A. History of Indigenous education
The first school for Aboriginal children was established as an experiment by Governor Macquarie in Parramatta in 1815. It soon failed and was closed in 1823. The 1840s were the years when 'native' schools were first established in Western and South Australia.
A British Government Royal Commission in 1837 inquired into the conditions of Aboriginal people in Australia and recommended that a protectorate system should be established and that "the education of the young will of course be amongst the foremost of the cares of the missionaries". By the middle of the century the protectorate system had failed.
During the second half of the 19th century Aboriginal reserves were created. Some were set aside for missions while others were administered by local police. By 1911 the Northern Territory and every State except Tasmania had 'protective' legislation which established a Chief Protector or a Protection Board with extensive powers over Aboriginal people. Families who had lived and worked independently, for example as farmers on land granted by the Crown, were evicted and forced into reserves or town fringe camps.
In the Territory and a number of States the legislation made the Protector or the Board the legal guardian of all Aboriginal children. The people were required to live on reserves and needed permission to leave and to move to other reserves. Children were separated from their parents to dormitories on the same or on other reserves. In some cases the children were removed to specially established training institutions prior to being placed in domestic (for girls) or labouring (for boys) employment at about the age of 13 or 14.
The education they received was organised and provided by the Protector or Board separately from that provided to non-Indigenous children. Many of their teachers were not trained and the regular State curriculum was not used.
Some children did enter the public school system. For example, in NSW in 1880 there were an estimated 200 Aboriginal children in the public school system.2 In 1883 the NSW Department of Public Instruction established schools on two of the State's larger Aboriginal reserves.3 A rough census in 1889 revealed, however, that only 428 Aboriginal children in the State - 15% of all Aboriginal children - were receiving any instruction at all.4
It was common at this time for schools to refuse to admit Aboriginal children if the parents of non-Indigenous pupils objected. To cope with those excluded from the State systems, the Protection Boards and Aborigines Departments were forced to establish separate Aboriginal-only schools.5 By 1940 in NSW, for example, there were 40 Aboriginal schools.6
A national conference in 1937 adopted the assimilation policy which resolved, among other things, that the "efforts of all State authorities should be directed towards the education of children of mixed aboriginal blood at white standards, and their subsequent employment under the same conditions as whites with a view to their taking their place in the white community on an equal footing with the whites".
'Full-blood' families and their children were more likely to be left to their own devices on the now-dwindling reserves. 'Mixed blood' or 'half-caste' children removed from their families mostly continued, however, to be confined to Aboriginal institutions rather than sharing orphanages and other children's institutions with non-Aboriginal children.
Witnesses to the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families reported that they had received "little or no education, and certainly little of any value".7
What education was provided generally aimed at completion of their schooling at the level achieved by a ten year old child in the State education system. It emphasised domestic science and manual training, thus preparing the children for a future as menial workers within the government or mission communities or as cheap labour in the wider community.8
The 1940s saw the introduction of exemption certificates, commonly called 'dog licences. These certificates exempted Aboriginal people who proved they were responsible and could live independently from the rigorous control of the Protection Boards and Aborigines Departments. They were certificates of citizenship. Children of exempted parents were supposed to be admitted to State schools.9 The continued to be routinely excluded, however, on health and cleanliness grounds.10
It was not until the 1950s and 1960s that the Aboriginal schools were gradually closed and that State schools were opened to Aboriginal children generally. That move followed a reformulation of the assimilation policy at a national native welfare conference in 1951.11
Institutionalisation declined from about the 1950s with a greater use of foster care and adoption. This is not to say that institutionalisation ended, however. For example, 6 institutions were opened in Victoria in 1961 to cater for the growing numbers of Aboriginal children removed from their families.12 In NSW the Cootamundra Girls Home did not close until 1969. The dormitory system survived in some parts of WA into the 1970s.13 It was not until the 1980s that Aboriginal children who could not stay with their own families were placed with other Aboriginal families as a matter of preference.
In 1989 the Commonwealth launched the national Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education Policy. This was the first policy on Indigenous education formally endorsed by any national government. It had four objectives
- to ensure Aboriginal involvement in educational decisions making
- to provide equality of access for Aboriginal people to education services
- to raise the rates of Aboriginal participation in education to those for all Australians
- to achieve equitable and appropriate educational outcomes for Aboriginal people.
Endnotes
2 Select
Committee of the Legislative Assembly upon Aborigines, Second Report,
NSW Parliament, 1981, page 172.
3 Id, page 173.
4 Id, page 174.
5 See, for example, id, page 175; Commissioner Pat Dodson,
Regional Report of Inquiry into Underlying Issues in Western Australia,
AGPS, 1991, page 563 (part of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths
in Custody).
6 Ibid.
7 Bringing them home, HREOC, 1997, page 170.
8 Bringing them home, HREOC, 1997, pages 170-171.
9 See, for example, the NSW Select Committee's Second Report,
page 181.
10 Ibid.
11 It was not until 1972, however, that principals' right to
remove children from their school on the ground of 'home conditions' was
finally repealed in NSW: id, page 183.
12 Bringing them home, HREOC, 1997, page 62.
13 Commissioner Pat Dodson's report, page 564.
