Bringing-Them-Home-Report-Web

Aboriginal boys. Kinchela moved to Kempsey in 1924. The Board also contributed to theUnited Aborigines Mission home at Bomaderry on the NSW south coast where youngerchildren and babies were placed.The Board regularly received complaints about the conditions in these institutions. A1937 Board inquiry into allegations of extreme cruelty by the Kinchela manager led tohim being transferred to the station at Cumeragunja. In response to his actions thereCumeragunja families walked off the station, crossed the Murray River and establishedcommunities in Victoria. These communities were later subjected to the child removalpolicies of the Victorian Government.Under arrangements with the Commonwealth Government the NSW Board alsoplaced Aboriginal children from the ACT who had been removed from their familiesunder the Neglected Children and Juvenile Offenders Act 1905 (NSW).While Indigenous children were being institutionalised, removed non-Indigenouschildren were being fostered or ‘released back’ into the care of their mothers. An 1874Public Charities Commission inquiry had stressed that institutional life,… is prejudicial to a healthy development of character and the rearing of children as good anduseful men and women. The one fatal and all-sufficient objection to the massing of childrentogether under the necessary conditions of barrack life is, its utter variance from the familysystem recognized by nature in the constitution of human society as the best suited for thetraining of the young (page 40).mapinsertResistance and dissentDuring the late 1920s and the 1930s Aboriginal resistance to the operations of theBoard organised at the political level. In 1925 the Australian Aborigines ProgressiveAssociation (AAPA) was formed in New South Wales and immediately called for an endto the forcible removal of Aboriginal children from their families (Markus 1990 page176). In 1928 the Association wrote,… girls of tender age and years are torn away from their parents … and put to service in anenvironment as near to slavery as it is possible to find (quoted by Markus 1990 on page 177).Fred Maynard, an Aboriginal activist, wrote to the Premier in 1927 demanding ‘thatthe family life of Aboriginal people shall be held sacred and free from invasion andinterference and that the children shall be left in the control of their parents’ (quoted byLearning from the Past 1994 on page 44).The Member of Parliament for Cobar, a supporter of the AAPA, raised themanagement problems then existing at Brewarrina Station in Parliament which resultedin a Parliamentary Select Committee into the Aborigines Protection Board, followed by afurther inquiry in 1938.Aboriginal activists continued to campaign against the actions of governments