Girlhood: A Global History

13. Stolen Girlhood: Australia's Assimilation Policies and Aboriginal Girls

250 13 Stolen Girlhood australia’s assimilation policies and aboriginal girls christine cheater In Darlene Johnson’s short film Two Bob Mermaid,1 an Australian Aboriginal mother peers through a wire fence watching her daughter, the two-bob mermaid, as she swims in the whites-only pool in Moree in northern New South Wales. The two-bob mermaid is pale skinned: she can pass as a white girl. As she leaves the pool with her white friends, a group of Aboriginal girls call out “Tidda” (or sister), a reminder of her hidden identity.2 Like most of the creative works produced by Australia’s Aboriginal people, Two Bob Mermaid is semiautobiographical. The Aboriginal mother is Darlene Johnson’s grandmother, and the girl who passes for white is her mother. The film is a statement about the impact of racism on the lives of the women in her family. Swimming in the whites-only pool was an act of defiance, a brief chance to experience the privileges of a white girl that ended when the New South Wales Aboriginal Protection Board removed Johnson’s mother from her family and sent her to live in a girls’ home. Johnson suffered a similar fate, as did many Aboriginal girls. Some families suffered through three or four generations of child removal by the various Australian states. This treatment resulted from the girls’ standing as young members of a colonized people. From the first years of British colonization, Aboriginal Australians were viewed as an impediment to the successful settlement of the country and, after 1901, as a stain on Australia’s projected image as a white nation.3 According to historian Russell McGregor, solutions to what was termed the “Aboriginal problem” ranged from violence, to protection, to assimilation.4 Aboriginal children became the focus of Australia’s assimilation policies, because British officials thought that the way to break Australian Aboriginal culture was to break the link between parent and child. As other authors in this volume, especially Nancy Stockdale and Corrie Decker, have shown, this attitude influenced the treatment of indigenous children in many British dominions and became the guiding principal of assimilation policies in all the Australian states until the 1960s.5 State governments defined Aboriginality according to physical appearance Stolen Girlhood 251 and lifestyle. Any person who looked Aboriginal, who lived in an Aboriginal community, or who socialized with other Aboriginal people required assimilation into mainstream society. Authorities thought that the fastest way to achieve this end was to remove children, especially female children of mixed descent, from their families. Across Australia, authorities singled out children like Darlene Johnson and her mother because they could pass for white but continued to identify and socialize with other members of Moree’s Aboriginal community. By removing these children from their families, authorities hoped to break their links with Aboriginal communities and thereby facilitate their absorption into white society. Similar practices occurred in other settler states, such as the Native boarding systems in North America, but in Australian states they were taken to extremes. In one of the first studies of the impact of assimilation policies on Aboriginal families, historian Peter Read called children who were removed from their families and placed in institutional or foster care “the stolen generations.”6 He found that even children who were not taken lived with the constant threat of permanent separation from their parents or of losing a sibling. Since Read’s study, the impact of child removal has become a dominant theme both in Australian Aboriginal studies and in the history of Australian childhood. In 1994, a nationwide judicial inquiry on “the stolen generations” estimated that around 20 percent of Australia’s Aboriginal children were removed from their families and recommended the gathering of oral histories from the people involved.7 The result was an oral history collection of 340 interviews conducted with removed children, their families, welfare workers, and policy makers.8 These interviews reveal that although each Australian state developed separate assimilation policies, these policies and their impact on the lives of Aboriginal children followed similar trajectories.9 In this chapter I draw on these oral histories, along with the memoirs of four Aboriginal women, to reveal the experiences of girls trapped by the assimilation process. According to historian Heather Goodall, the majority of Aboriginal children removed from their families before the 1950s were girls.10 Although Goodall based her observations on data from New South Wales, similar trends occurred in the...