LETTERS FROM ABORIGINAL WOMEN OF VICTORIA, 1867 - 1926 LETTERS FROM ABORIGINAL WOMEN OF VICTORIA, 1867 - 1926 Edited by Elizabeth Nelson, Sandra Smith and Patricia Grimshaw History Department The University of Melbourne 2002 © 2002 Copyright is held on individual letters by the individual contributors or their descendants. No reproduction without permission. All rights reserved. Published in 2002 by The History Department The University of Melbourne Melbourne, Australia The National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Letters from aboriginal women in Victoria, 1867-1926. ISBN 0 7340 2160 7. 1. Aborigines, Australian - Women - Victoria - Correspondence. 2. Aborigines, Australian - Women - Victoria - Social conditions. 3. Aborigines, Australian - Government policy - Victoria. 4. Victoria - History. I. Grimshaw, Patricia, 1938- . II. Nelson, Elizabeth, 1972- . III. Smith, Sandra, 1945- . IV. University of Melbourne. Dept. of History. (Series : University of Melbourne history research series ; 11). 305.8991509945 Front cover details: ‘Raffia workers at Coranderrk’ Museum of Victoria Photographic Collection Reproduced courtesy Museum Victoria Layout and cover design by Design Space TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements 7 Map 9 Introduction 11 Notes on Editors 21 The Letters: Children and family 25 Land and housing 123 Asserting personal freedom 145 Regarding missionaries and station managers 193 Religion 229 Sustenance and material assistance 239 Biographical details of the letter writers 315 Endnotes 331 Publications 357 Letters from Aboriginal Women of Victoria, 1867 - 1926 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We have been helped to pursue this project by many people to whom we express gratitude. Patricia Grimshaw acknowledges the University of Melbourne Small ARC Grant for the year 2000 which enabled transcripts of the letters to be made. Sandra Smith would like to thank the Melbourne Museum Bunjilaka Aboriginal Centre, family history project. She also thanks Nicholas Knight and Jane Beer from the Centre for the Study of Health and Society who assisted her with research. Elizabeth Nelson thanks the staff at the National Archives of Australia, Victorian branch, in particular Joanna Leahy and Doreen Mahony, and the friendly staff at the Public Record Office Victoria. We would also like to thank Mary Morris, Collection Manager of Indigenous Collections, Melbourne Museum, and the administrative staff at the University of Melbourne History Department, particularly Robin Harper, and the Chair of the Editorial Board of the History Monograph Series, Dr Richard Pennell. Dr Ian Anderson of the Centre for the Study of Health and Society and the historians Dr Tony Birch, Dr Tracy Banivanua-Mar and Dr Julie Evans, all contributed their advice in helpful ways. Several students read the collection and gave encouragement, including Clare Land and Sharon Harding. In order to publish the letters we have followed the procedure set out by Australian copyright law. We placed a notice of our intention to publish, including the names of all the letter writers, in the Commonwealth of Australia Gazette, B13 April 2001. Sandra Smith then sought permission from those descendants of the letter writers whom she was able to locate. We are very grateful to the following people who kindly gave their permission for us to publish their forbears letters: Eileen Alberts, Laura Bell, Ivan Couzens, Elizabeth Clarke, Maisie Clarke, Michael Harding, Jessie Hunter, Dawn Lee, Judy Monk, Kevin Murray, Dot Peters, and Carl Turner. Letters held by the Public Record Office of Victoria are reproduced with permission of the Keeper of Public Records, Public Record Office Victoria, Australia. The letters of Bessie Flower are reproduced with the permission of the State Library of Victoria. 7 Reserve Locations in Victoria Warangesda MURRAY RIVER RIVERINA NEW SOUTH WALES 9 Cumeroogunga Ebenezer Maloga WIMMERA LODDON RIVER GOULBURN RIVER VICTORIA WESTERN DISTRICT Coranderrk GIPPSLAND MELBOURNE Lake Tyers Lake Condah Framlingham Ramahyuck Elliminyt Station Reserve *Map: copyright W. Atkinson, University of Melbourne. Letters from Aboriginal Women of Victoria, 1867 - 1926 INTRODUCTION In the early 1930s, an Aboriginal woman, Annie Alberts, wrote to the manager of Lake Tyers station, asking him whether she and her husband would be allowed to return to live in the Lake Tyers community. From her mission childhood – she was born on Ebenezer mission in 1885 – Annie had suffered serious obstacles and disappointments in her search for a decent and dignified life in an alien settler community. She had found scant concern for her own and her family’s expressed wishes about their lives and well-being among white officials, missionaries, governments and churches. She ended her letter with words that appear poignant and disturbing to the eyes of readers in the early twenty-first century: ‘every dog has its days’ she wrote; ‘some day the public will take it up and treat us better so answer this letter’.1 Many other Aboriginal women like Annie Alberts who were educated on the Victorian mission stations and who asserted their civil rights and economic entitlements in this period met the same hostile response. Like her, they had every reason to voice deep discontent with the treatment they themselves, their families and their communities had faced on the missions and reserves over the previous decades. In Victoria the humanitarian goals of the original Christian ‘civilising mission’, with its already sharp tension between notions of ‘uplift’ and ‘equality’, had deteriorated to the point where missions were now bent on keeping inmates inside and others out. An agenda that evangelicals in Britain had begun with hopefulness in the late 1830s and that colonial governments first implemented in Victoria in the 1850s and 1860s, had by 1930 deteriorated into a travesty of Christian humanitarianism.2 The letter writers in this collection had a shared experience of mission regimes. The Lake Tyers station on which Annie Alberts lived was by 1930 the only official Aboriginal reserve that remained of some eight that the Victorian Government had initially established across the colony. The principal stations had been Ramahyuck and Lake Tyers in East Gippsland, Ebenezer in the north west, Lake Condah and Framlingham in the Western District, and Coranderrk north of Melbourne. Each of the stations was overseen by a government- appointed manager or church-appointed missionary.3 Framlingham and Coranderrk were government stations, Ramahyuck and Ebenezer were funded by the Victorian Presbyterian Church which supported missionaries from the related German Moravian Church, and the Anglican Church of Victoria funded the missionaries at Lake Tyers and Lake Condah.4 11 Introduction The Victorian mission stations were constituted on a basis different from the mission ventures that had preceded them in the Pacific islands, in New Zealand, and in New South Wales including the Port Phillip District (later Victoria) itself. By the turn of the century they bordered on prison institutions, where missionaries and managers appeared not to be their protagonists but their jailers. Religious and secular staff had acquired a capacity for surveillance, coercion and punishment for which some other Protestant missionaries of the Pacific region might at times have secretly yearned but few outside of Australia ever realized. This situation came about because of an unprecedented congruence of local church missionary goals and state agendas that occurred specifically first in Victoria. How this came about needs explanation. The imperial ‘civilising mission’ in the antipodes Evangelicals had moved into the Pacific region from the first expedition of the London Missionary Society in 1797, followed swiftly by missionaries supported by the Church Missionary Society, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society. These great mission bodies sent missionaries and mission wives to the Pacific, initially to face responses from indigenous peoples that ranged from lack of interest to outright hostility. Typically missionaries to the Pacific region arrived at islands and harbours already populated by European sailors, whalers, beachcombers and traders, who arrived well ahead of imperial authorities. Missionaries often sustained precarious footholds just when indigenous groups were vying among themselves for preeminence and where resident whites were often hostile to mission activities. Missionaries needed to negotiate with indigenous leaders for roofs over their heads, for food, and for protection from attack. They needed not only the authority of whiteness derived from possession of intriguing material artifacts and novel skills, but personal attributes that enabled them to negotiate with chiefs first for survival and next for acceptance of western religion and education. The imprimatur of British imperial and colonial regimes came later if it came at all. Both before this and afterwards indigenous peoples in no way treated with missionaries from a position of dependence. Their lives in the community were separate from the missions even where missionaries, colonial officials and new indigenous political leaders were in strong partnership. Indigenous Christian converts or pupils did not commonly live with missionaries, or come under their personal command, but engaged with them at a personal distance as individuals or members of communities.5 Nineteenth-century missionaries worked within the framework