In South Australia, the Protectorate had been abolished in 1856, but in 1860 a Select Committee on the Aborigines was asked to consider government expenditure and the efficiency of land allocations
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for Aboriginal people. The Committee took a strongly pessimistic view of the plight of the Aboriginal people, observing the rapidly declining population, which it decided was due to disease, immorality, infertility and traditional customs such as infanticide (Select Committee 1860, 1). No mention was made of frontier violence or loss of food sources due to settler activity. In considering the allocation of reserves to Aboriginal people, chiefly for the purpose of leasing them to fund Aboriginal services (as had been the intention following Buxton), the Committee noted: “The melancholy fact has frequently forced itself upon the minds of the Committee, during their examinations, that the race is doomed to become extinct, and it would only be a question of time when those reserves would again revert to the crown” (Select Committee 1860, 5). While up to 10,000 acres had been provided as Aboriginal reserves in the colony, the allotments had been small, and the 1860 Select Committee observed that Aboriginal people had not made use of them (Rowley 1970, 203). The Committee recommended the reappointment of a Protector with a limited role of distributing rations and blankets to Aboriginal people who were deemed unable to look after themselves (Brock 1993, 14; Raynes 2002, 18). The Committee also supported the continuation of missionary work aimed at educating and civilising Aboriginal children, separated from their parents. With the frontier contact still continuing in this period, up into the Northern Territory, the under-resourced Protector relied on police working alongside the settlers, poorly supervised by the government in Adelaide (Rowley 1970, 205). When South Australia was granted control over the Northern Territory in 1863, it chose to appoint a part-time Protector of Aborigines in the Northern Territory, but this was insufficient to address the mistreatment and malnutrition of the Aboriginal people in the further reaches of the northern districts (Raynes 2002, 18-20).
The government saw no reason to pass legislation following this unhappy evaluation of the Aboriginal situation, and were slow to take action on the recommendations of the Committee. Raynes describes this period as one of “laissez-faire” as the government chose to do little about the rapid decrease in the Aboriginal population, and even failed to fill the position of Protector between 1868 and 1880 (Raynes 2002, 21). Missionaries and church organisations thus moved into the space vacated by the government, and established a number of missions between 1850 and 1898 in an effort to protect the Aboriginal people in their apparent decline. One of the most well-known was Hermannsburg, near Alice Springs, by that time under the control of South Australia. The missions at Poonindie, Point Pearce and Point McLeay also gathered significant permanent Aboriginal populations, and like those at Coranderrk in Victoria, many formed strong attachments to the locality. Settler demands for access to land continued to threaten Aboriginal security on these missions, however, and the depression in the 1890s saw Poonindie mission being subdivided and
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released for sale, even after decades of Aboriginal occupation, and unrewarded labour clearing and farming the land (Brock 1993, 55-9).
Brock (1993) emphasises the strategic behaviour of Aboriginal people in South Australia in this period as they sought to remain close to their traditional land, and close to employment opportunities. For many, the choice to stay on their country meant that they were forced to submit to the control of the missionaries who established institutions in the area (Brock 1993, 141). Access to land for food and ceremonial purposes was increasingly restricted by pastoral leases and frontier conflict, but the missions provided rations, and allowed continued kinship connections. Many Aboriginal people worked on pastoral stations but returned to the missions for rations and support when seasonal work dissipated. Missions clearly did not offer the autonomy or self-reliance which the Aboriginal people would have preferred. Indeed, they were instrumental in undermining traditional social structures, discouraging customary rituals, and limiting the transmission of essential skills and knowledge of living off the land, thus narrowing the options available to their residents over time (Brady and Palmer 1988, 240). Brock observes, “Had they been provided with their own reserve land, they would have had no need of the mission. They could have run their own stock and continued working on pastoral stations” (Brock 1993, 161). Aboriginal people made many such requests of the South Australian government, as was occurring in New South Wales and Victoria at the time, and did so again at the South Australian Royal Commission on the Aborigines in 1913, but this was rejected firmly by the government, and where land was granted, it was given to missionaries, not directly to Aboriginal people (Raynes 2002). One exception to this lack of responsiveness to Aboriginal requests was the special mining reserve created in 1905 for Aboriginal people to continue to mine ochre at Parachilna for traditional purposes (Brock 1993, 127).
The church organisations had their own objectives for the missions, and their work arguably served the interests of the government and settlers more than those of their Aboriginal charges (Alroe 1988, 40). As missionaries extended their reach into more remote areas, they continued to establish missions with the purpose of “civilising” the Indigenous people and preventing them from continuing their “savage” traditions and culture. Their objective was to protect the Aboriginal people by preparing them for the inevitable contact with white settlers, providing them with Christian beliefs, and industrial training (Edwards and Clarke 1988, 187). This was clearly in accordance with the humanitarian ideals proposed by the Buxton Committee in 1836. The nature of this project is clearly illustrated by the “principal aims” of the Point McLeay Mission, which were quoted as follows by the South Australian Aborigines Royal Commission in 1913:
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1. To instruct the natives in such industrial pursuits as may make them useful on the land, and enable them to earn their own living.
2. To encourage and assist native families in forming civilized homes.
3. To instruct them in the doctrines, precepts, and duties of the Christian religion.
4. To maintain a boarding school, where the children of the natives may receive gratuitously the ordinary elements of an English education, and be trained in civilized habits.
(Royal Commission 1913, vi)
Civilising, in this sense, clearly had strong assimilative intentions, and the missionaries were prepared for resistance from the Aboriginal people. In many cases, they induced Aboriginal people to abandon their nomadic customs and live on the missions with the offer of food rations, tobacco, education and land security. Having done this, some missionaries were then able to control the lives of their residents, by imposing a segregated dormitory system and Christian education for the children (Alroe 1988). In time, the missions had created a dependent, inward-looking population which had very few links to the outside economy and society, and many were active in crushing traditional Aboriginal customs and beliefs in the process (Rowley 1970, 205; Gale 1987, 139).
The South Australian government was slow to legislate in Aboriginal affairs. In the 1890s calls to legislate for the protection of Aboriginal labourers in the pastoral districts, and to provide secure reserves for Aboriginal people were rejected, and proposed legislation along these lines was protested vigorously by pastoralists, and dismissed by parliamentarians as a “sentimental fad” (cited in Raynes 2002, 30). The Aborigines Act which was eventually passed in 1911, was modelled on the similar acts in Western Australia in 1905 and Queensland in 1897. It established the office of Chief Protector and the Aborigines Department, and provided for leases of land for Aboriginal people, to be governed through missions or reserves, but did so within a political climate which favoured segregation. All Aboriginal and part-Aboriginal children were under the guardianship of the Protector, and removals to reserves or missions were authorised under the Act (Raynes 2002, 35-6).
When the South Australian government eventually held its own Royal Commission on the Aborigines in 1913, the inquiry deplored the failure of the missions to help their charges to integrate into wider society. Instead, they noted of Point Mcleay for example, that “the Mission is languishing, the aborigines and half-castes are being reared for the most part in idleness, and instead of the natives being trained to useful work, they have, to a great extent, become dependent on charity” (Royal Commission 1913, vi). This disapproval of the effectiveness of the missions was arguably prompted by the Chief Protector at the time, William South, although Aboriginal residents of the missions made similar requests to end the control of the missions (Foster 2000, 19-20). The Commission visited the
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missions and heard evidence from the staff and residents as well as local pastoralists (Raynes 2002, 36).
The Royal Commission noted the decreasing number of “full blood blacks” and the increasing number of mixed race Aboriginal people, and argued that the role of the government with respect to the Aboriginal population was no longer to protect, but rather to assist their integration into the community as self-reliant individuals (Royal Commission 1913, vii). This new task was seen as being beyond the missions who lacked the necessary resources or will. The Commission recommended that the government appoint a “board of disinterested and qualified gentlemen” to direct this new policy. This was eventually implemented with the appointment in 1918 of the Advisory Council on Aborigines (Raynes 2002, 41). The Royal Commission also urged the separation of Aboriginal people from those of mixed descent, provided for the removal of all children over the age of ten years from their parents, and recommended the imposition of strict controls on reserves including inspections, discipline and “good order” (Royal Commission 2013, x; see also Brock 1995).
In the years following on from the Royal Commission’s report, the government took over the two former missions, Point McLeay and Point Pearce, and proceeded to introduce a much harsher range of measures to control residents on the reserves, including cutting rations, imposing stiff penalties for misdemeanours, and stepping up the removal of children. All Aboriginal males over the age of 14 were forced off the reserve to find employment, and were no longer provided with rations. Given the high rates of forced removals from the missions, it is not surprising that the government soon felt justified in dismantling the reserve system altogether (Foster 2000; Brock 1995). The economic drivers of this policy should not be ignored, however: Raynes (2002, 44) observes that by the 1920s the government-run stations were running at very substantial losses.