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Re-thinking Aboriginal history

By Joe Lane - posted Monday, 25 November 2013


The formal study of Indigenous History has relied on second- and third-hand sources, on hearsay and oral history. Without attention to primary sources, this will remain a very serious defect.

My wife and I made the first Aboriginal flags, back in 1972, more than a hundred of them up to 1981 or so, and sent them all around Australia. We were ardent supporters of land rights and self-determination and used to devour any new book on the subject. Invariably they were based on secondary and tertiary sources but they fitted in with our way of thinking at the time.

In the eighties, I found the Journals of George Taplin, the missionary who set up the Point McLeay Mission on Lake Alexandrina, where my wife was born, and managed it between 1859 and 1879. The Journals were (and still are) in the State Library in Adelaide, in an old type-written copy. At the time, I thought that some fool should type them up again. As it turned out, I was that fool. But I had found a gold-mine of information, much of which did not conform to the dominant paradigm, or 'narrative'.

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A friend gave me some old letter-books from the Mission, covering up to 1900, which I carefully copied. By then I was hooked on searching out first-hand sources and went on to type up the thousand pages of the various Royal Commissions 'into the Aborigines', of 1860, 1899 and 1913-1916. Many other documents suffered the same fate. More recently, I have been typing up the correspondence of the Protector of Aborigines in South Australia, more than thirteen thousand letters in, and eight and a half thousand letters out, 1840 to 1912.

  • The dominant paradigm, which is being taught around Australia, in schools and at universities, asserts thatAboriginal people were 'herded' onto Missions;
  • Aboriginal people were driven from their lands;
  • Countless children were stolen from their families.

So far, I have found no unambiguous evidence of any of this. Of course, one may say, you wouldn't expect him to write anything like that, would he ? Indeed, but he DOES often write counter-factually, advising or recommending what would go right against this paradigm, at least in South Australia. Let's look at each of these assertions in turn:

Herding Aboriginal people onto missions

Between 1840 and the present, the Aboriginal population on Missions never exceeded more than 20 % of the total Aboriginal population in contact with the state, except during the depression when it rose to about 30 %. In other words, for most of the time, more than 80 % of the entire Aboriginal population lived away from Missions, across the State.

It should be noted that the total number of full-time staff of the grandly-named Aborigines Department, was one, the Protector. His main task was to set up and supply up to forty ration depots, as well as roughly as many issuing points for individuals and families. Issuers, mainly police officers, station managers and pastoral lessees, and missionaries, were not paid. So: one full-time staff member and up to seventy five or more issuing-points. So who was doing the 'herding' ?

Mission staff rarely numbered more than three or four. They were flat-out issuing stores, building cottages, supervising farm work, running the schools, providing medical attention. As far as I know, no Mission ever had a fence around it to keep people in.

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Many times in the Protector's correspondence, an issuer may ask urgently for more stores as a large number of 'Natives' had arrived at their Depot, sometimes hundreds. A few weeks later, they're gone again. People came and went, as they chose.

The Protector sends rations to a Mission near Port Lincoln, located on eighteen thousand acres of crop and grazing land, with the express instruction that the rations are not for the residents but for 'travelling people', passing up and down Eyre Peninsula to and from Port Lincoln, and that the rations are to keep them supplied on their journey. The Mission population there were supposed to be self-supporting (which they were from about 1868 onwards). The 'travelling people' camped a couple of miles from the Mission and occasionally worked for wages on the Mission, grubbing stumps.

At Point McLeay, from Taplin's Journal, from the Letter-Books and from the Protector's letters, one can read of hundreds of people suddenly arriving from down the Coorong or from up the Murray for ceremonies, who camped a mile or two away, and who needed provisioning. A week or two later, they have gone back to their own country.

Rations were strictly for the sick, aged and infirm, mothers with young children, and orphans. Able-bodied people were expected to hunt or fish or gather, or work for farms and stations. Families which had been deserted or widowed were also provided with rations.

By the way, rations included, flour, tea, sugar, axes, rice, sago, tobacco, soap, fishing lines, fish-hooks, netting twine, needles and thread, clothes, clothing material, blankets, blue serge and blue serge shirts, cotton shirts, spoons, quart-pots, pannicans, billy-cans, tomahawks, bags and tarpaulins for wurlies, occasionally tents, and free medical care and travel passes to and from hospital.

Rations were provided to isolated individuals. For example, on many occasions, an old man or woman on a station might need to be looked after - the Protector asks the lessee to ask the person if they want to go to a mission to be better cared for there, but they say no, they want to stay on their land, so he arranges for the station-lessee to provide him/her with rations, often for years. One Aboriginal woman on Kangaroo Island, originally from Tasmania, is supplied with rations in this way for at least twenty years.

A deserted wife and her family in Adelaide are provided with rations for many years, at least until the record ends.

Missions regularly expelled people who had behaved badly, or immorally. In other words, they were fairly particular about who could and couldn't stay on a Mission. I suspect that one Mission had to wind down in the 1890s simply because it couldn't get enough working men to come and stay there: it seemed to have a chronic shortage of labour from the late 1870s as capable men found work in the district which paid better.

In sum, there does not seem to be any evidence of 'herding', or even any obvious intention to ever do so.

Aboriginal people were driven from their lands

There is only one instance in the Protector's letters of a pastoral lessee trying to drive people from his lease (in 1876), and as soon as the Protector is informed, he writes to remind the lessee that he would be in breach of his lease, which stipulates that Aboriginal people have all the traditional rights to use the land as they always had done, 'as if this lease had not been made', as the wording went. It was assumed that traditional land-use and pastoral land-use could co-exist, as, of course, they could and still can. I'm informed that that condition still applies in current legislation.

By the way, six months later, that pastoralist is applying for rations. The depot there was still issuing rations at least thirty years later.

The Protector provided dozens, perhaps a hundred or more, 15-ft boats, and fishing gear (fishing-lines, fish-hooks, netting twine), to people on all waterways, even the Cooper's Creek, so that they can fish and 'stay in their own districts'. He provided guns to enable people to hunt more effectively. Boats and guns are provided free – as well as their repair – to people unable to earn a living, and able-bodied people are expected to pay half their cost.

The Game Act has always expressly exempted Aboriginal people from restrictions on hunting and fishing in 'Close Season', even now.

He advises a woman who has been living on a Mission, but whose husband has been knocking her around, that he can provide her with rations at a town near her own country.

Over the years, whenever particular individuals or groups were 'loafing about the City' or drunk and disorderly, or begging (what we call 'humbugging' these days) about the streets, he provides them with rail or steamer passes to 'go back to their home districts'.

From the earliest days, Aboriginal people were encouraged to lease plots of land, up to 160 acres rent-free, and to live on the land, which usually happened to be in the country from where they came. The earliest record seems to be a woman who had married a white man – often white men thought that, if they married an Aboriginal woman, they could get a piece of land, but no, the lease was always vested in the Aboriginal partner.

During the 1890s, more than forty Aboriginal people, including at least three women, held such leases. In fact, one Mission may have wound down precisely because the more capable men took out leases of their own, leaving the Mission bereft of labour and getting seriously into debt.

In sum, again there does not seem to be any evidence of any intention to drive people from their country. Again, quite the reverse.

Stealing countless children from their families

It's probably no secret that colonisation disrupted much of Aboriginal traditional life and family patterns. Women had children by white Men (as well as Africans, Chinese, Afghans and West Indians) and lived peripatetic lives around the towns. Many children were abandoned or orphaned by single mothers who either could not support them or died. Many children were brought down from the North by stockman and survey teams, sometimes from inter-state, and then abandoned in the city.

All States have fiduciary obligations to their inhabitants, especially to children. The Protector was, in effect and in law, the legal guardian responsible for the well-being of such abandoned children. Facilities in those days were either rudimentary or non-existent, so the most suitable place for such children, short of locating their living relatives (which occurred occasionally), was to ask a particular Mission if they could take them. Often this was not possible, so the Protector had to shop around to see where to place a particular child.

So how many ? I typed up the School Records, 1880-1960, from one Mission/Government settlement and found that, for example, between 1880 and 1900, only eight children - out of a roll of two hundred over those years – had been brought to this Mission. In fact, there were barely as many again in the next fifty years.

And just in case 'stealing children' means taking them from missions and settlements, it should be pointed out that, in that period 1880 to 1960, during which eight hundred children were, at one time or another, enrolled at that school, a grand total of forty seven children transferred to homes or institutions or the Adelaide Hospital, the vast majority of whom came back within a year or two. Mothers died, fathers died, families fell destitute - the reasons for Aboriginal children being put into care of any sort were not much different from those for any other Australians, and at 4 %, neither was the rate of 'removal'.

Under the Protector's watch, if children knew their own country and wish to go back there, he arranged for their travel home. One boy from the far north at one mission was unhappy and wished to do that, so the Protector promptly arranged for him to travel up to Oodnadatta and then on to his own country. A year or so later, he was back at the mission, working and asking for some financial support to buy a harmonium.

So, from the record, there does not seem to be any concerted effort to take children from their families. In fact, the Protector notes that he does not have the legal power to do so, and I suspect neither did he have the intention.

So why did I believe as I did, without evidence ? Because the conventional paradigm, the 'black-armband approach', fits together. It makes sense. It doesn't need evidence. And perhaps in other states - Queensland, for instance - conditions were much harsher for Aboriginal (and Islander) people. But that's for researchers up there to follow up on, if they have the courage.

There are such things as 'facts'. There was only one full-time staff member of the S.A. Aborigines Department. There were forty or more official ration Depots from around 1870 onwards. Sometimes 'facts' are like rocks in a stream of 'interpretation': flow this way or that, twist and turn as one may, the 'interpretation' of history still has to deal with the 'facts'.

It may not have been all sweetness and light, but neither was it as brutal as the conventional paradigm supposes. Nineteenth century people were no different from ourselves. We are them, they were us. It's time we relied more on evidence than feelings, or suspicions, otherwise we will forever be barking up the wrong tree.

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About the Author

Joe Lane is an independent researcher with a long-standing passion for Indigenous involvement at universities and its potential for liberation. Originally from Sydney, he worked in Indigenous tertiary support systems from 1981 until the mid-90s and gained lifelong inspiration from his late wife Maria, a noted leader in SA Indigenous education.

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