Chapter 9: Over the Grid, 1951 – 1969

Policy Shifts

In 1951, Paul Hasluck was appointed as the Federal Government’s Minister for Territories, with responsibilities for Aboriginal Affairs in the Northern Territory. Later that year, another Conference of Native Welfare Ministers was held in Canberra. South Australia was not represented at this Conference (but see Appendix XIV), at which Hasluck announced major changes in the Federal Government’s policy, towards assimilation: as Hasluck explained,

Assimilation means, in practical terms, that in the course of time, it is expected that all persons of Aboriginal blood or mixed blood in Australia will live like white Australians do. The acceptance of this policy governs all other aspects of native affairs administration.

This definition was to change many times before the official policy was changed again in the seventies. The policy thus recognised the different roles for what were still called half-castes and full-bloods: the destination for one would be alongside other Australians, if perhaps at arm’s-length, but the other group would remain shut out of Australian society for the far distant future. Partly, this policy shift was influenced by the Australian Half-Caste Progress Association in Darwin, which, according to Powell, ‘managed to shake off most of the legal restraints upon them during the 1950s and move towards integration with the white Australian community.’ (Powell, 1988: 232). This shift was not openly expressed in racial terms, but in those of need, which still left the full-bloods in the Northern Territory universally categorised as ‘wards’ of the Federal Government when the NT Welfare Ordinances were proclaimed in 1953. (Ibid.: 233).

In South Australia, the more progressive organisations such as the Advancement League, congratulated Hasluck on what was seen at the time as a forward-looking policy: it may not seem as such today, but even in the early fifties, the spectrum of racists was already wide and tended almost universally to be on the right of Hasluck and to condemn him accordingly.

While progressive people may have been somewhat concerned for the cultural integrity of full-bloods, they were, especially after the experiences of the War, far more preoccupied with the abuses arising from the continued diminution of Aboriginal people’s human rights, their right to vote, drink, live where they like, marry whom they liked. In fact, those anthropologists who worked with full-bloods, Elkin, Stanner, Thompson, the Berndts, did not necessarily see that the full-bloods had lost by the new Ordinances: they were, after all, designed to protect Aboriginal people from the very real, even genocidal, super-exploitation by pastoralists and to control their interaction (cf. Berndt et al., 1987).

In South Australia, the more common word was ‘absorption’. Words – and therefore policies - have different meanings at different times, depending on what is assumed to be axiomatic and therefore unnecessary to speak of: for example, to know what the word ‘absorption’ meant in 1951, one must know what was assumed to be its bounds, beyond which nobody assumed it would go: a careful reading thus suggests that, while in the year 2000, it may have the meanings of ‘total immersion, incorporation, submergence, obliteration, becoming lost within the mass’, in 1951, it had a far more specific meaning of ‘incorporation of able-bodied Aboriginal people, usually men, and if possible reliably married and sober, in the rural economy, as remote as possible from whites, with as few as possible opportunities for interaction especially between the sexes’. In South Africa, they would have called it something like ‘remote-area apartheid’, but later here we came to call it ‘assimilation’.

In South Australia after 1951, the Protection Board favoured the granting of small farms to carefully selected families, using erstwhile Aboriginal reserves. They also cautiously began a policy of purchasing houses on the edge of small country towns and placing young married couples, with reputations for sobriety and fidelity, in casual rural employment in those regions. Houses were set aside in Meningie as early as 1951. Even this tiny step was opposed by many whites: in Meningie and Tailem Bend, the Board was informed, whites reportedly did not want Aboriginal people living next door right into the sixties.

The Meningie Council had approached the Board earlier calling for a police station to be set up at Narrung with the task of keeping ‘Point McLeay people out of whites’ hair.’ A police station was eventually set up at Narrung in 1953. But the hostility of whites against Aboriginal people continued to grow: in 1956, councillors from Tailem Bend were noisily opposing any further moves by Aboriginal people to that town and maintained the pressure into the sixties: ‘By 1962, the Auditor-General was recommending that Aborigines should not be admitted to Tailem Bend Hospital, but be sent on to Meningie.’ (Linn, 1988: 203-211).

Thus, the progress of ‘absorption’ of young, sober Aboriginal families into nearby towns met another obstacle: in such a racist society, not only might the Aboriginal people themselves not seek absorption but nor would many whites be at all hospitable to them: from both sides, mechanisms would ensure that the line would not be blurred, the boundaries would not be crossed. Meningie and Tailem Bend were valuable test-cases: they demonstrated that, for many racist reasons, absorption, as we may now define it in 2000, would never occur in fifties South Australia: assimilation, as it later came to be called, would remain for a long time yet a very long-term goal, an inscription on a banner, rather than an immediate program.

But only so long as the Protection Board kept control of the processes of re-location, employment placement and service allocation. So, perhaps a few hundred Aboriginal people may be dispersed in one generation, a few hundred in the next and so on, while the full-bloods would continue to die out on the stations. By the year 2000, it may have been assumed, after two or three generations, only the darker castes might be still living on the stations, with perhaps a slight majority of Aboriginal people from stations like Point Mcleay living on the edge of country towns, and, some having married lower-class whites, some living actually in the towns. Perhaps a few hundred may even have moved to the city and found employment in factories there.

But the Aboriginal people themselves had other ideas. By the beginning of the next decade, the policy of exemptions was in complete disarray, with Aboriginal single people and families moving more or less at will to wherever they could find work, stations, the railways, country towns and, in rapidly growing numbers, the city. By 1970, twenty percent of the state’s Aboriginal population were living in Adelaide. By 1972, the authorities responsible for Aboriginal affairs were forced to even contemplate the provision of housing for Aboriginal people in the city rather than in country towns. The isochrome lines had moved much more rapidly than they had ever dreamt from the remote areas to the city: maps

Economic Changes

Partly this was due to the boom in the Australian economy after 1956, which was particularly salient for the urban economy. The whole economy of course was further boosted by the Vietnam War, which on the one hand took out of production a number of young men, while putting demands for war-related production from favoured economies like Australia’s.

In the rural economy, while there had been little investment during the late forties, massive re-investment took place during the fifties, but to a large extent in ‘a technological revolution’ according to the Vernon Committee, in land improvements, irrigation schemes, mechanisation and the application of fertilisers: in the same time, a substantial reduction occurred in the need for semi-skilled rural labour. Labour was replaced by machines, by more self-employing reorganisation of production, a move to more mixed farming. There was, admittedly, massive growth in the production of wool, meat and grain production, but these were all areas which did not signify more secure employment for Aboriginal people, except as shearers. Average rural productivity per head increased by some fifty percent between the 1947 and 1961 Censuses, without any appreciable increase in the need for labour. (cf. Waterman, 1972: 108).

Educational Changes

The baby boom at the end of the War put massive pressure on the capacity of the education system; from the early fifties, school systems had to cope with a sudden phenomenal rise in school numbers, an increase which continued throughout the fifties and into the next decade. By the early sixties, it was not uncommon for teachers to be trying to educate fifty and even sixty in a classroom. To compound the problem, the Bean Committee in 1949 had recommended that the compulsory schooling age be raised to fifteen. This was postponed until 1963, perhaps to alleviate the need for extra schools at a time of financial stringency, but was yet one more factor impelling a building program of dozens of secondary and area schools, throughout the fifties.

Aboriginal Response

By 1950, Aboriginal stations in ‘settled’ South Australia were not idyllic communities sheltered from a strange and alien world: the populations lived under the surveillance of superintendents and other staff, and had done for generations. The knowledge of the people about the outside world would have been fairly comprehensive: many people had been reading the daily newspapers for decades and of course, working in the rural economy. Some had been fortunate enough to escape to the city, where some Ngarrindjeri had lived for decades. While most people had an extremely strong affection for the station on which they had been born and bred and for the relations and friends amongst whom they had grown up, they nevertheless knew that opportunities lay elsewhere. As the Berndts had discovered, many Ngarrindjeri people saw the city as providing the chances for their children that they had never had.

In 1951, A.P. Elkin wrote:

There is an unsettlement, a ferment almost everywhere among the younger virile Aborigines who have any contact whatever with non-natives – townships, settlers, stations, mines or missions. Cultural diffusion and mixing are going on apace. Many want the best of both worlds, the old and the new. Others … want a fair deal and good education. Some of the inducements, of course, are not laudable, being but the froth and jetsam of western culture; but that, too, is part of the change, the rate of, and desire for which was very much increased in the 1940s. (Powell, 1988: 232)

Professor Fay Gale visited Point Mcleay many times as a young woman, from the late forties to the sixties. As she reported, even in the late forties, the women at Point McLeay

seemed so outgoing, so much in command, so intelligent and so thirsty for knowledge of the outside world and of the city in particular. At the time, exemption laws were in force and they could not leave the mission without permits. I found their conversation more stimulating than that of most white women. The Aboriginal women at Point McLeay seemed concerned with broader issues of freedom, equality, the validity of Christianity for their situation, the right to employment or social benefits. Admittedly these were not usually expressed in philosophical or political terms but the meaning was clear. Why are we here in this place and what do we do to either improve it or get out of it ? (Gale, 1989: 130)

At the time, Point McLeay, although home and hearth to nearly four hundred Ngarrindjeri people, did not inspire admiration: cottages were in disrepair, without running water or electricity, privacy was impossible, movement away for seasonal work lent the station a pervading air of anarchy and dissatisfaction, especially amongst the women: the men were much freer, unburdened by children, to move away and work in new and promising situations. (cf. Ibid.: 131):

When I returned to Point McLeay in conjunction with field work for my thesis in the 1950s I was able to talk to the older women on a more equal basis. Their main questions to me were about life on ‘the outside’, especially in the city. Point McLeay had clearly become a prison to many. They felt the urgent need to move away for the sake of their children and grandchildren. They were worried about the low level of education available to them and the lack of employment. Their farm labour was no longer required, as it had been in earlier times, and the market for their craftwork had collapsed… (Ibid.: 132)

A small community offers much, but only so much: a variety of environments in which to grow up, a tight group of relations and friends, often a secure world; but little else for those seeking access to the promises of the larger society, and for those who are prepared to risk its pitfalls. At any one time, most Ngarrindjeri people had in fact made the decision to stay away from the station entirely, and subsist at fringe-camps near country towns, just beyond council boundaries, but close enough to be able to walk into town for supplies, or to seek out available work. In ‘settled’ Australia, with no land base left, Aboriginal people still had to survive somehow, and the most independent-minded sought to do this with integrity, and without relying on the stations. Thus, from one-mile, two-mile or three-mile camps, they had to continually walk the tight-rope between destitution and police control, between survival and surveillance; camps near Victor Harbor, Swan Reach, Mannum, Murray Bridge, Tailem Bend, Wellington, Kingston, Bordertown, Berri, Meningie, and Renmark, as well as along the Coorong, would have hosted Ngarrindjeri families at different times. (cf. Clarke, 1994: 258).

Such camps formed a network of places used by travelling groups, an archipelago of refuges across a hostile European-controlled landscape. People passing through in the 1940s from Point McLeay or from shearing engagements, on the way to Adelaide, made use of these camps. And when the Protection Board began building houses in country towns, these destinations added to the refuges available to travellers, who might drop in at any hour of the day or night:

Compared to Point McLeay people, camp dwellers had greater opportunity to take up seasonal work, such as harvesting and shearing or to gain employment in railways or on road and drain construction. (Clarke, 1994: 258-260)

Point McLeay School

Mr Reginald Lawry replaced Wilfred Lawrie in May 1951 as the head teacher at Point McLeay. Inspector Glastonbury reported that he had settled in well, and that for the first time there may be students receiving their Progress Certificates, in spite of, in his view, their poor oral language.

The Advancement League was constantly concerned about the level of education at Point McLeay: while even Ernabella now had two local teachers, and other teachers and nurses had long graduated after completing their schooling at Colebrook, Finniss Springs and even Umeewarra, not one student at Point McLeay had even achieved a Progress Certificate. The AAL suggested that young people from Point McLeay and Point Pearce should be brought into Adelaide for their secondary education, rather than wait for the establishment of a system of secondary education at the stations. The key issue, as they saw it, was therefore to establish a hostel for young people to be able to complete their secondary schooling in Adelaide, and perhaps – an outrageous idea at the time – go on to University.

In April, 1952, the Advertiser reported that Aboriginal people had raised £ 500 for a City Hostel for students. In that year, the Women’s University College in Melbourne also offered two scholarships for Aboriginal girls to go on to tertiary study. In June, 1952, the Advancement League organised the first meeting, probably of any organisation in Australia, at which all speakers were Aboriginal: all speakers stressed the need for better education; and amongst the speakers was George Rankine was Point Mcleay: he pointed out that there were no real opportunities for training at the stations.

In July, 1952, plans were announced to set up Abschol, the Aboriginal Scholarship Fund, at universities around the country: University of Adelaide students were involved in this cause from the outset. As T.G.H. Strehlow said at the time, Our ‘situation is being watched by a thousand million brown people who are our neighbours in the near North.’ In December, Nancy Brumbie, a Colebrook student and soon to be one of the first Aboriginal teachers in Australia, was appointed treasurer of the Advancement League. There was definitely something new in the air.