Loving Protection? by Fiona Paisley

Author:Fiona Paisley [Paisley, Fiona]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9780522865691
Google: JQWODwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing
Published: 2016-10-18T22:10:30+00:00

6

In the Eyes of the World

FROM THE EARLY 1930S, Aboriginal conditions in northern Western Australia and the Northern Territory drew growing humanitarian attention in the south. In Perth, the Australian Association for the Amelioration of the Aborigines was formed in 1932. Its members resolved to consider future policy directions for the Aborigines, specifically in response to the needs of Aboriginal and mixed-descent women.1 The following year, a deputation from the Association for the Protection of Native Races to the Minister for the Interior, John Perkins, argued that conditions of slavery existed among natives in the Northern Territory and elsewhere. Aborigines were subjected to the use of chains, captured and indentured to white employers who abused and neglected them. ‘Interference with Aboriginal women’ was cited as the greatest cause of murders of white men by Aboriginal men. A member of the National Council of Women who was part of the deputation called for the appointment of white women as protectors to respond to this injustice.2

Humanitarian challenges also intensified as the League of Nations mandate system supervising Australia’s presence in New Guinea brought ‘world opinion to Australia’s door’.3 The federal government was called upon to respond nationally and internationally to several scandals concerning the treatment of Aborigines. Early in 1933, a number of Aborigines killed some Japanese fishermen, who allegedly had failed to produce a barter of tobacco for the sexual use of Aboriginal women. In response, four policemen with trackers entered Arnhem Land, taking Aboriginal women into their custody as witnesses, and one policeman was speared to death. Meanwhile in northern central Australia, the local policeman protector brought an Aboriginal man and a number of Aboriginal women into custody for alleged cattle theft. During the journey back, they were grossly ill-treated, one woman dying as a result. When the policeman was tried for assault, the judge, renowned as the flogging judge of Darwin, raised doubts about the reliability of Aboriginal witnesses, expressed his preference for their hanging or flogging, and generally conducted his court with scant attention to procedure. Back in Arnhem Land, a punitive expedition to capture the Aboriginal man who had speared the policeman was stopped through southern-based humanitarian lobbying of the federal government. Fears of greater bloodshed led to a missionary party instead apprehending a suspect who claimed self-defence. When the same Darwin judge sentenced him to death, humanitarians succeeded in having the decision appealed in the High Court. Although the sentence was unanimously overturned and the man released, frontier justice prevailed: he was never seen again.4

Later in the same year, reports of Aboriginal slavery aired at the BCL conference were reported in the London press and then in Australia. The Manchester Guardian was one of the few papers prepared to publish criticisms of the Australian governments’ treatment of Aborigines. In 1930, for example, it had reported on BCL conference allegations of slave conditions among Aborigines in Australia and assertions that the Australian federal government had contravened the League of Nations slavery convention.5 Some days after Ruby Rich

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