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 socalled apprenticeship scheme. This article examines this policy, for an apparent para dox emerges. 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 usually 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. Aboriginal oral histories recount the authorities' indifference with a sense of embattlement. As one man explained in the 1980s: The hard part was that they didn't like us after the girls ... They'd come and get 'em and take 'em away. They'd have 'em down there for twelve months and they'd get 'em into trouble and they'd be cornin' back with white babies. That's what we were up against. That's true that is.1 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 Aus tralia ... What a horrible conception of so-called Legislation'2-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 Aborig ines' Protection Board is to build a white Australia.'3 Nor was such a view restricted to those who were losing the girls of their commu nities. Earlier that same year, a white woman by the name of Joan Kingsley-Strack told
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