Re-thinking Aboriginal history

From the earliest days, Aboriginal people were encouraged to lease plots of land, up to 160 acres rent-free, and to live on the land, which usually happened to be in the country from where they came. The earliest record seems to be a woman who had married a white man – often white men thought that, if they married an Aboriginal woman, they could get a piece of land, but no, the lease was always vested in the Aboriginal partner.

During the 1890s, more than forty Aboriginal people, including at least three women, held such leases. In fact, one Mission may have wound down precisely because the more capable men took out leases of their own, leaving the Mission bereft of labour and getting seriously into debt.

In sum, again there does not seem to be any evidence of any intention to drive people from their country. Again, quite the reverse.

Stealing countless children from their families

It's probably no secret that colonisation disrupted much of Aboriginal traditional life and family patterns. Women had children by white Men (as well as Africans, Chinese, Afghans and West Indians) and lived peripatetic lives around the towns. Many children were abandoned or orphaned by single mothers who either could not support them or died. Many children were brought down from the North by stockman and survey teams, sometimes from inter-state, and then abandoned in the city.

All States have fiduciary obligations to their inhabitants, especially to children. The Protector was, in effect and in law, the legal guardian responsible for the well-being of such abandoned children. Facilities in those days were either rudimentary or non-existent, so the most suitable place for such children, short of locating their living relatives (which occurred occasionally), was to ask a particular Mission if they could take them. Often this was not possible, so the Protector had to shop around to see where to place a particular child.

So how many ? I typed up the School Records, 1880-1960, from one Mission/Government settlement and found that, for example, between 1880 and 1900, only eight children - out of a roll of two hundred over those years – had been brought to this Mission. In fact, there were barely as many again in the next fifty years.

And just in case 'stealing children' means taking them from missions and settlements, it should be pointed out that, in that period 1880 to 1960, during which eight hundred children were, at one time or another, enrolled at that school, a grand total of forty seven children transferred to homes or institutions or the Adelaide Hospital, the vast majority of whom came back within a year or two. Mothers died, fathers died, families fell destitute - the reasons for Aboriginal children being put into care of any sort were not much different from those for any other Australians, and at 4 %, neither was the rate of 'removal'.

Under the Protector's watch, if children knew their own country and wish to go back there, he arranged for their travel home. One boy from the far north at one mission was unhappy and wished to do that, so the Protector promptly arranged for him to travel up to Oodnadatta and then on to his own country. A year or so later, he was back at the mission, working and asking for some financial support to buy a harmonium.

So, from the record, there does not seem to be any concerted effort to take children from their families. In fact, the Protector notes that he does not have the legal power to do so, and I suspect neither did he have the intention.

So why did I believe as I did, without evidence ? Because the conventional paradigm, the 'black-armband approach', fits together. It makes sense. It doesn't need evidence. And perhaps in other states - Queensland, for instance - conditions were much harsher for Aboriginal (and Islander) people. But that's for researchers up there to follow up on, if they have the courage.

There are such things as 'facts'. There was only one full-time staff member of the S.A. Aborigines Department. There were forty or more official ration Depots from around 1870 onwards. Sometimes 'facts' are like rocks in a stream of 'interpretation': flow this way or that, twist and turn as one may, the 'interpretation' of history still has to deal with the 'facts'.

It may not have been all sweetness and light, but neither was it as brutal as the conventional paradigm supposes. Nineteenth century people were no different from ourselves. We are them, they were us. It's time we relied more on evidence than feelings, or suspicions, otherwise we will forever be barking up the wrong tree.