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THE NATIVE PROBLEM.
SOUTH-WEST CONDITIONS.
Camps or Settlement ?
(By 'Araunah.')
The tour from which the Chief
Secretary (Mr. Reenan) returned on Monday,
and which included inspections, of native
camps at' Gnowangerup. Williams, and
Narrogin as well as a visit to the
abandoned settlement at Carrolup, must have
impressed him with the extreme ethical,
economic, and practical difficulties of the
native problem in the South-West division
of the State. When Western Australia
was granted Responsible Government by
the Imperial Parliament, the Constitution
Act was made to provide as a perpetual
obligation on the * Government of the
State care of the aborigines within its
borders. There is thus a legal as weil
as a moral obligation upon the Govern
ment to care for the original owners of
our territory? how,ever dire the economic
situation of the community and however
difficult of solution the practical difficulties
may appear.
The native problem in the south-west
division differs radically from that pre
s'entd in the north, for a number' of
reasons. Here the problem of the half
caste and quarter-caste assumes propor
tions which it has not attained elsewhere,
because it is of longer standing and is
consequently both larger and more com
plex. In the early days of occupation -by
the whites, numbers of ex-soldiers and
some ex-convicts, settling in or roaming
through the south-west division and de
prived of opportunities of mating with
women of their own colour, practised a
natural but reprehensible promiscuity
with the women of the native tribes and
began that racial dilution which. has been
progressively growing ever since, and
which is now evident to the most casual
observer. Subsequently some half-castes
mated with whites to produce quarter
castes, while others mated with one an
other to perpetuate the racial mixture.
? . Origin And Race.
Here a very interesting and curious
factor enters. It is well known. that if
a member of the Caucasian race mates
with one of negroid or other non-Cau
casian stock. * 'throw-backs' will ' occur
in the next or succeeding generations.
Thus a half-caste American or African
negress mated with a white man will
often* give birth to an ebony coloured
child, although she may be almost white
herself and the child's father may be
an unmixed white.- This never happens
in the case of Australian aborigines, and
there is no recorded case of a 'throw-
back' — a reversion to physical type — in
the careful records of the department.
The Chief Protector of Aborigines (Mr.
A. O. Xeville) assures me that this is
because the Australian aborigine is Cau
casion, 'springing originally from the same
stock as we. It follows from this, and
from observations which I am about to
detail, that if miscegenation were, en
couraged instead of being frowned upon,
the aborigines would '? ultimately . become
absorbed, blending insensibly into ? the
white stock with which they had mated
and leaving in - their descendants no
physical trace of a mixed origin. This
conclusion is- apt to' be so repellant to
the inind of the ordinary white, that it
is likely to be received with a/ scepticism
born rather of prejudice than of reason,
aiid_ I may, therefore, be. forgiven for de
tailing some . actual observations made on
the recent tour. :
There are in each of the camps visited
quarter-castes so white as. to be indis
tinguishable . from Australians of purely
British parentage.. Even the finger nails
(sure indication of mixed blood even
where the British strain has mingled with
the Aryan races of India) betray no
dark_ circle of underlying pigmentation,
and in many cases the noses are aquiline
and all the - features eharacteristieally
European. In. one camp we saw several
children with flaming red hair! Dozens
of these people, taken out of the squalid
setting of a native camp arid 'seen dif
ferently clad in a wholly white environ
ment, would be accepted without question
as people of white parentage. Some of
the girls are quite strikingly pretty, and
I even saw one' who might have sat for
Raphael's Madonna. ' '
j£ut~~an(i this is a highly important, and
serious reservation— they cling to the
camps from, preference, and appear . not
to differ from their full-blooded relatives
mentally. (This latter is not necessarily
as great a handicap as it may seem to
those: who are unaware that the aboriginal
standard of ? intelligence has been much
under rated). How much these two pro
clivities are due to the fact that the
white stock which has been hHngled with
the native stock has commonly been of
a brutalised and inferior kind, and how
much may be inherent in the mixture as
an inevitable concomitant, is matter for
conjecture.. The fact, is there, however,:
that scores of people externally indis
tinguishable from whites are living fike
beasts in these camps ?
Feeandity of Mixed Bloods.
Another striking fact is that half-castes
and quarter-castes are more fecund than
full blooded natives, and they are mul
tiplying fast. Between Narrogin and A'-
baiiy— within 100 miles of the abandoned
Carrolup settlement— there are 1,000 na
tives, of whom a large proportion are
half-castes and quarter-castes. With them
are over 500 children — many of them to
all appearances white— who are at present,
except_ at Gnowangerup, receiving no
education.' It costs the Government ap
proximately £6,000 annually to feed these
people, although the scanty rations are
eked out by the funds earned by those
who can find work and who share their
earnings communally — often, be it said,
with the aid of a two-up' ring. They are
inveterate gamblers. Those who can find
work do not receive rations, and those
who are offered and refuse work are
similarly denrived.
_ On this point there appears to be some
difference of opinion, but those who know,
the natives best and have no axe to grind
seem to agree that although it is diffi
cult to get a, native to be punctual it
J6 a very rare thing indeed to find one
refuse work when it is offered. The Min
ister called upon a Mr. Croucher, a settler
near Williams who has himself exclusively
employed natives for 50 years, and whose
forbears did the same. He asserted posi
tively that in all his experience he had
never known a native refuse to work, al
though natives and whites could not be
linked together successfully because of th'
uupunctual habits of .the former. -,
A Bad Practice.
Nothing good can be said of tie pre
sent haphazard system' of permitting native
camps in close proximity to townships, and
for the most part on ground wholly un
suitable from every point of view. That
at Gnowangerup is almost in the town,
on a bleak -windy hill which is, in the pre
vailing winter wind, to windward of the
town. The natives shiver in rudelv con
structed huts of kerosene tins and bag
ging, and their lot — despite the efforts of
Brother Wright of; the Mission to Abor
ipnes and his wife (who teaches the.chil
dren_ for love) — is most unenviable. At
Williams the camp is in 'a swamp beside
the railway line and barely 200 yards from
the State school, only the line* separating
them. At Xarrogin. thanks purely to the
efforts of the Rev. F. J. Boxall. whose en
thusiasm is unbounded and who is the
honorarv local protector, the camp is on
a good site well away from the town (on
the .commonage), the huts are larger, bet
ter and infinitely cleaner than elsewhere,
and an air of well-being pervades the place.
By a curious irony, Mr. Boxall seems to
have been* unlucky, 'in his natives; those
seen here were distinctly inferior in type
and' manner (except for two patriarchal
old full-bloods in their 'seventies, with
flowing white beards) to those seen else-*
where. -???'.
It is obvious that this system is un
desirable, alike in the interests of natives
and whites. Tlie townspeople are every
where anxious to be rid of neighbours who,
because of their habits and mode of liv
ing, are undesirable,' despite their amiabil
ity and freedom on the whole, from other
obnoxious traits: Equally, the natives are
not best served by being herded on an
unprotected windy hill or in a swamp.
Hence the -Chief Protector's anxiety to
segregate as many as possible in the settle
ment at Carrolup, which, he believes,
should never have been abandoned. A
number of good stone buildings are there
which (despite the use of aboriginal lab
our) cost between £5,000 and £6,009 to
erect; there- fs water there, and some
stock can be run and necessities grown.
Difficulties are that nearly all the original
reserve has been alienated since the clos
ure of the settlement in 1922. and would
have to be re-purchased, and that settlers
in the neighbourhood are strongly averse
to the presence of natives, their dogs, and
their fires. Not manv settlers would be
so affected, but Mr. Keenan's -problem is
obviously .to do justice a!ikp to whites and
blackswhere interests c-crfliet. '
' Sefre§ation?
While aborigines are nomadic to a de
gree, they are lost outside their original
tribal territoiy. so that they cannot with
out hardship' and cruelty be removed to a
remote part of the State among 'foreign'
tribes. Tlie advance of settlement has
deprived them of the pick of their an*
cient hunting grounds, and the demoralisa
tion which must result from' the present
system of herding them, idle, into camps
in close proximity to townships and dol
ing out scanty rations to them can only
prove serious. The whole problem bristles
with difficulties, but it does appear that
ultimately complete segregation according
to localities will prove the only solution.
Even then, the tragic problem of the half
castes and quarter-castes must remain.
$