To Loudmouth.

The point I was making, was that the removal of half caste aboriginal children from tribal situations was a humanitarian obligation that was benign in intent, if not in practice. The aim was to remove half caste aboriginal children from situations where they were subject to racially inspired physical and sexual abuse by full blooded aboriginals (and predatory non aboriginal males) who called them "yeller fellers".

This abuse was even recounted in Doris Garimara's acclaimed book 'Rabbit Proof Fence" where she recounts (as a child) how badly her half caste mother was treated by aboriginal children. If I understand the situation, the government supplied "Aboriginal Protectors" of the time thought that aboriginal people were simply too dumb to ever function in a modern society, but that the half caste kids were smart enough to have a chance. Removing the half caste kids from unacceptable tribal squalor and educating them to take their place in society was the best course of action. This policy was fully supported by the extreme Left, who were the ones who originally proposed it, and now they are the ones determined claim that it was an act of genocide proposed by the Right.

In an age where social security did not really exist, this was the only sensible course of action that the authorities could manage. And I say that as a person who came very close to be "stolen" myself.

Just give the wheel time to go full turn & the word stolen will again get to its real meaning looked after. As monies become available to promote the term so will the attitudes change.

Hi LEGO,

I'm not so sure that there were many 'half-caste' children taken from tribal or traditional situations, or that there were many 'taken' at all. In the Protector's letters, it appears that almost every child who was quite unambiguously taken into care were the children of women who had been living close to towns, and who had died, usually in those days from TB (which took people amazingly quickly, within a month quite often).

As well, they may have been the children of a 'half-caste' couple in situations where the mother had died and the father wasn't able to look after them.

In seventy years, the numbers of children taken into care in South Australia - at least those who came to the attention of the Protector - may not have exceeded low double figures.

In fact, there was one case which I still can't quite get my head around, in which the Protector paid for the rental of a cottage in Goolwa for two half-caste widows and their children, and over a period of some years. Why has got me bushed.

In another case, a 'full-blood' who had married a white woman, and who had worked for twenty-odd years on the railways in the South-East, but who had to give it up, came into Adelaide to try to set up a green-grocer's business but was too sick, so the Protector paid for the family's accommodation in the city, at least until the man died. Even after, the Protector sent rations for the 'half-caste' children to their mother.

[TBC]

[continued]

Quite tragic, really: she had had two or three kids before she had married this man, quite a good man from the record, and had two kids by him.

After he died, she went up the river to Morgan and married another Aboriginal man and had two more kids by him. But he was Victorian, and not covered by any support from the SA Protector, so he left her and, I think went back to Victoria, leaving her with seven kids, only two of whom could get rations from the SA Protector.

She made her way as a seamstress, but never seemed to lose any of her kids. Some people must have sweated blood to survive in those days.

Cheers,

Joe

Why do we believe rumours ? Because we want to, if they bolster the way we already think. They help us 'pre-judge' issues. i.e. they reinforce our prejudices.

They work both ways. I was just reading a parson's account of his trip up the west coast of South Australia, where he heard a story of a young half-caste girl living with a group, I think from the Gawler Ranges, who was fattened up, killed and eaten. Quite fanciful, without some other evidence to back it up. The rumour probably got going with some bar-fly and was passed on and embroidered until the parson got hold of it and gave it more authority by repeating it.

Oral accounts are inherently unreliable without back-up. At Point McLeay, set up by George Taplin, some people won't have a bar of him because he was supposed to be very cruel to a young woman named Mutjuli. She had been abused by an ex-convict named Challenger and came back to the Mission in 1877 with two young boys. Taplin, I suppose, held that against her, not that it would have fazed him. In his Journal, in fact, he has nothing but praise for her, as she cared for Charlie Peake as he was dying, with the help of Philip Rigney, and they married soon after Peake died. Taplin put on a reception in his house for the couple, the first time he ever did so.

So where did this 'oral history' come from ? Long after Taplin died in 1879, another Superintendent, Sutton, in about 1896-1897, came down hard on Mutjuli for persistently committing adultery while her husband was away working. Sutton warned her that he would have her and her paramour expelled if she continued. In response, the couple spent three days in Adelaide at West's Coffee Palace in Hindley Street under other names. And before he could expel them, they ran off together to Goolwa, leaving four or five young children, and where they lived for the next thirty years until she died.

[TBC]

[continued]

Oral history, like Chinese whispers, can be totally unreliable, and just occasionally quite accurate. The problem is, which and when ? A story may indicate something, but it must surely be treated with scepticism until other evidence, documentary or forensic, can be found. Otherwise it's just a story which 'fits' one's prejudices.

I've just finished putting together a file on the issue of 'Land, Boats and Guns' to Aboriginal people from the 1840s to 1912, covering thirty-odd pages. It surprised me to see it spelt out in detail.

Joe
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