'We want our money. We deserve our money': Aboriginal elders sue for compensation for stolen wages
Aboriginal elders Edith de Giambattista and Ron Harrington-Smith were taken from their families as children and sent to work in harsh, lonely and unsafe conditions. Now they are leading a class action lodged in Western Australia’s federal court this week to seek compensation for the wages they never received.
Like many thousands of Aboriginal people, de Giambattista and Harrington-Smith were forced to live under Western Australia’s strict protection and assimilation laws and policies. These laws – which existed in every state and territory from the 1880s until 1969 – controlled where Aboriginal people could live and work, who they could marry, and made it legal for their children to be taken.
“I had to clean soiled toilet pans by emptying them down a mine shaft,” Harrington-Smith says. “I was about nine at the time I started to do this hard yakka, barefoot in the squalid conditions.”
“You couldn’t put a money figure on what we went through,” de Giambattista says. “They reckon they were protecting us. But they didn’t protect us. They just kept us there to give us a flogging.”
Shine Lawyers lodged the class action on Monday on behalf of thousands of Aboriginal workers whose wages were taken under the 1936 Native Administration Act and the 1963 Native Welfare act.
Up to 10,000 workers are expected to be directly eligible, as well as a “substantial” number of their descendants, senior associate Tristan Gaven says.
“You’re talking about a very sizeable workforce who were effectively not paid for the better part of potentially a century,” Gaven says. “It’s big. It’s generations of people who worked for their entire life without getting paid appropriate wages.”
‘Slavery beyond comprehension’
Harrington-Smith is 75. He was born on Nangatadjara country, near the South Australian border, and remembers his family moving around their traditional lands. His grandfather taught him “a lot of culture”; his parents “used to carry the law and sing”. But when they came “in” to any of the government ration depots around the region, the authorities noticed him, “this little half-caste kid”.
“I was a monitored kid,” he says. “They waited for me. And that’s how they got me.”
The police took him at four and sent him to the “squalid” Mount Margaret mission in the north-eastern gold fields. Harrington-Smith remembers being terrified.
“It’s a horrible state of affairs, being taken away from your mum,” he says. “The superintendent who was looking after the boys dormitory said: ‘Ron, if you don’t shut up, I will pin you to the clothesline.’ I was bellowing and crying and I couldn’t shut up, I couldn’t stop crying. My other cousins were there trying to comfort me but I wouldn’t take it.
“I wanted to go home to my mother. I was crying like that. Sobbing my blooming heart out, they reckon. I was really upset for quite a long time, for three or four days, I couldn’t shut up.”
At Mount Margaret he would see his mother when he was allowed to go down to the creek, where his parents had set up camp. He says she would sneak him bits of kangaroo meat; he was always hungry. At nine, the missionaries put him to work carting wood and cleaning toilets. Harrington-Smith says there was no option but to work.
“I couldn’t answer back, I couldn’t say no, I’d probably get the strap. My duties were chopping wood, carting wood to the missionaries. I didn’t have shoes, and I carried wood by hand. You’d put your arms out and the bigger boys would load your arms up with wood and say: ‘Don’t you ever drop one stick.’
“I was a pretty strong little fellow at nine because you learn quick what you’ve got to put up with. You’ve got to fight; you’ve got to do all sorts of things when you’re on your own.”
At 16, Ron was sent to work on sheep and cattle stations where he was “paid” in rations – flour, tea and tobacco.
“I can’t remember getting a cheque, but some of these station owners were quite rich because wool prices in the 50s were sky high, but I never got paid on the job,” he says. “We had just the bare necessities like packets of tobacco, and papers, matches. We didn’t have any meat. You had what rations they gave you and that was that.”
Harrington-Smith says the government was well aware people were being mistreated.
“The fact of the matter is this was done not through not sheer ignorance; it was a way of breaking our spirits,” he says.
“The government knew all about my movements before I got taken from my mother and put in a home, and then to be a kid carrying toilet pans, it’s slavery beyond comprehension.
“I never got paid. That’s just the fact of the matter. It’s slave labour all the way through from when I was young kid of nine or 10.
“That scarred my life as a result of it, forever. I didn’t opt to have this done. And neither did I opt to do the work they was forcing me to do, the pans. I was being forced to live in squalor.
“Pay a man for fair day’s work – that’s written in the Bible. They have to make amends.”
‘Neville the devil’
The architect of this regime was AO Neville, WA’s chief protector of Aborigines from 1915 until his retirement in 1940. Obsessed with blood quantum, and with “breeding out” colour, Neville decided to take fair-skinned children away to mission settlements. Children were to be trained in domestic and stock work and then sent out to earn.
De Giambattista, then unmarried and going by her maiden name Smith, was 14 when she met “Neville the devil”, as she called him.
She was living in a girls’ home in East Perth after years at the “horrible” Carrolup native settlement.
“One day, Mr Neville the devil came up and he said to us girls, ‘What sort of work do you want to do?’ So we were all cocky and got up and said, ‘Oh, we want to be nurses.’
“He looked at us and said, ‘Nursing is not for you, girls.’ He said, ‘You’re only fit for housemaids’, and housemaids we were.
“We were sent to the country, to different towns, cleaning houses for people – and really nasty people. The first job I went to, she was a very nice lady. But the rest of them were terrible. They were really bad,” de Giambattista says.
De Giambattista was born in Kojonup, south-east of Perth, 78 years ago. Her family – parents, grandparents, three sisters and a brother – lived in tents on the property where they worked. When she was 13, a man in a ute came and took the children to Carrolup.
“He just loaded us on the back of his ute and took us to this horrible place,” she says. “It was such a terrible place; it was so dirty. We were locked in dormitories at night.”
Carrolup was run by a matron who used to call them “little black kids with no future”.
“She didn’t like girls with long hair because she said we didn’t look look after it. She dragged me into a room and started to cut my hair. And I pushed her hand away and knocked the scissors on the floor. She picked the scissors up and stabbed me in the leg.
“She said, ‘You’ll be right, you won’t die. Little black kids with no future, that’s what you kids are.’ And that’s what we had to put up with.
“One day I went into the kitchen and I dropped a cup and a plate. Boy did I cop a hiding. It was terrible what we went through. Not only me but the other girls as well. I’m lucky enough to be here today to tell this story because a lot of my friends from the mission are all passed on now.
“Sometimes I’ll just sit down and have a little cry on my own, and think about this horrible life we lived for so many years. What could we do? We couldn’t do anything. We just had to live with it.”
Sent out to work as a maid at 14, Edith says she was told her wages were being held in trust.
“If you wanted to buy something, you’d have to write a letter and ask, and they could say no. I think I bought a dress once. We didn’t see any of the money, it went into this trust account.”
In 2012, the WA government allocated $2.55m to a compensation scheme which ran for nine months. Of 2,026 applicants, 1,276 were deemed eligible for an ex gratia payment of roughly $2,000 each successful applicant.
Shine’s Gaven said the scheme was “manifestly deficient”.
“The failure to provide independent legal advice … was just manifestly deficient. Time and time again, I spoke to people who accepted these payments, and they really just thought that was all they were going to get, and it was basically sold to them as that as well.
“I don’t think many people would consider $2,000 for a lifetime of work as reasonable compensation.”
The WA government says it is considering the grounds of the claims put forward by Shine lawyers.
“The government will look to achieve a mediated outcome of any claims made in respect to the stolen wages issues, with an acknowledgment of the impact that historical government policies related to income control have had on Aboriginal people and their families over many years,” the office of Aboriginal affairs minister Ben Wyatt said this week.
De Giambattista says the possibility of a settlement is a good thing.
“We deserve that money, because we earned it ourselves,” she says. “They didn’t give it to us, we earned that money. To wait all this time for it, I think that’s enough pain that we’ve been through.”
