The Price Aboriginal Children Paid at Retta Dixon
By Greg Pemberton
The royal commission into child sexual abuse has asked searing questions about the behaviour of people in power across Australian society, writes Greg Pemberton. In Darwin this week, it turns its attention to the homes for Aboriginal children run by missionaries 50 years ago, when government policy was one of assimilation and young children were stolen from their families. Barbara Cummings, now a 66-year-old grandmother, told the royal commission last week of how she was taken from her mother at the government-run Kahlin Compound for Aborigines. Her mother, Nellie, had earlier been similarly taken as a child from her people on the Daly River and deposited at Kahlin. Conditions there had been criticised by a Commonwealth parliamentary inquiry in 1923, which would lead to its closure in 1939 and replacement by the new Bagot reserve, co-located with the equally new Retta Dixon home, specifically taking the "half-caste" children in order to keep them separate from "full-blood" Aborigines. If Cummings thought conditions in a missionary-run home would be better than in Kahlin or Bagot, she was shocked when she arrived in the 1950s. "I got terrible thrashings. We all did", she told the Northern Territory News last week, recalling leather belts and canes.
Based on previously unpublished documents in the National Archives, Fairfax Media can reveal that in the late 1950s, when a reforming senior Darwin official sought to forbid this "corporal punishment" of Aboriginal children in Retta Dixon home, the former governor-general, Paul Hasluck, as Minister for Territories in the late 1950s, overruled him and ensured the missionaries could continue such practices. Retta Dixon home, named after its Baptist founder, was one of five religious-based charity-care homes for Aboriginal and, especially, "half-caste" children in the Northern Territory before the Second World War. The others were Catholic, Lutheran, Methodist and a Protestant, mainly Anglican mix. Baptist missionaries practised strict evangelism, emphasising religious salvation rather than the Methodists' more modern "social gospel". "I am going to save the heathen from unhappy social conditions not hell", quipped the then head of the territory's Methodist missions, Reverend J. W. Burton.
Retta Dixon housed about 80 children of both sexes, mainly female, under the age of 18, plus some single Aboriginal women. The missionaries, usually about four single European women and a married male, felt strong discipline was required. The superintendent, Amelia Shankleton, complained about the children failing to attend church services and, as they grew older, fraternising with "full-blooded" Aboriginal children in adjoining Bagot. From 1942 the home's charity, the Aborigines Inland Mission, increasingly relied on federal government financial support. In return, federal officials demanded greater accountability, asking for annual financial and general reports. Growing concerns led to a government inquiry in 1953 which described the missionaries as "fanatical", lacking in training. Nothing was done, however. Up to 1954, the two successive directors of Native Affairs were products of the Pacific Islands colonial service where "corporal punishment" of the "boys"(Islander men) was common and even shootings took place. The directors appreciated the charity's contribution to what officials called "solving the half-caste problem". Their successor, appointed in [year] was Harry Christian Giese. He was very different and took seriously new international legal regimes to guide better national policies.
A third generation Lutheran, German-Australian, he impressed everyone at the University of Western Australia before embarking on a decade of school teaching. A strapping 188 centimetres, he excelled at sport, and after discharge from the air force in 1945, was appointed head of Western Australia's National Fitness Council. He advocated policies which "take into account the biological and social needs of man no less than his industrial and financial needs". One such guideline Giese championed was banning the "flogging" or whipping of "natives". "Corporal punishment" as a legal punishment for adults and juveniles, "white" or "coloured", came under increased international scrutiny from the 1930s. The informal practice of colonial officials and even private citizens imposing this on "natives" was even more heavily criticised. In 1950, Australia had voted at the United Nations to abolish corporal punishment of natives in trust territories and subsequently did so for Nauru, but only partly for Papua and New Guinea.
The United Nations did not challenge such practices within wholly sovereign states and so, for mainland Australia, the states were left to make their own policies while in 1951 the Commonwealth brought the Australian Capital Territory into line with NSW law but left the Northern Territory unreformed. "Corporal punishment" for "natives" was not like the discipline dished out by parents or schoolteachers of years past, despite what a Federal Court judge suggested in the Stolen Generations landmark case in 2000, which was lost by former Retta Dixon children. An unsuccessful plaintiff in that case claimed her nipple was almost torn off by a belt buckle administered during a beating at Retta Dixon. A male missionary at Retta Dixon was described by government officials as "going berserk", beating the boys indiscriminately. The judge also did not acknowledge that the missionaries were private citizens with no legal authority over these children, despite protestations they were their "parents". Ms Cummings also complained of how "we were separated from society". This is backed up by Mr Giese in 1956 who reported that Retta Dixon superintendent Ms Shankleton who "was in direct opposition to the children partaking in the pleasures of the local picture theatre and dance halls", certainly without supervision. Mr Giese deemed this attitude "very limited", saying, "as these children will be forced to make their own way through life within the next few years, it is very important that they now should be permitted to attend such recreational facilities as pictures, dances and social evenings and to learn to mix and conduct themselves properly with other members of the community".
Mr Giese's concerns increased when the one European male at ReAta Dixon, E. R. "Dick" Stretton, took charge. Giese's order "that corporal punishment is not to be inflicted on my wards in any circumstances" was "vigorously contested" by the nuggety, former welder, who "threaten[ed] action" if anyone reported his punishments. Giese said it was especially inappropriate for male missionaries to punish female children. Government records at this time document the girls' complaints and "repulsion" over a male missionary touching them. Finding this "disturbing", Giese sought legal advice on his powers to prevent such punishment and suspected the charity would go over his head. The charity's head, Marjorie "ReAta" Long (nee Dixon) did just that, meeting Hasluck, along with her Northern Territory superintendent, Arthur Collins, accused this week in the royal commission of "turning a blind eye" to later sexual abuse. Hasluck came from a strict Salvation Army background. He did not share the apartheid attitudes of many Australians and had written extensively on Aborigines. Yet, he was a firm assimilationist. He agreed with the society's complaints against Giese, whose stand he described as "rather far-fetched and unreal", according to documents in the National Archive. He wrote: "I cannot understand how discipline can be maintained in all circumstances without some corporal punishment." Hasluck overruled Giese and gained cabinet agreement to support the charities and allow them to decide on how policies were implemented, thereby laying the foundation for the abuse that the Royal Commission is now examining. Giese could not defy his minister and to work with him but he did organise a census of Aboriginal people in the territory, the first of its kind in Australia, which laid the basis for giving them the vote in 1962. He became the territory's first ombudsman in 1973. Greg Pemberton is a graduate of Duntroon, former cavalry officer and writer.
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