Support aboriginal workers fight
Stolen wages a major barrier to reconciliation
 

The Age
August 30, 2007

Gary Highland

Indigenous people need a proper return on their labour for this nation.

To MOST Australians, the word "slavery" conjures up images of Africans in
chains being taken across the Atlantic to work the cotton fields of
America's Deep South. We struggle to comprehend that slavery is also part of
our own nation's history.

Governments around Australia controlled wages, savings and benefits
belonging to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people for most of the
20th century. Payments withheld included child endowment, pensions and even
soldiers' pay. Much of the money held in trust was never paid to its owners.
Trust account funds were transferred to public revenue, or disappeared
through fraud or negligence along with many of the records.

Historians estimate that tens of thousands of indigenous people had their
labour controlled by state and territory governments during this time.

Among those people was the great Aboriginal leader Lowitja O'Donoghue, who
as a young woman had her wages placed in trust while she worked as a
domestic in South Australia. Years later, when O'Donoghue began her nursing
career, she sought to have this money paid to her so she could buy uniforms.
However, the authorities turned down the request and she never received her
money.

In Queensland, Jubilee Jackson worked as a stockman near Mount Garnet for 60
years from the age of 10. His pay was a small amount of pocket money at
rodeo time. The rest was held in a trust account. When he died in 1967,
there was only $99 in his government-controlled account. The local police
sergeant was later charged with multiple counts of fraud relating to several
savings accounts.

In New South Wales, my friend Rob Welsh's father, Ray, was one of 400
Aboriginal boys between five and 15 who were taken from their families and
sent to the Kinchela Boys Home, near Kempsey, between 1924 and 1971. The
boys received poor education, an inadequate diet and many suffered beatings
and abuse. When they turned 15, the Kinchela Boys were sent to work as rural
labourers. The Aboriginal Welfare Board kept their wages, which were
supposed to remain in trust for them until they reached adulthood. Most
never received any of their trust money.

Across northern Australia from the Kimberley to Cape York, the unpaid labour
of indigenous workers was used to establish lucrative industries such as
beef cattle and pearling. In Queensland alone, it has been estimated that as
much as $500 million in today's value was lost or stolen from indigenous
families.

Victoria was not immune to this practice either. Up to the mid-1960s,
workers at the Lake Tyers reserve in Gippsland received only a small cash
wage supplemented by rations. It is also likely that part or all of the
wages of people under the Aboriginal Welfare Board were paid into trust, as
were Commonwealth benefits like child endowment and pensions. More research
is needed to determine what became of this money.

Many of these workers across Australia faced a double injustice because they
were also members of the Stolen Generations. They were removed from their
families, culture and land and then had their wages and entitlements removed
from them.

The twin practices of child removal and stolen wages took many indigenous
people into a form of cultural and economic exile, denied a place in
indigenous society and then prevented from gaining the economic stake so
essential to a decent life in the mainstream.

To date only the NSW government has responded to this aspect of our nation's
past with any decency, establishing an Aboriginal Trust Fund Repayment
Scheme to fully reimburse claimants for money identified as still owing in
today's value. In contrast, the Queensland government offered only a maximum
$4000 per person as a "gesture of reconciliation" to compensate for decades
of stolen and mismanaged wages and entitlements.

In other states, governments have yet to meet their responsibility to ensure
elderly and vulnerable indigenous people finally receive the payments denied
to them for so many years.

The unresolved issue of stolen wages remains one of the nation's greatest barriers to reconciliation and justice for indigenous people.

Gary Highland is National Director of Australians for Native Title and
Reconciliation (ANTaR). This is an excerpt from his introduction to Hard
Labour, Stolen Wages: A National Report on Stolen Wages, available at
www.antar.org.au