AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald
September 30, 2014
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”,
Based on previously unpublished documents in the National Archives, Fairfax Media can reveal that in the late 1950s, when a reforming senior Darwin official sought to forbid this “corporal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.
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