Aboriginal Histories in Australia Government Archives:

Working with Records of Trauma

by Kirsten Thorpe and Cassandra Willis

Colonial Secretary's Building on the corner of Macquarie and Bridge streets, headquarters of the Aborigines Protection Board and Aboriginal Welfare Board.

Introduction

A little over a year ago, we (Cassie and Kirsten) found ourselves working together again at the Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia (UTS). We had first met over a decade ago when the New South Wales Government (NSW) initiated the NSW Aboriginal Trust Fund Repayment Scheme (the Scheme) to investigate monies that were held in trust by the Aborigines Protection and Welfare Boards (the Boards) and never repaid to their rightful owners. At the same time, an exhibition, In Living Memory, was developed to return and connect images created by the Boards to families and communities in NSW. The projects are significant in terms of archival redress for Aboriginal people in the South-East of Australia.

On reuniting at UTS, we have had an opportunity to reflect on these two major projects and the use of these government records for reparations and social justice. We reflect in this article on our shared experiences of this intensely challenging period of our professional and personal lives. A period which has shaped and informed many of our future projects and our aspirations to build a focus on Aboriginal self-determination in archives. As we started to write and reflect on this article, we both felt an intense feeling of pain. Despite all our efforts to be resilient, we realize that we still carry the feelings of distress from this period, of trying to navigate these projects with sensitivity and respect whilst being the face of an archive of trauma. Nevertheless, we acknowledge that these were important times for using records for healing and for truth-telling, and we are proud to have contributed to the wider team's valuable work.

“We were brainwashed to act, speak, dress and think white and we were punished if we didn’t..…We were not allowed to talk in our language or about culture or about our families.”  

Aunty Lorraine Peeters, Healing Foundation, 2019

Cover, Dawn Magazine, May 1953. A monthly magazine produced by the Aboriginal Welfare Board 'for the Aboriginal people of NSW' from 1952-1969.

The Aborigines Protection and Welfare Boards

The Aborigines Protection and Welfare Boards operated in NSW from the period 1883 to 1969. These Government agencies (the Boards) were responsible for devastating policies that sought to control and dispossess Aboriginal people from their land, communities and culture. Most notably, the Boards were responsible for legislating the forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families--now more commonly known as The Stolen Generations. The Boards had wide ranging power, all of which aimed to destroy Aboriginal culture, language and connections. Firstly, under a ‘protectionist’ ideology the Board set up Aboriginal reserves, together with missions and stations, where Aboriginal people were forced to live. Secondly, with a changing focus on supposed ‘welfare’ the Board sought to assimilate Aboriginal people into mainstream society.

The records that have survived from the Boards operation are incomplete. They are administrative files in nature – records that supported the day to day operations of the Board. Some of the material is mundane, recording requisitions and purchases and maintenance of vehicles and homes. Other material documents the intervention of the state in child removal, the denial of parents visiting their children in state institutions, the control of movements by being restricted to both live on reserves or being expelled from reserves.

Despite the inherent bias of the records, there are moments where Aboriginal people's agency is revealed, be it in a petition to the Board or in correspondence or enquiries that were investigating the injustice of the Boards policies. For us, the collection is a symbol of trauma, an archive which objectifies Aboriginal people, and one which positions Aboriginal people as subjects of the state. They are records of propaganda, used as tools to justify discriminatory government legislation and policies.

Cover, Dawn Magazine, October 1966. A monthly magazine produced by the Aboriginal Welfare Board 'for the Aboriginal people of NSW' from 1952-1969.

Being involved in reconnecting community with the records

Both the Scheme and the In Living Memory exhibition utilized these records as a form of government reparations. Both projects brought up painful memories for survivors of the Boards, but the projects also provided an opportunity to acknowledge past wrong-doings and a moment to share stories of resilience. It is a complex process to engage people with records that are truly offensive and racist. Relationships are key to reconnecting people with these records, and you must be prepared to sit with people to let them tell their stories.

Both projects occurred when digitisation programs and systems to support digital engagement were in their infancy. Despite a growing body of knowledge around participatory archives and the Australian Records Continuum model, which acknowledge multiple rights in records, limited work had been carried out to implement these in institutional settings. There were so many challenges in play with these projects that the right of reply and a reclaiming of the archive at that time seemed insurmountable.

Cover and contents page, Dawn Magazine, December 1954. A monthly magazine produced by the Aboriginal Welfare Board 'for the Aboriginal people of NSW' from 1952-1969.

Cassandra's reflections

I worked on the Aboriginal Trust Fund Repayment Scheme (ATFRS) from 2005-2011. My role was as Project Support Officer and I was the first line of call for queries to the Scheme. The hardest, most challenging part of working on the ATFRS was dealing with people or their families who had to endure one of the most harrowing chapters in the history of NSW. It was a bloodletting, where people  were given a chance to have a voice and respond to their treatment under the Boards for the first time since the Boards closed in 1969.

On the front line there were lots of telephone calls and visits. Most of the time, people were highly distressed to deal with the Scheme in terms of registering, understanding how it worked, what was going to be paid. They were also distressed once they started to talk about their personal history or family history in terms of their connection to the Boards.There was often anger, despair and a great sense of injustice. All of which  was overwhelming and not anything the Scheme was set up to deal with, as it was only there to deal with Trust Funds, no other part of the history of violence or injustices faced for Indigenous people in NSW.

The difficulty was also that people were being exposed to records about themselves or their families that were deeply racist and often contained within them atrocities and crimes against humanity. The most harrowing challenge was to live in the stories with the claimants themselves as they relived the histories that they were forced to endure. Terrifying stories of the cruellest cut, children being stolen or forcibly removed by the Board from their parents, sadistic and debasing matrons and mission managers. Young women and girls being forced to be domestic servants, young men and boys forced to be farmhands, cruelly and sadistically treated by the people they worked for as unpaid slaves.

It has been eight years since working on the Scheme, and I continue to be emotionally and mentally affected by the trauma that I was exposed to during the Scheme’s operation. My own family was affected by the Board and the encounter with the Scheme was experienced through me in deeply personal ways. I experienced the tragic loss of close family members when the Scheme was in operation, an experience which I and my family are still grieving from.  The oppressive history of the Board and its injustices continue to affect us daily and have an impact on our individual, family and community lives. I have come to realise that this trauma of dealing with the records and the Board’s oppressive and violent history, as what can only be described as regimes of terror, is very recent, and it's difficult to find the right words to describe the intergenerational trauma that has stemmed from this. 

Except, Aborigines Protection Act 1909 (NSW). This Act gave the Aborigines Protection Board statutory powers in relation to all missions, stations and reserves in NSW and gave the Board power to exercise control, including monitoring and surveillance over all matters affecting Aboriginal people in NSW.

Kirsten's reflections

One of the hardest aspects of working with the records of the Board was the lies. The untruthful ‘facts’ that were boxed up in files and somehow now perceived to be the truth. No archives education, no history degree, no sociology degree can prepare you for this kind of work. It was truly gut-wrenching to witness the ongoing trauma of recordkeeping on the lives of Aboriginal people in both the Scheme and the In Living Memory exhibition. Being around these records en masse, day after day, is a different experience to that of entering a reading room and retrieving a box or file for research. You are an insider, all the while aiming to protect yourself from the information you are surrounded by, whilst trying to be respectful to the people and families whose lives are documented in the records.

I would regularly imagine that a symbolic burning of all the files would be the best approach. Just destroy these bureaucratic records which were no more than tools to legitimize the discriminatory policies and practices of the Board. Obviously, as a professional archivist I knew this was not the answer, they tell a powerful story in their original form and they are evidence of a history of racist government intervention. Yet our biggest question at the time was how did we record Aboriginal people's responses to these archives? What did people do after they encountered a file, an image; what were they expected to do with their response? The tensions of access were extreme in these projects. People wanted to find material, but when they did, they had to work through such complex, derogatory and incomplete information.

I am proud of the work that I contributed to the Scheme and cherish the conversations I had with many community members and survivors of the Stolen Generations as part of the In Living Memory exhibition. The exhibition had a strong focus on informed consent, and respect for Indigenous protocols. We took the time to talk to people and to respect their wishes. It was a process that was about true partnerships and reciprocity. I am proud also of the deep archival descriptive work thatis a legacy of both projects. Countless hours were spent by teams of indexers to document every file and every photograph so that people were named and identified wherever possible.

I spent a decade of my working life surrounded by the records of the Board. The experience encouraged my activism around the re-reading and re-claiming of these spaces so that Aboriginal people can have voice to their own experience through a right of reply. I am also deeply committed to growing a focus on living archives, where relationships are key, where multiple perspectives relate to records and recordkeeping systems. I am pleased to observe the current NSW Reparations schemes underway which further priorities around ‘unfinished business’ with members of the Stolen Generations. It is a much more mature scheme which focuses more on healing agendas than was in operation in the mid 2000s. Much of the support that we had as staff was self-generated, and our emotional care and support was never fully considered.

Health Hints, Dawn Magazine. A regular section appearing each month dispensing health and hygiene tips.

Conclusion

A decade on we have joint aspirations to develop agendas around archival activism that give voice to Aboriginal people and allow opportunities for these archives of trauma to be reshaped. This is not a history that has stopped with the close of the Board. The rates of Indigenous Australian incarceration and child removal continue to grow. Our efforts now need to focus on how records are kept into the future so that projects like the Scheme and the In Living Memory exhibition are no longer needed in the future.

A note on the images

We have included a selection of images and graphic material taken from the Dawn Magazine that was produced by the Aboriginal Welfare Board from 1952-1969 ‘for the Aboriginal people in NSW’. It is and was a derided publication that was poorly, cheaply produced and racist in tone.

Sadly however, it was all there was that included stories and photos of our families and children at that time that were widely circulated.

Other examples include graphics and images from the Dawn where the visual communicative intent is propaganda in the promotion of the Board’s, and ultimately Australia’s agenda, of ‘whiteness’ and fear including the visual references to Constructivist graphic design in the masthead. Its common visual narrative from the Board’s perspective at the time was, ‘here is the primitive man that we are working hard to civilise’, therefore we have limited photos of families and children for sensitivity reasons.

On the other hand, as we begin to perform the interventions and deconstructions required to reclaim our families from within it, such as writing and interrogating its imagery and intent, Dawn can perhaps begin to serve as a rewritten archive of photos and stories for the families involved where their power is upheld and maintained.

We have also included an excerpt from a significant piece of State legislation from 1909 affecting the lives of all Aboriginal people in NSW and a postcard of the Board’s headquarters in Sydney.

Acknowledgements

We thank the Los Angeles Archivists Collective for the opportunity to write about our encounters and cultural memory. As Griselda Pollock has described elsewhere, when discussing the canon of Holocaust writing and literature, it is a way of dealing with trauma and historical violence is a way of ‘bearing witness to two historical encounters’ (Pollock, 2011).  We would like to acknowledge our fellow colleagues who worked with us on the Scheme and as part of the In Living Memory exhibition.  We speak about our experiences acknowledging the thousands of Aboriginal people who were affected by the Boards, and who engaged with the Scheme and the In Living Memory exhibition. 

References

Healing Foundation 2019, Aunty Lorraine Peeters BTH20 Case-Study, https://healingfoundation.org.au//app/uploads/2017/09/Aunty-Lorraine-Peeters-BTH20-Case-Study.pdf

NSW Government 2010, Guidelines for the Administration of the NSW Aboriginal Trust Fund Repayment Scheme, archived 28 January 2010, http://nla.gov.au/nla.arc-115581

Pollock 2011, ‘The lessons of Janina Bauman: Cultural memory from the Holocaust’, Thesis Eleven

State Records 2007, In living memory: exhibition catalogue State Records Gallery, https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/34915990?q&versionId=43322426

Cassandra Willis

Cassie Willis (Ngemba/Yuwaalaraay, Brewarrina NSW) is a freelance graphic designer currently studying a Masters Research (Design) at UTS. She also works at Jumbunna Institute as an administration co-ordinator. Cassie is interested in the history of graphic design and visual communication from Indigenous and non-Indigenous perspectives and how these intersect and collide. She is also interested in curatorial activism that aspires to decentre the world order and increase the representation of contemporary Indigenous voices and histories in cultural institutions.

Kirsten Thorpe

Kirsten Thorpe (Worimi, Port Stephens NSW) is a professional archivist, who has led the development of protocols, policies, and services for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in libraries and archives in Australia. Kirsten’s professional and research interests relate to Indigenous self-determination in libraries and archives. She has been involved in numerous projects that have involved the return of historic collections to Indigenous peoples and communities, and advocates for a transformation of practice to center Indigenous priorities and voice in regard to the management of data, records, and collections.