I've been typing up the correspondence of the Protector of Aborigines here in South Australia, 1840 to 1907, for the past year or so, about eight thousand letters over 2,500 pages. It's been an amazing journey.

For example, in spite of the myth of 'herding people onto Missions', the one-man 'Department' sent out rations to up to one hundred places across the colony, forty designated ration depots and up to sixty places where Aboriginal people could get rations, as they were travelling through.

Rations, as the Protector had to remind Issuers (who were never paid) time and again, were mainly for the elderly, sick and infirm, and in drought times, for the able-bodied as well.

I'm intrigued by the impact that a huge network of ration depots might have had on the ability of the elders, the old and infirm, to gather in relative comfort for long periods - effectively for the rest of their lives - near ration depots, in good times and even more so in bad times, where for year after year, they could exchange knowledge and ceremonies and stories and magic while the able-bodied could be assured that they would be looked after. As well, the able-bodied had to look after more or less just themselves, and not have to find food for their elderly and sick and infirm as well. Sounds like win-win to me :)


In other words, in bad times, instead of scattering across their country and having to shelter in the country of neighbours, people could stay put. In fact, they were able, through the ration system, to stay put precisely in the worst times, instead of scattering - and droughts down this way could last for years. One lasted from about 1892 until 1900 or so, then there was the 'Federation drought' from 1902 to 1904. What do old people do during bad droughts ? They die. What do mothers with young babies do during droughts ? They often had to let their babies go. i.e. their babies died.

But not once a ration system was instituted. They lived.

[TBC]

[continued]

Paradoxically, counter-intuitively, is it possible that Aboriginal groups – at least in South Australia - were able to be more solid, practising their culture, or at least major ceremonies, based for perhaps years around a ration depot, when there was a long drought ? In other words .....

Did the ration system actually strengthen Aboriginal culture ?

Of course, the elders would have said that it was the power of their magic that persuaded or maybe tricked the whites to provide for them and for everybody, precisely during the worst times, and people would have believed them. Clever people !

Maybe the ration system even managed to actually boost the population in bad times as well as good, when it would have been decimated in pre-colonial times ? I don't know enough about the interaction between environment, climate, and demography to know.

There's more scope for genuine research, right there - if there ARE any genuine Indigenous researchers out there :)

Hey Joe are you going to publish the letters?

I think we can find them in the same spot Joe did.
And thanks bloke I do look such up may do that today after get things done.

All very enlightening Joe. But I'll wager you wont have any of that covered, in any of the "progressive" curricula our schools have received from on high --It tells the wrong story.

They would rather cover the fictions of "Rabbit Proof Fence" etc.

SPQR,
If you take away fiction and artistic creation from the "progressive" belief system then they have no documentation at all, these are the people who believe that the "truth" is divined from novels and allegories such as "Night" by Elie Wiesel, "The Handmaids Tale" by Margaret Atwood and "The Power Of One" by Bryce Courtenay.
I've a sister given to daydreaming and utopianism, her bookshelf is filled with "historical" novels.

Hi Jayb, Belly, SPQR,

I've been trying to get a web-site up with all of these information sources on it, but I'm an old person, so I naturally have been having trouble doing that effectively. But you might have better luck:

http://www.firstsources.info/

I've tried, over the years, to find and transcribe the major documents in Aboriginal affairs in South Australia: the Select Committee of 1860, the Royal Commissions of 1899 and 1913-1916, Rev. George Taplin's 20-year Journal, the Point McLeay Superintendents' letter-books 1880-1900, the Protector's correspondence and Annual Reports 1901-1937 and - coming shortly - selections frrom the Minutes of the Advisory Council of Aborigines (1918-1939) and other key documents.

All that amounts to around five thousand pages and constitutes a body of material from which - I believe - one can make inferences and draw conclusions over policy.

After all, in a real sense, every letter of the Protector is a statement of policy, what he - and the Government behind him - believes is a reflection of the right course of action.

So:

* a vast network of ration depots, with depots closing and opening as people move from place to place;

* a clause in every pastoral lease recognising traditional Aboriginal land-use, 'as if this lease had not been made';

* support for Aboriginal schools during the nineteenth century, at Encounter Bay, Adelaide, Goolwa, Kingston, Point Mcleay, Port Lincoln, Point Pierce (Pearce), Kopperamanna/Killalpaninna and Mount Gambier;

* provision of about a hundred 'canoes', 15-ft boats, 5-ft beam, to Aboriginal people on all waterways, including perhaps the Cooper's Creek, along with modern fishing gear, hooks, lines and netting twine;

* allocation of around fifty leases of land to Aboriginal people, men and women, usually 160-acre blocks, on 14-year leases, rent-free, occasionally, with implements - one time some lessees provided with milk-cows as well;

* free medical attendance and medicines and Hospital admission of serious cases.

[TBC]

[continued]

* provision of a wide range of items as rations including:

Sugar
Axes
Rice
Netting Twine
Tobacco
Needles
Soap
Threads
Sago
Fishing Lines
Blankets
Fishing Hooks
Blue serge
Spoons
Blue serge shirts
Quart pots
Cotton shirts
Pannicans
Galatea cloth
Billy cans
Tomahawks
Bags and tarpaulins for wurlies
Occasionally, tents

As well, half the cost of guns and their repair; and half the cost of the repair of boats.

Yes, folks, in South Australia, Aboriginal people were always allowed to have guns.

In sum: no, it's not as if Aboriginal people won X-Lotto, but neither is it 'stale bread and water, bowed down by iron chains' either.

Let's run with what can be demonstrated to hae been the evidence of actions for or againstv Aboriginal people, and suspend belief of assertions which are not backed up by evidence. And then, of course, try to find the evid3ence, one way or the other.

For evidence of the thriving nature of indigenous discourse, you may like to check this site out:

http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers=&discussionID=251249296&gid=3451857&commentID=146516646&trk=view_disc&fromEmail=&ut=1BD_28KSzS3BQ1

Thanks,

Joe

Oops, of course flour and tea as well.

Nicolas Rothwell has a wonderful article in this weekend's Australian, which goes against this approach to an extent.

Nicolas raises the issue of whether or not 'the absence of evidence doe not necessarily mean the evidence of absence.'

I would be interested in what posters have to say about that principle. After all, for many aspects of history, there may be no tangible evidence, and yet ......

Thanks for an interesting post. NSW had a similar ration distribution system but, I think, not so extensive as in SA. The NSW records also include detailed censuses of the Aboriginal people receiving rations and other support from about 1880-early 1900s, with the population broken down by male/female adult/children, 'fullblood'/'halfcaste' (later population figures are not so detailed). These document the radical decline in population through this time, mainly due to a decrease in children surviving. I've documented a family history in NSW where about 6-7 children died of TB during this period; only one survived to have children and only one of those survived.

By enabling the Aboriginal people to stay put, and providing support during droughts etc., the ration stations may have a had an unintended down-side in that the impact of introduced disease was probably more more severe in such sedentary populations.

Do the SA records include similar census data?

Hi Cossomby,

In SA, the Protector put together Annual Reports more or less every year from 1901. He always included a population count, and as you say, by adult/children, male/female/ full-blood/half-caste. He also included populations on the Mission stations.

So it is no problem to calculate that the Mission populations never totalled more than 20 % of the total population, usually around 16 %. So 80-84 % of the total Aboriginal population were always living away from the Missions.

Ergo, no 'herding onto Missions'.

You could be right about the health effects of people gathering for long periods near ration depots, but depots were provided with medicines, and in many cases, a Medical Officer was paid an annual stipend to provide medical attendance for all Aboriginal people within a region.

Dr Kennedy, for example, was contracted to provide medical attendance for all Aboriginal people up and down the North-South railway, and within 20 miles of the railway towns of Oodnadatta and Hergott (Marree). Many other regions had such Medical Officers at various times - Goolwa, Border Town, Mannum, Murray Bridge, Kingston, Denial Bay (Ceduna) and Mission Superintendents were also provided with medicines.

Sick people were usually given what they called 'Medical comforts', meat, milk and bread. Old people were provided with firewood in regions where the timber had been stripped. At least, that's what the record shows.

Of course, it appears from the genealogies that Mission populations had a more secure existence, with cottages and some employment provided, as well as the wherewithall to grow their own crops and raise their own animals, for rations.

I'm sure it wasn't all beer and skittles, but neither was it stale bread and water either. It was quite common for kids at the Schools, at least at Point McLeay, to spend ten years or more at school.

[TBC]

[continued]

And at any time, there would have been around fifty Aboriginal people with leases of land, 160 acres, rent-free - some families held those leases for thirty and forty years, including the family of Tom Adams, Michael O'Loughlin's ancestor, as described in a recent 'Who Do You Think You Are?' who still held land well into his seventies.

It's been a fascinating journey typing up these letters - so many surprises :)

Cheers,

Joe
www.firstsources.info

Further on NSW, most of the people receiving rations in the late 19C-early 20C in western NSW (most similar to SA) were living on the big pastoral stations and in fact, the records sometimes say of a locality 'no rations needed, all employed'. The 'rounding up into missions/reserves' by government was later, in the 1930s+, and different from the earlier church-run missions. It was a side-effect of the closer settlement policies which broke up the big pastoral stations, plus, I think, the effect of the Depression (with differences between eastern/central and western NSW) - both factors put many previously employed Aboriginal familes out of work and off their now subdivided land. There is one unique case in WNSW, where the Aboriginal community escaped the forced moves, and stayed on the station, which they now own. (Merri Hill, 1996, Weilmoringle : a unique bi-cultural community.)

Try researching Maralinga Tjarutjaand then see how many were cooked in the British Blasts. Check that out for crusine culture. No wonder the Irish hate the Poms.

Thank you, Cossomby, reality is often much stranger than the stereotype, isn't it ?

Yes, in SA, the government took over two church-based Missions in 1916-1917, and another Mission in the far North-East was transferred to private leaseholding at about the same time, and as you say, during the Depression, people moved back to the 'Missions', as they were still - and are still - known, during the depression.

Watching Chris Masters' program on the ABC last night on Australia during that time, I was thinking that life might have been hard and cottages overcrowded on 'Missions', but at least they stayed alive.

In fact, that overcrowding might have been the major incentive for people to get the hell off and find a new life for themselves in country towns immediately after the War, and from their into the towns and cities. Hence, the massive shift to cities a generation later, and the maturing of a young urban population in the eighties and later.

Hence, since then, far more participation in higher education, for them and their children. Bingo ! Thirty three thousand graduates as at the end of 2012. Well, 'bingo' might be a bit precocious.

There are little gems in all those letters. One time, when the blokes at Victor Harbor had been provided with an 18-ft boat, six-oared, for fishing further out, and the people up the coast at Port Elliott demanded the same, when the Victor Harbor people demanded to be paid to look after the boat, the Minister ordered the boat to be taken off them and given to the Port Elliott people.

A boat that size would have cost about ten pounds, a fifth of a good annual wage, say eight thousand dollars in our money. There were easilya hundred boats on the waterways at any time from the 1870s. Relations of my wife's were still using a boat like that in the 1950s at Wellington here in SA.

Clearly, the intention was to force people to usethe resources of the river, plus modern fishing gear, to lighten the ration burden. B@stards !

[TBC]

[continued]

Chris,

Yes, indeed, some terrible things were still being done right up to the sixties, and those atomic tests are probably still having repercussions for the health of the people there.

Joe
www.firstsources.info

Still trying to work this website thing ! Currently, I can put only three files on at a time, but I've tricked it to take all the Correspondence 1840-1912, in two files, and Annual reports on the other. That's about three thousand pages.

www.firstsources.info

Joe

Hi Joe,

I think what you are doing is pretty important and deserves some support.

I am reasonably savvy around web pages as well as content management systems. If you feel you could do with some assistance I am willing to donate some time to help with the web part of your project.

On the other hand if you are happy surfing the learning curve yourself (and that can be fun too) that is fine.

Well done on your efforts thus far.

Thank you, CSteele,

I'm working through some mob called iPage, and until I learn better, what I hope to do is consolidate files (up to say, 1 mB) and rotate all the files I have, after a week at a time. In other words, two or three thousand pages up each week - I have enough that way for about a month, then I start all over again :)

I have to thank everybody who has contributed to these discussions - I've learnt a great deal from everyone, to know where they are coming from. But I'm more convinced than ever that genuine Aboriginal history can only progress on the basis of solid evidence- and there is oodles of it around, just maybe not the 'evidence' that people were hoping for, or that they are comfortable with.

Cheers,

Joe
www.firstsources.info

Dear Loudmouth,

I usually work with Joomla but feel Word Press is probably better suited to what you might be trying to achieve, so perhaps keep it in mind for the future. You really shouldn't be limited to how many files you upload unless it is part of the iPage policy.

I realise they are cheap but a decent Word Press site on a hosting service like Arvixe is still only $5.00 per month and should afford you pretty well unlimited access and uploading.

There are quite a few confronting letters in the short time I had to skim through your collection but this one certainly struck me.

Quote.

28th September 1898
The Secretary to the
Board for the Protection of Aborigines
Melbourne

Dear Sir,

I have to thank you for the copies of your last annual Report, which you were good enough to send me – I regret to see that the Native population in Victoria has decreased so much in number, notwithstanding the care & attention bestowed upon them by your department.
I enclose you some returns giving the latest information respecting our Aborigines, and the efforts made in their behalf.

End Quote.

I'm wondering if there was a substantial difference in the rate of Aboriginal population decrease between Victoria and SA and if so what differences in approach you might have identified.

Thank you CSteele,

I'll check out Wordpress ASAP.

Yeah, there are a lot of surprises in those letters. Dozens of ration stations, in every part of the Province.

No evidence of people being 'herded onto Missions'. Not many Missions, really.

Dozens of boats provided to Aboriginal people, on every waterway, with the government paying half the cost of repairs, as they did with guns too. Who would have thought ?

Very few children being taken into care, going by these letters and by school records and certainly no 'stolen generation', at least not before 1912.

And, at least from these letters, nobody being driven off their lands, quite the reverse: well, that was the point of providing for a multitude of ration depots, after all.

I don't know much about Victorian history, but I get the idea that it was much more violent in the early days than here in SA, especially in the South-West, the North-West, Gippsland, along some of the rivers - pretty much everywhere, really. Perhaps, given the comparative lushness of the environment, people were much more settled in their country, maybe Victoria's convict and bushranger past made it a more violent place - Eureka, and Ned Kelly, after all.

The authorities seemed to have relied on the Missions, Ramahyuck, Coranderrk, Ebenezer, Lake Condah, Lake Tyers, even Maloga/Cummeragunga on the Murray but in NSW, etc. rather than setting up a network of ration depots like over here, in other words, a much more segregated society from the outset, I don't know.

On the other hand, from the early twentieth century, it seemed to have the most enlightened policies of all the States. But that's all for some Victorian researcher to follow up :)

There is so much material out there, and so much to learn ! And so much, I suspect, which confounds our prejudices.

Cheers,

Joe

Just as an aside 50 years ago
I knew an illiterate station owner (Brunette Downs, Sundown Murders) who used to collect, into his bank account, the social security payments (of the day) for whatever numbers of aborigines he guessed were somewhere on his property.
He would then give them flour, sugar, tobacco, metho and orange juice and tea every second Thursday when they came into the station.
They would leave their sick behind and disappear back into the wilderness. Needless to say he was a very wealthy man.

Hi Chris,

If what you say is correct, the people might not have done too badly out of it either, for the times. And those supplies would have cost him something, especially to transport them out to such a remote area.

So he looked after the sick ? The Native Welfare Department contracted and paid for him to do that ? And people were paid Social Security payments every fortnight ? I didn't think Aboriginal people, of 'no fixed address', could get Social Security payments. In SA, Aboriginal people on Missions and government stations couldn't even get Unemployment Benefits until 1969. Governments hummed and ha'ed about giving women Child Endowment payments.

Are you sure he wasn't just bragging ? I suspect that there has been a hell of a lot of that over the years.

Sorry for being such a suspicious b@stard, Chris :)

Best wishes,

Joe

Dear Joe,

I went to look at the annual report for that year regarding the situation at the first mission you mentioned Ramahyuck.

It had one birth for that year but 7 deaths. That represented 10% of the population of the mission.

Georgina King - 25 years – Consumption
Alice Grace King – 10 months – teething
Adolph Donald Moffat – 1 year and 6 months – Decline
Lousie C Login – 22 years – Fits
Mary Scott – 57 years – Consumption
Alice Login – 1 year and two months – Decline
William Logan – 24 years – Inflammation of the bowels

These were not victims of violence, nor it appears of alcohol, “There has been very little drinking noticed among the people of this station”. For the children to be dying of 'Decline' and 'Teething' speaks to something else.

It was interesting to note 2/3rds of the land had been stripped from the Aboriginal Reserve by the Department of Agriculture the year before leaving it just 850 acres. The manager writes “The total income of the station has again been small, and naturally will remain so in the future on account of the reduction of the reserve.”

Some of the other stations fared better but over all the missions there were three times as many deaths as births. This should be seen in light of the fact that the Board for the Protection of Aborigines managing to spend nearly the same amount on stationary as they did providing medical services for those under their care and nearly twice as much on travel expenses.

You are right Joe, the facts do speak for themselves. It appears rorting was not a modern phenomena and that the charge of 'managed genocide', which I had tended to dismiss, may not be that far from the truth, at least in Victoria.

http://archive.aiatsis.gov.au/removeprotect/25107.pdf

Hi CSteele,

That's interesting, I thought Ramahyuck had been closed for forty years or so by then, that the population had been encouraged to move to Coranderrk, and from there to the other Missions. That's appalling though, so many deaths.

In those days, I get the idea that people didn't have much immunity to these strange diseases - some of them, consumption, etc - had no cure for another fifty years: George Orwell and D. H. Lawrence both died of TB, or consumption, many years later. In the nineteenth century in SA, people could die within a month from consumption. Over this way, measles was a major killer, right into the nineteen-forties. We don't realise how recent cures have been for major diseases like those, polio, septicemia etc.

Can you put those documents on pdf ?

Regards,

Joe

Joe,
No he wasn't boasting.
It was around 1970,and he even billed the Fed govt for cartage and storage. As far as the sick (and dying) was concerned he contacted the Flying Doctor and left them camped around the home paddock.
Brian Bowman was his name and he hated the natives.
All he cared about was getting back the one million pound (a lot of money back then) that his father lost on the Adelaide race tracks and retiring to the banks of the Murray River with a few goats for company.
Brian was your perfect B@stard.
No general muster on his property because he used to send his stockmen up to two hundred miles stealing clean-skin calves.
A general muster might find stolen calves joining with their mothers.
There were always native bodies to be buried in unmarked graves on the property after "payday".
If TB or malnutrition didn't kill them the metho would.

Yeah. Goom. I've heard of shop-keepers having it in their fridges. It could make you blind or paralysed, if it didn't kill you outright. But it was cheap and legal, and if you mixed it with cordial, it was supposed to be quite pleasant.

In the Protector's letters, he refers quite often to people who have become paralysed in the legs - I wonder if they had been on something like metho. In SA, Aboriginal people got free medical attention and medicines - yeah, that surprised me too.

At the moment, I've got the full 1840-1912 letters on that web-site, as well as the Protectors Annual reports up to the 1930s - nearly a hundred years of records. I was checking out the State Library records as well, and there's a mountain of material there too, 60 cm of correspondence from Poonindie Mission, for example. So if anybody wants to set up a scam, they should do their homework first.

Probably the same in every major state library.

'Bowman' was a big name amongst pastoralists down here, around the Lakes and at Crystal Brook and in the Flinders, with a fair reputation. That bloke might have been the runt of the litter. Sounds like a bit of a runt.

Cheers :)

Joe
www.firstsources.info

Dear Joe,

The document I gave you a link to is actually on a PDF. You can save it to your computer quite easily. Let me know if you have any problems.

That there was a high mortality rate at that time is a given but there were also large families so births were still outstripping deaths by a long shot. Not so in these missions it would appear.

You are right about TB being prevalent during the period but it is also a good indicator of overall health. Only 5-10% of people who test positive to the disease end up exhibiting its active form. This is far higher among those who have their immune systems compromised through malnutrition or poor living conditions. A modern day example are AIDS sufferers of whom “About 5–10% of those without HIV, infected with tuberculosis, develop active disease during their lifetimes. In contrast, 30% of those coinfected with HIV develop active disease.” Wikipedia

Just look at the shocking figures for Lake Condah for the same year. Of a mission population of around 65 there were no births but the following deaths.

Harriet Turner – 15 years – Tubercular peritonitis
Mabel McLeod – 19 years – Phthsis pulmonatis
Mary Gorrie - 80 years – Senile decay
Thomas E Watson – 5 years - Acute phthisis
Flora Turner – 12 years - Phthsis pulmonatis
Johnson Mobourn 18 years - Phthsis pulmonatis

All past those vulnerable early years and all but one under 20.

No wonder “a spirit of dissatisfaction was raised among the blacks here”. To lose 10% of ones community in a single year must have been horrendous. The accompanying depression and despair would have been significant.

Thank you for opening my eyes to this. I had no idea things were so terrible for the Aborigines held on missions in Victoria. I had intended to visit Lake Condah on my last stay at Bridgewater but unfortunately did not get there.

“For thousands of years, Gunditjmara people engineered and constructed an extensive aquaculture system along the Mt Eccles/Tyrendarra Lava flow and wetlands .”
http://www.budjbim.com/

Hi CSteele,

'Phthisis' was another name for consumption, or tuberculosis.

Regardless of how well-nourished people may be, if they haven't built up a certain level of immunity to a disease, then they can die very quickly from it. Measles up in the north-west of SA back in the late thirties, for example - something like 100 died from one epidemic alone, something the missionaries and teachers certainly weren't happy about.

I think anthropologists these days are starting to realise, over the last thirty or so years, that - when they go into an area where people haven't been exposed to white people much, they are carrying all manner of viruses etc., from which they have inherited or built up immunity, but the people who they wish to 'study' have not. Lo and behold, the people start getting sick.

As well, the 'remedies' that the people employed were not necessarily beneficial - to wade out into the Lake when you had a fever, for example.

Aboriginal people were, and are, as intelligent as anybody else, but their perceptions and notions of 'science' and magic and technology, in pre-European times, may have hampered their understanding of what to do, as our own has and still may do. Cf. the Broad Street pump and cholera in London, and the notion of 'vapours' a hundred years ago.

I was just looking at some of the 20 cm of microfiche in our State Library on the community of Poonindie, near Port Lincoln, and the level of sickness - and death - was appalling, to our eyes. But it was common for families to have ten children and lose five.

After all, think about it: the world's population doubled from 0 AD to 1600 AD, with no birth control methods, in other words, at a tiny rate overall, big families yet no real growth each generation, touch and go whether the population was going to grow or shrink over a lot of that time. i.e. very high infant mortality rates.

Thanks, C. Steele,

Joe

[continued]

One can see that in some of the Aboriginal genealogies - either people having no children, or some having great numbers of kids with half of them dying very young, right up to the 1950s.

Joe

Dear Joe,

Sorry mate but not buying it.

Here is why.

Firstly on TB and overcrowding;

“Poor living conditions and overcrowding often go together and both increase TB risk. Hostels, student halls, prisons, refuges and rented housing with many people living together are all places where TB can spread more easily.”

“Poor nutrition can weaken your immune system so your body is less likely to kill TB bacteria if you breathe them in. You are at higher risk of getting ill with tuberculosis. It is easier to get TB if you have no heating and live in damp, dark or dusty conditions. TB bacteria can live in damp and dusty air for longer. If it’s dark, TB bacteria don’t get killed by sunlight. TB bacteria hang around in the room if there is no fresh air.”
http://www.thetruthabouttb.org/am-i-at-risk/living-conditions

The authorities actually had a good handle on the problem years before.

Here is a link to a report from the Board for Protection of Aborigines done in 1879 (nearly 2 decades before the deaths I mentioned earlier) titled;

Report and Correspondence Relative To The Mortality Amongst The Residents Of The Aboriginal Stations Of Victoria.

This is probably the most damning document I have read in a long, long time.

The first piece of correspondence cited was from the Vice Chairman of the Aboriginal Board to the Chief Secretary.

Written on the 12th June 1879 it begins;

“Sir,

I have the honor to inform you that the Board for the protection of Aborigines has recently had under its serious consideration the advisability of concentrating the natives on fewer stations than at present. It is a painful fact that the Aborigines throughout Victoria are rapidly decreasing in numbers, the total numbers being now probably not more than 800, including half-castes.”

The letter then goes on to recommend the closure of Corandderrk and Framlingham, the first because of the cold, wet climate but both because of the 'grave reason' of the proximity to townships with the existing populations moved on to the remaining reserves.

Cont...

Cont...

One gets the true reason a couple of paragraphs further on.

“The reserves of Coranderrk, 4,800 acres, and Framlingham, 3,500 acres, which the Board wish to hand over to the government, are of great commercial value, and would probably realise by auction an average of $4 per acre, or $33,200.”

The solution, ship them off to Gippsland. Never mind the cold and wet there. The board acknowledged that 8,000 acres would need to be purchased at lake Tyers but while “the land is of very inferior description” it was “suitable for the purpose required”.

Good god!

This paragraph was particularly chilling;

“The Board anticipates that ultimately the last of the Victorian natives will be gathered to these two stations, Ebenezer and lake Tyers.”

In a second letter from Vice Chairman to the Secretary similarly dated states;

“It is with much regret we find the steps which have been taken to arrest the terrible death rate prevalent for many years on our stations have proved completely futile.”

Further down the letter relates “We have further the honor to bring under your notice the very important fact that death in most cases is the result of a disease of the lungs peculiar to the natives”

He goes on the extort the Secretary “having under our care the lives of several hundred human beings, we have thought it our duty to bring the matter under your notice, and to urge that it should be remitted with the least delay possible for inquiry.”

Well the good Secretary did his job and wrote to the colony's Chief Medical Officer, one W. McCrae the following day. He replied on the 26th.

I reproduce it here in its entirety because it is so damning, notwithstanding its Victorian eloquence.

Cont...

Cont...

The Chief Medical Officer to the Honorable The Chief Secretary
Medical Department, Melbourne, 26th June 1879

Sir,

In obedience to your minute of the 13th instant asking me to suggest what steps should be taken to investigate the nature of the disease which causes the terrible death rate among the aborigines of this colony, and to ascertain some popular remedial course of treatment, I have the honor to inform you that this subject was brought prominently under my notice in 1876, when I proceeded to Coranderrk. There I minutely investigated the conditions under which the aborigines were living, as well as the surrounding locality, and had no difficulty in arriving at a conclusion as to what were the causes of the mortality which at that time decimated the natives. I enclose a printed copy of the report I made on that occasion, in which I pointed out the sanitary defects which, in my opinion, were the cause of excessive mortality.

In the first paragraph of my report I have alluded to the site as insalubrious. I would now repeat that allusion, and recommend the site be changed to a more healthy one; with this exception, I see nothing to add to the report of 1876.

Since the date of that report, though two years and three months have elapsed, six only out of the thirty-two new huts have been built, and these have not been drained. Their walls have been lined with boards for six feet of height only, and the roofs not lined with calico. Drains have been cut in front and behind the old huts, and the floors of these huts have been boarded, but no further improvements have been made in them. Separate rooms for children over eleven have not been built, but female children sleep in the school-room. Skillions have not been built, nor have earth closets been provided. Neither new kitchen nor hospital has been built.

Cont...

Cont...

The Aborigines Board allege as an excuse for these necessary changes having not been carried out that they had not been provided with funds for the purpose. Under these circumstances it is not surprising that the health of the Aborigines did not improve; but if the recommendations of my report were carried out in their entirety, I have no doubt but their influence on the health of the natives will be very great and beneficial.

I have, &c.,

W. McCrea
Chief Medical Officer

The good Doctor McCrae appended his earlier report and it is well worth reading. These are just some of his quotes;

“The natives complain greatly of the cold and the wet in winter, and I have no doubt that the situation of the establishment contributes not a little to the development of chest diseases.”

“The huts of the natives are built on a street which runs north and south across the face of the slope, instead of up and down it, the natural advantage of the fall of the ground for drainage being thus lost”

“There are few closets of a common description, covering mere holes in the ground, scattered about irregularly over the establishment, insufficient in number for the wants and decency of the population.”

“The construction of the huts is, in a sanitary point of view, the worst possible; the walls are of slab, paling, or bark, mostly the latter, with openings in them so numerous that they may fitly be compared to bird cages.”

“The floors are clay and are damp even at the driest season of the year, whilst in winter the natives complain the water rises to the surface of the floors after every shower of rain.”

“In wretched hovels like these it is no wonder the mortality is excessive.”

The Board's response?

Well McCrae only visited one of the settlements. “That the Board differs with Dr. McCrae in his conclusion as to the cause of the excess morality.” That it was “a peculiar of chest disease that carried off so many natives”.

Cont...

Cont...

These death rates were still unchecked nearly two decades later.

It is hard not to conclude there was neglect, waste, profiteering, and a lack of any real desire by the Board to improve the desperate lot of the few hundred remaining Victorian aborigines. Moreover there was sense of just managing their ultimate disappearence. This document shows the circumstances to be far more dire than I had imagined and puts to bed any notion that the native population were looked after.

The only two emotions I can muster are of deep pity for the indigenous people at that time and deep anger at the Board.

So I am asking of you Joe that you be circumspect about attributing these deaths to insufficient 'levels of immunity', certainly in Victoria. This has all the appearance of a managed genocide and our forefathers who organised it, or participated in it, or even just condoned it, should stand condemned, even by the standards of the time.

http://archive.aiatsis.gov.au/removeprotect/24778.pd

Hi C. Steele,

No, you misunderstand me - I'm certainly not saying that a high mortality rate was due only to a lack of immunity to introduced diseases alone - there were probably many reasons why people died from various diseases, as well as lack of immunity. No cure, anywhere in the world, for one - TB was 'incurable' until the middle of last century, for example. Polio too, and it killed. Blood-poisoning killed many women in child-birth until penicillin was used to treat it (or was that streptomycin?)

As well, working life was far more physical and rural, with medical attention often far away, and therefore rural work was doubly dangerous. Working men died from accidents, snake-bite, horses rolling on them (my great-grandfather for one, after two weeks, Braidwood, 1900), even thirst. They were comparatively hard times for Black and White both.

Check out any old graveyard, say going back into the mid-nineteenth century -check out the number of young children buried there, who perhaps 'failed to thrive', or died of marasmus, malnutrition etc. (I saw a mother the other day on the bus giving her 18-month-old a bottle with just sugar-water in it). People died or were disabled by adulterated food and grog. Life expectancy in 1900, after all, was barely into the fifties.

And yes, I take your point about wanting to sell off Coranderrk and Framlingham (still in Aboriginal hands) and restricting people to comparatively barren tracts like Lake Tyers. I suspect that in each case, the full story is much more complicated. But that's for somebody else to check out :)

Cheers,

Joe

Dear Loudmouth,

It appears I have left an 'f' off the end of my link to the document from which I quoted. Thus I conclude this is the reason you present as possibly not having read it and are therefore making the assumptions that you are.

The full link is here;

http://archive.aiatsis.gov.au/removeprotect/24778.pdf

In the absence of evidence you and I are free to make what ever assumptions we like within the bounds of reason. That is not the case here. We have the exact words of the Chief Medical officer of the colony of Victoria, some of which I have furnished earlier.

He also wrote of Coranderrk in the same link above;

“It appears by Mr. Ogilive's report that in 1875, with a population of about 150 people, 31 deaths took place – one out of every five human beings in one year perishing from the disease. This awful mortality was doubtless exceptional, an epidemic of measles having been prevalent in the early part of the year; but this epidemic prevailed all over the colony, causing a considerable increase in the general mortality; yet when the mortality of the whole colony, about 17 per 1,000, is compared with that of Coranderrk, the discrepancy is appalling, the latter amounting to 193 per 1,000, or, in other words, for every person out of the general population who died, 11 deaths occurred at Coranderrk. Two out of the 31 deaths were caused by measles directly, but 4 others caught cold after measles; and 14 cases of pleuro-pneumonia and chest disease point but too surely to the draughty walls and roofs and to the damp floor of the huts as their cause. People attacked by such diseases scarcely have a chance of surviving in such hovels.”

Cont..

Cont..

I think we should give proper weight to the observations and conclusions of the Chief Medical Officer, who examined the mission first hand, and place it well above the Board's perspective. And if you forgive me, above your own assumptions.

Given the waste, the neglect, the attitude of the Board and its intransigence, and given the condemnation from Dr McCrea I feel the only conclusion that is possible was that these missions were about a 'final solution'.

Again I would ask you circumspect about creating the impression that these were actually good times for native peoples, actually I'm going to request you to do more than that, I'm asking that you recognise the deep injustices which occurred to the indigenous people in Victoria during that period and to condemn them.

You wrote of it being 'complicated'. No it wasn't. The good Dr. McCrea knew that. This was criminal neglect that resulted in an insanely high mortality rate and nearly saw off Victoria's indigenous population.

I invite you to acknowledge that fact.

Hi C. Steele,

I'm quite willing to condemn any injustices against anybody, including Aboriginal people in Victoria.

I'm not sure what you mean by:

"I think we should give proper weight to the observations and conclusions of the Chief Medical Officer, who examined the mission first hand, and place it well above the Board's perspective. And if you forgive me, above your own assumptions."

Sorry, what assumptions ? Are you referring to a possible lack of immunity of Aboriginal people to measles ? That disparity is amazing. It killed many people over here too, right into the 1940s.

And the poor quality of housing would have been responsible for a high proportion of the death-rate - small, one-bedroom places for a dozen people, no running water or sewerage system, wood-fires, etc. would have aggravated any chest complaints. No, it certainly wasn't all beer and skittles. But it also wasn't all that different from the hovels of Redfern or Collingwood of the time.

As for 'complicated', I was talking about the ins and outs of why Coranderrk was sold off and Lake Tyers bought.

Thanks,

Joe

You blokes seem to give a lot of credence to statements and reports by government officials.
Surely back then they just as sneaky as they are today.
People lived and they died it was a harsh land and a harsh time so who really cares. I can't find anybody in my peer group at the RSL.
Sorry its all academic at best.

Hi Chris,

Do you have evidence of how sneaky you say people were (surely they couldn't have been as sneaky as some people are now?!) ? Or is it just your gut feeling ? i.e. belief without evidence ? (which is called .... prejudice ?)

Cheers,

Joe

Dear Loudmouth,

You asked;

“Sorry, what assumptions?”

Well tell me if I am wrong but I gave a quote (in answer to your point about disease immunity) from Dr McCrae which he asserted the following;

“I enclose a printed copy of the report I made on that occasion, in which I pointed out the sanitary defects which, in my opinion, were the cause of excessive mortality.”

You did not acknowledge his message but went on to list “the many reasons why people died” including TB, polio, bloodpoisoning, accidents, snake-bite, horse rolling on them, marasmus, malnutrition, adulterated food, and grog.

I'm just wondering why you felt the need to make that point/those assumptions? I gave you the words of a medical professional, a man who had personally visited an aboriginal mission with the express purpose of ascertaining the reason for the horrendous death rates being experienced therein, who proceeded to give his professional opinion of the fundamental cause of these deaths, namely the totally unsanitary living conditions, and who then, with great clarity, gives a list of actions that needed to be followed to address the issue.

They included modifications to the huts, drainage, a hospital for contagious cases, better medicines on hand and better provision of medical services, and changes to the diet

These were attended to by the board in a most cursory manner and more lives continued to be lost as a direct result of their wilful inaction.

These poor unfortunate people died from neglect.

I accept you have offered an implicit condemnation of “any injustices against anybody, including Aboriginal people in Victoria”. I am wondering if you could afford us an explicit condemnation of the Victorian Board for the Protection of Aboriginals during this period?

Sorry, C.Steele, yes, I did miss that point - sanitary conditions were a constant problem here too, at the Missions and at the ration sites were there was also accommodation, like Victor Harbor.

Sorry, I thought you were focussing on another issue, why Missions were closed. Over here, the Anglican Mission at Poonindie, near Port Lincoln, closed, sort of, in the early 1890s, and I'm trying to find out why. There are six inches of microfiche in the State Library, equivalent I suppose to a metre of documents, that i want to look at. I suspect, from other sources like the Protector's letters, that the population there - which was never very big, around 100 - declined as some people moved (some of them back) to other Missions like Point Pierce and Point McLeay. A few families took up leases of land on Poonindie, private 160-acre blocks, rent-free, 14-year leases, renewable. That still seemed to leave a dozen or so people, who were still there some years later.

So, I am wondering if places like Coranderrk encountered the same issues, with some taking up leases of Coranderrk land, others going to other Missions, and some hanging on for some years after the place is supposed to have closed. That's for a Victorian researcher to check :)

To get back to your point: yes, mortality was much higher everywhere in the world back then than it is now, especially of young children, and perhaps it always has been. Health improvements over the past century and a half have maybe impacted precisely on those age-groups everywhere.

BUT - the birth and death records from one community here in SA show that the highest decade since the 1860s for infant mortality was the 1950s - the 1950s. Coincidentally, this was the decade AFTER the more enterprising people from that community had packed up and left, leaving behind the 'less enterprising'. Also coincidentally, the first time that a police station was set up in the 'white' community a mile away was in 1953. Not 1853, but 1953. Somebody should check that allout.

Cheers,

Joe