Working with ATSI people and communities



Entry page For your use Committee Coordinators Workers Growing in understanding History Key Ideas Today Structures Reports FAQ Readings Glossary Practice implications History The Dreaming The Land The Law & The Lore Family and kinship Image and identity Self-determination Practice tips Policy Upper Hunter Acknowledgements Test your knowledge Copyright \| Feedback		Reading 9

		Consequences of reomoval - Children's experiences Chapter 10 Bringing them Home Children’s Experiences Most of us girls were thinking white in the head but were feeling black inside. We weren’t black or white. We were a very lonely, lost and sad displaced group of people. We were taught to think and act like a white person, but we didn’t know how to think and act like an Aboriginal. We didn’t know anything about our culture. We were completely brainwashed to think only like a white person. When they went to mix in white society, they found they were not accepted [because] they were Aboriginal. When they went and mixed with Aborigines, some found they couldn’t identify with them either, because they had too much white ways in them. So that they were neither black nor white. They were simply a lost generation of children. I know. I was one of them. Confidential submission 617, New South Wales: woman removed at 8 years with her 3 sisters in the 1940s; placed in Cootamundra Girls’ Home. 10 Children’s Experiences Children’s experiences following their removal contributed to the effects of the removal upon them at the time and in later life. In this chapter we briefly survey the evidence to the Inquiry concerning those experiences which have had the most significant impacts on well-being and development. Totality of separation The overwhelming majority of the children forcibly removed under assimilationist legislation and policies were separated from their Indigenous family, community and culture. They were not permitted to use their languages. Y’know, I can remember we used to just talk lingo. [In the Home] they used to tell us not to talk that language, that it’s devil’s language. And they’d wash our mouths with soap. We sorta had to sit down with Bible language all the time. So it sorta wiped out all our language that we knew. Confidential evidence 170, South Australia: woman taken from her parents with her 3 sisters when the family, who worked and resided on a pastoral station, came into town to collect stores; placed at Umewarra Mission. Missionaries in the Kimberley region of WA as late as the 1960s continued to pursue this policy of forbidding the use of Aboriginal languages (confidential evidence 505, Western Australia: man made a State ward at 6 years in 1966 and placed in a church-run hostel in Fitzroy Crossing). My mother and brother could speak our language and my father could speak his. I can’t speak my language. Aboriginal people weren’t allowed to speak their language while white people were around. They had to go out into the bush or talk their lingoes on their own. Aboriginal customs like initiation were not allowed. We could not leave Cherbourg to go to Aboriginal traditional festivals. We could have a corroboree if the Protector issued a permit. It was completely up to him. I never had a chance to learn about my traditional and customary way of life when I was on the reserves. Confidential submission 110, Queensland: woman removed in the 1940s. This policy was usually applied by foster and adoptive families as well as missions and other institutions. We made a series of errors through our ignorance and paternalism. We brought him up separate from the Koori population … away from the Koori people. The ones we’d heard about in the paper were having big problems, so we thought we will keep him away from these problems till he matures. We didn’t understand the full ramifications of invasion, of dispossession or dispersement. We learnt all this later. So we were – in the 1960s we’re talking – we were ignorant well-meaning whites. We had some problems of course when he was about 10 – identity problems. Confidential evidence 155b, Victoria: adoptive parents of a year old boy. Contact with family members was at best limited and strictly controlled. My mum had written letters to us that were never forwarded to us. Early when we were taken she used to go into the State Children’s Department in Townsville with cards and things like that. They were never forwarded onto us. Confidential evidence 401, Queensland: woman removed and fostered at 6 years in the 1950s. If we got letters, you’d end up with usually ‘the weather’s fine’, ‘we love you’ and ‘from your loving mother’ or whatever. We didn’t hear or see what was written in between. And that was one way they kept us away from our families. They’d turn around and say to you, ‘See, they don’t care about you’. Later on, when I left the home, I asked my mother, ‘How come you didn’t write letters?’ She said, ’But we did’. I said, ‘Well, we never got them’. We were all rostered to do work and one of the girls was doing Matron’s office, and there was all these letters that the girls had written back to the parents and family – the answers were all in the garbage bin. And they were wondering why we didn’t write. That was one way they stopped us keeping in contact with our families. Then they had the hide to turn around and say, ‘They don’t love you. They don’t care about you’. Confidential evidence 450, New South Wales: woman removed at 2 years in the 1940s, first to Bomaderry Children’s Home, then to Cootamundra Girls’ Home; now working to assist former Cootamundra inmates. Many children were told they were unwanted, rejected or that their parents were dead. I remember this woman saying to me, ‘Your mother’s dead, you’ve got no mother now. That’s why you’re here with us’. Then about two years after that my mother and my mother’s sister all came to The Bungalow but they weren’t allowed to visit us because they were black. They had to sneak around onto the hills. Each mother was picking out which they think was their children. And this other girl said, ‘Your mother up there’. And because they told me that she was dead, I said, ‘No, that’s not my mother. I haven’t got a black mother’. Confidential evidence 544, Northern Territory: woman removed to The Bungalow, Alice Springs, at 5 years in the 1930s; later spent time at Croker Island Mission. I was trying to come to grips with and believe the stories they were telling me about me being an orphan, about me having no family. In other words telling me just get up on your own two feet, no matter what your size … and just face this big world … and in other words you don’t belong to anybody and nobody belongs to you so sink or swim. And they probably didn’t believe I would swim. Confidential evidence 421, Western Australia. They changed our names, they changed our religion, they changed our date of birth, they did all that. That’s why today, a lot of them don’t know who they are, where they’re from. We’ve got to watch today that brothers aren’t marrying sisters; because of the Government. Children were taken from interstate, and they were just put everywhere. Confidential evidence 450, New South Wales. Children were given the very strong impression their parents were worthless. When I first met my mother – when I was 14 – she wasn’t what they said she was. They made her sound like she was stupid, you know, they made her sound so bad. And when I saw her she was so beautiful. Mum said, ‘My baby’s been crying’ and she walked into the room and she stood there and I walked into my – I walked into my mother and we hugged and this hot, hot rush just from the tip of my toes up to my head filled every part of my body – so hot. That was my first feeling of love and it only could come from my mum. I was so happy and that was the last time I got to see her. When my mum passed away I went to her funeral, which is stupid because I’m allowed to go see her at her funeral but I couldn’t have that when she requested me. They wouldn’t let me have her. Confidential evidence 139, Victoria: removed 1967; witness’s mother died two years after their first and only meeting. ‘Your family don’t care about you anymore, they wouldn’t have given you away. They don’t love you. All they are, are just dirty, drunken blacks.’ You heard this daily … When I come out of the home and come to Redfern here looking for the girls, you see a Koori bloke coming towards you, you cross the street, you run for your life, you’re terrified. Confidential evidence 8, New South Wales: woman removed to Cootamundra Girls’ Home in the 1940s. I grew up sadly not knowing one Aboriginal person and the view that was given to me was one of fear towards [my] people. I was told not to have anything to do with them as they were dirty, lived in shabby conditions and, of course, drank to excess. Not once was I told that I was of Aboriginal descent. I was told that with my features I was from some Island and they [foster family] knew nothing of my family or the circumstances. Confidential submission 483, South Australia: woman removed to a children’s home at 18 months in the 1960s and subsequently fostered by the caretakers. In an attempt to force ‘white ways’ upon the children and to ensure they did not return to ‘the camp’ on their release, Aboriginality was denigrated and Aboriginal people were held in open contempt. This denigration was among the most common experiences of witnesses to the Inquiry. All the teachings that we received from our (foster) family when we were little, that black people were bad … I wanted my skin to be white. Confidential evidence 132, Victoria: woman fostered at 10 years in the 1960s. She [foster mother] would say I was dumb all the time and my mother and father were lazy dirty people who couldn’t feed me or the other brothers and sister. Confidential evidence 5, South Australia: man fostered at 5 years in the 1960s. There was a big poster at the end of the dining room and it used to be pointed out to us all the time when religious instruction was going on in the afternoon. They had these Aborigine people sitting at the end of this big wide road and they were playing cards, gambling and drinking. And it had this slogan which they used to read to us and point to us while they’re saving us from ourselves and giving our souls to the Lord. It had, ‘Wide is the road that leads us into destruction’, which lead up into hell. The other side they had these white people, all nicely dressed, leading on this narrow road, and ‘Narrow is the road that leads us into the kingdom of life or the Kingdom of God’. When I was 14 years old and going to these foster people, I remember the welfare officer sitting down and they were having a cup of tea and talking about how they was hoping our race would die out. And that I was fair enough, I was a half-caste and I would automatically live with a white person and get married. Because the system would make sure that no-one would marry an Aborigine person anyhow. And then my children would automatically be fairer, quarter-caste, and then the next generation would be white and we would be bred out. I remember when she was discussing this with my foster people, I remember thinking – because I had no concept of what it all meant – I remember thinking, ‘That’s a good idea, because all the Aborigines are poor’. Confidential evidence 613, New South Wales: woman removed to Bomaderry Children’s Home as a baby in the 1940s; foster placement organised from Cootamundra broke down after 17 months and she was then placed in various work situations. We were told our mother was an alcoholic and that she was a prostitute and she didn’t care about us. They [foster family] used to warn us that when we got older we’d have to watch it because we’d turn into sluts and alcoholics, so we had to be very careful. If you were white you didn’t have that dirtiness in you … It was in our breed, in us to be like that. Confidential evidence 529, New South Wales: woman fostered as a baby in the 1970s. I got told my Aboriginality when I got whipped and they’d say, ‘You Abo, you nigger’. That was the only time I got told my Aboriginality. Confidential evidence 139, Victoria: removed 1967. Child and adolescent psychiatrist, Dr Brent Waters, has interviewed a number of people forcibly removed in NSW. The people that I’ve talked to who were placed in white families were – and I haven’t seen any that were absolutely fulsome about their family experience, most of them had some reservations – things seem to have gone quite well until they got into the teenage years. Then they started to become more aware of the fact that they were different. Some of these were quite light kids, but nevertheless that they were different. And it was the impact of what peers were doing and saying which seemed to be most distressing to them. And sometimes their families didn’t deal with that very well. They were dismissive. ‘Look, the best thing to do is just forget you were ever Aboriginal’ or ‘Tell them that you came from Southern Europe’. To pass off what was obviously a difference in skin colour. But in none of those families was there a sense that one way to manage this situation was to recapture your sense of Aboriginality. There seemed to be no honour and dignity in being an Aboriginal, even if you’d been brought up by a family (evidence 532). Institutional conditions The living conditions in children’s institutions were often very harsh. And for them to say she [mother] neglected us! I was neglected when I was in this government joint down here. I didn’t end up 15 days in a hospital bed [with bronchitis] when I was with me mum and dad. Confidential evidence 163, Victoria: woman removed at 9 years in the 1950s. The physical infrastructure of missions, government institutions and children’s homes was often very poor and resources were insufficient to improve them or to keep the children adequately clothed, fed and sheltered. WA’s Chief Protector, A O Neville, later described the conditions at the Moore River Settlement in the 1920s (Neville had no control over the Settlement from 1920 until 1926, his jurisdiction being limited to the State’s north during that period). Moore River Settlement had rapidly declined under a brutal indifference. Here ‘economy’ had taken the form of ignoring maintenance and any improvement of buildings, reducing to a minimum the diet of ‘inmates’ and doing away with the use of cutlery – the children in the compounds being forced to eat with their hands. The salaries of attendant and teachers had been reduced and anything that was not essential to the rudimentary education available was removed. Even toys, such as plasticine, were removed from the classroom. Unhappiness and the desperate anxiety to locate and rejoin family members led to a sharp increase in absconders and runaways. Punishment was harsh and arbitrary and the ‘inmates’ feared the Police trackers who patrolled the settlement and hunted down escapees (quoted by Jacobs 1990 on page 123). Doris Pilkington described the conditions as ‘more like a concentration camp than a residential school for Aboriginal children’ (Pilkington 1996 page 72). Young men and women constantly ran away (this was in breach of the Aborigines Act). Not only were they separated from their families and relatives, but they were regimented and locked up like caged animals, locked in their dormitory after supper for the night. They were given severe punishments, including solitary confinements for minor misdeeds (Choo 1989 page 46). The situation did not improve with Neville’s return. The per capita funding for the Moore River Settlement was half that of the lowest funded white institution (the Old Men’s Home). In 1936 Western Australia spent less per capita on Aboriginal affairs than any other State. In 1938 the West Australian newspaper wrote of the ‘crowded and unsuitable schoolroom’ at the Settlement where over one hundred school age children carried out ‘a campaign against two greatly-handicapped teachers’. The children were taught basic literacy, numeracy and hygiene, with a view to employment as domestic servants and rural labourers. There was no equipment for vocational training, therefore these skills were learnt by working on the settlement (Haebich 1982 page 56). An Aboriginal witness to the Inquiry in Perth who taught in the school at Moore River during the 1950s gave evidence that inmates were flogged with a cat-o’-nine-tails (now held in the WA Museum) (confidential evidence 681). Conditions in other children’s institutions are also remembered as harsh. Melbourne law firm Phillips Fox summarised the experience reported by their clients. … the consistent theme for post-removal memories is the lack of love, the strict, often cruel, treatment by adults, the constantly disparaging remarks about Aboriginality – and the fact that the child should be showing more gratitude for having been taken from all that – and of course, the terrible loneliness and longing to return to family and community. Some commented that ‘I thought I was in a nightmare’. ‘I couldn’t work out what I’d done wrong to deserve this’. ‘It was like being in prison’. ‘It was very strict – you weren’t allowed to do anything’ (submission 20 page 6). There was no food, nothing. We was all huddled up in a room … like a little puppy-dog … on the floor … Sometimes at night time we’d cry with hunger, no food … We had to scrounge in the town dump, eating old bread, smashing tomato sauce bottles, licking them. Half of the time the food we got was from the rubbish dump. Confidential evidence 549, Northern Territory: man removed to Kahlin Compound at 3 years in the 1930s; subsequently placed at The Bungalow. It’s a wonder we all survived with the food we got. For breakfast we got a bit of porridge with saccharine in it and a cup of tea. The porridge was always dry as a bone. Lunch was a plate of soup made out of bones, sheeps’ heads and things like that, no vegetables. For dinner we had a slice of bread with jam and a cup of tea. After our dinner we were locked up in a dormitory for the night. WA woman who lived at Moore River Settlement from 1918 until 1939, quoted by Haebich 1982 on page 59. We didn’t have enough meal. We used to go jump over the fence to the garden and steal rockmelon, watermelon, whatever we can get hold of, just to fill our stomachs for the night. Confidential evidence 820, Western Australia: man removed at 6 years in the 1940s to Beagle Bay Mission in the Kimberley. Institutional regimes were typically very strictly regulated. Dormitory life was like living in hell. It was not a life. The only thing that sort of come out of it was how to work, how to be clean, you know and hygiene. That sort of thing. But we got a lot bashings. Confidential evidence 109, Queensland: woman removed at 5 years in 1948. Children’s well-being was sometimes severely neglected. These are people telling you to be Christian and they treat you less than a bloody animal. One boy his leg was that gangrene we could smell him all down the dormitories before they finally got him treated properly. Confidential evidence, New South Wales: man removed to Kinchela Boys’ Home in the 1960s. Many witnesses related receiving or witnessing severe punishments. At the time, we used to get a lot of coke. You got to fill the coke bins up. That’s what you got to kneel on – on the coke [as a punishment]. You got no long trousers, [only] shorts and bare-footed. You know what we got to eat? Straw and buns. That was our tea. That’s besides getting the cane. Get straw and buns. Quite naturally you’re going to pull the straw out and chuck it away. You do that and you get caned. You’re supposed to eat it. Confidential evidence 531, New South Wales: man removed to Kinchela Boys’ Home at 9 years in 1950. I remember the beatings and hidings [they] gave us and what I saw. I remember if you played up, especially on a Sunday, you got the cane. You play chasing, you had to drop your pants, lie across the bed and get 3-5 whacks. If you pissed the bed – another 3-5. I remember seeing, when I was about 7 or 9 – I think it was IM get pulled by the hair and her arm twisted behind her back and hit in the face … Confidential evidence 251, South Australia: man removed to Colebrook at 2 years in the 1950s. They were very cruel to us, very cruel. I’ve done things in that home that I don’t think prisoners in a jail would do today … I remember once, I must have been 8 or 9, and I was locked in the old morgue. The adults who worked there would tell us of the things that happened in there, so you can imagine what I went through. I screamed all night, but no one came to get me. Confidential evidence 10, Queensland: NSW woman removed to Cootamundra Girls’ Home in the 1940s. I’ve seen girls naked, strapped to chairs and whipped. We’ve all been through the locking up period, locked in dark rooms. I had a problem of fainting when I was growing up and I got belted every time I fainted and this is belted, not just on the hands or nothing. I’ve seen my sister dragged by the hair into those block rooms and belted because she’s trying to protect me … How could this be for my own good? Please tell me. Confidential evidence 8, New South Wales: woman removed to Cootamundra Girls’ Home in the 1940s. They used to lock us up in a little room like a cell and keep us on bread and water for a week if you played up too much. Stand us on a cement block outside in the rain with raincoats on if you got into trouble – for a month, after school, during playtime. Confidential evidence 358b, South Australia: man removed as a baby in the 1950s; first placed at Koonibba Mission, then a Salvation Army Boys’ Home where he experienced above punishments, then on to reform school and prison. In some cases administrators were admonished for their treatment of inmates or residents. Former WA Chief Protector, A O Neville, described in his 1947 book some of the treatments meted out by his staff at the Moore River Settlement. One Superintendent I had, because he suspected him of some moral lapse, tarred and feathered a native, and he did the job thoroughly, calling the staff to see the rare bird he had captured … Another Manager I did appoint, an ex-Missionary, and a good man too, I had to dismiss for chaining girls to table legs … Indeed, it was found necessary to provide by regulation for the abolition of ‘degrading’ and injurious punishments and the practice of holding inmates up to ridicule, such as dressing them in old sacks or shaving girls’ heads (Neville 1947 pages 112-113). Verbal complaints and formal petitions were dismissed by one superintendent who told the commissioner, ‘the natives generally feel that they must always have some complaints when you visit them’ (quoted by Haebich 1982 on page 59). In 1927 Mrs Curry, a former employee at Cootamundra Girls’ Home in NSW, alleged that girls had been ‘flogged, slashed with a cane across the shoulders, and generally treated with undue severity and lack of sympathy, the use of the cane being a daily occurrence’ (NSW Aborigines Protection Board Minutes quoted by Hankins 1982 on page 6.1.11). In 1935 the NSW Aborigines Protection Board commissioned a report on the conduct of the manager of Kinchela Boys’ Home following receipt of allegations of insobriety and ill-treatment of the boys. Upon consideration of the report late in that year, the Board determined to ‘strongly advise’ the manager ‘to give up taking intoxicating liquor entirely’ particularly when in the company of the boys and to inform him ‘that on no account must he tie a boy up to a fence or tree, or anything else of that nature, to inflict punishment on him, that such instruments as lengths of hosepipe or a stockwhip must not be used in chastising a boy, that no dietary punishments shall be inflicted on any inmate in the Home’. He was also to be told that the practice of loaning out boys to local farmers was disapproved (NSW Aborigines Protection Board Minutes of Meetings, 4 December 1935). Almost 1 in every five (19%) Inquiry witnesses who spent time in an institution reported having been physically assaulted there. 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.