July 7.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Exploitation of Aboriginal girls and women
Wadjularbinna was born into the Gungalidda people of the land adjacent to the Gulf of Carpentaria. She was conceived when her mother was raped by a white man. At the age of three or four she was forcibly taken by the Plymouth Brethren, who ran the Doomadgee Mission. She remembers being snatched out of her grandmother's arms and her grandmother's wailing as she walked away from the mission. She lost contact with her family and never saw her grandmother again. Mission policy was to segregate boys and girls, to raise them in dormitories and keep the children apart from the adults on the mission. Wadjularbinna explained:
My sister and I could not speak a word of English. We communicated in our own language. We soon learned that we weren't allowed to speak our language, so when we tried to communicate to each other we were dragged off to the bathroom and had our mouths washed out with soap on a face washer. This went on for days, weeks and months until we lost our language completely. [1]
Life in the dormitory was harsh. 'We were treated as slaves', Wadjularbinna recalled, 'because we had to do things military style'. She worked for the missionaries, cooking, carrying water, caring for the children. Punishment was often severe. Senior girls who escaped from the dormitory were chained to trees and flogged with a plaited greenhide leather whip. Some were flogged so hard they 'swelled up and could not move''; others had to be carried away and taken inside to be bathed for days before their health returned.
'This continued trauma and distress', she explained, 'continued through [my] life on that reserve concentration camp'. Her loving parents were near 'and yet so far because [I] could not turn to them'. [2] She thought of herself as just a number in the system, explaining that:
I realised that each stage of my growing up in that reserve were acts of genocide, not only against me but against members of my family. They were barbaric acts of genocide. It was a deliberate plan to deny me of my true identity and try and destroy my place within a system of law and religion which connects me spiritually to the land, sea and creation. [3]
After arranged marriage with a white grazier, arranged by the missionaries, Wadjularbinna eventually returned to her community. 'I've done a complete circle', she wrote, 'and returned to my clan and the land of my very being only to find my whole People are at the mercy of genocide right up to this very day'. [4]
Affidavit no. 2 of Wadjularbinna Nulyarimma, affirmed 8 July 1998, Supreme Court of the ACT, p. 1.
Ibid., p. 2.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 5.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, An Indelible Stain, pp. 10-11, 181 n.7, n.8, n.9, n.10.
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Between the two World Wars in New South Wales, under the administration of the Aborigines Protection Board, Aboriginal girls and young women were taken from their families to be placed as indentured domestic workers in white household under a so- called apprenticeship scheme… Despite a rhetoric of protection, of giving Aboriginal girls 'a better chance' than they would otherwise have had if they remained with their communities, the records reveal an unusually high illegitimate birth rate to girls in apprenticeships, while close examination shows the authorities made no effort to stem what amounted to a pattern of sexual exploitation of these young Aboriginal servants…From the time Aboriginal activist Fred Maynard railed against the Board's policy in the 1920s — 'They are trying to exterminate the Noble and Ancient Race of sunny Australia ... What a horrible conception of so-called Legislation' [1] — an Aboriginal view of a sinister motive behind the apprenticeship policy has been documented. 'At the age of fourteen our girls [are] sent to work — poor illiterate trustful little girls to be gulled by the promises of unscrupulous white men', Koori spokeswoman Anna Morgan stated in 1934, 'We all know the consequences. But, of course, one of the functions of the Aborigines' Protection Board is to build a white Australia.' [2]
Maynard to an Aboriginal girl, 14/10/27, Premier's Department Correspondence Files A27/915. 2. Quoted by Heather Goodall, Invasion to Embassy: land in Aboriginal politics in New South Wales 1770-1972, Allen and Unwin, St Leonards (Sydney), 2008, p. 223.
Quoted Goodall 1996: 187.
Acknowledgment: Victoria Haskins, ‘A better chance? — Sexual abuse and the apprenticeship of Aboriginal girls under the NSW Aborigines Protection Board, Aboriginal History, Vol. 28 (2004) p. 33 n.2, n.3.