A tale of three missions

NSW was more than twenty years later than Victoria in setting up government control of Aboriginal people, and in 1882 the first official Protector of Aborigines was appointed. He granted reserves and camping grounds to Aboriginal people throughout NSW, but within ten years many of them had been cancelled or revoked. However in 1891 the 300 acre Wallaga Lake Reserve near the sacred mountain Gulaga was established by the NSW Aborigines Protection Board. It was run by a state appointed manager instead of missionaries. God may not have been in control, but its residents were fenced in. 

In 1894 miners took gold valued at £3876 pounds from Gulaga while the traditional owners received an annual handout of less than £300. This is a little known and shameful fact from the nation’s gold history.

As townships expanded more reserves were revoked and the choices of Aboriginal people were further restricted when the NSW Aborigines’ Protection Act in 1909 was passed. Those regarded as full blood Aborigines were to stay on the reserves, while those of mixed ancestry were to be sent into the white community where their colour would slowly be bred out. How this translated from policy to practice was the state removal of children.  

Families were disrupted and so too was a culture practiced since the dreamtime as the manager did not allow residents to speak their own language. In 1941 the NSW protection board was renamed Aborigines Welfare Board, but the word ‘welfare’ apparently meant control. Percy Mumbler remembers; “When I was young and roamin’ around with my mother and father... the manager of Wallaga Lake sent the letter up to the manager at Roseby Park and told the manager we got to go home to Wallaga - or otherwise they’d send us away to the homes”. 

In 1949 Aboriginal people resisted government attempts to rezone some of the land at Wallaga Lake, but a sizeable chunk was sold to white people.

Max Harrison came from Wallaga Lake and got work in local sawmills, but when he went to visit his mother and family he had to report to the manager and say who he was coming to see and for how long; “He had a lot of power, you know, and we had no rights then, not under the Welfare... See, I was out workin’ in the white community and I was supposed to stay out that way so that people could look on me as being a white man, assimilated, you know”. 

Visitors were strictly controlled and most of the Australian population probably had no idea what life was like on a reserve. In 1965 Emil Witton, vice president of the Aboriginal Australian Fellowship, visited Wallaga Lake with Ken Brindle where; “Mr Brindle wanted to visit relatives. The Manager said that Mr Brindle, an Aboriginal, could enter the reserve and visit his relatives, but we as white people were not to get out of the car”.

In March 1983, the NSW Government passed the Aboriginal Land Rights Act, which transferred the title deeds of existing reserves to local communities, but at the same time it also passed the Crown Lands Validation of Revocation Act which validated the seizure of most of the Aboriginal reserves.  According to elder, Ossie Cruse, this is the reason there are so many camping grounds and caravan parks in such great locations in NSW. They are on land that had been set aside for Aboriginal people - then taken back. 

After a long struggle in 1984, Wallaga Lake became the first aboriginal community in New South Wales to receive title deeds for what little that remained of their traditional lands.

Delegate

In June 1892 the Aborigines Protection Board gazetted an Aboriginal Reserve about 5 kilometres from the township of Delegate (a corruption of an Aboriginal word meaning one big hill). It was up on the highlands of the Monaro on a site that had been recorded before as having been in use by Aboriginal people.  

Delegate was run as a station - meaning that a police station was responsible for the local Aborigines.  Importantly, although rations were issued from a police station, the people were unsupervised. Their lives were not controlled, they were free to take what work they could find and they were free to travel. In fact, there was a walking track between the reserve at Delegate and the mission at Lake Tyers.