Brian McCoy

'They Weren't Separated': Missions, Dormitories and Generational Health

In 1997 the Bringing Them Home Report brought attention to those Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children who were taken away from their families for the purpose of assimilation. Less attention was given to those children who were also taken away but grew up in mission and settlement dormitories. Over a number of decades, and until the early 1970s, a large number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children were taken into mission and settlement dormitories. In various ways they were physically and socially separated from their families. What are the generational implications of those separations? Are there any significant differences when compared with those who were taken away? What are the social and emotional health implications for later generations?

In March 2000, Senator John Herron presented a submission—Inquiry into the Stolen Generation¹— to the Senate Legal and Constitutional References Committee on behalf of the Federal Government.² In its critique of Bringing Them Home, Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families,³ the submission proposed that those children who were placed in dormitory accommodation 'were not distanced from their families and grew up in full knowledge of their backgrounds.'⁴ Because 'further contact between the child and his or her parents was not precluded,' the submission argued, such children could not be counted among those of 'the stolen generation.'⁵

While the Bringing Them Home report largely focused on those Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children who were separated and taken away for the purposes of assimilation, little attention has been given to those who were placed in community dormitories where both the children and their families lived. Only Christine Choo's Mission Girls has examined in any detail the separation of children as a result of the mission dormitory system, as it particularly affected Aboriginal people of the Kimberley.⁶ This paper continues that exploration, focusing especially on the link between those experiences of separation and the health of subsequent generations.

In this paper, I wish to give attention to those Aboriginal children who grew up in government and mission dormitories, spending large parts of their early lives separated from the care and attention of their parents and older relations. I will focus specifically on one particular mission, Balgo Mission in Western Australia (WA), and describe how its dormitories came to be established. This will provide a context for examining some of the social and cultural effects of this particular form of separation. I will draw on health research conducted within the region between 2001–04; quotations within this paper come from that research.⁷

In seeking to address some of the health consequences of the dormitory experience, I am aware that the topic of 'forcible removal' continues to remain a most sensitive topic within the Indigenous community. I am also aware that the Federal Government sought to challenge a number of claims within the Bringing Them Home report, particularly whether the number of children separated was ever more than 10 per cent.⁸ In suggesting that the children who grew up in dormitories were also 'separated', I am not suggesting that their experiences were the same as those who were forcibly separated and relocated away from any contact with their families. As I hope to show in this paper, while there would appear to be some similarities, there are also significant differences.

Balgo Mission

Unlike most missions or settlements, Balgo Mission experienced several geographical transitions before finally establishing itself where it is located today, in its post-mission form. In 1934, a group of Catholic Pallottine missionaries left Beagle Bay Mission, on the west coast of the Kimberley, for Rockhole Station, near the town of Halls Creek, in the south-east Kimberley. Their desire was to establish a medical centre, a home for the old and infirm, and a school. Unable to obtain permission from A.O. Neville, the WA Chief Protector, to establish a centre at this location, the missionaries then sought to establish a mission further into the desert. In September 1939, accompanied by Aboriginal people from Beagle Bay, they departed Rockhole and headed further south.⁹ After three months of travelling and looking for a suitable mission site, they finally camped at a large waterhole, Tjaluwan, in time for Christmas. There they met a large number of Desert people for the first time.¹⁰

However, it was not until three years later, in 1942, that this missionary band finally managed to locate a suitable place where they believed they could establish a mission. Finding a good and adequate water supply proved the greatest challenge, as did developing a cordial relationship with their neighbours on the pastoral lease at Billiluna. However, when water supplies continued to prove problematic, and it was realised that they had established the mission on a part of the Billiluna pastoral lease, the missionaries decided to move and establish another mission site. In 1965, thirty-one years after they had first come to the East Kimberley, the Pallottine missionaries moved to a new location. Here they established 'new' Balgo, also known as Wirrimanu, laying the physical foundations of the mission upon the ancestral dreaming track of the Luurnpa (Kingfisher).

The first priority for missionaries of those times was to administer and maintain a mission in the remote and physically demanding region of the Kimberley. They differed from one another in the emphasis they gave to adult Christian conversion but were agreed on one thing: the importance of education and the training of the children. In 1950, Fr Alphonse Bleischwitz (superintendent 1939–57) at old Balgo described the aims of the mission:

The principal aim of the Mission, as of all religious missions to the primitive people, is to help these people become ideal Christians. The secondary, but important, aim is to endeavour to give them any positive good which our modern civilization is able to give them, and they on their side are able to absorb to the benefit of their general wellbeing ... We hope in the near future to have a school for the children, where they will be educated, both in religious and secular matters. Further, we intend to build dormitories for the girls and the boys.¹¹

Ronald and Catherine Berndt, who had contact with Balgo Mission as early as 1957, noted 'two statements that came into circulation early in the history of Aboriginal–European contact':

'You can't do much with the adults, you just have to concentrate on the children'; and, 'the only way to do anything with the children is to get them away from the adults.' The means of implementing these views ranged from wholesale removal of children without adult consent, through consultation and partial or temporary removal, to emphasis on psychological rather than physical separation.¹²

While they pointed out that 'wholesale removal' was most consistent where one of the child's parents was Aboriginal and the other was not, they also showed that, while some missions had abandoned the use of such removal, 'a few continue to favour it.'¹³

At one extreme were girls' dormitories that were locked each night, apparently to keep out boys and betrothed husbands, or were strictly supervised by staff. At the other, much rarer, were those that relied on more informal persuasion and more diffuse disciplinary measures. In the north and centre, the United Aborigines Mission, the Church Missionary Society, and branches of the Roman Catholic Church, among others, had their particular versions, but only the Catholics now maintain it consistently. In at least one instance, it has been tightened.¹⁴

Here, they were referring to Balgo Mission.

Mission dormitories

As the Berndts pointed out, not all dormitories in Aboriginal missions and settlements at that time were the same.¹⁵ Some missions had chosen not to use them and preferred to work through families, while others focused on the girls, protecting them 'from cradle marriages' and from getting pregnant.¹⁶ While the Pallottines maintained that local marriage laws were 'carefully observed,' they sought to remove the right of older men to marry young girls.¹⁷ Hence, at old Balgo Mission,

children remained with their parents until they were five or six years of age. When they began school ... they moved into dormitories and lived in the dormitories right through their school age and afterwards until they married.¹⁸

The particular model of dormitory life used at old Balgo Mission was taken from Beagle Bay, Balgo's 'parent' mission.¹⁹ Beagle Bay Mission was established in 1890, on the coast north of Broome, and staffed by Catholic French Trappists until 1900. Pallottine priests and brothers then took responsibility for the mission in 1901. It was from Beagle Bay that Pallottine staff, with the support of local Aboriginal personnel, left to establish Rockhole Station and then Balgo Mission.

Image 1: Boys' Dormitory, Balgo Mission, 1973. (Photograph by author.)

Christine Choo, in her submission to the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families, quoted Fr Walter's 1928 account of his time at Beagle Bay:

For Aborigines, correct mission method is to let them get used to a settled lifestyle and regular work without using force or restricting their freedom. Only love and a friendly approach can lead to success, not harshness or force. As soon as possible, children can be removed from the adult camp and the nomadic ways of their parents, and be housed in dormitories on mission premises to be educated at school and in trades.²⁰

While Choo argued that such 'removal' was for the purposes of evangelisation, its intention was more far-reaching. As the children of mixed parentage were removed to Beagle Bay for the purposes of assimilation, the removal of children at Balgo Mission was of similar intent. As families were encouraged to settle within the mission, the missionaries saw it as their right and responsibility to separate and 'train' the children into a specific form of Western education and cultural behaviour.

At Beagle Bay life was regulated and institutionalised. All children of school age were cared for in the confines of the dormitory and the mission compound. They were allowed to visit their families in the Colony [sic] for a picnic or an outing only once a month, although they could see them across the fence every day. The children were not allowed to speak their own languages or practise their traditions and customs. They were locked in the dormitory at night.²¹

While the children at Balgo were not prevented from speaking their own language, the strict form of separation between children and their parents that was introduced at Beagle Bay was repeated at Balgo Mission. By 1951, a girls' dormitory had been established at old Balgo, and a boys' dormitory by 1960.²² Initially, neither was locked at night and there were no rigid restrictions between children and their families.²³ However, this soon changed.

As at Beagle Bay, the missionaries believed that children became unsettled if they returned to live with their families in the camps or went hunting with their parents.²⁴ Therefore, they deemed it necessary to increase the separation between children and parents so that the children could experience a largely uninterrupted form of education and socialisation. In 1949, the Departmental District Officer, L. Rhatigan, reported that the Balgo Mission Superintendent had plans to establish a girls' dormitory. He also noted that there were sixty-five people in the community at that time, 'including fifteen children of school age,' while 'another 100 to 150 came in from the bush to visit the Mission from time to time.'²⁵ It would seem that when Desert people first made contact with Balgo Mission, they would occasionally leave, join other families for ceremonies or go hunting. For some, it was convenient to leave the children in the care of the mission. Pallottine Fr Joseph Kearney (at Balgo during 1950, 1955, 1957 and 1960) described those days:

At the beginning the older people would come in and out of the mission still maintaining their nomadic life for many years. While they were still young and active they were able to hunt for themselves. The children stayed at the mission. They were allowed to remain while the parents went out and hunted their food. These children left at the mission received their religious instruction normally in school where they also received their other instructions regarding their new pattern of life. This was the general pattern on our missions as they have been established in the Kimberleys, particularly noticeable at Balgo.²⁶

However, as mentioned already, over a relatively short period of time, especially in the move from old to new Balgo Mission, the separation between children and families was further reinforced as security around the dormitories was 'tightened.'

Ronald and Catherine Berndt described that period of change:

In the late 1950s [Balgo] had no boys' dormitory, and the girls' dormitory was not rigidly policed but worked on an honour system: girls could come and go quite freely in the early evening, and on hot nights slept in the open beside the dormitories, looked after by the sisters in charge. Today [1972] both dormitories are operating, but only the boys are allowed to visit the Aboriginal camp; the girls meet their parents and other relatives in the central area in and around the church and the main institution buildings.²⁷

When the mission moved in 1965, the new site was carefully prepared. The various buildings were established in the shape of a large horseshoe: the church at the top of the horseshoe, the convent and girls' dormitory on the east side and male staff quarters and boys' dormitory on the west side. A large playground with basketball courts lay between these two groups. What was significant about the site was the geographical separation of the dormitories from the 'camp' to the west, where the families along with the very young children lived. This camp, comprising small houses of locally cut stone, lay outside the mission complex. The marginal status of the adults and very young children, in relation to the dormitory children, was highlighted. Only on Christmas Day, and only for part of that day, were the girls allowed to visit their families in this camp. Not only was there a clear geographical barrier between parents and children but a defined social barrier as well. In addition, a high, barbed-wire fence surrounded the girls' dormitory.

The physical separation of the dormitories from the camp where parents, grandparents and those siblings too young to enter the dormitories lived, did not prevent parents from coming up to the central playground to meet their children. After dinner at night, during film nights (projected onto a large outdoor screen), at church, and on other social occasions, children could have contact with their families. However, such contact was brief. Children were not fed, taught or nurtured by their parents and older relations. They returned to sleep in the dormitories each night.

In April 1973 the dormitories were closed, and parents were told to assume responsibility for the care of their children.²⁸ Fr Ray Hevern (superintendent 1969–84) took the initiative that the children of Balgo should be returned to their families. There were new pressures on mission staff caused by the increasing numbers of young people needing to be fed in the community dining hall, but it was also clear to Hevern that the children rightfully belonged with their families. The youngest went home first. They were encouraged to come to the dormitories in the morning to shower and dress in school uniform before going to school; they reversed the process in the afternoon. Little is recorded about how the families interpreted this change in mission policy. For more than twenty years they had been told that non-Aboriginal people would take responsibility for their children. During that time the mission had arrogated to itself an authority and responsibility over the lives of the children.²⁹ For those children who came from the neighbouring cattle stations of Sturt Creek, Gordon Downs and Billiluna, the dormitory system continued until the communities of Mulan and Kururrungku were established in 1979.³⁰ Today, most Wirrimanu adults, now aged in their forties and fifties, spent a large part of their lives growing up in the Balgo Mission dormitories.³¹

Dormitories and kanyirninpa (holding)

The memories and effects of that experience have varied across families and communities. While it is not uncommon to hear people describe the dormitories as 'prisons,' where they remember being locked in and 'weren't really free,' people also perceive that there were benefits. While some have talked about the value of learning English and relating with non-Aboriginal people, others remember their separation from their families and how, if they tried to run away, they would be caught and sent back. One of the particular effects of the dormitory experience was its impact on kanyirninpa, a cultural value and relationship translated into English by the word holding.

In his ethnographic work with the Pintupi, Fred Myers identified the cultural significance of the rich and polysemic word kanyininpa, which in Pintupi/Luritja has been translated as 'kept, had, cared for.'³² As with the similar word in Kukatja, kanyirninpa, Myers identified a wide use of kanyininpa within Pintupi language and its association, not only with various types of physical possession or ownership but also with the moral order.³³ He suggested that kanyininpa existed as a 'dominant symbol' within Pintupi culture.³⁴

When a child is held against its mother's breast, kanyinu yampungka, Myers argued that this invoked a double and inter-related effect. Kanyinu evoked the 'image of security, protection and nourishment.'³⁵ It brought to mind the importance of looking after, caring for and taking responsibility for those who were younger. It described a whole range of cultural and moral practice around care and nurturance.³⁶

Kanyirninpa or holding also invoked 'an ideological or social referent to the relationship between the generations.'³⁷ Hence, kanyirninpa expressed a relationship that linked the generations; it provided a reciprocity of care and respect that kept old and young people together. What Myers translated as 'looking after,' 'nurturance,' 'holding,' can be understood as a primary and highly significant way to describe the ways in which the Pintupi, and other Desert people, understood key relationships and how those relationships were reproduced across generations.³⁸ In other words, cultural values and social expressions of kanyirninpa lay at the heart of Desert identity and Desert social reproduction.

While recognising that there were different domains of kanyirninpa, Myers maintained that kanyirninpa essentially derived from ritual occasions when older men mediated the authority of the tjukurrpa (the ancestral dreamtime) at young men's ceremony time.³⁹ It was at this time that the older people nurtured the people. They protected and cared for the whole of Pintupi society at that most critical moment when it experienced being renewed and reproduced. It was, at such important ceremony times, that the spiritual power of the tjukurrpa was transmitted through older people to those who were younger. This was the strongest and most powerful way that older people could show how they cared those who followed them.

The nurturance of older people was authoritative in that their instructions and directions arose from cosmic meanings and also a cosmic imperative.⁴⁰ This formed the basis of what people continue to describe as the 'Law,' the principles and regulations that determine social and religious behaviour. As a result of the performance of these ceremonies, older people ensured that Desert life and culture would be maintained as each generation took responsibility to nurture and 'grow up' the generations that followed. Desert life, culture and the Law all depended upon the regular performance of these ceremonies of initiation. The values and expressions of kanyirninpa held and protected that cycle of social identity and renewal.

Hence, when younger people experienced being held by older people, as in this sense of kanyirninpa, they were provided with a key foundation for social and personal behaviour. Key Desert values that linked tjukurrpa (dreaming), walytja (family) and ngurra (land) were deeply reinforced as older people inducted the following generation into a cosmic, social and meaningful world. While Desert society promoted individual autonomy, along with attentive care for one's walytja (family) and respect for the authority of elders, it did so through the care and religious authority that older people gave to the young. Kanyirninpa ensured that Desert society would be reproduced from one generation to the next. It also provided young people with a means to sustain their personal Desert identity and autonomy as they became adults.

Hence, in seeking to understand the health and generational implications of the dormitory system, one might approach its impact upon the deeply embedded and important cultural value of kanyirninpa. What effect did the dormitories have on those children who spent many years of their lives within them?

Effects of the dormitory experience

Clearly, the dormitory system provided an alternative and different experience of being held. Children, often as young as five, lived with large numbers of other children of the same gender, a much larger and more foreign social group than they had experienced previously. And, within the dormitory system at Balgo Mission, they were usually looked after by an older person of the same gender, a non-Aboriginal person who was not married (that is, celibate).

Not only did the dormitory system separate young children from their mothers, but it also prevented both parents from feeding and caring for their children. It prevented them from 'looking after,' teaching and 'growing them up.' In this way, adults were denied their primary responsibilities, although some of the women were employed to cook for those in the dormitories who ate in the communal dining hall. While it can be argued that the mission assumed a new holding relationship for the children, in that it took the responsibility to feed, clothe, house and educate them, it can also be argued that it severely interfered with a fundamentally important relationship that lay at the heart of Desert life, health and wellbeing.

William Grayden and other members of a Western Australian Parliamentary Select Committee, visited Mt Margaret, Cosmo Newbury and Warburton Missions in 1957. Like Balgo, they found that the children were housed and fed at these missions where the parents 'have limited access to the children ... [and] the children are not permitted to return to the camps with their parents'.⁴¹ They commented:

On this question [of separation of Aboriginal children from their parents] it should be pointed out that it is the considered view of all authorities that the bond of affection between a native woman and child is at least as great as between a white woman and child. Indeed certain factors militate to make the bond, if anything, stronger.⁴²

While acknowledging that there were difficulties in obtaining consent from the parents, they believed that the children 'would be perplexed to the extreme and would be without a single stabilising influence on which to orient themselves to a new way of life thrust so inhumanely upon them.'⁴³

Grayden's comments, in 1957, prophetically pointed to the difficulties that would be experienced in later life for those children who were separated from their families at that time. While the missionaries whom Grayden met could not envisage what effect separation might have on later generations, his group was accurate in identifying the significance of Aboriginal children growing up without a 'single stabilising influence on which to orient themselves.' Foundational values that lay at the heart of Desert culture and life were profoundly affected. Relationships that provided stability and predictability within Desert life were fractured.

When Grayden addressed the WA Parliament in 1956, John Bowlby's seminal work on the ill-effects of 'maternal deprivation' had been published by the World Health Organization a few years before.⁴⁴ His research was introduced by the following reflection:

Among the most significant developments in psychiatry during the past quarter of a century has been the steady growth of evidence that the quality of the parental care which a child receives in his [sic] earliest years is of vital importance for his [sic] future mental health.⁴⁵

Bowlby continued with his research over the following decades, culminating in his three-volume work Attachment and Loss.⁴⁶ His work continued to explore the psychological effects on children who were separated at very early ages from their primary carers. While Bowlby's initial research was based on children who were institutionalised in Britain, at the same time other children continued to be separated and institutionalised, especially Aboriginal children in Australia, Canada and America. This separation, and the attempts to reconstruct their lives according to non-Aboriginal values, was based on racialised child-rearing beliefs and practices common to Western countries at that time.

These beliefs and practices were clearly evident in Canadian Residential Schools. In November 1996, the Canadian Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples issued its final report. This comprehensive document covered a wide range of topics, including the history and rationalisation of Canada's Residential Schools. It noted:

Residential schools were more than a component in the apparatus of social construction and control. They were part of the process of nation building and the concomitant marginalization of Aboriginal communities.⁴⁷

There was the belief that 'a wedge had to be driven not only physically between parent and child but also culturally and spiritually.'⁴⁸ And, as a consequence, 'the future that was created is now a lamentable heritage for those children and the generations that came after, for Aboriginal communities and, indeed, for all Canadians.'⁴⁹

Separation as trauma

When Judith Herman, psychiatrist and clinical researcher, described in 1992 experiences that 'destroy the victim's fundamental assumptions about the safety of the world, the positive value of the self, and the meaningful order of creation' she could have been describing some of the social and emotional consequences of this dormitory separation. She was, in fact, describing trauma.⁵⁰

While Desert people, today, do not use the term 'trauma' to describe the dormitory experience, their description points to the various ways in which key relationships across and within generations have been seriously fractured. A married man, now in his mid-fifties and with four adult children, commented on his dormitory years:

R: What do you think about that dormitory time when you look back?
A: Mm ... good training ... not enough to go and visit my parents
... it was a really hard life ...
R: It was a hard life?
A: Really hard, a hard life.

Like others of his generation, his views on the dormitory experience were mixed. He believed that he learned a lot during that time and he experienced 'good and strict laws.' He can now speak English, and has confidence to mix and work with non-Aboriginal people. While he has learned many skills in order to understand and live in a non-Aboriginal world, he recognised that what he missed most was the company and support of his family.

I supposed to be learning from my father when I was ten ... or nine ... or eight ... during the ceremonies they had in the camp with women folks and all. Well the man that do their dancing, well you'll see the one little fella behind ... that was when women do their dancing ... same time ... well I missed out that one.

His example is instructive. He did not describe stories that his father might have told him, or songs he might have taught him. Instead, he described an embodied form of knowledge that he could only receive in the physical and social company of his father and older men. Dancing upon the land, using his body, being in the company of others, men and women, all provided an important social and cultural context for learning about himself, his culture and heritage. It was an important means of discovering his identity. These were experiences that laid crucial foundations for cultural knowledge that was gendered, relational and intergenerational. Now, as an older man, he is looked on to lead and guide the community through difficult decisions and Law ceremonies, but such leadership and responsibility he can find difficult to sustain. There are times when he is very aware of his lack of critically important cultural knowledge.

What this man's story reveals is the importance and context of cultural knowledge that is handed down in the company of men from one generation to the next. While the content of this knowledge is obviously important, equally vital is the context by which this knowledge is obtained. For young men, their growth into adulthood begins at that first ceremony of initiation. They acquire and begin to embody new knowledge only when they leave the holding care of the women for the holding care of other men. Adult identity develops through a new defining and further experience of kanyirninpa for young men. However, this can only occur if older men have access to these young men, can share experiences with them and have authority over them.

The impact of the dormitories was not simply that they separated children from the older members of their families. The control that the missionaries could exercise through the dormitory system also enabled them to keep young boys from being initiated. In this, the dormitory served to do more than separate the young from the old. It acted to undermine fundamental rituals that provided meaning, identity and renewal to the whole of Desert society.

Fr John McGuire (superintendent 1958–70) not only spoke against the ceremonies for the young men, but also actively sought the elimination of their practice. While this policy changed when Ray Hevern came to new Balgo as the priest/superintendent in 1969, McGuire believed that the 'old fellows take the boys away for horrible practices.'⁵¹

One time, a young initiate (marlurlu), accompanied by a small group of men, walked from Billiluna to old Balgo. His task then, and as is still practised today, was to bring people from Balgo back to Billiluna for his final ceremony of initiation. After he arrived at Balgo the people performed the appropriate ceremonies, but when they tried to return with him:

He (McGuire) try to stop that Law, culture, you know ... he tried to stop all them people so they didn't ... no one didn't, no one didn't follow me that time. I had to go back myself, and me and whatever family.

Now an old man, he remembered his father's shame when he returned to his community without his relatives:

R: How did [your father] feel?
A: Oh ... that was really (he laughs) ... they got upset, but they knew that Father was a little bit cheeky.⁵²

McGuire's attempts to prevent, or restrict, ceremonial Law acted directly at the heart of Desert, not just male, identity. Not only was this a time when Desert society was renewed, but it was also a time when social meanings around ngurra, walytja and tjukurrpa were reinforced and deepened. As Myers described it:

The production of the social person involves an elaboration of the ties of relatedness to others, the creation of a public self that takes priority over its private qualities, and the development of the ability to 'look after' others ... in initiation, the strands of Pintupi social life are brought together at the fulcrum of the system: the construction of related individuals.⁵³

When the dormitory system separated young people from the holding relationships of older people, it separated them from values and knowledge that were critical if they were to grow into the responsibilities that accompanied their cultural identity. The dormitory system acted, as Grayden predicted, to undermine and wound a number of 'stabilising influences' as expressed within the relationships and social meanings of kanyirninpa. It provided its own particular form of intergenerational trauma. Trauma, in this particular context, can be identified as those moments when the transmission of identity, and important cultural values associated with that identity, across generations has become severely broken and wounded.⁵⁴

Pat Dodson, in commenting on the contemporary health of young Aboriginal men, has said:

The senior men are important, they are the people who can bring you through the path onto the big road ... If you don't go there then you're just milling around with another group of young fellas like yourself. You have got no idea how to get over there. You're on one side of the river ... You have a sense in your being that there is something that you've got to go to or you should be part of or you should be more knowledgeable about ... but you're not getting that and so you have this sense of being cut off.⁵⁵

His metaphor of the river captures the social 'gulf' that can be experienced between generations of Aboriginal men, where both groups experience being 'cut off' from one another, and where they do not see a holding relationship as possible. The young do not know how to cross the river, join the company of senior men, and experience what they believe these older men can provide for them. The older men are cut off from those they are supposed to hold, and what they believe it is important for them to provide. The senior men possess critically important knowledge, but it is not knowledge they are able to pass on to the younger men. It is critical knowledge because it promises to sustain and ensure the future of Desert society, as it also promises to sustain and empower the lives of younger men. Trauma, as illustrated by this metaphor, does not describe the possible dangers of 'crossing the river' or the difficulty of 'finding a bridge' in order to cross. Trauma lies in the awareness and experience by both younger and older men that what is critically important in their relationship, and for that of the larger Desert community, is not being realised.

Conclusion

When Senator Herron submitted to the Senate Committee, on behalf of the Federal Government, that dormitory children 'were not distanced from their families and grew up in full knowledge of their backgrounds,'⁵⁶ he was possibly articulating what many Australians have come to believe: forcible separation did not have serious generational or health implications for those children who grew up in community and mission dormitories.

A similar belief, denying the social and emotional health needs of those who were separated through mission dormitories, can be found elsewhere. For example, in the recently re-edited From Patrons to Partners: A History of the Catholic Church in the Kimberley, there is specific reference, and apology, to 'The Separated Children of the Kimberley.' These were children removed from their families to live in Broome or at Beagle Bay Mission. There is no mention of those who were separated from their families through the policies and practices of the different mission dormitories.⁵⁷

In suggesting some similarity of 'separation' between those who grew up in the mission dormitories and those taken away to other families, institutions and communities, it is important to note that both situations cannot be simply considered as equivalent. While in both cases children experienced a wide range of family and cultural 'loss,' at Balgo Mission, for example, parents and their children were always visible to each other, despite the presence and influence of social and physical 'fences' that served to separate them.

However, there is a growing body of evidence that there are serious intergenerational health implications for all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children whose carers experienced separation from their families. In the second volume of the Western Australian Aboriginal Child Health Survey, The Social and Emotional Wellbeing of Aboriginal Children and Young People, some of the first empirical data has now been provided. It reveals a range of intergenerational effects caused by the policies of forced separation.⁵⁸

In the light of research conducted in the Kutjungka region, it would seem that the separation caused by the dormitory experience provided its own particular form of trauma. Not only did the early intervention by the mission into the social organisation of Desert people reshape key marriage and family relationships, but it also affected key foundations upon which deeply important Desert relationships were based. One of those foundations is expressed by the cultural value of kanyirninpa. While children could see their families, and have some contact with them, that critical relationship that held and nurtured both young and old became severely fractured.

While present generations believe that important elements of their culture have not been passed onto them, older generations have also particularly suffered. For although this group of older people was not separated from their families, they were prevented from growing up their children and grandchildren according to the values that had sustained them, their parents and earlier generations. It is likely that the return of the children to their care in 1973 heightened more than a sense of loss. To return to Dodson's image, it reinforced what had been denied them. For more than two decades they had been unable to provide what was culturally important for their families, and to ensure the life and wellbeing of their children. They had received a clear message from both mission and government that they were incapable of doing so. They faced the challenge of taking up responsibilities they had been prevented from assuming, but also responsibilities that non-Aboriginal people did not value or appreciate.

While the deliberations and final report of the Senate Committee did not acknowledge the generational implications of those who had been forcibly separated and 'grown up' in mission and government dormitories, it would seem that the health needs of this group, their parents and now their children, require at this time careful, sensitive and serious attention.

La Trobe University

Notes

^1. John Herron, Inquiry into the Stolen Generation, Federal Government Submission, Senate Legal and Constitutional References Committee (Canberra, ACT: Senate Legal and Constitutional References Committee, 2000), 3.

^2. Senate Legal and Constitutional References Committee, Healing: A Legacy of Generations. The Report of the Inquiry into the Federal Government's Implementation of the Recommendations Made by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission in Bringing Them Home (Canberra, ACT: Senate Legal and Constitutional References Committee, 2000), 3.

^3. National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families, Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families (Canberra, ACT: Human rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 1997).

^4. Herron, 3.

^5.Ibid.

^6. Christine Choo, Mission Girls: Aboriginal Women on Catholic Missions in the Kimberley, Western Australia, 1900–1950 (Perth, WA: University of Western Australia Press, 2001). In the Bringing Them Home report, Balgo Mission is not mentioned, and neither Christine Choo nor Anna Haebich, Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families 1800–2000 (Fremantle, WA: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000) describe Balgo in any detail.

^7. Brian F. McCoy, "Kanyirninpa: Health, Masculinity and Wellbeing of Desert Aboriginal Men" (PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, 2004). Available at http://eprints.infodiv.unimelb.edu.au/archive/00001886/.

^8. Herron, ii.

^9. Letter, A.O. Neville to the Right Reverend O. Raible, Vicar Apostolic of the Kimberleys, 6 August 1935 (Perth, WA: Department of Indigenous Affairs, ACC 993, AN 10/35).

^10. Francis Byrne, A Hard Road: Brother Frank Nissl, 1888–1980, A Life of Service to the Aborigines of the Kimberley (Nedlands, WA: Tara House, 1989); Mary Durack, The Rock and the Sand (London: Constable, 1969). I use the term 'Desert people' as an inclusive term to describe a wide range of peoples and their languages within this region. These include Kukatja, Walmajarri, Kriol, Jaru, Ngarti, Wangkatjungka and Warlpiri.

^11. Alphonse Bleischwitz, Pallottine Mission, Hall's Creek: Annual Report of the Commissioner of Native Affairs for the Year Ended 30 June 1950 (Perth, WA: Department of Indigenous Affairs, 1950), 62.

^12. Catherine H. Berndt and Ronald M. Berndt, "Aborigines," in Socialisation in Australia, edited by F.J. Hunt (Sydney, NSW: Angus and Robertson, 1972), 132.

^13.Ibid., 133.

^14.Ibid., 133–4.

^15. Similar situations existed at Warburton and Mt Margaret Missions. See William Grayden, Adam and Atoms (Perth, WA: Frank Daniels, 1957), 30. There were dormitories in other States such as Yarrabah (Qld), and Hermannsburg (NT): 'Under various guises of compulsion, parents handed over children between the ages of five and ten,' Andrew Marcus, Governing Savages (Sydney, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1990), 80.

^16. Berndt and Berndt, "Aborigines," 133. See also, Max Harris, "Tent Town at Balgo Mission," West Australian, 13 May 1965, 5

^17. E. A. Worms, "Observations on the Mission Field of the Pallottine Fathers in North-West Australia," in Diprotodon to Detribalization: Studies of Change Among Australian Aborigines, edited by Arnold R. Pilling and Richard A. Waterman (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1970), 371.

^18. Joseph Kearney, "Our Aboriginal Apostolate," Kimberley Journal: A Source Book, volume 1, compiled by Peter Willis, 6 May 1974 (Wirrimanu, WA: Kutjungka Catholic Parish Archives), 2.

^19. The first Catholic Mission in the Kimberley was established by the Trappists who arrived there in 1890; they remained until 1900. The Pallottines (Pious Society of Missions) came and were given responsibility for Beagle Bay in 1901. Margaret Zucker, From Patrons to Partners and the Separated Children of the Kimberley: A History of the Catholic Church in the Kimberley WA (Fremantle, WA: University of Notre Dame Australia Press, second edition, 2005).

^20. Christine Choo, "The Role of the Catholic Missionaries at Beagle Bay in the Removal of Aboriginal Children from their Families in the Kimberley Region from the 1890s," Aboriginal History, vol. 21 (1997): 14–29.

^21.Ibid., 25.

^22. 'Ten girls are in the dormitory, but there are 25 children altogether permanently living at the Mission. Another 10 to 15 are still with their parents leading a nomadic life.' Alphonse Bleischwitz, "Balgo Mission—Pallottine (Roman Catholic) Order," Annual Report of the Commissioner of Native Affairs, year ended 30 June 1951 (Perth, WA: Department of Indigenous Affairs), 27.

^23. Ronald M. Berndt and Catherine H. Berndt, "Some Points of Change in Western Australia," in Diprotodon to Detribalization: Studies of Change Among Australian Aborigines, edited by Arnold R. Pilling and Richard A. Waterman (East Lansing MI: Michigan State University Press, 1970), 66.

^24. Grayden, 30.

^25. G. E. Cornish, "Report," in Balgo Mission: Reports by Field Officers, Acc 1667, no. 282/65, 26 August (Perth, WA: State Records Office of Western Australia, 1965).

^26. Kearney, 2.

^27. Berndt and Berndt, "Aborigines", 134. Allie Evans came to Balgo in 1951 and lived in the girls' dormitory with 28 girls. See Byrne, Hard Road, 96. Caroline Gye (a pseudonym for Ida Mann) described the mission and dormitory in The Cockney and the Crocodile (London: Faber and Faber: 1962), 93. Mann's visit, as an ophthalmologist, was in 1953.

^28. There were 47 boys in the dormitory, aged between 5 and 15. Initially, only the younger boys and girls returned to their families; they would come to the dormitories in the morning to shower and change their clothes for school and then, after school, change before returning home (author's records 1973).

^29. In early April 1973 the first group of children returned to their families. Eleven younger boys were in the first group (author's records, 1973).

^30. In 1974, the year after the dormitories closed for the children of Balgo families, there were 30 children from pastoral stations still boarding. Ray Hevern, Letter to J.F. Fogarty, Owen Dixon Chambers, 3 January 1974 (Wirrimanu, WA: Kutjungka Catholic Parish Archives).

^31. In the recently revised second edition of From Patrons to Partners and the Separated Children of the Kimberley: A History of the Catholic Church in the Kimberley (2005) there is no mention of the children who were separated and brought up in the Catholic Church mission dormitories of the Kimberley, such as at Beagle Bay, Balgo, La Grange and Kalumburu.

^32. K. C. and L. E. Hansen, Pintupi/Luritja Dictionary (Alice Springs, NT: Institute for Aboriginal Development, third edition, 1974).

^33. Fred R. Myers, "Ideology and Experience: the Cultural Basis of Politics in Pintupi Life," in Aboriginal Power in Australian Society, edited by Michael C. Howard (Brisbane, QLD: University of Queensland Press, 1982), 83. The Kukatja kanyirninpa is very similar, in both sound and meaning, to words in Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara and Pintupi/Luritja; they all belong to the Western Desert group of Central Australian languages. Institute for Aboriginal Development, Central Australian Languages—Current Distribution (Alice Springs, NT: Institute for Aboriginal Development, 2003).

^34. Myers, 83. Myers takes the phrase 'dominant symbol' from Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), 28.

^35.Ibid., 83.

^36. See Footnotes 42 and 44: John Bowlby's work around the critically important relationship between a mother and child.

^37.Ibid., 83.

^38. Fred R. Myers, "A Broken Code: Pintupi Political Theory and Temporary Social Life," Mankind, vol. 12, no. 4 (1980): 312. Also, Myers, "Ideology and Experience," 81.

^39. Myers, "Broken Code," 313.

^40.Ibid., 313.

^41. Grayden, 30.

^42.Ibid., 32.

^43.Ibid.

^44. John Bowlby, Maternal Care and Mental Health: A Report prepared on Behalf of the World Health Organization as a Contribution to the United Nations Programme for the Welfare of Homeless Children (Geneva: World Health Organization, 1952).

^45.Ibid., 11.

^46. John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, Volume 1 Attachment (London: The Hogarth Press, 1969). Volume II, Separation: Anxiety and Anger, was published in 1973, and Volume III Loss: Sadness and Depression, was published in 1980.

^47. Canada Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, Volume 1: Looking Forward, Looking Back (Ottawa, Ont: The Commission, 1996), 334.

^48.Ibid., 341.

^49.Ibid., 335.

^50. Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery (London: Pandora, 1992), 51.

^51. Fr. J. McGuire, "What Happened at Balgo," The Record, Thursday, 31 December 1959. McGuire is also remembered for 'undressing' another young boy who was being prepared for his ceremonial initiation. When an initiate (marlurlu) is being prepared, a special hair-belt is put around his waist. It seems, in this case, the missionary took the hair-belt off him.

^52. See Macquarie Dictionary for 'cheeky'. It notes the Aboriginal English use of the word as 'unpredictable' and 'dangerous'. Poisonous snakes, for example, can be described as 'cheeky'. Macquarie Dictionary: Australia's National Dictionary, (Sydney, NSW: Macquarie Library, Macquarie University, revised third edition, 2001).

^53. Fred R. Myers, Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place and Politics Among Western Desert Aborigines (Canberra, ACT: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1986), 228.

^54. Judy Atkinson identifies Aboriginal trauma differently. She distinguishes between intergenerational and transgenerational trauma: the former referring to what is passed from one generation to the next, the latter referring to what is transmitted across generations, Trauma Trails: Recreating Song Lines: The Transgenerational Effects of Trauma in Indigenous Australia (Melbourne, Vic: Spinifex, 2002), 180.

^55. McCoy, Kanyirninpa, 230.

^56. Herron, 3.

^57. Zucker, 182.

^58. S. R. Zubrick, S. R. Silburn, D. M. Lawrence, F. G. Mitrou, R. B. Dalby, E. M. Blair, J. Griffin, H. Milroy, J. A. De Maio, A. Cox and J. Li, The Western Australian Aboriginal Child Health Survey: Forced Separation from Natural Family, Forced Relocation from Traditional Country or Homeland, and Social and Emotional Wellbeing of Aboriginal Children and Young People: Additional Notes (Perth, WA: Curtin University of Technology and Telethon Institute for Child Health Research, 2005).

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