UPDATE JULY 10 2019: Today’s announcement that the Queensland government will pay $190 million in stolen wages to about 10,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who had their pay given to the state under historical Protection Acts, brings a long running legal battle to a close. While the settlement (less than half what some historians say is owed) addresses one element of the act, there is much that simple cannot be redressed . The act controlled the minutest aspects of Indigenous Australians’ lives: where they could live, where they could travel and who they could marry. As much as wages, lives were stolen. The following piece, from 2017, explores this through the eyes of one who experienced it.
Roy Savo was born in Mapoon, in far north Queensland, a few hours south of Punsand Bay where the arrow head pointing at Papua New Guinea chips off into the Torres Strait islands. Both of his parents worked on the Mapoon mission, a perpetually underfunded Presbyterian mission whose industrial school became the destination for scores of children stolen from the surrounding peoples — including the Mpakwithi, Taepithiggi, Thaynhakwith, Warrangku, Wimarangga and Yupungathi peoples. They were converted to Christianity and put to work. By the time Savo was born, in June 1939, Mapoon’s various attempts at self-sufficiency were floundering, and the place could only survive thanks to “compulsory financial contributions” deducted from the wages of domestic staff and stockmen.
From the age of 14, Savo was taken to Bramwell Station to work. Speaking to Crikey, he describes his employer there, Ron Heinman, as “the best boss” as well as “the end of the good bosses”. He worked happily for two years — “cattle work, mustering, rounding and all that” — before droving down from Mitchell River to Charters Towers, and eventually being sent to work at Wurung Station.
“You just went where they sent you, you didn’t have any control over your life,” Savo said. “Your life wasn’t yours.”
Wurung was very different to Bramwell, where Savo said he was treated as an equal. In addition to physically punishing work and long hours, Savo and the other Indigenous workers on the station were treated “like second class citizens”.
“We were not allowed to sit with the white stockmen for tea,” he said.
The Aboriginals Preservation and Protection Act was struck the same year Savo was born, and like previous “protection acts” in Queensland (and equivalent acts in other states), it ensured that no Indigenous person under it (roughly half the Indigenous population in the state) could decide the reality of their own life. Where they worked, who they could marry, where they could travel — these were all determined by the state.
Dr Ros Kidd, who has written scores of articles and several books on work done under protection acts, describes it as a “conscripted workforce”.
“If people were taken under government control could be sent out to work , they had no rights to decide what work they would do, what payment they received, or how long they were there,” she told Crikey. ” If you deserted from work — if you were mistreated or just wanted to see your family — they would bring you back in chains. You were always under threat of being sent to Palm Island, where you may never see your family again.
“If you have no control over your labour, your pay or how long you are engaged, that’s pretty much conscription,” Kidd said. “I think Apartheid is a very close parallel.”
Savo goes further.
“We were slaves, in a sense,” he said. “We had no say over our lives, we were teenagers getting up at 4am and working till 9 at night some days. And they just call you ‘ boy’. No one ever called me Roy.”
Significantly, protection acts also controlled Indigenous workers’ wages and savings. Their wages were usually paid into a trust that they couldn’t access. Very often, this money was never accessed by who had earned it.
“We never saw any money from it, because we didn’t know anything about money, ” he said. “You got your breakfast, lunch and dinner, and that was it.”
Kidd said it was widely understood (and recorded) among the rural protectors that, year after year, many stations in Queensland would not have been able to function without this cheap Indigenous labour, enforced on pain of potential incarceration. Savo said there was no question that he could just ask for his wages.
“You weren’t allowed to ask questions. You didn’t say anything, unless you were asked,” he said. “Today people wouldn’t believe what happened to us — we were slaves, basically a step up from being an animal. But it really happened.”
Savo applied to be exempted from the Protection Act in 1961. Sometime in 1962, his wish was granted. He took up work in the railways of far north Queensland. In November of the next year, the Mapoon mission was closed. The population who had been forcibly placed there years before were now obstructing a potentially significant Bauxite mine, and so had to be forcibly removed.
A handful of Mapoon residents and their children, named in a “removal order” initiated by the director of Native Affairs, were sent north to New Mapoon on the Cape York Peninsula. Behind them, their homes burned.
Roy Savo, is being very nice about this, it was a lot worse than this, I seen it, was on cattle stations working also.
Also, on a Northern Territory property not far of Gulf border, for a joke, the (Wags) lined up the older black women, made them lift their clothes, and with other hand to hold back one side of their vagina, so they could be sprayed with DDT, hard to believe isn’t it. a lot of stories that were funny once have all gone under ground now
These stories can still be seen in books published from the turn of the 19th century through until the 1960s. I have a collection of these books I call the John Howard library. In them, white people boast, joke, recount of the horrific acts being committed against Aboriginal people in rural and remote Australia.
The horrific racism in these books, so casually talking of murder and abuse of Aboriginal people is shocking. They blow away the myth that white people in cities did not know what was happening. They did. Atrocities against Aboriginal people even appears in children’s literature. (EG: Phylis Power Under Australian Skies published 1955 contains an image of a contemporary white woman shooting at Aboriginal people painted up for ceremony, and recounts what these days would be called a massacre) ) Sadly, there are many books in the John Howard library. In them, there is no attempt to hide the thoughts and behaviour of the white people perpetrating acts of cruelty and murder on Aboriginal people.
I keep these books as evidence when white Australians try to deny the past, I can show them. In their own words. Much like what Bill Gammage has done using the accounts of explorers to paint a picture of pre invasion Australia, the authors of these books document the genocidal actions and entrenched racism in Australia up until the 1960s.
As the comments show, it was much worse than Apartheid, although motives- dispossession of aboriginal people- were similar. The missions corresponded to the “ homelands” where people were uprooted from the own lives and put to work for whites, waiting for them to die of as a “ backward “ people.
But the controls were always greater than under Apartheid. They were slaves, though not chattel slaves, who could be bought and sold in the market.
This disgrace still hangs over people made outcasts in their own land, and the crimes of the past carried forward and magnified by cheap attempts to deny compensation- would any white not get full compensation for stolen wages? What about land stolen through missions and settlements?
These crimes have always made me angry and ashamed for the many amongst us who have contrived their blindness to what was done
Ask a ‘ good bloke’ like Tim Fisher about bucket loads of extinguishment in the 1990’s, shortly before he went to the fucking Vatican. Shortly after arriving in Oz in the early 1970’s I saw Elliott in the NT and was gobsmacked by Apartheid on steroids. Still they received an apology from Kevin Rudd!
Capital’s original sin is you only get great piles of wealth you can invest and sit back and live off the returns from it if you straight up steal it. This particular act of theft was especially awful. To not only lose your land but also be denied even wages? That is just cruel.
Murdoch is using this to beat up racism, the man is worse than Goebbels ever was.