home | news l

Stolen Wages and Consequential Indigenous Poverty: A National Issue

Assoc. Professor Anna Haebich

Kathleen Fitzpatrick Lecture
Department of History
University of Melbourne

20 May 2004 - At last, the `Stolen wages’ issue is heating up after many frustrating decades of lobbying by Aboriginal people. Over the last 12 months it has begun a seismic shift from local Queensland concern about unpaid Aboriginal wages to an industrial wage justice issue of national significance encompassing swag of discriminatory practices. Litigation and a national public awareness campaign are in process and a national report documenting the history and legacy is now in the pipeline.

I first heard stories in the 1980s from Aboriginal workers claiming to have been robbed of their wages by the West Australian government. I knew that prior to the introduction of equal wages in 1968 Aborigines in the pastoral industry had worked in appalling conditions for no pay. But the people I listened to had been sent out to paid work under government supervision. They told me that their wages were put directly into government Trust Accounts and that they had received nothing back after years of back breaking labour. I went on to write about the systematic withholding of wages in Western Australia in my book For Their Own Good.

Meanwhile historian Dr Ros Kidd was beginning her forensic analysis of enforced wage `saving’ in Queensland. Aboriginal writers like Steve Kinnane and Glenys Ward were publishing personal accounts of forced and unpaid servitude. During the 1990s the RCIADIC and BTH Inquiry and my own book, Broken Circles, along with hundreds of hours of Aboriginal testimony, provided further evidence of past nationwide discriminatory treatment of Aboriginal workers of all ages.

An historic breakthrough came in 1996 when the Human Rights Commission ruled that between 1975 and 1986 the Queensland government had contravened the federal 1975 Anti Discrimination Act by paying below award wages to Aboriginal workers on government settlements. The `Palm Island Case’ had gone ahead despite attempts by the Queensland government seeking to impound and possibly destroy crucial evidence documenting legal advice to government and decisions to endorse mass sackings rather than budget for proper wage payments. It was only in 1986 with the introduction of Aboriginal community control that award rates were paid.

The HRC instructed the Queensland government to make a formal written apology and to pay compensation of $7000 to each claimant. However, it only complied when former workers began federal court action in 1997. To date around $50M has been paid out to claimants.

This success spurred action in Queensland for the return of all wages `robbed’ from Aboriginal workers. Hoping to curb further litigation and costs, the Queensland government announced in 2002 a reparations package offering $2-4,000 to living claimants on proof of their eligibility and on condition of their signing an indemnity forfeiting their rights to any future legal action.

The state Aboriginal Coordinating Council called the offer an insult. The package total of $56.5M was a mere fraction of all wages due. In fact, with interest owed and consequential damage for decades of exploitation calculated in, some Aboriginal organisations estimated that between $1-3B should be returned. The offer was also unjust because of the obligatory legal indemnity and refusal to pay families of deceased workers.

At best it could be considered a down payment. It was particularly insulting since the sum of $56.5M was not significantly greater than the total paid out to Palm Island claimants to compensate them for under award wages paid over one decade. This offer was meant to compensate workers who were robbed of their wages over several decades.

The Aboriginal Coordinating Council acknowledged that desperate circumstances would force people to accept activist and artist Gloria Beckett, dying of cancer told the press that she was owed far more after decades of domestic service, but that her family had to take the money to pay for her funeral. The Aboriginal Coordinating Council has since been sacked by the Queensland government.

The offer has backfired on the Beattie government. To date only a quarter of eligible claimants have applied, and litigation is continuing. Last year descendants of deceased Aboriginal boxing champion Elley Bennett lodged a writ in the Queensland Supreme Court to reclaim winnings of $3.5M.

The Lutheran Church and the Queensland government were also in court for payment of below award wages to mission workers. With both sides defending the act, the matter has been set-aside until the end of 2004 ­ a major blow for fragile elderly claimants.

Public protest in Queensland has been the catalyst for a national Stolen Wages campaign, led by the Stolen Wages Working Group, which represents claimants and their families.

ANTAR, PIAC and various community organisations and unions have adopted it as a major wage justice and industrial issue.

While local mainstream media has shown little interest, the BBC News World Edition ran an extensive coverage in April with personal stories from various workers A decisive moment came in New South Wales earlier this year after the National Indigenous Times published a leaked cabinet document revealing that the Department of Community Services had been lobbying Cabinet for several years to endorse a plan to pay back $69M to 11,500 Aboriginal people whose wages, pensions, inheritances, lump sum entitlements and child endowment payments had been held in trust funds set up by the government between 1900-69. Premier Carr was forced to make a formal apology in State parliament and a commitment to identify and reimburse all claimants. Now he has announced the appointment of a 3-person panel to report by October on a scheme for repayment of due entitlements plus interest from a kitty of $70M to claimants, including families of deceased workers. Despite the virtual absence of archival records and calls for recognition of oral evidence, claimants will be required to provide some form of documentary evidence, causing claimant Les Ridgeway to ask, `How do we get to prove anything when they’ve got no documents?’ Aboriginal leaders, backed by ATSIC are now planning a class action to recoup the $350M of stolen wages that they claim is owed.

In October this year the Centre for Public Culture and Ideas at Griffith University will co-host an international forum with keynote speakers including Elouise Cobell, the lead plaintiff from the Montana Blackfeet nation class action in the USA. After several years of litigation, the court has ruled that the US government breached its fiduciary duties to trust account beneficiaries and requires that it provide a complete and full accounting for the half a million accounts, estimated to be out by billions of dollars due to mismanagement and missing records. Other speakers at the forum will include international human rights lawyer Justice Marcus Einfeld who, in a recent speech, claimed: We stole their land. We stole their children. Now we admit to stealing their money too. Is there anything left to take? Only the souls of a proud and defiant people have been spared ­ and I think they too would have been taken if our governments knew how. He also called for an independent federal or Human Rights Commission inquiry `to get to the roots of the matter’. Following the forum a community meeting will be held to bring together interested parties from around the nation to push the matter forward.

Justice Enfield’s call has been taken up by the states. Work on a preliminary national report is exposing history of systematic economic deprivation, exclusion and neglect, often associated with mismanagement and even official fraud, implemented by governments under policies of protection and assimilation. With the exception perhaps of Tasmania, Aboriginal workers everywhere experienced this `special treatment’. A swag of practices are being investigated: principally non-payment, under-payment and withholding of wages, welfare benefits and deceased estates, but also government failure to fulfil its fiduciary duty to ensure sufficient training, wages, protections and conditions for Aboriginal workers. By denying generations of Aboriginal people the right to decent and productive work, proper wages, sufficient services and adequate welfare, governments laid the basis for an Aboriginal underclass without sufficient land, property, capital, economic skills or employment prospects. In this way governments actively contributed to the `consequential poverty’ referred to in the title to this lecture. This is a stark irony in a nation that prides itself on its history as a `workers paradise’ and that endorses the rights of workers enshrined in international conventions of the ILO and the United Nations.

My own research over the years has made clear to me that when governments, money and Aboriginal people cross paths strange things can happen and governments in particular can be swept up in a seemingly irresistible illogic. Consider this case from Western Australia. In developing the wheat belt early last century, West Australian governments gave prospective farmers cheap land and easy credit in return for improvements (residence, clearing, fencing) completed over a set period of time. Nobody expected that local Nyungar families would apply, but they did. After some discussion the government magnanimously decided to include Nyungar applicants, but only under `special conditions’. While other farmers were granted freehold blocks, their land would be granted as Aboriginal reserves of one or two hundred acres, with residency contingent on completing the very same improvements set for all other farmers. These `special conditions’ were imposed to quell white fears that Aboriginal families would simply sell the land and pocket the cash. Around 16 of these Aboriginal farms were granted before 1910 and by 1914 all had been resumed. At the time this dismal outcome was blamed on perceived Aboriginal racial and cultural traits and was accepted as further proof that they were not and never could be `economic men’. However, it was those `special conditions’ that grew out of white Australian concerns that destined the Nyungar farmers for failure. Without freehold title to their farms they had no security to raise capital to finance the required improvements to their blocks. The only way they could get money was to work for other farmers at the very time they should have been working on their own land. They were trapped in an impossible situation. Their absences from their blocks were reported by local farmers with an eye to their own gain, and land inspectors informed Head Office in Perth of their seeming inability to complete improvements. Finally the families were ordered off their blocks with no compensation for work done and the land was resumed and parcelled out to adjoining farmers. Meanwhile government officers blamed the Aboriginal farmers for their misfortunes and commiserated with their colleagues over the failure of their good intentions.

This case from the past has a sadly familiar ring to this day. We still see variations of this same illogic played out. Stated intentions to liberate Aboriginal people from poverty and dependency are translated into projects hedged about with `special conditions’ ­ deprivations, interventions, tutelage, control, surveillance, accountability and punishments. These limit and distort rather than liberate and empower and they make white expectations of failure into self-fulfilling prophecies while they also elicit the secret pleasures of saying `I told you so’ and `we did our best for them’. Just last year we heard then Federal Minister Wilson Tuckey’s claim before the ATSIC Review Tribunal that `fundamentals of Aboriginal culture’ prevent `fair and prudential’ administration of public monies. The self-serving interests of stakeholders ­ managers, officials, employers, companies etc ­ have played an integral role in how these processes have been played out, along with rigid bureaucratic structures and stereotyped white imaginings about Aboriginal people, identity and nationhood.

Of the Holy Trinity of cleanliness, work and religion of earlier `civilising’ projects, work was the true centrepiece. Left initially to employers and missionaries, from the late nineteenth century work became a focus for government boards and departments intent on accelerating the transformation of hunters and gatherers into docile cheap labour, to serve local employers and to be self-supporting rather joining the ranks of the dependant poor. In Victoria children were taken from their families in government stations like Corranderk and apprenticed to employers on the outside. Families who objected could be expelled from their homes and then refused rations and mainstream welfare benefits on the outside, rendering them vulnerable to poverty and further family break-up.

By contrast, in north Queensland the government transferred child workers from employers to government missions, ostensibly for their better protection and training, but then sent them out again, often to the same heartless employers. Woven into the legislative framework that controlled Aboriginal lives were controls and protections over labour conditions, training, wages and property, for Aboriginal people within Aboriginal institutions and without. This `special treatment’ was applied like a grid to all Aborigines ­ `one size fits all’. For the many caught up in this web, life was a trajectory of forced removal from family to the drudgery of institutional life and then out to work until finally, after years of back breaking labour, they finished up with no family, no savings and nowhere to go.

Queensland had the most extensive system of Aboriginal labour management and enforced wage `saving’ that was admired, envied and copied by the other states. This operated from 1897 to 1972 and affected over half of the state’s Aboriginal population, which grew from 15,000 in 1910 to 40,000 in 1960. Considerable government resources ­ money, time and manpower went into clearing people from the town camps and forcing them to work in institutions or back on the outside under government control. A consequence was that Aboriginal workers were confined to a narrow niche of domestic, farm or pastoral labour, without the skills to negotiate their economic circumstances. Rather than enforcing their powers to protect Aboriginal workers from exploitation and abuse, governments set about providing cheap unregulated labour, syphoning off workers’ wages to meet administrative needs at the expense of their families. Denied proper schooling, housing, medical care and cash welfare payments taken for granted by other Australians, Aboriginal people were especially vulnerable to poverty and the consequential break up of their families. Following the Stolen Children disclosures, we are familiar with the bleak conditions for children growing up in Aboriginal institutions. Authorities knew that institutions produced institutionalised adults, not competent workers, but these remained the principal instruments of training for work. The children and young people were not taught how to become independent effective workers in a cash economy. Their `training’ meant doing jobs for no pay, and learning about order and routine, subservience, obedience and taking orders, enforced through physical, emotional and psychological punishments. There was no training in how to use money or how to shop. The deplorable conditions in which they were forced to live were not likely to produce fit and healthy workers. At Palm Island in the 1930s malnutrition and deaths of the very young and elderly were rife and yet the superintendent opposed the demands of a visiting doctor for more rations and even fruit juice for the children on the grounds that they were too costly.

Once in employment, workers were denied the normal rewards that can reinforce the positive experience of work ­ proper wages, safety, good living conditions, protection and security, the right to choice and respect for work well done. Queensland governments consistently refused to adopt the basic wage ­ introduced in 1907 to ensure sufficient living conditions for Australian working families. From 1919 to 1968 wages in the pastoral industry were set at 66% of the basic wage, although for much of this time the government failed to demand that quota. Workers on missions and government settlements received no pay at all. Aboriginal exclusion from unions and legal compensation for work injuries was also endorsed along harsh punishments such as imprisonment for breach of employment contracts.

Then on top of all this Queensland governments robbed workers of their wages and of their capacity to care for themselves and their families. Official claims to be forging Aboriginal economic independence, were contradicted by actions that guaranteed and perpetuated dependence and poverty. Aboriginal wages were locked up, frozen in government accounts when the money was urgently needed by families to survive. Imagine how it would affect your family’s situation if over the decades of your working life you were forced, in addition to paying income tax, to pay up to three quarters of your wages into a government savings account and you never got the money back. This assault on the hip pocket is something that we would relate to with outrage and condemn as unacceptable and un-Australian. Between 1904 and 1919 the Queensland government unrolled a system of compulsory wage saving for Aboriginal workers. Up to 75 percent of their wages would be paid directly to police protectors and then deposited in the Queensland Aboriginals Account to be managed and invested by the government. The remainder was to be paid as `pocket money’ by employers. This system operated into the 1970s. No proper records exist but one estimate is that a total of $560M of individual life savings was locked up in this way. In 1936 pastoral employee Johnny M had 645 pounds in savings ­ enough to buy a 3-bedroom home on the outskirts of Sydney ­ but he could not access his money. Workers had to ask local police officers for cash from their accounts to pay for personal items, travel, medical care etc. Police were under no obligation to be helpful nor were they or employers held accountable for how they handled Aboriginal wages and successive governments refused to act on complaints from Aboriginal workers.

In 1943 the Aborigines Welfare Fund was set up to administer moneys `for the general benefit’ of Aboriginal people drawn from a new tax of up to ten percent on Aboriginal wages, surplus interest and profits from the Aboriginals Account, profits from settlement enterprises (worked by free Aboriginal labour) and unclaimed deceased estates. In practice the bulk of this money went towards the operational costs of the settlements in which Aboriginal people were forced to live, and even the costs of transporting them there. The story of injustice does not end here. Ros Kidd has compiled compelling evidence of negligent accounting, mismanagement and fraudulent use by Queensland governments of Aboriginal wages and savings in these accounts. They did nothing to stop the trail of mismanagement and fraud that led from employers, police protectors, institutional staff, workers in head office to highly placed government officials. Moneys were also diverted to cover other state expenses and to generate state profit. One particular payment continues to rankle Murri people in Brisbane ­ the use of their wages to pay for the building of the Redcliffe Public Hospital ­ a hospital that refused to admit Aboriginal patients until recent years.

Today few records of the savings and welfare funds remain in the Queensland state archives. What happened to the hundreds of millions of wage savings of individual people may never be known. At present the Aborigines Welfare Fund holds only $8.6M. There are no proper records to account for what happened to the other millions of dollars channelled into the Fund. Now the Queensland government has decreed that this money will be used to fund `support projects’ such as an Aboriginal bank, history kits for schools and family tombstones. This despite Aboriginal protests that the money belongs to individuals and should be returned to them to use as they wish. Once again government has adopted `special conditions’ for Aboriginal people.

When Australian governments adopted the policy of assimilation in the 1950s they promised to create a new level playing field and improvements across the board for Aboriginal people. Twenty years later they could rightfully showcase momentous legislative and administrative reforms; however, outside of the statute books that equal playing field ­ a prerequisite for the achievement of assimilation ­ remained an elusive dream. So too did economic parity and independence. Despite important reforms such as opening up access to mainstream services and cash welfare benefits, governments failed to provide the essential resources to relieve the consequential poverty of earlier policies. Rather than benefiting from work opportunities in the mainstream economy, many Aboriginal people became enmeshed in welfare dependency, for which they were blamed, once again.

In the brave new world of assimilation, the site for transformation was no longer the multi-purpose institution. It was now the imagined suburban Aboriginal nuclear household, images of which saturated government publications of the period. As with working class families at the end of the 19th century, the nuclear family was to be both the vehicle and destination of assimilation into middle class family life. The suburban home provided a potent public sign of successful assimilation that could be seen, inspected and reported on. In a further twist of government illogic, work was allowed to slip from the agenda, despite the fact that the survival of the conventional suburban home rested on a regular male income.

A West Australian government pamphlet Citizens from 1964 depicts Aboriginal people acting as responsible citizens in various settings, but above all, living as nuclear families on typical suburban blocks with a brick house, garden, family car, interior furnishings and household appliances with mum in the kitchen, dad coming home from work and the children from school with an older sister wearing the latest style frock. Such imagery mirrored back to white Australian audiences their own desires for a comfortable suburban life and appealed to the popular, albeit often misguided, altruism circulating at the time. It also reinforced preconceptions that assimilation was inevitable and unproblematic, a passage to a way of life that was normal and welcoming. This imagery suggested that many Aboriginal families had already successfully negotiated the transition. In fact, it was light years away from the experiences of most Aboriginal people.

Assimilation swept families up in a spiralling accumulation of pressures to change and of punishments for failing to adopt a new way of life that few had the means to achieve, whether or not they wished to take it on. Assimilation accelerated the `special conditions’ ­ deprivations, interventions, tutelage, control, surveillance, accountability and punishments ­ that once again limited and distorted responses, intentions and outcomes. Bureaucratic, cultural and demographic factors, along with continuing white racism, all contributed to this state of affairs. Grossly inadequate government funding was a central stumbling block, along with stifling institutional inertia and entrenched resistance to change. Administrators seemed unable to break away from established `practices of suppression’ that severely disadvantaged Aboriginal communities and ultimately blocked the road to assimilation.

There is a sadly familiar ring to the following list of their sins of omission and commission:

• Inability to re-form around new policy directives
• Lack of research and planning
• Grossly inadequate resources (financial and human)
• Programs of change imposed from above
• Inability to relinquish punitive controlling measures
• Blindness to the ethnocentrism of policy and practice
• Failure to appreciate the extent of white racism and its potential to obstruct initiatives, as well as Aboriginal resistance and agency.

Aboriginal resistance escalated over the decades as official goals clashed with Aboriginal cultural imperatives. Families had welcomed the promise of new conditions and rights, but many resisted pressures to abandon the support of their extended families, for the more precarious nuclear family unit. Official expectations of middle-class family living often clashed with accepted Aboriginal ways of doing things. Aboriginal people also resented pressures to uncritically adopt the ways of the people who had oppressed and rejected them for so long. And, as anthropologist Diane Barwick observed at the time, referring to families she worked with in Melbourne, white people and their ways `simply weren’t interesting’. With a combination of low irregular incomes and many dependants ­ the 1966 Census showed 50 percent of Aborigines were under the age of twenty-one ­ families had a `special vulnerability’ to the downturn in rural employment. In the past governments had responded by removing children from impoverished Aboriginal families, and even now, despite their avowed commitment to the intact nuclear family unit, they resorted to the same tactics, thereby perpetuating Aboriginal resentments.

Queensland was the outsider, paying lip service to assimilation, while remaining committed to its segregated institutions. This continued until the early 1970s when the Whitlam Labour government forced its hand. The continuing legacy of dormitory life, together with family break-up through outside employment, `precluded the most basic requirements of domestic and familial normality’.

The 2001 Cape York Justice Study has documented how the families on Queensland settlements lived in shacks with `leaking roofs without ceilings or bathrooms, often averaged over eight occupants, and were serviced by open, overflowing drains’. Together with sub-standard sanitation and water supplies and negligent medical services, this guaranteed the chronic illnesses, infestations of parasites and infections that plagued routines of work and schooling. A survey of infant mortality by the Queensland Institute of Medical Research recorded death rates six times higher than the state average. Malnutrition was found to be the key factor in 85 percent of infant deaths under the age of four. As the Cape York Justice Study observed, in `another situation these were precisely the conditions that would have prompted State intervention to remove children `for their own good’’. Furthermore, these `extreme deficiencies undercut political rhetoric towards assimilation²’ and made it `nearly impossible for children to develop to take their rightful place as citizens anywhere in Australia’.

Rather than improving conditions, officials increased the policing and punishment of residents. With no incomes to purchase utensils, cleaning products or serviceable furnishings, they were punished for failing to meet standards of cleanliness and hygiene. In 1966 superintendents were granted sweeping powers to punish residents for `being idle, careless or negligent at work, refusing to work or behaving in an offensive, insolent or disorderly manner, failure to conform to reasonable standards of good conduct, exhibiting behaviour detrimental to the wellbeing of other persons, committing acts subversive of good order or discipline’. The Cape York Justice Study later commented that this was `part of what was publicly claimed as a `liberalisation’ of State controls’ under assimilation policy.

In southern Australia the intention was to empty institutions and town camps and to relocate Aboriginal families to housing estates in the suburbs, despite the fact that white residents did not want them there and that miserly state funding meant that there were few homes for them to move to. When Western Australia converted its institutions to farm training schools for children all adult residents ­mostly the elderly, sick and institutionalised who had lived there all their lives ­ were directed to move out, with only a train ticket to help them on their way. One woman I interviewed was a small child when she arrived at Moore River Native Settlement north of Perth in 1918 and, apart from a brief placement outside as a domestic servant, had lived there continuously, first in the dormitory, then working long hours without pay sewing garments for government departments and finally marrying and going to live in a tent in the settlement camp. With no alternative, she thought to return with her family to the same sort of fringe camp in the same district her mother had originally been taken from, with nothing to show for all their years away, to begin picking up the pieces of their disrupted lives. However, the fringe camps were being cleared and bulldozed and they had nowhere to go.

The solution of `transitional housing’ was a cheap way of accommodating the many families rendered homeless by the emptying of institutions and reserves, while supposedly preparing them for life in the suburbs. Families living in shacks on reserves with shared shower and toilet blocks were to be rewarded with the privilege of moving up the housing ladder as their life style began to approximate white models and practices. However, progress was blocked by the dearth of Aboriginal housing: in 1967 Western Australia had just over 500 one-roomed huts and only 35 conventional homes. A consequence of limited housing was overcrowding ­ in rural New South Wales in 1965, the average Aboriginal household group was double the state round. Frustrated by the lack of resources to bring about change, government officers fell back on established practices and escalated management of Aboriginal households and their living arrangements and cultural practices.

Mothers were expected to lead the charge in the home. The New South Wales Aborigines Welfare Board’s claim that `training for assimilation begins in the home’ meant creating `good wives’ and `responsible mothers’ who would make a stable home for their husbands and children. This created a terrible double bind: although most lived without the most basic comforts of home, struggling to survive on household incomes far below the minimum wage, they were blamed for failing to maintain imposed new standards. They were to be trained in homemaking and home-management and skills of dealing with shopkeepers, teachers, hospital staff, maternal and child welfare nurses, police and so on. White women, formerly encountered as staff in institutions or employers in domestic service, now converged on Aboriginal households in professional roles as social workers, clinic nurses, counsellors and teachers or as church and community volunteers.

Cleanliness was presented as an essential marker of assimilated households. An article in the New South Wales Dawn Magazine claimed that `mothers are responsible for the cleanliness of their homes, and their families, and if they do their part, this business of assimilation can be speeded up until in a few years time the colour bar will be ceased’. They should practice `scrupulous personal cleanliness and in the home, honesty, good behaviour and their homes should be sober and clean with attractive table settings and clean yards free of flies. Mothers who failed to follow suit should be told that they were `letting you all down’. `I love my dark friends’ the writer concluded, `and I want them to become known as the cleanest dark race there is. I know how very clean many of them are and how they have had to suffer for the few careless ones.’ One man recalled that when welfare came to inspect homes in his street, families would surreptitiously move food, utensils and small items of furniture from one house to the next as the inspection progressed down the street. The tragedy for families of course was that mothers who failed to maintain these standards faced having their children removed. This comment from a welfare officer in Western Australia in 1968 reflects the significance of home environments in child removals: A thorough examination was not made, as the father was not present. From what I saw, however, I am satisfied that the children are `neglected’, if for no other reason than the shack they live in.

This threat of removal was exacerbated by an aggressive program of assimilation through education of children and mainstreaming of child welfare services. In Western Australia there were now a host of placements for Aboriginal children in Aboriginal hostels, Department of Child Welfare homes, foster and adoptive families, and institutions for juvenile offenders. Not surprisingly, numbers increased by over a thousand between 1960 and 1966 and by 1970 20 percent of all children in Department of Child Welfare institutions were Aboriginal. This happened despite repeated official instructions that field officers were to `no longer deal with children as a separate entity and the only part of the Aboriginal race worth saving’ but to work with intact families since children were `best reared with their parents under normal circumstances’.

With all this attention on mothers in the home and schooling of the rising generations, what was being done to develop the role of the male head of the house and principal wage earner? Very little it seems. The illogic of this omission was referred to earlier. A key element in creating stable assimilated suburban nuclear families was the father’s regular income, a fact acknowledged in the creation of Australia’s basic wage for working families. And yet this was essentially overlooked in the assimilation project with disastrous results. The 1966 National Census ­ the first to attempt to collect Aboriginal statistics ­ reported Aboriginal male unemployment at double the national rate, probably a woeful underestimate of the situation. Rural workers were left to fend for themselves in a shrinking labour market. Those who did find work out in the surrounding districts were told to leave their children behind to attend school or face losing them. Many workers packed up their families and moved to the city to try to find factory and labouring work, moving in with relations in already over-crowded accommodation. Most became trapped in a cycle of unemployment and deepening poverty. In Queensland continued wage deductions for workers outside the settlements meant a further impediment to change.

Schooling and training for young men continued to focus on rural skills, with only a select few offered apprenticeships in industry. Male authority within the family, already weakened by the focus on mothers in the home, was further undermined by the actions of some zealous government officers who, critical of what were conventional Aboriginal male behaviours, encouraged some mothers to live independently with their children on government welfare benefits. Federal social security and other cash benefits, gradually extended to Aboriginal families over a thirty-year period from the mid-1940s, provided much needed relief for the many struggling families, previously eligible only for rations of flour, tea and sugar and then often only in centralised settlements. But for families with limited access to paid employment in the mainstream economy, this also created an escalating dependency on welfare and government benevolence, and reinforced white preconceptions about their inability to function successfully as `economic men’. And once again those same `special conditions’ came into play. There was the extended period of time taken to allow all Aboriginal people to claim all benefits and initially, at least, these benefits were not paid directly to individuals, as was the case for other Australians. For administrators, missionaries and employers accustomed to dipping into moneys due to Aboriginal people they were simply another source of funding. In the early 1960s the Queensland government was planning to reduce expenditure by diverting Aboriginal pension moneys to state revenue. These practices continued in remote areas in northern and central Australia into the early 1970s. Lack of supervision created opportunities for abuse: for example welfare officers in the early 1960s observed Kimberley pastoralists paying their Aboriginal workers out of pension moneys and issuing social security payments in kind as rations of flour, tea and sugar.

A particular injustice was the manipulation of child endowment payments due to Aboriginal families from 1942. These moneys were intended to assist Australian mothers to keep their families together. Child endowment was to: Š ease the burden of the mother of the family. It relieves her at least of some of the fear that adversity may prevent her from giving to her children that adequate support which they deserve and which she desires to provide. Prime Minister Menzies stated in Federal Parliament that the benefit was `a redistribution of the national income’ for the `practical enjoyment and aid of families and to relieve `the economic pressures on parents’. Introduced during the 1940s it was set at 5 shillings for the first child and ten shillings for each other child. Given the size of most Aboriginal families this should have constituted a boon for struggling parents. Instead it brought a new burst of special conditions.

In Western Australia police screened Aboriginal mothers applying for child endowment and those deemed `incapable’ of using the money `properly’ were instructed to place orders on local storekeepers. All mothers remained under police surveillance and welfare officers recorded their advance towards assimilation. Mothers who objected faced the threat of removal of their children. The new Commissioner of Native Affairs stopped this practice in the early 1950s on the grounds that it was `a most iniquitous and inequitable deal’. However, as a matter of expediency, employers in the north continued to distribute endowment payments into the 1960s with little supervision. Shirley Andrews of the Council for Aboriginal Rights commented at the time that it was `common knowledge that [child endowment] money has been misappropriated [by these employers] in some cases and mishandled in many’. A further injustice was the channelling of child endowment moneys to expand institutional facilities for Aboriginal children. For example, bulk endowment payments to missions and settlements in Queensland and the Northern Territory were used to finance capital works such as settlement schools, dormitories, hospital clinics and art workshops.

In this way, child endowment contributed to the continued separation of children from their families, in contradiction to the stated aims of endowment and the policy of assimilation. In 1971 a columnist in the Melbourne Age newspaper asked ` What motivations will [Aboriginal] people have for health, hygiene and better housing when their past has been destroyed, their present is lived in squalor and their future holds little hope?’ Thirty years later the Cape York Justice Study was asking the same questions after visiting house after house crammed with families of several generations surviving on pooled welfare benefits and living without even basic furnishings such as tables and chairs. Thirty years after the Age article the census registered continuing alarming rates of Aboriginal unemployment, calculated at 3 times higher than the rate for non-Indigenous Australians, with rates for Indigenous youth peaking at 31.8 percent. Of employed Aboriginal people (which includes those working for the dole on CDEP schemes) 60 percent worked in low skill occupations. Only two percent were listed as employers. Add to this the alarming statistics for Aboriginal health and life expectancy. The children are paying the price of growing up in these poverty-stricken environments.

I have argued that this is `consequential poverty’ ­ a direct consequence of the `special conditions’ imposed on Aboriginal families by successive governments, with devastating consequences for Aboriginal households. As Ros Kidd stated in a recent public lecture on the Stolen Wages issue: governments institutionalised poverty, hunger, destitution, sickness and death to a degree unheard of in our `free’ country. It is government, which charted their failures and hid those records from the public; it is governments which must now be made accountable for the deeds of their office deeds whose cost haunts and shames our nation today.

I have also argued that a tragic illogic has plagued government planning and implementation into the present as stated intentions to liberate Aboriginal people from poverty and dependency are translated into projects that limit and distort and that reinvigorate self-fulfilling prophecies of failure and hopelessness. But it is not just government. We are all responsible. The interests, imaginings and fears that we hold within us as a nation help to shape these ingrained patterns and to bestow an appearance of normality on the illogic in our governments’ dealings with Aboriginal people.

These stem from our colonial past and the continuing colonial nature of our relationships with Aboriginal people. Let’s not be kept in an hypnotic and comfortable `twilight of knowing’ about this issue, I urge you to read, find out more, do your own research and support the initiative of Aboriginal leaders and claimants.

In his 2002 The Price of Reconciliation speech Justice Einfeld concluded: The things in the past should not have happened. Together they are human wrongs, not for blame in the crude sense. But for the deepest regret and for a commitment to put them right as a matter of the utmost urgency. If they represent what some have called a black armband of history, I for one wear it as a mark of sorrow, and as a commitment to reconciliation. Rather a black armband that a white blindfold to shut out the truth. Let us not devastate another opportunity to demonstrate our pledge to make amends.

Surely the Stolen Wages issue is the ideal vehicle to finally snap Australians out of that hypnotic twilight zone and to create a common understanding of what Aboriginal people have had to endure in the past and the will to work together to create a better future.

Source: Griffith University

Further information: stolen wages issues page - includes news index and external links

|| click to go to the top of this page