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Jaggs 1986 page 7). However, no State relied on this principle to displace the rights ofIndigenous parents. Illegitimate non-Indigenous children were not made wards of theState by legislation. No proof was required that Indigenous children were illegitimatebefore they were made wards. The legislation extended State guardianship over allIndigenous children satisfying the particular definition at the time regardless of whetherthey were the children of a marriage or not. In other words, their Aboriginality (or the‘degree’ of it) was the reason for the extension of guardianship by legislation, not theirlegitimacy or illegitimacy.The Crown, as the ‘parent’ of all subjects, and the courts have long had the power toremove parental rights. Both at common law (Re Agar-Ellis 1878) and under legislation(with the exception of Queensland from 1865 until 1911), however, an individual casewould always be scrutinised and the parent could only forfeit parental rights throughmisconduct or because a court found guardianship to be in the individual child’s bestinterests. The Australian High Court confirmed this position, for a non-Indigenous parent,in 1955.It must be conceded at once that in the ordinary case the mother’s moral right to insist that herchild shall remain her child is too deeply grounded in human feeling to be set aside by reasononly of an opinion formed by other people that a change of relationship is likely to turn out forthe greater benefit of the child.It is apparent, too, that a court which is invited to make an order of adoption must appreciate thatthe child is another’s, and that only the most weighty and convincing reasons can justify theinvoluntary breaking of a tie at once so delicate and so strong as the tie between parent and child(Full High Court in Mace v Murray page 385).Like a parent, or school teacher to whom the parent has entrusted his child, a nonparentalguardian such as the Chief Protector had the power at common law to ‘confine’his or her ward. By making the Chief Protector or Board the guardian, Western Australia,South Australia, the Northern Territory and Queensland legalised the detention so thatthey were not in law guilty of wrongful imprisonment of Indigenous children.Confinement, even by a parent, must be done ‘in a reasonable manner and for asufficient reason’ (Halsbury 1955 Volume 38 page 769). Aboriginal Protection Acts didnot require Chief Protectors or Protection Boards to consider questions of reasonablenessor sufficiency. These decisions were already made: if the child was Aboriginal or ‘halfcaste’that was reason enough to remove and institutionalise him or her. Again thecommon law protections were set aside in the interests of maximising State control overIndigenous children. Again Indigenous people were denied common law rights taken forgranted by other Australians.The discrimination was noticed and criticised by many. In 1938 Gladys Prossermade the point in an interview to the WA Sunday Times (quoted above). In the sameyear, the Hon H Seddon MLC contrasted child welfare practice relating to Indigenousand non-Indigenous mothers.