we had the Welfare coming in, asking you what you was going to do – telling you most of the time that your parents didn’t want you, the father of the baby didn’t want you … they said to me they couldn’t find anyone that wanted me, and they couldn’t find anywhere for me, like a live-in job where I could take the baby. And then they said the only one they could find that was willing to take me was my eldest sister, who I’d never seen since I was a little girl – she’d gone before us: she went away with some white people that were supposed to take her away for a good education – and they said she was the only one who was willing to take me, but she didn’t want the baby. So they brought the papers in and told me to sign and that was it. Confidential evidence 689, New South Wales: woman removed in the 1960s and placed in Parramatta Girl’s Home.

The powers of the NSW Board differed from those in some other States in that it never had guardianship of Indigenous children and therefore could not consent to the adoption of one of its wards. However the Adoption of Children Act 1965 allowed for the consent requirement to be waived if ‘that person is, in the opinion of the Court, unfit to discharge the obligations of a parent or guardian by reason of his having abandoned, deserted, neglected or ill-treated the child’. Rather than endeavour to contact the mother of a child whose foster parents wanted to adopt him or her, the Board applied to the Children’s Court to waive the consent requirement.

In 1968 responsibility for placing Indigenous children from the ACT was transferred to the Commonwealth Department of the Interior. This marked a shift in policy for foster care. Previously the practice had been to place children with an unrelated foster family in NSW. Restricted contact with their natural family and continued foster care arrangements meant that these placements, in effect, often became pseudo-adoptions. From 1967, the practice of Commonwealth Departments was to place children in residential care in the ACT and attempt to reunite the child with their family (ACT Government interim submission page 16).

Abolition of the Board

In 1969 the NSW Aborigines’ Welfare Board was abolished ‘leaving over a thousand children in institutional or family care. Almost none of them was being raised by Aborigines, still less by the child’s own extended family’ (Dr Peter Read submission 49 page 14). Wards of the Board were transferred to the Department for Child Welfare and Social Welfare which set up the Aborigines’ Advisory Council in 1971. Although the abolition of the Board meant that Indigenous children were, in theory, treated the same as non-Indigenous children, ‘the child welfare approach was, in effect, overt denial but covert recognition and denigration of Aboriginality’ (historian Dr Heather Goodall quoted by Wootten 1989 on page 26). Kinchela and Cootamundra closed shortly after the Board was abolished but the home at Bomaderry was still functioning until 1980.

I was taken off my mum as soon as I was born, so she never even seen me. What Welfare wanted to do was to adopt all these poor little black babies into nice, caring white families, respectable white families, where they’d get a good upbringing. I had a shit upbringing. Me and [adopted brother who was also Aboriginal] were always treated different to the others … we weren’t given the same love, we were always to blame. … I found my mum when I was 18 – she was really happy to hear from me, because she didn’t adopt me out. Apparently she did sign adoption papers, but she didn’t know [what they were]. She said to me that for months she was running away from Welfare [while she was pregnant], and they kept finding her. She remembers being in – it wasn’t a hospital – but there were nuns in it, nuns running it. I was born at Crown Street. They did let her out with her brother one day and she run away again. Right from the beginning they didn’t want her to have me. Confidential evidence 657, New South Wales: woman taken from her mother at birth in 1973 and adopted by a non-Aboriginal family.

The Broken Hill office of the Western Aboriginal Legal Service informed the Inquiry that it was clear from its research that ‘there were children removed from Wilcannia in the 1970’s in much the same way that children were being removed in the 1960’s’ (submission 775). Once Cootamundra and Kinchela had closed, Indigenous children who rebelled against their removal and foster placements could be sent to a detention centre.

Mt Penang Training Centre [in the early 1970s] was described to me by a former deputy superintendent as a para-military institution which followed the tradition of treatment of young offenders which commenced in the early days of colonisation … The atmosphere was one of absolute regimentation with very strict practices and procedures throughout the centre.

Attitudes to Aboriginals were described by the former deputy superintendent as ‘appalling’ … There are no figures on the number of Aboriginals who were at Mt Penang but there is no reason to think it was less than 25-30% … The regime would have been very harsh for any young person but must have been particularly oppressive for Aboriginals like Malcolm, having regard to the relative freedom with which he had lived his early years, and the racist attitudes (Wootten 1989 pages 25-6).

Source
Bringing them Home
Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families
Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission
April 1997

Full report available on the web.