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AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINES: THEIR FUTURE WELFARE

On This Day - The Times, August 8, 1922

8 August 2002 - Australia is the only Commonwealth country that has never entered an official treaty with its indigenous peoples. Since 1967 Aborigines have had full citizenship, but have yet to receive a formal apology or financial compensation.

OUT on Ooldea, on the great trans-continental railway line, lives Mrs. Daisy Bates, a woman whose name is well known wherever Australians gather.

With heroic obedience to a fine ideal she has pitched her tent among the blacks, attending to their ills and providing them with food. Some people, and they are not unmindful of her unique self-sacrifice, think it would be better if she were less generous. The Australian native becomes absolutely lazy and dependent as soon as he gets the idea into his head that it is somebody else’s duty to care for him and supply him with rations and with blankets.

Mrs. Bates is not the only one who is concerned with the welfare of the aborigine. It is a problem which is becoming increasingly difficult to the authorities, and many minds are worried over the future management of the tribes. One solution of the problem appears to be to segregate the diseased, and give them medical attention; to let the mission stations do their best with the numbers they have there, and to encourage the wild natives to keep away from the tragic clashing with white civilization.

Even those mission stations which have turned black labour to commercial account to make the undertakings self-supporting are beset by difficulties, due to the nomadic instincts of this race and inherent qualities which chafe when the harness of discipline is put on. In his natural home the Australian black is a simple child of nature and a gentleman too; but, out of his element, he is cunning, indolent, morally lax, and too often altogether contemptible.

The most important step taken in recent years to save these wild tribes is the establishment of a sanctuary in the far-away country on the border of South Australia, Western Australia, and the Northern Territory. This “corner” consists of 65,700 square miles. Whites may not enter that domain, except at the risk of serious penalty. Here the natives are able to maintain their wonderful traditions, and live in all their old simplicity. Isolation for the black means preservation. The number of full-blooded blacks remaining in Australia and still enjoying the freedom of their savage state is stated to be 59.000. There are remarkable instances of blacks attaining a high degree of Western civilisation. There has just died in Adelaide, at the age of 57, Matthew Kropinyerie, whose father was a full-blooded native and whose mother had also black blood. In a long obituary notice the Adelaide Register described him as a mental prodigy. The purity of his English and the comprehensiveness of his vocabulary was unique.

Kropinyerie was a diligent and discriminating reader. “I have read by starlight, moonlight, candlelight, and firelight,” he said once, “until I have read myself almost blind.”

The other type provides a sharp contrast. Quite recently a male, named Wongacurra, was reported to have murdered Konica, a “lubra” (young woman).

He had lost his own lubra and two piccaninnies by death following upon a disease, which, according to tribal law, was due to witchcraft. By some subtlety of native reasoning he fastened the blame on Kon-ica, and, after tracking her through wild country for several days, came upon her when she was digging in a rabbit warren. He completed his mission of revenge with a spear. The black was sentenced to death for his crime, but the sentence so aroused the indignation of the community that a deputation waited upon the Government. Wongacurra’s death sentence was commuted to imprisonment for life.

But it is questionable whether, confined within the narrow limits of his cell, and with unaccustomed clothes on his body, the untutored savage would not have preferred punishment by death at the hands of opposing warriors in the great battleground of Australia’s silent interior.

This article appeared in The Times

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