indigenous politics
15 Feb 2008
The Sins of the Fathers
'Half-caste' children were often evidence of white male immorality, argues Alison Broinowski, that is why they were removed
On the day after so many Australians said they were sorry, I wrote to the Sydney Morning Herald. They didn't print my letter, so here it is:"I don't want to detract from Australia's happiness yesterday, but Valerie Linow's story and the racist rationalisations of Baldwin Spencer compel me to point out the obvious. The fathers of 'half-caste' children were all non-Indigenous men. Removing the children meant removing the evidence of who had made Indigenous women in camps, on farms, in missions, or in towns pregnant. Not a few squatters and their wives would have been happy for the evidence to disappear, to say nothing of missionaries, policemen and others who coined the term ‘black velvet' for Aboriginal women."
Professor Baldwin Spencer of Melbourne University, who was Chief Protector of Aborigines in the Northern Territory in 1911-12, advocated leaving no "half-caste" children in native camps, but taking them away to "breed out" their colour and low intelligence. But Spencer was applying a pseudo-scientific, social Darwinian gloss to a fact that was rarely mentioned in polite society: that half-caste children were evidence of white male immorality. He was rationalising the removal of the evidence.
An Indigenous woman, who objected passionately that Brendan Nelson had cited her story incorrectly without her permission, told ABC radio today that her father was a local grazier, who also had two other children by indigenous women.
Henry Reynolds has written of the "whispering in our hearts" about our treatment of Aborigines. The shame of fathering children out of wedlock didn't whisper in outback Australia, it shouted; because the evidence was visible to everyone. Aboriginal women were shamed, and so were their husbands, no matter how much they loved their mixed-race children. Settler society was shamed because there was such contempt for miscegenation and such store was set by racial superiority. Settler wives were shamed by their husbands' infidelity. Hence the big cover-up; hence the whispering.
And you can't tell me it was just lonely shearers and jackaroos who fathered the children. What about the priests and laymen (great term) in the missions? What about the policemen and itinerant officials, storekeepers and publicans? It is so obvious that I can't believe how silent we still are about this, even when we have heard so many painful stories.
Instead, we find the stories in novels, opera, and film. Many French colonialists merged into Vietnamese, Tahitian, and Noumean society - see Indochine - as if they really did believe in equality. The British imperialists, who didn't, had strict rules against socialising with the natives. The penalty was shame and ostracism, as EM Forster showed in A Passage to India. When the wives went up to the hill stations in the summer, the men broke the rules, of course. (Harry Flashman, in George McDonald Fraser's yarns, broke them all the time). Hence the 11th commandment: thou shalt not be found out. The 12th was: don't fall in love with her, and if she's pregnant, leave her.
Of course, Chinese men could and did marry Indigenous women in Australia without secrecy or shame, and founded some very successful families. Some, like Quong Tart, married Englishwomen. But it was different for the Aboriginal heroine in Katharine Susannah Prichard's novel Coonardoo (1928) who has a squatter's child and is killed. ‘Eccentric' white man Roger Jose, in Nicholas Jose's factual story Black Sheep (2002) on the other hand, lived in childless contentment for 50 years with his Indigenous wife and her sister in Borroloola, and was classified as "half-caste".
We search obsessively for the causes of accidents and diseases, but we rarely talk about that fact that most homicides and violent attacks are done by men. We still tend to prosecute female prostitutes but not their male clients. We have just had an orgy of talk about the Stolen Generations, but we still don't say it was always men who fathered them, men who took them away, and men who justified it.
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There is an additional factor at play here, and that is the patriarchal notion of children as property of the father. Therefore white fathers felt entitled to collectively authorise the state to steal children from their mothers and their mothers’ families.
This is perhaps another factor in the moral blindness of the conservatives. As both Tony Abbott and Brendan Nelson have revealed, even in the most apparently bland middle class white family, mothers, grandmothers, sisters, aunts, and girlfriends were bullied into relinquishing their children for adoption. The mindset that allowed that supposedly pragmatic solution for the social stigma of illegitimacy, and ignored the subsequent pain, will never understand the human tragedy of children stolen, families destroyed, and a culture damaged.
Rudd’s great step was to move beyond the notion of property, and to proclaim the value of family, kinship and connection.
Alison says that half-caste kids were always the children of Aboriginal mothers and white fathers. Not really true: down here, even in the mid-nineteenth century, some white women married Aboriginal men and got their ten-acre block. And more importantly, from about 1860 (at least, down this way) half-castes were marrying half-castes and having half-caste children. [Sorry, I find that word offensive, but it’s a term, and a subject, that has to be understood.] By about 1870, half-caste women down this way were having quarter-caste children. By 1890, ….. you get the picture.
This is actually crucial: in the various Acts, the definition of a ‘half-caste’ was quite precise: the child of a European man (native or local-born) and an Aboriginal woman. According to the Act, children of half-castes were therefore not half-castes. Seriously ! In SA, they had to change the Act accordingly when this ‘anomaly’ dawned on them, because it meant that there was a group of people over whom they had no legal control.
And of course, there were many, many other non-Aboriginal men around besides white fellas: in the lower Lakes in the 1860s, there was at least one African-American, and one guy from the Cape Colony pretending to be the returning spirit of a dead Aboriginal bloke from the area. There were quite a few Chinese men, at least one down in the South-East and one around Port Lincoln, who had children by Aboriginal women. A West Indian guy named Savage lived in Adelaide (records say, most intriguingly, that he was born in Adelaide in 1852) and he married a local Kaurna woman (i.e. from the Adelaide area) named Ivaritji. Legend has it that a Maori guy also lived in the lower Murray area and had kids by an Aboriginal woman. And of course, Afghans had very wide and friendly relations with many Aboriginal women up and down the country. Truth is much more varied than formula.
As well, Alison, are there any documented cases of half-caste children by missionaries ? As a Marxist who has developed a great respect for missionaries, I am shocked. There was a rumour about the son of one down this way, having relations with a white woman, but at a court hearing it was clear that he had been working hundreds of miles away while she was in the process of becoming pregnant.
Rumours abound, of course, of missionaries and Aboriginal woman - rumours are such wonderful things, they don’t need ‘proof’ (ptuh ! ptuh !) - so Western, so bourgeois - and when they are untrue the subject is usually totally unaware of their existence - a very useful way to destroy someone. And proof is often so difficult, it’s so much easier to believe what you want to believe.
And you can always drop this one on people: prove that he didn’t. Impossible, but very useful.
"As well, Alison, are there any documented cases of half-caste children by missionaries ? As a Marxist who has developed a great respect for missionaries, I am shocked."
Why on earth would you be shocked that a missionary would do what comes naturally to all humans, indeed all mammals, and have sex with a member of the opposite sex? Surely that’s not actually surprising?
Obviously when the white population was mainly male, most half-caste children were from black mothers and white fathers, and obviously many were a product of rape.
There is also evidence in the CD Rowley’s research, that there were some attempts to negotiate peaceful sharing of rescources by the Aboriginal population, during which wives were provided to certain vetted white farmers. Many ran away, but not all. The reality of such trade arrangements is that they were made through providing the means for bonds of blood with the Aboriginal leadership, so as to ensure that belief in reciprocal obligation entered the white population, and that the debt would be carried forward in time to the present, if not immediately paid. There are only rare incidents of those trade arrangements being met by the invaders. Yet the few examples in which white farmers learned indigenous languages and protected blacks from police etc, are extraordinarily significant parts of the history of our nation.
When the number of white women in the population had increased however, there also began marriages of white woman to Aboriginal men. More often those women moved into the indigenous cultural paradigm, and are why not all Aboriginal persons are so dark as many might otherwise be. Such women have been, in general, well treated within indigenous contexts, as have white men whom gravitated into the indigenous belief system.
Yet the treatment by the police, of those black men whom have loved white women, includes some of the most shocking facts I know. The stories are not only historical either, but current. And those white mothers whom had children with black men, have neither escaped from having had children removed …
… let the full story gradually unfold into the public veiw. What is known by indigenous Australians about the depravity of behaviour that supported the invasion of Australia, and which still supports racial discrimination against the indigenous population, is traumatic often even to learn of, short of any need to experience. But as we whitefellas learn the full tale, we are alleviating the emotional burden on the black community.
Word Sword Sworn
At Hath
That Hat
Inshallah no poetry farce
By Solomon’s Seal will my past
No word not true can last
Hi Rebekkap,
Of course I am not saying that missionaries did not marry or enjoy sex with their wives, as much as anyone else does. Many of them had plenty of kids, and I suppose -plenty of sex in between kids. I’m sure the occasional minister (or Catholic priest or monk for that mattter) got the hots for other women, Black and White - and on Aboriginal settlements of one or two hundred people, one does tend to meet the same small group of people almost every day, and often very up close and personal.
All I am saying (please excuse my obviously inarticuloate expression) is that, in my poor experience and in my limited reading, I haven’t come across any missionary having a fling with any Aboriginal woman (certainly, one can tell from Taplin’s Journal at Point McLeay that he was very fond of at least two young women, Teenminnie and Mutjuli, to the point of deep love, certainly in the case of Teenminnie: he really sounded distraught at her death in 1869) or going off shagging behind the church, or moving in with an Aboriginal woman and having any children by her (actually, in New Zealand, one of the earliest missionaries in the Bay of Islands, Kendall, ran off from his wife and went to live with a Maori woman in the Kerikeri pa, around 1818 I think.)
So if you know of any missionary who rooted any Aboriginal women and had kids by them, I would be interested, Rebekka. I could then join in the general condemnation. But if you don’t really know of this ever happening, can we drop it ?
In my view, the missionaries were often, if not usually, the most wonderful people ever to have anything to do with Aboriginal people, the Left of their age (after all, where were there any other signs of a Left in Australia in the nineteenth century ? The unions ? Yeah, right.) And as a Marxist, I do offer them my deepest respects and admiration to them, certainly the ones I have read about. Of course, they were usually religious nuts, fanatics, but would they have come out to some god-forsaken spot to devote their lives to Aboriginal people otherwise ?
The maligning of good people is easy for fools, or people with an axe to grind, and it does fit in with the flavour of the month, but unless you have evidence of their misdeeds, move on and pick on somebody else. (I was going to write something a bit stronger there, but I took into account your obvious sensibilities.)
Hi Curaepirizid,
Yes, down this way, there were quiter a few cases of white women marrying Aboriginal men:
* in the Mount Barker area, a Peramangk man had a white wife and a few kids, according to the Select Committee report of 1860, and worked his ten-acre block with her;
* in the 1890s, when a shoe-making workshop was set up at Point McLeay, one of the students, George Rankine, ran off with the supervisor’s wife, May Mugg, and married her; they lived together in Adelaide for at least fifty years;
* a white woman was married to an Aboriginal man working on the Railways in the Tailem Bend area in the early 1900s, I think they had eight or nine kids.
But of course, most half-caste kids had white fathers in the earlier years, while after 1880 or so, until the 1960s, most half-caste kids would have had half-caste mothers and fathers. At least down this way in southern SA.
"So if you know of any missionary who rooted any Aboriginal women and had kids by them, I would be interested, Rebekka. I could then join in the general condemnation. But if you don’t really know of this ever happening, can we drop it ? "
No I don’t have specific instances, although several are listed by rmg above. My comment was not "generally condemning" missionaries - it was making the point that humans are humans, whatever their beliefs, and when you put humans in close promximity to other humans, they do what comes naturally to all mammals - that’s not actually a value judgement in my book. I don’t personally see anything immoral about sex in and of itself.
But given the generalities of human nature, I would say the burden of proof should belong on your side - prove no missionaries ever had sex with an Aborigine.
It’s an interesting principle, that something must have happened because I can’t imagine it not happeneing.
No. You prove that it happened, if you wish to assert something. Innocent until proven guilty.
Prove it or f**k off.
Sorry, that’s a bit rude. But how on earth do you prove something didn’t happen, if ‘no evidence for it happening’ is not enough ?
Yes, there is a legal principle, used extensively (I should imagine) by defence lawyers, that the absence of evidence does not mean the evidence of absence. Extremely clever. But I’m also sure that most judges would tell them politely to shove it, go away and get some evidence if the lawyer wants to avoid a contempt charge.
For example, take the Rabbit-Proof Fence Episode: if this were NOT true, then one would expect to see an absence of reporting in the newspapers of the time, and I’m sure that historical researchers can cite chapter and verse that sort of evidence, and it would be readily available on Google. Such a story would have got international coverage.
As well, the Protector, A.O. Neville, had a sworn enemy in Mrs. M.M. Bennett, who worked out in the country beyond the Fence and who wrote extensively about Neville’s evil doings, so one could easily look up what she wrote about him at the time, and of course this also would be on Google. She had connections on the Left, including in Russia, which would have absolutely loved to sink the boot into the colonial-inmperialist Australian government (regardless of the fact that this would have been exclusively a Western Australian matter).
And really, the various groups operating on behalf of Aboriginal welfare and rights at the time (and there were a few in WA, mission socieites at least) would have recorded and commented on this Incident. So it would be a reltaively easy matter to check out those sources and verify the Incident, if it actually happened. If something has actually happened, there is usuall ya huge range of evidence, often duplicating each other.
As well, if the Rabbit-Proof Fence incident was a myth, a leg-pull by one of the old ladies, then it could easily be verified as fact by consulting the records at Moore River and Jigalong, to track the movements of the girls involved.
To take another example: the Hindmarsh Island business: in that case, there are birth, death, marriage, school, and police records, Protector’s letters, missionary’s journal, and much other evidence which could have been used, not to mention the 600-page seminal work by the Berndts, the preeminent anthoropoligists in Australia between 1940 and 1990, who had intimate knowledge of the group involved, in fact cut their teeth on it. So, for example, the key element in that Incident being the passing of secrets from mother to daughter, down an unbroken line, depended on an unbroken line of maternal descent being Ngarrindjeri. Problem was that almost none of the women involved had an unbroken maternal descent - almost all had a non-Ngarrindjeri maternal ancestor, sometimes even mothers. As far as I can tell from the genealogies, only one woman had what seemed to be an unbroken line of descent, and she admitted knowing nothing, and in any case was not really from that particular country, or even dialect group.
So there are many ways to prove something. But there are really no ways to prove conclusively that something didn’t happen if it, in fact, didn’t happen, if you ignore the simple lack of evidence, and take even that to mean that it still could have happened. Without a shred of evidence, there will still be doubts, rumours, innuendo, outright slander (as you use, Rebekka). And if people believe something, no lack of evidence will change their minds: this used to have a name. That name was Prejudice, judging without evidence, judging BEFORE having the evidence, making your mind up that something happened, in the absence of evidence.
Joe