Wounded Country by Quentin Beresford

Author:Quentin Beresford [Beresford, Quentin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781742236780
Publisher: NewSouth
Published: 2021-08-04T00:00:00+00:00

Conditions for Aboriginal people

The onward march of closer settlement affected Aboriginal people in the Murray–Darling Basin. The shift from big estates to smaller, family-sized holdings reduced the demand for Aboriginal employment: ‘Family-sized blocks needed few if any permanent workers and had neither the means, nor need, to support an Aboriginal camp − as the larger pastoral properties had done in earlier periods’.97 This trend accelerated with the introduction of mechanised farming methods.

Aboriginal people were not considered eligible for Soldier Settlement blocks in the 1920s and 30s, despite the fact that a number of Aboriginal men had been recruited for the Australian Imperial Force. Indeed, the defence force applied the same racist assumptions that Aboriginal people were subjected to in the broader community. In 1917, for example, a group of 16 Aboriginal soldiers from Barambah Settlement in south-east Queensland were summarily dismissed from the army when it was discovered that they were, in the racist terminology of the time, ‘full bloods’. The men complained that, instead of an orderly discharge, they were handed over to police ‘like a lot of prisoners’. The army would only accept ‘half caste’ Aboriginal recruits, because ‘full bloods’ would not make soldiers, although it is not clear why they thought this. Nonetheless, the 16 men suffered the indignity of an examination by an army medical officer to determine their racial classification.98

Adding to the injustice, dozens of Aboriginal returned soldiers were denied an old age or war pension throughout the 1920s and 1930s.99

The pastoral industry continued to exploit Aboriginal workers and did so with the willing support of governments. In 1939 the New South Wales branch of the Australian Workers Union (AWU) spoke out against the repressive and exploitative system of sending Aboriginal children out to work:

[The] Aborigines Protection Board owns 10,000 aborigines in this State, body and soul. It can, and does, take young children away from their parents and send them to work, and it can send the parents to the other end of the State away from their children’s place of work. Young girls who work as domestics on pastoral stations are supposed to get 1/0 a week, but actually they only receive 6d a week, the rest supposedly being put away in a trust fund by the Government for the time the gin comes of age. In fact, however, the girls rarely see the money again, and certainly never see the full amount deducted from their weekly pittance.100

With the outbreak of war in 1939, some Aboriginal people were called upon to fill labour shortages, although they continued to be denied equal pay. In 1944, Justice Kelly of the Arbitration Court rejected an application made on behalf of Aboriginal pastoral workers by the AWU on the basis that ‘natives … neither needed nor desired the so-called standard of living claimed by Australian and European workers’.101

In New South Wales during the 1930s, the policies of the Aborigines Protection Board hardened into one of systematic segregation as it aimed to concentrate Aboriginal people throughout the state into a limited number of reserves.

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