Governing Savages

Andrew Markus

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000257298
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Australische & ozeanische Geschichte

In 1928, after a white man was killed, a punitive party mounted a series of attacks on Aborigines northwest of Alice Springs. The party's leader admitted that 31 Aborigines were killed. One missionary in the area put the toll at 70; another at as many as 100.Since 1911, the administration of the Northern Territory had been the direct responsibility of the Commonwealth. In placing this event and others within the context of policies pursued by the national government, Governing Savages reveals how policies of brutality and calculated neglect bequeathed a bitter legacy to subsequent generations.

1
Protecting Aborigines

The making of an issue

Under the Australian Constitution of 1901, the states assumed responsibility for Aboriginal affairs. The Commonwealth’s involvement began in 1911 when it acquired control of the Northern Territory, a region of sparse white settlement in which the Aborigines were thought to outnumber the combined white and Asian population by a proportion of four or five to one. While there was uncertainty over precise numbers it was estimated that perhaps a quarter of Australia’s surviving Aboriginal population lived in the Territory.

In 1911 it was the hope of the small minority of white Australians who took an interest in Aboriginal welfare that the Commonwealth government, representing all white Australians and with the resources of the nation at its disposal, would set an example for the states in its treatment of Aborigines. Some urged the federal government to recognise Aboriginal welfare as a trust vested in the nation and to assume responsibility for all Aborigines. The newly formed Association for the Protection of Native Races argued that:

The method of relying upon State and Colonial Governments has been tried from the earliest days of colonisation, and has undeniably failed. The Colonial and State Governments have themselves acknowledged the failure. It has been set forth time after time, by their own officials - Special Commissioners, Magistrates, Police, Doctors - publicly and in official reports … It is a recognized political principle that the wider the area from which the governing power is derived, and the larger the task set, the wider and more statesmanlike the policy is likely to be. It follows as a corollary that the Federal Government is likely to deal with the whole problem more adequately than the State Governments with the five separate sections of it.¹

A committee on Aboriginal welfare established by the Australian Association for the Advancement of Science urged in 1913 that ‘the Aboriginal problem will only be solved when all that is left of the race is made a single and National responsibility, and cared for in a National way … A national sentiment of sympathy and pity would be created towards this unfortunate race whom we have dispossessed’.²

The call for federal control was not taken seriously. After an initial period of reform, the federal government lapsed into the inactivity that had characterised South Australia’s administration of the Territory. For a decade there was almost no public or government interest in Aboriginal issues. Apathy and complacency were sustained by the assumption that the Aborigines were a dying race.

The first signs of a new mood amongst white Australians became evident in the mid 1920s. The growing level of dissatisfaction with policies pursued in the north was manifested in a movement for the establishment of an Aboriginal state. Although originating in South Australia, the idea attracted attention throughout the country and a petition circulated by its proponents secured 7000 signatures. In 1927 a group of influential citizens, including Mr Aubrey Williams of the Sydney Morning Herald, the retired Bishop Dr Gilbert White, the anthropologist Professor Radcliffe Brown of the University of Sydney, the Reverend J. S. Needham, chairman of the Australian Board of Missions, the Reverend W. Morley, secretary of the Association for the Protection of Native Races, and five members of Parliament-, met with the Minister of Home and Territories to urge the establishment of a royal commission into the status of Aborigines throughout the country, with special attention to the area controlled by Western Australia and the Commonwealth. The government was sufficiently impressed to solicit the views of the states, and when co-operation was not forthcoming decided to conduct its own investigation into conditions in the Northern Territory.³ The inquiry was undertaken by the Queensland Chief Protector of Aborigines, J. W. Bleakley, and his subsequent report served momentarily to focus attention on government policy. In the same year a royal commission on the Constitution led to renewed pressure for federal control.

The new mood was also evident in the attention accorded to the activities of punitive expeditions. For a brief period the curtain was drawn aside to reveal the brutal reality of race relations in the north. In 1926, in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, following the killing of a white pastoralist a heavily armed punitive party comprising two policemen, four other whites and seven Aborigines went on a killing spree. While some Aborigines were shot, it seems that a number of women and children were clubbed to death. The bodies were burned at four separate sites in what become known as the Forrest River massacre. A royal commission reported that at least eleven Aborigines had been killed; the Reverend E. R. Gribble, the missionary responsible for bringing the incident to public notice, put the death toll at 30. According to Aboriginal tradition, however, a much higher number of people were murdered.⁴ The two policemen who led the party were put on trial, to the outrage of the local white population which set up a fund to meet their legal costs. The police were acquitted and promoted out of the district. In 1928 a similar episode in central Australia sparked a much greater public outcry. Following the killing of a white dogger and an attack on a local pastoralist, a party led by Constable W. Murray launched a series of raids on the drought-stricken population in the Coniston regioll, north-west of Alice Springs. Murray admitted that his party had killed 31 Aborigines; estimates by missionaries who worked in the area were in the range of 70 to 100.⁵

In the short term, news of the killings focused greater attention on the treatment of Aborigines. The Adelaide Advertiser commented in an editorial that the Forrest River massacre had:

shocked all humane people in the Commonwealth, and created an irresistible demand for public action to save the remnant of the black population from extinction … Enough has become known regarding the horrible treatment of the aborigines on the outskirts of civilisation to make it imperative that measures should be taken for their better protection against cruelty and neglect, and to give them at least a chance of survival. It is a disgrace not merely to the Western State, but to Australia as a whole, that the responsibility of the white man to the original occupants of this continent should have been so shamefully evaded.⁶

With the onset of the Depression, the little interest that had been generated was diverted to issues of immediate significance to white Australians. A rough guide to the changing importance attached to Aboriginal issues is provided by indexes to major daily newspapers of the period, the Melbourne Argus and the Sydney Morning Herald. Table 1.1 lists items dealing with Aborigines at two yearly intervals.

TABLE 1.1: Content analysis of the Melbourne Argus and the Sydney Morning Herald: Items relating to Aborigines

	Argus	Sydney Morning Herald
1910	43
1912	33
1914	11
1916	11
1918	10
1920	8
1922	41
1924	18
1926	24
1928	82
1930	44
1932	40	93
1934	262	231
1936	116	86
1938	132	136

Source: Indexes of the respective newspapers, subject entries for Aborigines, anthropology, murder, Northern Territory.

While attention was diverted from Aboriginal issues in the early 1930s, the lack of interest which had characterised much of the first three decades of the century was not to return. A major pressure group, the Association for the Protection of Native Races, was re-activated as a result of the events of 1926–29 and the press was coming to regard the treatment of Aborigines in the north as a newsworthy subject.

In 1933 and 1934 national attention was again directed to northern methods of dealing with those Aborigines who dared to raise their hands against their superiors. A plan to send a punitive party into Arnhem Land following the killing of a policeman was aborted on instructions from Canberra and several Aborigines were persuaded by missionaries to travel to Darwin to explain their actions to the authorities. The arrest of one of their number and the apparent bias evident in the handling of their cases by Judge Wells of the Northern Territory Supreme Court led to widespread protest in the south, which is reflected in the marked increase in newspaper coverage of Aboriginal issues in 1934 (Table 1.1). While allegations of mistreatment continued to attract the press, a movement for a radical shift in policy, led by Professor A. P. Elkin of the University of Sydney, gathered support. Elkin argued that it was time to replace a negative approach, which only directed itself to the physical needs of Aborigines, with a ‘positive policy’ aimed at adapting the Aborigines to a new life. The government, concerned with Australia’s reputation abroad, was increasingly placed on the defensive and the political agenda was gradually reshaped. New issues were emerging. Could a different system of dealing with tribal Aborigines charged with criminal offences be instituted? Were there any prospects that ‘half-castes’, and perhaps even ‘full-blood’ Aborigines, could be educated and absorbed into the world of white Australians? Was the extinction of Aborigines inevitable?

Numbers and distribution

There was no reliable census of Aborigines in northern Australia in the first decades of the century. In 1911 the best estimates available to governments indicated that the largest Aboriginal populations were in Western Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory, with the estimates for each in the range of 20 000 to 25 000; some two-thirds of the surviving Aboriginal population was believed to be in northern Australia. In 1924 what was described as the first ‘census’ of the Aboriginal population merely served to confirm earlier figures: the combined Aboriginal and ‘half-caste’ population of Western Australia, the Northern Territory and Queensland was in excess of 60 000. Of the remaining states, New South Wales had a population of7000, South Australia 5000, and Victoria 500. Tasmania recognised no Aborigines within its borders.

The general expectation that the Aborigines would soon become extinct was supported by figures for those classed as ‘full-blood’, although even at the end of the 1930s there were still no reliable figures for much of the north. It was estimated in 1925 that the total ‘full-blood’ population was just over 62 000; by 1939 it had declined to under 52 000, the lower figure partly being the result of a significant revision of estimates in 1933. While the ‘full-blood’ population seemed to be declining as expected, governments were having to confront a problem unforseen at the turn of the century: the rapid increase in the population of mixed descent. The ‘half-caste’ population, as it was termed by contemporaries, was 10 000 in 1911; by 1939 it had increased to over 25 000, and was growing at a rate consistently in excess of the white population; in 1939 there were 10 000 people of mixed descent in New South Wales, 6800 in Queensland and 4700 in Western Australia. The combined Aboriginal population comprised about 1 per cent of the Australian total.

The letter of the law

In the nineteenth century the dispossession of Aborigines was achieved by...