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key indigenous australian issues
| home | news lStolen wages a major barrier to reconciliationBy Gary Highland
30 August 2007 - To MOST Australians, the word "slavery" conjures up images of Africans in chains being taken across the Atlantic to work the cotton fields of America's Deep South. We struggle to comprehend that slavery is also part of our own nation's history. Governments around Australia controlled wages, savings and benefits belonging to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people for most of the 20th century. Payments withheld included child endowment, pensions and even soldiers' pay. Much of the money held in trust was never paid to its owners. Trust account funds were transferred to public revenue, or disappeared through fraud or negligence along with many of the records. Historians estimate that tens of thousands of indigenous people had their labour controlled by state and territory governments during this time. Among those people was the great Aboriginal leader Lowitja O'Donoghue, who as a young woman had her wages placed in trust while she worked as a domestic in South Australia. Years later, when O'Donoghue began her nursing career, she sought to have this money paid to her so she could buy uniforms. However, the authorities turned down the request and she never received her money. In Queensland, Jubilee Jackson worked as a stockman near Mount Garnet for 60 years from the age of 10. His pay was a small amount of pocket money at rodeo time. The rest was held in a trust account. When he died in 1967, there was only $99 in his government-controlled account. The local police sergeant was later charged with multiple counts of fraud relating to several savings accounts. In New South Wales, my friend Rob Welsh's father, Ray, was one of 400 Aboriginal boys between five and 15 who were taken from their families and sent to the Kinchela Boys Home, near Kempsey, between 1924 and 1971. The boys received poor education, an inadequate diet and many suffered beatings and abuse. When they turned 15, the Kinchela Boys were sent to work as rural labourers. The Aboriginal Welfare Board kept their wages, which were supposed to remain in trust for them until they reached adulthood. Most never received any of their trust money. Across northern Australia from the Kimberley to Cape York, the unpaid labour of indigenous workers was used to establish lucrative industries such as beef cattle and pearling. In Queensland alone, it has been estimated that as much as $500 million in today's value was lost or stolen from indigenous families. Victoria was not immune to this practice either. Up to the mid-1960s, workers at the Lake Tyers reserve in Gippsland received only a small cash wage supplemented by rations. It is also likely that part or all of the wages of people under the Aboriginal Welfare Board were paid into trust, as were Commonwealth benefits like child endowment and pensions. More research is needed to determine what became of this money. Many of these workers across Australia faced a double injustice because they were also members of the Stolen Generations. They were removed from their families, culture and land and then had their wages and entitlements removed from them. The twin practices of child removal and stolen wages took many indigenous people into a form of cultural and economic exile, denied a place in indigenous society and then prevented from gaining the economic stake so essential to a decent life in the mainstream. To date only the NSW government has responded to this aspect of our nation's past with any decency, establishing an Aboriginal Trust Fund Repayment Scheme to fully reimburse claimants for money identified as still owing in today's value. In contrast, the Queensland government offered only a maximum $4000 per person as a "gesture of reconciliation" to compensate for decades of stolen and mismanaged wages and entitlements. In other states, governments have yet to meet their responsibility to ensure elderly and vulnerable indigenous people finally receive the payments denied to them for so many years. The unresolved issue of stolen wages remains one of the nation's greatest barriers to reconciliation and justice for indigenous people. Gary Highland is National Director of Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation (ANTaR). This is an excerpt from his introduction to Hard Labour, Stolen Wages: A National Report on Stolen Wages, available at www.antar.org.au Source: The Age related links:
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