|
|
|
Book Review
| Penelope Hetherington, Settlers, Servants and Slaves: Aboriginal and European Children in the Nineteenth-Century in Western Australia, University of Western Australia Press, Crawley, 2002. pp. v + 246. $34.95 paper.
|
| In recent years new scholarship in the field of Aboriginal history has brought increasing focus to the treatment of Aboriginal children. While attention has been given to early twentieth century and particularly to interwar policies of biological absorption, accounts such as those of Anna Haebich (Broken Circles, 2000) and Robert Van Krieken (Children and the State, 1991) have noted correlations between concepts of childhood and racial and class hierarchies across nineteenth-century Australian colonies. They point to the interface between histories of the removal, institutionalisation and indenture of Aboriginal children and the 'progressive' population management engaged in the colonies, variously consolidating in the racial policies of the modern Australian welfare nation-state. |
1
|
|
Hetherington focuses on the local impact of such complex imperial, colonial and national histories in nineteenth-century settler Western Australia, arguing for a reassessment of colonial labour history to acknowledge the importance of children's labour. |
2
|
|
Until the 1840s, Hetherington informs us, when the colony was no longer a social experiment funded by government, child labour was fundamental to its success. Families were allotted land proportional to the number of workers they comprised, including women and children of relatively young age. For most colonists, settlement was a decidedly family project. Children had quantifiable economic value, being worth acres in proportion to their age and hence working capacity. For example, Colonial Office legislation in 1832 stated that a child aged three years and above was worth 40 acres (p. 26). Children of poor and lower middle-class families worked in the fields along with their mothers and with indentured workers, some of them Aboriginal. Moreover children over ten years of age were considered able to support themselves and might be indentured. One of the earliest Acts passed in the colony was in 1845 and sought to ensure that women and children without a means of support would not be a drain on the state. Children without parents could be indentured without consent as apprentices to a master or mistress until age 18 (p. 27). |
3
|
|
Hetherington notes that child labour was intimately related to 'race' management. In the first decades, the taking of Aboriginal children by white families as workers was considered sufficient to 'civilise' them. But as many of these children grew up and returned to their communities instead of remaining among whites, such expectations diminished, and institutional methods of 'bringing in' young Aboriginal people began to be employed. As missions stepped into this role, Hetherington concludes that they must be recognised as part of contemporary demands for labour. |
4
|
|
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, ideas about the needs of children were changing. Combined with the relative failure of Christianisation, they led the government to propose a new policy for Aborigines: institutionalisation combined with indenture into white families. Similar concerns about poor white children resulted in some parallel approaches. The Industrial Schools Act of 1874 and the Aborigines Protection Act of 1886 each asserted the need to separate child populations on the grounds that education and training were necessary for their attainment of adulthood. For Aboriginal children — who were considered members of a child race — maturation was to include the adoption of white culture. In both cases, such children were being prepared for the same kinds of low status employment as their predecessors, but from (sometimes very) early adult life. Hetherington argues that Industrial Schools and Aboriginal Missions and Settlements created alienated groups among the white working class and Aborigines — which were henceforth never fully accepted into their own cultural, racial or social groups. |
5
|
|
Hetherington's account of child labour in nineteenth and early twentieth century Western Australia returns us to one of the paradoxes of race policy in Australia. If Aboriginal children were supposed to be uplifted through contact with white culture, they were predominantly submitted to treatment mostly characterised by contempt, neglect and oftentimes abuse. (The gender and sexual impact of child labour/removal is notably lacking in Hetherington's account.) In her attempt to find an explanation for whites' apparent capacity to accept such a paradox, she resorts to a model of reason. Thus support for the draconian removal of Aboriginal people — people who had once worked 'side by side' with whites (p. 32) — to a network of state-run reserves in the late nineteenth century comes from 'otherwise reasonable people' (p. 192). Elsewhere, she describes the Aborigines Protection Act of 1886 as a 'deliberate misnomer' because, as we all know, protection was in fact persecution (p. 2, my emphasis). Indeed, 'protection' has long been criticised for its persecutory effects. (For example see Huggins & Blake in Saunders & Evans: Gender Relations in Australia (1992).) But by claiming that deliberate subterfuge or a consensus among whites was unfathomable because it was unreasonable, Hetherington seems to me to work against her own project. Surely the kind of close reading of historical texts that occupies her in this book aims to show how and why particular kinds of reason held sway, in which place, and when. |
6
|
| | | | |
| Griffith University |
FIONA PAISLEY | |
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|