September 22.
Treaty by Glenn Loughrey
Women were vulnerable
The experience of Aboriginal women.
There were developments as well in the fishermen’s exploitation of Aboriginal women. As has been noted, women were as capable of working in the fisheries as men. They often accompanied their husbands on the boats and were frequently used willingly or unwillingly to satisfy the sexual needs of the fishermen. This practice persisted beyond the period of this research and was the cause of much Aboriginal hostility. Indeed, [John] Douglas [Government resident, Thursday Island] believed the fact that the bece-de-mer industry had associated with it ‘a good deal of illicit intercourse with native women’ was one of its attractions to some fishermen. In addition to this ruthless exploitation of Aboriginal women for sexual purposes on boats, there was also a good deal of what Europeans saw as systematic prostitution ashore. Thus in a report on the pearlshell fisheries in 1879, Lieutenant Commander Thomas DeHoghton noted that the shellers were generally very healthy but added: ‘The chief sickness amongst the shellers is, I believe, venereal, which they pick up from the native women, there being camps of natives along the Australian coast where regular prostitutes are kept who are badly diseased.’ [1]
…At much frequented recruiting areas, such as the Batavia River, the prostitution of the women completely disrupted the camps and was a major factor in changing the traditional way of life, second only to recruitment itself. Thus, at Mapoon, under the eyes of the missionaries and the Northern Protector of Aborigines, fishermen of all races went to the Aboriginal camps or took women on board their boats for varying periods of time.
‘Annual report of the Govt. Res. at Thursday Island’, 1890 V. & P. Vol. III, p. 172; Roth to Pol. Com., 6 May 1898; Douglas to Col. Sec., 16 December 1891; Lt DeHoghton, H.M.S. Beagle, Thursday Island, to Commodore J.C. Wilson, H.M.S. Wolverine, Sydney, 22 September 1879 [copy] encl. ‘Further correspondence in re Pearl-Shell, etc. Fisheries’, 1880 V. & P., Vol. II, p.1164.
Acknowledgment: Noel Loos, Invasion and Resistance, pp.148-149, 284 n.77.
____
The abuse of Aboriginal women by white colonisers.
Most Aboriginal people whose land was usurped by pastoralists were forced in by defeat, exhaustion or starvation, or lured by food and tobacco. Some groups in Queensland were described in the 1880s as having a hunted and anxious look as they begged food and medicine from settlers...Some living on the outskirts of settlements were wracked by alcohol or opium addiction and disease, while women survived by prostitution. In 1900, Ardock station in Queensland continued the not uncommon frontier practice of confining [Aboriginal] women for sexual purposes. Nine Aboriginal women were constrained by rabbit-proof fencing for the use of white station hands. [1]
...Gender clearly shaped frontier relations. Aboriginal women probably suffered the worst abuse, as sexual oppression has always followed conquest and exploitation. It was doubly inevitable on the north Australian frontier where the rough-and-tumble European adventurers came without their own women. Male chauvinism and racism combined to permeate the attitudes of most European men in the north. Bill Harney, who knew the Top End as well as anyone, said that there were two kinds of single men in the Territory: 'those who have lived with native women and admit it and those who will not admit it'. [2] Many whites claimed that they were lured to the north by adventure, money and Aboriginal women. The old territory joke was that Europeans were 'sexplorers' who sought the joys of 'black velvet'. This was the slang term for Aboriginal women, which reflected a whole set of attitudes to race and sex that determined the sexual exploitation of black women by white men. Women were vulnerable...
Cited in R. Evans, K. Saunders and K. Cronin, Exclusion, Exploitation and Extermination: Race Relations in Colonial Queensland, Australian and New Zealand Book Co., Sydney, 1975, p.107
Y. B. Harney, Life Among the Aborigines, London, 1957, p.14.
Acknowledgment: Richard Broome, Aboriginal Australians – A History Since 1788, pp. 114-115, 134, 390 n.54, 392 n.28.