‘A better chance’? – sexual abuse and the apprenticeship of Aboriginal girls under the NSW Aborigines Protection Board

Abstract

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

Stuck in Suffering: A Philosophical Exploration of Violence

“…100 First Nations people experience disproportionate family, sexual, and domestic violencein '2016-2017, Indigenous people were 32 times as likely to be hospitalised for family violence, compared with non-Indigenous people'. 101 Deeper than this, First Nations peoples still carry with them the legacy of paradigm colonial violence and the aftermath of the Stolen Generations, 102 which have created intergenerational trauma. 103 Furthermore, though Australia was once 'one of the most linguistically diverse places on earth', the after-effects of the colonial project is that, 'as of 2016, only 10% of Australia's Indigenous population spoke an Indigenous language at home'.…”

Accounting for “moral betterment”

“…8. During 1912 and 1928, the period for which the apprentice records have survived, 72 per cent of the children removed were girls (Haskins, 2004).…”

Introduction

“…As for early missions themselves, New Norcia is perhaps the most fully researched (for example, Hetherington 2002). A number of studies examine the position of Indigenous female domestic servants (for example , Haskins 2004;Huggins 1995;Walden 1995). In other examples, Hunt (1983) has made a study of women's labour and sexual relations in north-western Australia from 1860 to 1900, while Watson (1998) has carried out research on the sexual economy in south-western Queensland.…”