Month: April 2021

April 7, 2021

From Outcasts in White Australia – 2 (1971)

C.D. Rowley details the findings of a survey into conditions among Sydney’s Aboriginal community:

Mrs Pamela Beasley made at the beginning of 1964 an interim report on conditions in the Redfern–Chippendale area. She found over 500 persons willing to be interviewed as Aboriginal, in a small area including part of Redfern and part of Chippendale, both run-down inner city areas where factories have been rapidly replacing dwellings. Over 46 per cent of her population were children under fifteen years – a figure well above the census average for the Australian community but well below the proportion established by sample surveys of Aboriginal families in rural areas. There were very few old people, for obvious reasons. Of the adults, only three were in employment which could be classed as skilled. Of 103 dependent on employment, fourteen were unemployed at the time of interview. On the average two persons lived in each room, including kitchens as living rooms. One family owned a house and two more were in the process of purchasing theirs. High rents were common by the rent standards of that time:

 

In spite of the hospitality of most of the Aboriginal people in the area, there were some who had great difficulty in solving their accommodation problems, and were without places to sleep for periods ranging from one day to a week or two. Some of these solved their problem in ways which could not be accepted by white authorities. Some ‘squatted’ in temporarily untenanted homes, leaving by the back door and over the fence if a knock came at the front door. Some walked around the streets for a few nights before being ‘smuggled’ into a residential where there were already one or two ‘stowaways’. Some left luggage with friends and split up among different homes for the night, or nights, involved. Their difficulty would seem to be no reflection upon the willingness of their friends and relatives to help them, but rather upon the housing situation as it exists in the area.

 

Reasons for coming to Sydney were stated as:

            A. To find work                       99

            B. To find accommodation  65

            C. Illness of self or relative  81

            D. Social                                 15

            E. Other reasons                  13

Charles Perkins on bus to Tranby Aboriginal College, Glebe, c. 1964. (Robert McFarlane, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra)

It was noted that fifty-one of the total of 208 children were ‘not living with parents or with one parent normally responsible for their care and up-bringing’. In forty-three cases, the reasons offered, in order of importance, were lack of accommodation, removal by the Child Welfare authority, and illness. Extended family arrangements accounted for only six such cases, where the child was stated to be residing with grandmother.

Just half the adults included in the survey had been living in this area for over three years. Other evidence indicates two directions of movement out from such areas – back to the country town or into the outer suburbs. This was a typical area for Aboriginal experiment in big city life.

Some later work by Mrs Pamela Beasley indicates that those families which do establish homes in the capital are likely, on the average, to be better off for living space than they were in the country area, for it is simply not possible to live in a fringe-dweller’s shack in the city. The only ‘self-built’ shacks seen were on the Aboriginal reserve (and just off it) at La Perouse, which is a fringe-dwellers’ settlement now surrounded by the expanding city, and illustrating many of the social problems of such dwelling areas. For the city as a whole, Mrs Beasley found an average sized of 5.5 rooms, somewhat below the urban average for New South Wales, but well above that for Aboriginal housing found in our rural survey. Yet there were 1.25 persons per room as compared with 0.67, the Australian average in 1961. (Our rural average was 1.63.) Even in the better conditions of Sydney there was a good deal of obvious overcrowding, with over 70 percent of Aborigines subject to accommodation pressure of two or more persons per room. Here again, the situation was favourable when compared with our country town sample.

 C.D. Rowley, Australian, 1906-1985

April 7, 2021

From Outcasts in White Australia – 1 (1971)

Public servant and academic C.D. (Charles) Rowley was principal of the Australian School of Pacific Administration from 1950 to 1964, where Australian administrators of the Territory of Papua New Guinea were trained. In 1964 he accepted a three-year appointment to the Social Science Research Council of Australia, Canberra as director of a project to study Aborigines in Australian society, resulting in his books The Destruction of Aboriginal Society (1970), Outcasts in White Australia (1971) and The Remote Aborigines (1971). They would help to determine the agenda of the Whitlam Federal Labor government. In a chapter on ‘Metropolitan Urbanisation in “Settled” Areas’, he looks at why Aboriginal people came to Sydney:

The urban drift into Sydney seems to have become an item for press articles from about 1948, when the Superintendent of the Methodist Mission in South Sydney began to speak of the special problems being faced in the inner suburbs of Redfern and Surry Hills. By 1950 the Redfern All Blacks football team was said to be drawing large crowds on Sunday afternoons, though a few years later this effort to express pride of the Aboriginal group was to be questioned as contrary to the to the requirements of assimilation! Another indicator of an incipient Aboriginal community feeling in the inner suburb was the increased membership of religious organisations which had welcomed Aborigines in the rural areas. Pentecostalism was being strengthened in the city. The Church of the Four Square Gospel, one of whose missionaries I was to meet at Condobolin during the field work for this book, was one of the rallying points for those who sought comfort and support. A trained social worker who was also a Congregational Pastor in Redfern and working with Aboriginal people told me that a main attraction into the city was the hope of permanent employment; that those he met had seldom had permanent work in the areas from which they came. Those who remained, he thought, generally obtained permanent work in the end. He estimated a period of hardship and adaptation to be commonly one or two years, at the end of which time those at least who received some help had generally obtained a house and employment. By inference, then, the inner city areas were serving to some extent as staging areas. There would now be few, if any, suburbs in Sydney which do not have families of Aboriginal descent.

Urbanisation was in full swing during the term of the research for this Project. One found that people in distant parts of New South Wales, for instance, would know certain addresses in Sydney where a person without a bed could always at least get a ‘shake-down’ on the floor. I remember well discussing the point with a typical motherly Aboriginal woman in a street in Redfern, whose response to my question was simple and humane, ‘You can’t let them sleep on the footpath, can you?’

Cover of 1972 Pelican Books edition.

By 1964 the effects of rationalisation in rural industries had begun to combine with those of the drought. There was a much-publicised inspection by pressmen of inner city areas at the end of August. Perhaps the migration pattern was illustrating the real weakness of a vague ‘assimilation’ policy; since if assimilation was the aim, it could be reasonably argued that the Aboriginal slum-dweller was living like some non-Aborigines. In an interesting statement on the 1963 debate which led to the removal of restrictions on alcohol in New South Wales, the Member for Armidale argued that, though the rates of increase were high, migration to the city was taking from the rural areas half the number of annual increase (which could only have been a wild guess); that in the city there were being accepted as ‘white’; that this was the story which should be told rather than that of old injustices.

By 1964, however, distress was becoming more obvious in Sydney, and a matter for editorials and headlines, but nobody knew the size of the problem. When the Foundation for Aboriginal Affairs announced the purchase of a 3-story building in July 1964, [Professor W.R.] Geddes estimated that the numbers in the city were from 6,000 to 12,000; but until a count is made, using a referral technique, an accurate estimate is impossible.

C.D. Rowley, Australian, 1906-1985