It seems likely that consumption, particularly of fresh fruits and to a lesser extent vegetables, declined when Burnt Bridge became a station and the population increased, although the evidence to support this is circumstantial. We know that farming came to a fairly abrupt halt when the managers took over control of the farms (Morris 1986) and that fruit and vegetables (other than potatoes and onions) were not provided in the rations. Those who did not have a cash income would therefore have been unable to supplement their diets with store produce. According to old residents, small domestic gardens were maintained by some families, but lack of reticulated water supply made this extremely difficult during the summer months. It seems that such enterprise diminished over the years as the conditions at Burnt Bridge deteriorated.
36 One elderly women recalled collecting yams as a child.
37 Morris (1983) notes that rural employment shooting possums,
dingos and rabbits provided both cash and meat to Aborigines.
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Important sources of vegetables were the farms where residents worked. Sometimes their wages were paid partly in produce and at other times they used their cash to buy vegetables at greatly reduced prices. 'They [the men] used to come 'ome with vegetables, potatoes and pumpkin and squash and cabbage'. In later years a travelling produce salesman
brought his truck to Burnt Bridge once per week. It is likely that this coincided with more people having cash incomes as a result of the
lifting of restrictions on welfare payments.
While it is impossible to tell the extent to which people relied on rations during this period there is one important factor which may have influenced apparent consumption. Morris (1986) has described how
traditional culinary practices, typified as 'dirty blackfella ______ ', were an important component of the negative portrayal of Aborigines. While this no doubt had had the effect of suppressing traditional
practices, especially amongst those who were trying to be accepted into the white community, it must also have led to some concealment.
According to Fink (1957:106):-
They [Aborigines on the Reserve] feel they don't like a white person to see them cooking down in the ashes and near the dirt and eating their own [bush] food.
Thus, consumption of bush foods, particularly those that were
unacceptable to the white community such as cobrah, acacia or 'wichety' grubs and echidna, may have gone 'underground'. I had some insight into
this when a woman, with whom I had had regular contact over a period of many months, included a 'wichety' grub in her resume of the previous day's food intake. Her hesitancy and alertness to my response made me acutely aware of the significance she attached to this revelation.
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The closure of the station at Burnt Bridge in 1968 and the relatively rapid relocation of residents into town probably led to a sudden
diminution in the consumption of bush food. That these foods were still consumed, albeit sporadically, is evidence that they had, however, never been completely lost from the diet. Since everyone now had a cash
income from some source and ate a 'supermarket' diet it seems reasonable to conclude that they were consumed in much greater quantities in the past when income was low and unreliable and rations were inadequate. Indeed, informants stated themselves that they did not eat nearly as much bush food as they had in the past. The importance of this lies in
the fact that deficiencies in the past diet cannot be deduced from an evaluation of rations since an unknown quantity of dietary
supplementation with bush and other foods was taking place.
There is some evidence that nutrition, particularly of children, was inadequate on many stations though there appears to have been
considerable variation. Calley (1957:211) observed in the far north that:-
At X. [estimated population 140], perhaps only two families are undernourished. At U. [estimated population 130-140], however, the standard of nutrition is very low indeed. Many children are given 'bread and dip' (damper or bread dipped in thin gravy)
three meals a day. Only two of the families on the station make a practice of cooking any other vegetables than potatoes. This is partly because vegetables tend to be very expensive, and partly because of cultural categories that class meat^gnd bread as 'food', but vegetables as luxuries or 'trimmings'.
High infant mortality and growth failure in children, which were apparently widespread (see for example Calley 1956), are indications that nutrition may have been inadequate. But worm infestations,
38 There appear to be grounds for doubting Calley's conclusion
recurrent infections, poverty and alcoholism were also prevalent. As noted in chapter four such factors influence nutritional status so that it is not possible to deduce nutritional intake purely on this basis. By the 1960s poor diet was already beginning to be used in official explanations for Aboriginal health and social problems. In Kempsey, an AWB welfare officer cited poor diet as the basis of Aboriginal failure in schools (Macleay Argus, June 25, 1966) completely ignoring the profound difficulties experienced by children who attended public schools in Kempsey at this time.
One poorly explored area is the effect of the use of rations by the State, both as a marker of cultural inferiority and as a means of
controlling behaviour. According to Goodall (1982) AVB rations were
always less than those given to destitute or unemployed whites, although they were increased at the height of the depression in 1931 and again in 1938 to 'approximately' the level of white food relief (Long 1973). Underlying this difference in rations were two seemingly irreconcilable Board policies. While the Board was on the one hand determined to decculturate Aborigines in preparation for their absorption into white society, it was on the other hand exploiting traditional practices by relying on dietary supplementation with bush food to sustain it's dependents. Indeed, as Goodall (1982:31, quoting APB Report 1904) has pointed out the Board was forced to 'vigourously oppose' the 1903 legislation making the killing of native fauna an offence because Aborigines 'under the Board's care have depended largely upon native game for their animal food'. Such ambiguities must have greatly
increased the frustrations of Aborigines who were dispossessed of their farms, inadequately sustained on Board rations and forced to supplement their diets by denigrated practices. After 1916 meat rations could
officially be withdrawn 'in areas where it could be shown that supplies could be made up by hunting and fishing' and according to Read (1983:24) this regulation meant that during the Great Depression 'practically no meat was distributed at all: reserve children were entitled to 41bs of flour a week as basic nourishment'. If meat could be provided at the discretion of the Board, station residents would have had an additional incentive to conceal the amount of meat they were getting from the bush. During the Great Depression both the definition of 'Aboriginal' and the value of rations were manipulated by the state.
Since 1918 the police, as guardians under the Act, had been instructed to recognise only 'half-caste' and 'full-blood' Aborigines as eligible for rations and other aid. However, with the introduction of the Food Relief and Work Relief schemes, from which Aborigines were to be
excluded, the definition was expanded to include all persons of
'Aboriginal appearance' (Goodall 1982:264). All Aborigines thus defined were denied Food Relief and directed back onto the APB for support.
This was a government cost-cutting measure which was effective for two reasons. Firstly, the Board did not have to provide the Aboriginal destitute with any meat. Secondly, Food Relief recipients received ration allocations for their children and full Family Endowment while Aborigines receiving rations from the Board had the value of their childrens' rations deducted from their Family Endowment and had no guarantee of being paid the balance. Many Aborigines who had been economically independent and free from Board control were now forced to become dependent on the Board only to find the value of their support less than that paid to other unemployed persons (Goodall 1982).
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children into the schools and threats to withdraw rations were later used to gain compliance with Board schemes (Goodall 1982). Dependency on the Board for rations during the worst years of economic hardship had a significant effect on residency patterns, bringing people into the reserves and town camps and thus under government control. Kelly (1944:143) records that in New South Wales in the late 1930s:-
[Through farm labour] the native becomes self-supporting and by far the great majority explained that they did not wish to live on the reserve, and they preferred not to take rations when out of work, for this might mean that the government could order them back to the reserve [emphasis added].
Thus food has been an important nexus through which the state has exerted control over Aborigines, right up until the time that welfare reforms assured them of a cash income. For this reason at least some of what is now so soundly criticised as inadequate diet based on ignorance,
lack of initiative, failure to adapt to new foods and poor distribution of resources can be attributed to state policies in preceding decades.
Food consumption was also used in the wider community as a marker of racial inferiority. Aborigines employed on rural properties on the Macleay in the 1930s were 'fed outside', a racial slight that was keenly
felt (Morris 1983; see also informant's account in Kamien 1978). Little had changed by the 1950s when Aboriginal farm hands who worked side by side with whites were fed under a tree or in an outhouse or laundry, often without utensils, while the white hands ate with the employers (Calley 1956). Forestry and sawmill workers ate in separate groups. Though some of these barriers have been broken down, there are still places in Kempsey where Aborigines wouldn't go to eat and many feel extremely self-conscious about eating where they can be observed by whites.
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Cooking: Morris (1986) argues that at Bellbrook, the camp fire remained an important focal point in the public (external) domain and cooking a public space activity, in spite of the provision of internal fireplaces and the attempted suppression of 'eating dirty blackfella food' (food cooked in the ashes) by the station manager. Kelly (1944:144) also discusses the adjustment to reserve housing made by establishing a hearth outside the house -'life around a camp fire had meaning. The fuel stove had none'. This remained true right up until the closure of the stations since Long (1947:47) found in 1965 that 'a good deal of cooking was done at outside fireplaces', in spite of the fact that the houses were provided with internal fireplaces or stoves.
Indeed fires have remained important in both the private and public domains wherever Aborigines are protected from white scrutiny.
Interviews I conducted at Burnt Bridge in the 1985 were held inside near the fireplace, and the fires were kept burning during the day. Open fires were still frequently lit outside at Greenhill and at Burnt Bridge when people gathered together to drink, play cards or talk; but they were seldom lit in suburban backyards in the town.
Open fire cooking did however, embrace new technology so that cooking pots and camp ovens were used, and boiling replaced the traditional practice of dry baking in ashes. One pot cooking led to the adoption of the composite dishes variously named 'stew' or 'gravy' or 'soup', which are ubiquitous in Aboriginal cuisine (see chapter five).
Conclusion
attention to the fact that post-contact Aboriginal societies have been almost universally depicted as disintegrated and disorganised, and this is particularly true of communities in settled Australia where cultural integrity has been evaluated in terms of dilution of Aboriginal 'blood' and the loss or retention of 'traditional' lifeways. This view of urban Aborigines as detribalised and acculturated still has wide currency (see
for example Altman and Nieuwenhuysen 1979).
While there has clearly been a breakdown in many aspects of
'traditional' Aboriginal life (language use, ceremonies, marriage
customs, subsistence patterns etc) a view of urban Aboriginal society as completely disintegrated does not do justice to the variety of
strategies and initiatives Aborigines have pursued in adjusting to quite dramatic social change. Nor does it adequately account for the survival of a distinctive Aboriginal identity in settled Australia (see for
example Carter 1988; Schwab 1988) and the retention of some 39
'traditional' customs and beliefs.
What should be clear from this chapter however, is that Aboriginal adjustment to social change has been greatly complicated by all- encompassing intervention from the state. This intervention was
grounded in the belief that Aborigines were an inferior 'race' compared to whites, an ethnocentrism which was, in the eyes of the state,
complicated by miscegenation (see for example Goodall 1982; Morris 1986).
In the early post-contact era, loss of land and marginal involvement in 78
In chapter seven I describe, for example, the burning of the possessions of a deceased women at Greenhill in 1985.
the labour market confounded Aboriginal transformation from a hunting and gathering to a capitalist economy. Subsequently, increasingly intensive state intervention and supervision excluded Aborigines from active participation in the social, economic and political life of the dominant society at the same time as they were being incorporated into it. The reproduction of social relations across generations was
interrupted by the widespread removal of children, whose assimilationist 'training' was directed towards the eradication of 'part' Aboriginal culture. In addition, access to food was manipulated by the state, as part of its incorporative strategies, bringing about dietary changes and the suppression of denigrated 'dirty blackfella' practices .
In fact, throughout this period all Aboriginal lifeways were both denigrated and suppressed. To whites, Aboriginal as 'dirty' was a
critical signifier of racial difference, and this provided the rationale for the exclusion of Aborigines from using facilities such as hospitals, schools, swimming pools, hotels and cafes, barbers, and even meeting rooms which were used by whites. Significantly, the control of 'dirt' in the domestic domain was also emphasised in the training of Aboriginal women, and it was largely on this basis that families were eventually deemed 'fit' to be absorbed into white society.
A critical feature of the life experiences of Aborigines is their
response and resistance to these events. Not surprisingly, the central themes of their stories are in many cases of powerlessness and
dependency in a hostile world. As one man remarked to Gilbert (1977:32)s-
You've got to go through it to understand what some of us've been through in life. They look at you today 'n' say, 'By gee, he gets it easy,' but when you look back 'n' see the hardships you went through.
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Critical to an understanding of contemporary social conditions is the recognition that these 'hardships', and how and why they came about, are very much alive in the minds of today's adults. They comprise both an ongoing source of grievance and the context in which contemporary social pressures are embedded.
This account has dealt more with the lives of those Aborigines who attempted to maintain their autonomy, their economic independence, and their land base. Much less is known of course of the complete
casualties who, in Gilbert's (1977:18) words, 'give up and say, 'oh what's the use,' and become no-hopers and drunks and goodness knows
what'. Their stories are largely told, albeit more indirectly, in
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