Hi Olivia Miguel, I'm from Australia, we have a two word saying in Australia, the second word is Off, the first word starts with "F", maybe in New York you have the same saying,

Other than other peoples money, what do you want?

Best sentence ever in OLO :

". I ordered the $75,000 worth bank transfer and to my greatest surprise, i got it with 3 working days."

Hi Steele,

Many times, I have written about how casual liaisons were made illegal (in SA, in thev1939Act) while marriages were approved - clearly, what governments didn't want were casual liaisons producing more illegitimate children.

Doctor Bryan was, I think, American ? So not much WA legislative input there; recommendations maybe. Same with the Moseley Royal Commission: the power to recommend but again, not any power to legislate, and certainly not to legislate back in 1905, when Moseley was probably still in short pants. Perhaps a child could explain the differences between recommending and legislating to you, if their mother allows you near one.

And no, it was never the law (at least in SA) that the Protector had superior rights to the mother: time and again, in the Protector's annual reports (now available in a book by Alistair Crooks and that fool Joe Lane, 'Voices From the Past', on Amazon and Book Depository etc.) and in his letters, he points out that he has no power, or desire, to take children without a mother's consent, unless the child is grossly neglected, i.e. if the mother - or any parent - can't be found. If anything, he responded to requests from mothers to send her child to a Mission for schooling, that sort of thing.

Where do some of you whitefellas get the idea that Protectors were forever drooling at the prospect of ripping kids away for no reason ? Do you have any evidence of that, at all ? You've seen records to that effect ? I don't mean some incredibly sincere and tearful speech by someone claiming, hand on heart, that it happened, but evidence that it happened ? Can you tell the difference ? Yep, one born every minute.

A little learning, my friend ......

Joe

Dearest Foxy,

I'm glad that at last you are beginning to do some research into some of these fascinating topics. But you and I put together will never have the fifty-year experiences of Big Nana right on the coal-face, so to speak, as a nurse from one end of the Kimberley to the other. If you have data which contradicts what she says, one thing is for sure - you will know it is rubbish.

As for some strange craving to take children away for no reason, in SA, from the forties and perhaps much earlier, the Children's Welfare and Public Relief Board was paying Aboriginal single mothers to take care of their children, and paying the mothers until they were sixteen. My wife found a list from about 1951, of about thirty children who were being supported this way. She was one of them. She was always puzzled why her step-father didn't formally adopt her - she was known by her father's surname but when we were being married, her mother's surname was on her birth certificate, and that was the name the minister called out. Embarrassing all round.

So no, I don't believe a word about the 'stolen generation'. All people have to do if they want to make money from it is find their file, usually somewhere in their State's Archives or Records, and bring it to court.

[TBC]

[continued]

People are talking about a second 'stolen generation' now. What, that some government people are taking kids away ? OR that, yet again, parental neglect has reached epidemic proportions ?

Strangely, the 1950s were (a) the peak decade for children being taken into care and (b) the second worst decade, at least from the death records from Pt McLeay Mission going back to 1860, for infant mortality. Why ? There was plenty of work around, therefore good wages. Could it be that the extra wages tended to get blown on much more purchases of grog ?

One bloke I knew in the early sixties, a terrible drinker (as was his wife), used to be blotto all weekend then went back to work in a railway camp with a four-gallon can of port, which he got through before the Friday. He had lost a couple of kids, one to starvation. Yes, that happened. Maybe that was common then, that men worked, got good money, and blew an enormous amount on grog, legal or not - and, in fact, the more they earned, the more their kids were neglected.

That answers a few puzzles. When we lived up on the community, almost all the men were employed and most used to take off to the pub on Saturday afternoons. One bloke who didn't drink said to me one Saturday, 'You know, you and me are the only sober blokes on this place.' Maybe it's a bit of a working-class thing too, that the more money you earned, the more you blew on grog. So people seem to be poor, because so little is left over, and certainly not much for the kids. Frank McCourt (in 'Angela's Ashes') wrote of his father drinking away almost all of his pay-packet on the one night. Michael Caine spoke of his father dying and leaving, after a long working life, 1/10, which for the kiddies is about nineteen cents.

Real life is so much more fascinating than the fables.

Love,

Joe

Joe
From Big Nana
"The other dormitory system was for those fair skinned children who had been removed from stations and sent to BEagle Bay to be raised by the nuns".