Assimilation, racism and Aboriginal labour in Robinvale: ‘Speaking back’ to White narratives

Maria Panagopoulos

Abstract: This article examines housing and assimilation in the Victorian country town of Robinvale during the late 1960s, when members of the Aboriginal community were relocated from the Manatunga housing settlement into homes in the township. I will argue that racist attacks made on the Aboriginal community and published by local newspapers during this time portrayed the community in a derogatory way, and I will demonstrate that this negative commentary continues to impact members of the community today. With a key focus on oral histories, this article will also examine the important Aboriginal workforce in Robinvale from the 1940s to the 1970s that has been historically ignored and unacknowledged by the wider community.

Introduction

The border town of Robinvale is located in the Mallee region of Victoria, 550 kilometres north-west of Melbourne. Hugged by the Murray River, it is situated on Tati Tati Country, within close proximity to the lands of the Latje Latje, Wadi Wadi and Mutti Mutti peoples. Robinvale is home to a large and diverse Aboriginal community, who have deep ties to the locality through family and tribal lore. The Aboriginal population of Robinvale is regarded as the largest in the state,¹ making up 7.8 per cent of the town’s approximate 3,300 residents.²

In this article, members of Robinvale’s Aboriginal community reflect on significant events that impacted their lives as part of a retelling of the cultural history of the township. The research and oral histories presented in this article inform existing literature about assimilation, housing and race relations in Victorian country towns. It also informs the subject of Aboriginal labour history in the Mallee region of Victoria and New South Wales (NSW) during the twentieth century.

Following a brief discussion about the background of the research, the first part of this article will illustrate the disparity between the assimilation policy of the Aborigines Welfare Board (AWB) and Aboriginal experience in Robinvale during the 1960s. The second part of the article examines the movement of members of Robinvale’s Aboriginal community from the Manatunga housing settlement into homes in the township, the public outrage that ensued, and how members of the community experienced it first-hand. I will demonstrate how the local press pursued a one-sided narrative of the community that defined them in a defamatory way, and I will argue that this narrative was forged by people in positions of privilege and power. The third part of this article discusses the Aboriginal labour force in Robinvale and surrounds during the 1940s through to the 1970s. Testimonies will illustrate how this labour contributed considerably to both the agricultural and urban development of the town.

Ellinghaus and Healy argue that the movements of Aboriginal people in Australia ‘into and out of particular buildings, across highways, and along roads had meanings that could make them momentous’.³ ‘In the context of the histories of assimilation in Australia … even small movements were hugely significant.’⁴ This argument resonates with the experiences of members of Robinvale’s Aboriginal community in their movement from the Manatunga housing settlement into homes in the European township. Despite the short geographical distance, this particular movement in the late 1960s developed into a national discussion about assimilation and race.

In a paper focused on the NSW town of Walgett, Penelope Edmonds argues it was common for Aboriginal experience to be ignored in country towns, their stories ‘largely erased or overshadowed by triumphant European narratives of progress’.⁵ Edmonds emphasises the necessity for more research of Aboriginal experience, writing that ‘many scholars have failed to identify the distinct and particular operations of settler colonial city and town formations, and how they produce, direct and exclude Indigenous peoples in particular ways’.⁶ By illustrating how Indigenous voice was suppressed in Robinvale, this article shifts power away from those in positions of privilege in the past to members of the Robinvale Aboriginal community who may now have their voices heard in the present. With the rewriting of an established white narrative, a different story is produced, not only about Aboriginal people but also by Aboriginal people.

Background of the research

Robinvale is known predominately as a soldier settlement town along with its production of table grapes and olives. With strong ties to both World Wars, the town is dotted with war memorials and pays homage to its pioneer past with popular tourist attractions including a historical homestead and rural museum. Until recently, the Aboriginal presence barely registered in public histories and memorials. For most of the period of white settlement, Indigenous voice was systematically supressed. It was this strong, Eurocentric and one-sided historiography of the town⁷ that prompted the first major scholarly study of the Aboriginal community of Robinvale by the author of this article. Part of a Monash University PhD thesis, the research spanned six years and aimed to fill a gap in knowledge regarding the Aboriginal heritage of the town, with a distinct focus on oral histories. Being born to Greek immigrants in Robinvale, growing up in the town and having a past association with the community made the research project possible. Importantly, the collaborative approach to interviews and research based on trust gave individuals involved in the project a direct say in how their testimonies would be shared. The memories, perspectives and reflections of members of Robinvale’s Aboriginal community that are presented in this article make a valuable contribution to the Aboriginal history of Victoria.

AWB policy and Aboriginal experience

Growing discontent in the Victorian community about the management of Aboriginal affairs by the Board for the Protection of Aborigines led to Victoria’s re-evaluation of its Aboriginal welfare policy.⁸ A review of the existing policy, initiated in 1955, ‘concluded that if assimilation was to be achieved, a new system of administration was imperative’,⁹ leading to the establishment of the AWB in 1957.¹⁰

In Robinvale during the late 1950s, more than 100 Aboriginal people resided in camps near the Murray River.¹¹ This prompted the AWB to establish a transitional housing settlement that would become known as Manatunga. As Gregory Lyons notes of Victoria, ‘a re-housing program was at the heart of the Welfare Board’s assimilation plan’,¹² and it led to Aboriginal people across the state coerced from their camps onto settlements. At Lake Tyers, the AWB had forced Aboriginal families onto a reserve ‘without consulting the Indigenous residents of those camps’.¹³ In Mooroopna near Shepparton, camps along the river were also evacuated ‘alongside a “staged” relocation to a new Aboriginal housing settlement’.¹⁴ In Robinvale, Aboriginal people were forced from their camps onto Manatunga from 1960. The settlement consisted of 12 concrete cottages and was situated on the outskirts of town. Here, Aboriginal people were forced onto individual allotments and compact dwellings designed to house immediate family only. From Manatunga, the AWB planned to gradually relocate families into houses in the Robinvale township constructed by the Housing Commission.

Corinne Manning observes that ‘transitional housing schemes’ such as Manatunga ‘were an integral component of Aboriginal housing policies in mainland Australia throughout the 1950s and 1960s’.¹⁵ Lyons describes Aboriginal housing settlements in Victoria as places where ‘Aboriginal families were to be “trained”, “rehabilitated”, “supervised”, “promoted” to new housing when they had “proven themselves”, and so on’.¹⁶ Manatunga’s purpose reflected that of the Rumbalara settlement, which Healy aptly described as ‘a halfway point between the old system of segregation and institutionalisation (the reserve/station), and the new goals of complete assimilation and disappearance (private homes within wider society)’.¹⁷ In the Latrobe Valley, a planned transitional housing settlement at Morwell had similar objectives, where ‘people might be given training to help fit them for life in a normal community’.¹⁸

Correspondence between the AWB and Manatunga supervisor Ray Hicks, alongside testimonies from its residents, illustrate that Manatunga was under strict surveillance, families had little control over their lives, and how the cottages quickly deteriorated.¹⁹ This is consistent with the substandard housing, segregation and surveillance reported at Rumbalara²⁰ and the Morwell transit village, where Beth Marsden notes the government ‘used highly controlled housing settlements to further their assimilationist aims’.²¹

In Robinvale, the constant shuffling of the lives of Aboriginal families was exacerbated when it was announced in 1968 that Manatunga would close, and the remaining tenants be placed into homes in the town. Here, the families were expected to fully transition into a European way of life, considered the final step in total assimilation by the AWB. In 1966, the AWB had reiterated its definition of assimilation as:

the policy of assimilation seeks that all persons of Aboriginal descent will choose to attain a similar manner of living to that of other Australians and live as members of a single Australian community – enjoying the same rights and privileges, accepting the same responsibilities and influenced by the same hopes and loyalties as other Australians.²²

The AWB stressed that their policy towards Aboriginal people in Victoria had shifted dramatically from that of the previous decade, from ‘European demand of conformity’ to Aboriginal people now having a ‘choice in matters affecting them’.²³

The AWB had also stated several times that Manatunga had been closed at the request of its tenants. Later, the Ministry of Aboriginal Affairs, which replaced the AWB in January 1968, claimed Manatunga was ‘being phased out at the request of residents’.²⁴ However, this is not consistent with the oral histories of those that resided on Manatunga. Aunty Marie Murray recalled that she and her family were given no option to stay, despite wanting to remain on the settlement.²⁵ As Helen Ross noted of the NSW Aboriginal Family Resettlement Scheme (1972) that encouraged families to leave government reserves and to move into nearby towns: ‘Government officials underestimated the attachment people had to these reserves, and reluctance of many to leave’.²⁶ For many Aboriginal people in Robinvale, staying at Manatunga would have allowed them to remain in a close-knit community near the bush and river, while avoiding the racism they often experienced in town.²⁷

The AWB’s policy also claimed that ‘Aboriginal customs, cultural values, beliefs, manner and place of living are given full recognition’.²⁸ This is also inconsistent with the experience in Robinvale, where the integral role of extended family living systems was ignored. This is evident at Manatunga and the homes in the township, where the government ‘persisted in building three-bedroom houses for two adult/two child families, despite the evidence of very different Indigenous household sizes and formations’.²⁹

Until 1963, the Robinvale township had maintained what Ellinghaus and Healy describe as ‘exclusionary zones of whiteness’.³⁰ That changed after negotiations between the AWB and the Housing Commission in 1959. It led to new legislation being passed that gave the AWB ‘power to enter into a contract or agreement with the Housing Commission to build houses for aborigines with the funds of the Board on land purchased by the Board’.³¹ In 1960, the AWB had purchased ‘two building sites on which it is proposed later to construct town houses to which the tenants of the Manatunga Housing Settlement will be able to progress as they succeed in their transit cottages’.³² In 1961, the AWB reiterated the homes in town would be promoted to ‘families who have done well in their transit cottages’.³³ This pointed to families deemed by the AWB as worthy of living among white people, chosen on their ability to keep their cottages clean and get along well with their neighbours.³⁴ By June 1963, two houses in Robinvale had been completed³⁵ and the first two families moved from Manatunga into the township.

Racial tensions escalate

When Manatunga was closed in 1968, the transition to the township for many Aboriginal families was not as smooth as the AWB had predicted. Racism from the white community escalated, with many residents publicly voicing their disdain at having Aboriginal people living near them. As Lovejoy notes of the early years of the Aboriginal housing program in Victoria: ‘hostility was often expressed by local white residents to attempts to house Aborigines on ordinary town allotments’.³⁶ Such hostility was expressed at Robinvale. Aunty Marie Murray recalled how one particular white neighbour went to extreme lengths to let her sister-in-law know he did not want Aboriginal people living next door:

[Aunty Marie Murray] Like when Buck and Lil moved into their house, and their next door neighbour put bullets in his logs, in his wood. He thought they were gonna steal his wood. And he thought he’d hear the bullets go off next door. But he forgot didn’t he? Put them in his own fire.³⁷

The indignation of many of Robinvale’s white residents was given an outlet by local newspapers, eventually going national. It created a narrative that falsely depicted Robinvale’s Aboriginal community as one that was entirely part-Indigenous, lazy, drunken, lacking morals, and a problem that needed to be solved. This left many of the Aboriginal residents feeling embarrassed and frightened.³⁸

In May 1968, the Robinvale and Manangatang Argus reported of a decision ‘by the Minister of Aborigine Affairs to demolish Manatunga Settlement and to remove existing families from the settlement and riverbank … to houses within the town’.³⁹ According to that report, the decision was based on the premise that Aboriginal people would be better able to work and contribute ‘to the country’s economic growth’.⁴⁰ Robinvale’s Aboriginal residents were represented by the newspaper as a group that was unemployed and living comfortably on the settlement off government handouts. However, the Aboriginal community was already working in and around Robinvale, and had been since the 1940s.

From segregated settlement to European streets

The houses in town differed from the Manatunga cottages in that they were larger and constructed from weatherboard.⁴¹ After living in close-knit communities along the river and at Manatunga for more than three decades, the Aboriginal community was scattered throughout various homes in the white township. As Lyons observes, ‘decisions about who was to be housed, when, how and where were made by the Board’.⁴²

[Aunty Lil Pettit] I had a baby and a two-year-old when we got our little house on Ronald Street there. Well, that was more flash than the one down the mission [she laughs]. You had a kitchen and you had a lounge room separate, your bathroom was separate.⁴³

Aunty Marie Murray moved into the township with her late husband Uncle Darcy Pettit and his family when she was 15:

[Aunty Marie Murray] It was a big change, we still had a good stove and the hot water and that sort of stuff … It was twice as big [compared to Manatunga]. We thought it was a mansion.⁴⁴

Thelma Chilly recalls moving into a house in town that was in an isolated location:

[Thelma Chilly] I think it was 202 Latje Road, but there was no other houses there, it was all shrubland and bushes, early development.⁴⁵

Aunty Lil Pettit described the move into the township from Manatunga as a loss that saw Aboriginal families scattered and some feeling afraid:

[Aunty Lil Pettit] And that was sort of a loss because people was all over the place. Some were still down the mission. Some was here, some was there, some was on different streets. And everyone I think had a bit of scared-ness, because I remember when I first come up when I had two little kids, and my husband was away shearing when we moved to town.⁴⁶

Stephanie Smith’s observations about the NSW town of Goodooga in the 1970s, where Aboriginal people were moved from camps into Westernised housing, resonate with the experience at Robinvale, where a sense of community was lost, highlighted by the testimony of Aunty Lil Pettit:

Larger distances between the various Aboriginal families, often housed according to position on the waiting list rather than proximity to family, and the nature of the extensive orthogonal grid of the town, meant that people were no longer able to monitor developments and changes within their community.⁴⁷

Aunty Lil Pettit also recalled the furore that ensued when she moved to town:

[Aunty Lil Pettit] But there was a big uproar because they started to move people up to town. And townspeople didn’t like that. We had all the reporters and everyone coming up from Melbourne and they was going off about it, local people. But the main thing about moving up to town was to have a better life.⁴⁸

Thelma Chilly recalls a strong sentiment of segregation after the move into town:

[Thelma Chilly] It was such a segregated community, you know … Blackfellas were perceived as a bit of a problem. I think there was a newspaper article by Dr Cleary, writing about the Aboriginal problem; gotta do something about it …⁴⁹

Mrs Chilly’s recollection of an article by Robinvale’s Dr Cleary and Aunty Lil’s memories of reporters descending on the town referred to the effects of a scathing opinion piece about Robinvale’s Aboriginal community which appeared in the Sunraysia Daily in 1968. Comments by Dr Cleary and other white residents during the time the Aboriginal community were transitioning from Manatunga into houses in the township garnered substantial attention in the press. It defined Robinvale as a place where Aboriginal people had accumulated and would ruin the town.

‘Can you help prevent the rape of a town?’ – A community defined by a racist doctor

In small country towns, professionals often play a major role in defining community opinion. In Robinvale in the late 1960s a key figure was the resident doctor, Dr Ronald Philip Cleary. Dr Cleary was a vocal critic of the housing policy of the AWB and used his position to promulgate extremely negative views of the Aboriginal community.

On 2 October 1968 Mildura’s Sunraysia Daily ran the front-page headline ‘Robinvale Angry Over Aborigines’, reporting that Robinvale’s white residents were ‘seething at the behavior of Aborigines who have been moved into their town under the Aborigines Welfare Board resettlement program’.⁵⁰ If something was not done soon, they said, Robinvale would be ‘ruined forever’.⁵¹ The front-page story served as a precursor to two others on the second page, one that questioned ‘Why should Robinvale bear all the burden of the Aborigine problem?’⁵² According to the Sunraysia Daily, ‘few residents wished to be identified with any public statement’,⁵³ while others did not ‘care who knows their feelings, and one of these men is Dr R.P. Clearly’.⁵⁴

Dr Cleary compared having Aboriginal people living in the township to being violated in the most extreme sense: ‘Can you help prevent the rape of a town?’⁵⁵ he asked, following with a lengthy statement where he claimed Robinvale had been built by hard-working returning soldiers whose sacrifice saw their dreams materialise into the town of Robinvale. After Robinvale had been established, Cleary said, Aboriginal people arrived and camped at the river and did nothing but drink:

In the wake of the industries came a few hangers-on, to live in humpies on the riverbanks – to cadge to buy wine and forgetfulness. With them came the part-Aborigines, who spent their days drinking, lazing, loving; but who scorned to work.⁵⁶

Aboriginal people had flooded out the town, Cleary said, and Robinvale was sinking, unable to manage them. Dr Cleary’s opinions were given credence by the Sunraysia Daily as the views of a doctor who had been practising in Robinvale for 14 years: ‘a man who has come into contact with the Aborigines moreso than most people’.⁵⁷

Illustrating the lack of voice offered to the Aboriginal community regarding these allegations, the Sunraysia Daily answered its own question – being what had the Aboriginal people of Robinvale done to bring on Dr Cleary’s ‘wrath’ – with the opinions of unnamed white residents in a third article. Entitled ‘Recurring Problem’ it quoted one white resident who was disgruntled rent for Aboriginal tenants was lower: ‘Why should their color and laziness entitle them to all those extras which the rest of the community must provide for itself?’⁵⁸ Another resident claimed Aboriginal people in Robinvale were ‘a drag on society’ who needed ‘strict supervision’.⁵⁹ ‘More disturbing’, according to the Sunraysia Daily, was that Aboriginal people were a ‘health hazard’, with Dr Clearly alleging 5 per cent of the Aboriginal community at Robinvale ‘have venereal disease’ with gastroenteritis uncommonly high because their ‘personal hygiene standard is so low’.⁶⁰

These articles had significant ramifications for how Robinvale’s Aboriginal community would come to be perceived. Aboriginal people were omitted from the discourse entirely; they were given no opportunity to share their side of the story, or to defend themselves against the allegations.

On 5 October 1968 the Melbourne Herald published a story investigating the racial tension in Robinvale. Journalist Kenneth Joachim claimed he spent hours ‘listening to the white population angrily claiming that their town is being swamped by blacks’.⁶¹ Unlike local reporters, Joachim spent time with Robinvale’s Aboriginal residents and included them in his story. He described the garden of Mrs Frank Egan of Ronald Street as ‘ablaze with flowers’, and visited with Jean Sampson, ‘in her spotless lounge’ that had a ‘a cabinet full of football trophies won by her son Leo’.⁶² The reporter also spoke to the owner of the Robinvale sawmill, Hans Ebster, who over the past nine years had employed around 300 Aboriginal people. He currently had nine men working for him, earning good money, he said, who were ‘very good workers and I couldn’t give them too good a reference’.⁶³ The reporter concluded that the Aboriginal people ‘of Robinvale will continue to be everybody’s best friends – providing they don’t try to become neighbors’.⁶⁴ In this instance the city reporter had attempted to portray the Aboriginal community of Robinvale as the antithesis of how the rural press had described them, noting they had lovely gardens, tidy homes and well-paying jobs. However, local reports that followed derailed the attempt to bring Indigenous people into the narrative.

The Robinvale and Manangatang Argus ran a front-page article on 11 October about ‘the Aborigine assimilation question which has been raging recently’.⁶⁵ It reported of a meeting of the members of Robinvale’s Junior Chamber of Commerce (Jaycees) and former Manatunga supervisor Ray Hicks, who claimed Aboriginal people ‘were getting too many handouts and could drift into uselessness’.⁶⁶ On 14 November the Australian ran a story under the headline ‘The War At Robinvale’ that stated: ‘On the banks of the River Murray, Aboriginals and whites are fast moving towards a head-on clash’.⁶⁷ The newspaper claimed Robinvale was a racist town, where Aboriginal people were not wanted, and included a quote by Dr Cleary who said ‘parts of our town will become ghettos’⁶⁸ if more moved into the town. The Australian surmised that the ‘attitude of the whites has created worry and anxiety among the town’s Aboriginals, many of whom have steady jobs and tidy homes’.⁶⁹ It also charged that events at Robinvale were of great national significance:

The Robinvale experiment is of great importance to Australia. Methods used there to assimilate the Aboriginal could very well become the classic assimilation technique for the rest of the nation … If the Victorian Government’s Robinvale policy is as misdirected as it was with Manatunga, something more tragic than a crumbling settlement could be the result.⁷⁰

It is worth noting once more the disparity between the reporting of the local press with that of metropolitan and national coverage. It is possible that the Freedom Riders of 1965, who had ‘sought to draw public attention to the poor state of Aboriginal health, education and housing’⁷¹ in country New South Wales, played some part. That event had led to notable press coverage across the country and, as Ann Curthoys reflected during the stopover in Walgett, ‘many urban papers presented the story in a light which was favourable to the students and unfavourable to Walgett’.⁷² Perhaps the national press the Freedom Riders had attracted three years prior had alerted people in cities of the ‘massive problems in housing, health and education confronting Aboriginal people at the time’,⁷³ and that knowledge led to more sympathetic coverage of country towns.

While the Herald and the Australian questioned the racist attitudes of Robinvale’s white residents, the local press continued to ignore the Aboriginal community. Four days after the Australian article, the Swan Hill Guardian reported of a ‘build-up of hatred between white and colored residents of Robinvale’ and that the Robinvale Jaycees had requested the Swan Hill council ‘formulate a policy’ regarding the settlement of Aboriginal people into the township.⁷⁴ The council wanted government representatives to visit Swan Hill and Robinvale to discuss the ‘problems’ associated with Aboriginal people there.

More local reports about Robinvale appeared with derogatory statements about the Aboriginal community, and it is not possible to discuss them all here. What becomes evident from those I have included, though, is that the AWB housing policy, which aimed towards integration of Aboriginal people into the township, precipitated a major reaction from the white community in Robinvale. It exacerbated latent racist views, resulting in more systemic attempts to supress and exclude Indigenous voices.

Ruth McCausland points out that ‘on the whole, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are associated with negative, homogenising stereotypes in the mainstream media’,⁷⁵ and that, in Australia, the news media in particular ‘has the power to marginalise and contribute to discrimination against Indigenous people’.⁷⁶ This in turn has ‘a powerful and permeating impact on the way that most Australians view Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’.⁷⁷ McCausland argues that ‘this can lead to the perception that Indigenous people or those from racial or ethnic minority backgrounds are the source of problems or disorder in society’.⁷⁸ Michael Meadows observes, ‘despite the relatively powerless position of Indigenous people in Australian society … they were represented as a threat to the established order’.⁷⁹ In his studies of the colonial press, Meadows found that, in Victoria, Aboriginal people were not only voiceless but also ‘variously framed as a problem’.⁸⁰ This literature particularly resonates with how the Aboriginal community of Robinvale was portrayed in the local press in the late 1960s by men in positions of power.

‘Too frightened to speak’: Suppression of voice

The Ministry for Aboriginal Affairs maintained a large file about the negative publicity surrounding Robinvale in the press entitled ‘Robinvale – Controversy Arising from Medical Officers Statement’. Correspondence contained within the file includes a letter from the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs Victoria at the time, E. R. Meagher, that was sent to the editor of the Australian to ‘correct some erroneous statements’⁸¹ in their feature story. Other letters were sent to the press in which the ministry refuted a total of 11 claims spanning seven articles – most published by the Sunraysia Daily – particularly comments by Dr Cleary. This included Cleary’s claim Aboriginal people would pose a health risk to Robinvale because 5 per cent of them had venereal disease. ‘In fact,’ the ministry responded in its letter to the editor, ‘Department of Health records show that the total number of notifications received from Robinvale this year for the entire population is one only.’⁸² The ministry, wrote Dr Cleary, was ‘either failing in his responsibility to notify the Health Department of cases of V.D., or he is distorting facts for ulterior purposes’.⁸³

What also becomes evident in the file is why the media took a particular interest in Robinvale in the first place. Interest was garnered by letters sent to Victorian newspapers from the Robinvale Jaycees in early October 1968. Three pages in total, the letter included the following statement:

We, the Robinvale Jaycees, believe the integration into Robinvale town, of people of mixed Aboriginal and European breeding, in excess of the present level, is against the best interest of social welfare of the part aboriginals and Europeans in the town.⁸⁴

The Jaycees, who represented the ‘Christian, European population of Robinvale’, accused the ministry of luring ‘people of mixed blood to the area’ and that this ‘accumulation of large numbers of people of mixed race in one small centre, where no opportunity for employment exists’ was a ‘form of racial discrimination’.⁸⁵ The Jaycees stated if Aboriginal people continued to be ‘absorbed’ into Robinvale then they demanded ‘an increase in the town of European population sufficient to maintain the present ration of mixed bloods to Europeans’.⁸⁶ One way the government could do this, they suggested, was to duplicate ‘the highly successful soldier settlement farming scheme on which the town is based’.⁸⁷ In summary, the Jaycees blamed the government for the following: ‘since 1960 and even more so now, Robinvale has been created the promised land for the part aboriginal’.⁸⁸

Other manuscripts in the file contain evidence that newspaper reports degrading Robinvale’s Aboriginal community had caused hurt and shame among its members. Social worker D. J. Travers reported to the ministry from Robinvale in January 1969, informing them that the racist commentary in the local press ‘is upsetting to the Aboriginal people’ who ‘have been forced underground to some extent by the unfortunate publicity that occurred’.⁸⁹ Travers revealed one Aboriginal girl had been so upset she told him she did not go to school for three days, being ‘too embarrassed, scared, shy’⁹⁰ to leave her house. Travers also stated Robinvale’s white residents were ‘quite prepared to say what they think. The Aboriginal people seem to be too frightened to speak’.⁹¹ In Robinvale on behalf of the ministry to initiate a better relationship between white residents and the Aboriginal community, Travers surmised that Aboriginal people in Robinvale had lost confidence in themselves, despite most of them being employed. These revelations by Travers relate directly to suppression of voice in the Aboriginal community.

Aunty Rose Kirby reflected about what it was like for Aboriginal people having the ability to speak up during this period. Recalling the events at the time they had occurred, she says: ‘I was up in town by then.’ Regarding Dr Cleary’s statements about the community, Aunty Rose adds they still matter, and it continues to affect them, because:

[Aunty Rose Kirby] We have to live in this town.⁹²

Living in Robinvale in the present means for Aunty Rose reliving the past, and she recalls vividly the racist comments made about Aboriginal people, in particular about women, and especially by Dr Cleary. I asked Aunty Rose specific questions regarding this time in the township:

[Maria] Do you think the suggestion by Travers that Aboriginal people were too frightened to speak out is a fair statement of the time?

[Aunty Rose Kirby] That’s right.

[Maria] Why is that?

[Aunty Rose Kirby] Because they’ve been only put down!

[Maria] Why do you think the local paper ignored the community? Why didn’t they ever interview someone, mention someone’s name? It was always from the white perspective …

[Aunty Rose Kirby] Because if the paper said anything good about the Aboriginal people, how were they going to cope with the backlash from the white community?

[Maria] So you thought it was just normal to put the Aboriginal people down?

[Aunty Rose Kirby] Yes! You know, we never had a voice.

[Maria] Do you think some people still believe that to be true, what Dr Cleary said?

[Aunty Rose Kirby] Yes … ’cause they look at other people, you know, now, and well … especially the men, and they say: Oh well, all they can do is drink.⁹³

As to why the racism experienced by the Aboriginal community during that time should be discussed and acknowledged by the wider community today, Aunty Rose says:

[Aunty Rose Kirby] I think it would be a wake up call for some of them.⁹⁴

‘They didn’t like it, having Blackfellas as neighbours’

Other testimonies by members of Robinvale’s Aboriginal community about the time they were moved from Manatunga into the township reveal the impact of Dr Cleary’s remarks. Fifty years later, they have not been forgotten.

[Uncle Fred Baxter] I want the people to know that Robinvale was a racist town, and how racist a lot of the people were against Black people. That we was classed as second-rate citizens, and we are still part of that, being Aboriginal.⁹⁵

[Uncle Norman Baxter] The movement from Manatunga into town here, it was like World War Four broke out! There was people that didn’t want us living next door, especially the doctor here, Dr Cleary. He was a horrible man.

[Uncle Norman] I was one of the first Aborigines in a house on Wallan Avenue, but that was nowhere near him, but he still went off about it. He was like: ‘I don’t want an Aboriginal living next to me!’ And he had petitions and all sorts of stuff around town, Cleary. But we took no notice of that. We didn’t rise up in anger or nothing (like) that, you know. We just lived with it. But the majority of the white people were quite happy about it.⁹⁶

[Aunty Marie Murray] It was a lot of problems when we moved to town. They didn’t like it, having Blackfellas as neighbours, you know. It didn’t worry me, I didn’t dwell on stuff like that. But I knew. You get those looks and you know. Like, you felt it [the racism]. You feel the vibes. Just them looking at you, you know what they’re thinking. And yet there were some really nice people. It wasn’t all doom and gloom.⁹⁷

The place where Aunty Marie felt racism the most was at the local clinic.

[Aunty Marie Murray] It was mainly at the doctor’s surgery. That’s where I felt it … It was like: ‘Ugh!’ You’re bringing some kind of germ into the place. But I think that’s why a lot of people didn’t like going to the doctors back in those days … and I think health played a big part in our Elders dying young, because they were too frightened to go to the doctors.⁹⁸

The above recollections highlight the complex race relations between Aboriginal people and Europeans in a rural town during the housing assimilation years of the 1960s. As noted by Gillian Cowlishaw: ‘In country places where there is face-to-face contact – albeit of a limited and circumscribed kind – the contradictory ideas and ideologies of and about Indigenous people are forced into the open.’⁹⁹ Habibis et al. point out that little is known ‘about Aboriginal perspectives on settler Australian culture and settler Australian people’;¹⁰⁰ hence, recollections such as those of Uncle Norman Baxter, Aunty Rose Kirby and others about events 50 years after they occurred, offer a rare insight into rural race relations:

Aboriginal viewpoints also provide dominant groups with an opportunity to see how they are viewed from the outside. This is especially important in regions with substantial Indigenous populations where the visibility of Aboriginal people make race relations a matter of everyday discussion and experience.¹⁰¹

Maria Nugent considers ‘the interplay between Aboriginal people’s remembrances about race relations in rural mid-twentieth-century Australia’,¹⁰² focusing on particular sites of segregation in country New South Wales in the 1960s. The recollections above regarding the racially charged assimilation years in Robinvale may, as Nugent put it, ‘evoke personal experiences of segregation, at the same time as they remake the meanings of spaces in which segregation was practiced’.¹⁰³ This is particularly evident in the testimonies of Aunty Marie Murray and Uncle Norman Baxter. Both recalled that they were racially vilified, but also remembered that not all the white residents in the town were against Aboriginal people moving into houses, despite the reportage of the press at the time.

Aboriginal labour in the Mallee

During interviews conducted for my research, the substantial work the Aboriginal community did at Robinvale from the 1940s onwards arose as a prevalent subject, and one the community requested be acknowledged. Indeed, the comments and opinions of Dr Cleary, Manatunga supervisor Ray Hicks and others made it appear as though Aboriginal people in Robinvale never worked at all. In actuality though, their labour helped to establish the first grape farms and, later, played an important part in the harvesting of local crops.

Aboriginal labour history has been described as an ‘important source of our increased historical knowledge’, alongside ‘a growing recognition by a number of historians that the use of Aboriginal labour in the south and east had always been very much more than historians had hitherto realised’.¹⁰⁴ The biased view that Aboriginal people were lazy and shunned employment is not limited to Robinvale or country towns; Curthoys and Moore have noted ‘the common belief that Aborigines did not work’.¹⁰⁵ Importantly, the authors also observe how ‘too often the very existence of a history of Aboriginal labour is quite unknown’.¹⁰⁶

Richard Broome points out that ‘Environmental historians … rarely discuss the labour of Indigenous people’, something he sought to ‘redress’ by ‘examining the Aboriginal precursors in what became the Mallee wheat lands of south-eastern Australia’.¹⁰⁷ Focusing on the present-day areas of Swan Hill and Mildura, Broome ‘explores some of the key relationships between nature and Aboriginal people through their labour in parts of the semi-arid Victorian Mallee before European settlement’.¹⁰⁸

Broome observes that ‘the Murray River’s Aboriginal geography of labour brought humans and nature together through sustainable productive labour that bound them to country as much as did culture and religion’¹⁰⁹ and that ‘the arduous and constant work they performed to live comfortably belies the claims of laziness in the European stereotype’.¹¹⁰ Broome’s article does not discuss Aboriginal labour in the locality that occurred following European settlement, hence, the oral histories presented below richly inform this subject.

‘A lot of Hard Yakka’ – Aboriginal employment in Robinvale, 1940–70

Uncle Norman Baxter wants people to know that the Aboriginal community of Robinvale did work – they worked extremely hard – and contributed to the town’s economy:

[Uncle Norman Baxter] Well, we lived off the land, but then, we talk about soldier settlement. They needed all the posts and all the work to be done. We spent about three to four years out here cutting posts for the grapevines.¹¹¹

The trees were logged on the NSW side of the Murray River during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Many Aboriginal men who were employed to cut down the trees worked in teams for different contractors. Uncle Norman worked in a team with his three older brothers:

[Uncle Norman Baxter] We would cut down trees … and we’d have three loads a day, sometimes four … when you put one load on, that would be 10 tonnes, on the truck. We’d load them by hand … so it was very, very hard.¹¹²

After ‘quite a few years’ of logging trees, Uncle Norman moved on to picking grapes for wages:

[Uncle Norman Baxter] We sort of come from out there working in the bush to contracts for picking … picked the grapes when they were all developed. But to us it was a blessing because we were able to support our families, feed our families, clothe our families. The grape picking and even the cutting wood out there, you know, well we didn’t only help develop the town, but our own wellbeing too.¹¹³

Uncle Kevin Pearce says his father, the late Uncle Walter Pearce, was instrumental in helping the first grape farms take shape in Robinvale:

[Uncle Kevin Pearce] In them early days we weren’t allowed to vote, or go into town! But we did work. We worked! Like my father … they worked on the fruit blocks before they had fruit blocks! Like, putting the posts in the ground. They were planting them posts, they helped to grow the grapes.¹¹⁴

Uncle Kevin Pearce understands his father’s contribution, and even his own, goes unacknowledged, something that does not surprise him. It is the lost opportunities for his family, however, that remain ingrained in his memory:

[Uncle Kevin Pearce] That was the story with the Blackfellas when I was growing up like a young fella, and we built this town. Well, we didn’t actually build the town … we made all the Moore Street driveways right through there. And we done the Civic Centre, and we made the tiles, and laid all the tiles, cement tiles all the way around there. ’Cause we had a big machine, a presser. We done the one in Mildura too, the fountain in Mildura, we went down there and made all the tiles and that. After that job finished, I said: ‘Can we have that machinery, so we wanna go into business so we can make the tiles and sell them you know and do people’s gardens.’ ‘Oh no, no, can’t do that!’ Even though you were good at it. We done it for two years! But they wouldn’t let us get that machine. We survived all that, see, ’cause we were survivors. You’d go and do a bit of work. You’d go live off the land.¹¹⁵

Uncle Fred Baxter says he did ‘a hell of a lot of concreting’ in Robinvale:

[Uncle Fred Baxter] Me and Noel Hancock concreted most of the paths around town, a lot of house slabs, we done the Scout Hall … I done concreting around Robinvale for about 20-odd years.¹¹⁶

Uncle Fred also worked for the Parke brothers, Stan and George, who owned substantial vegetable farms at Robinvale:

[Uncle Fred Baxter] A bus would come to the mission [Manatunga] (and pick you up). At Parke’s, we just picked peas, beans, and later, carrots and beans.¹¹⁷

Thelma Chilly’s father was one of many Aboriginal men who worked at the Robinvale sawmill while she grew up at Manatunga during the 1960s:

[Thelma Chilly] While we lived on the mission there, the big sawmill was right across the road, and dad worked at the sawmill see, so we were always over there mucking around … It employed a lot of Aboriginal men from the mission there. And then when it closed down, a lot of the men started going away, like for work, and out into the grapevines and everything then.

My entire family worked on Haynes’ fruit block. They worked there for years and years and years until I was almost an adult.¹¹⁸

Mrs Chilly’s parents harvested a variety of crops in the locality, and later, her father worked in the township for a plumber:

[Thelma Chilly] I have childhood memories of like getting in dad’s old car and driving, all of us, the whole family, and driving out to Murray’s and just picking all the oranges. When my father came up to town, he got a job working as an apprentice plumber. So he put most of the roofs on the new houses in Robinvale. He also laid concrete and pavers. I know because he used to take me on some of the jobs they did.¹¹⁹

For Aunty Lil Pettit, work was a means of survival for her family. Her parents, she says:

[Aunty Lil Pettit] was just more about trying to survive, and they was out when I was little, picking beans at Tol Tol … and then go over to Euston and picking tomatoes and capsicums.¹²⁰

Aunty Lil says Aboriginal people worked in the town while they were camping at the river, and later when they were residing at Manatunga, where farmers would come with trucks to pick up their Aboriginal employees:

[Aunty Lil Pettit] And when we got on the mission, they did (it) all, the Blackfellas; they picked all the grapes. Bosses pick them up, and a truck used to come and pick them all up, go out to Lake Benanee where all the cotton was growing … so it was all working because there was no Centrelink stuff … The picking would come around and we’d go out pick grapes. I was going picking grapes every season. My husband would drop me and my sister-in-law and my niece to one block, and we stayed there all day pulling out the vines … because they went to another block.¹²¹

When Aunty Lil moved into a house in the township in the late 1960s, working became essential in order to survive:

[Aunty Lil Pettit] When there was no food that’s what you had to go do to get more money. When he [Uncle Buck Pettit] started going shearing, the kids got older there, we were up in town, then he used to go way past up Balranald. He used to go away for the whole week. When my son started school, I got a job at the hotel.¹²²

Aboriginal people had to earn their keep, says Aunty Rose Kirby, there was no other way to survive:

[Aunty Rose Kirby] They had to live in the white world, the Western world, to earn their keep, and some of the men was woodcutters and then the Parke brothers, they had a farm out here, nearly all the Aboriginal people would go out there and do pea picking, bean picking, tomato picking and everything. And then grape picking.

Aunty Rose later gained employment at the Robinvale Hospital ‘as a kitchen maid’ while her late husband, Hartley, ‘started work with Bob Bettess, he was a plumber’.¹²³

Aunty Barbara Egan says although she was segregated from the Robinvale township while residing at Manatunga, she interacted with the wider community of Robinvale regularly because she had been employed by many of them:

[Aunty Barbara Egan] Oh yeah, we knew all the people, we worked for them. You know they probably wouldn’t have survived only for us either. My stepfather, Frank Baxter, he sheared for Harley Spittle. We moved over there for one part of it. [Mum] did peas and beans for George and Stan Parke, we all went out picking beans and peas. Dahlenburg and Parke’s used to come pick us up in a big truck. Some people had cars too to go out there, yeah. And that was good too because I remember we used to – oh Jesus this is going right back now – like when we used to work for Col Sandy, we used to stay in the pickers hut, he used to own a block. We used to do his grapes for him.

[The money was] enough to survive on you know, good pickers got a bit more. You’d just get paid what the weight was of beans and that, peas … We used to walk from here, Manatunga, over the bridge … we used to go pick peas and beans for Gallos.¹²⁴

Aunty Barbara Egan does not take kindly to people insinuating the Aboriginal community of Robinvale were lazy and unemployed:

[Aunty Barbara Egan] Aboriginal people bloody worked! Got the grapes off, you know, and things like that. Before the shakers came in, they used to do it all by hand then, shake the rack with the dried fruit.¹²⁵

[Uncle Norman Baxter] We put a lot of blood sweat and tears into the development of the town. We put a lot of hard yakka into the development of the soldier settlement; we worked six days a week, extremely hard. We didn’t have chainsaws or nothing like that. We’d swing an axe all day. And that was on daylight till dark.¹²⁶

Edmonds notes that in country towns ‘in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an expanding pastoral industry would first take Aboriginal land and then crucially require Aboriginal labour’.¹²⁷ In Walgett, for example, ‘Aboriginal labour was crucial. It was in the interest of a white middle class to have access to a limited group of Aboriginal people as a labour pool’.¹²⁸ Frank Stevens notes that in southern Australia in the twentieth century for some Aboriginal people:

their general level of literacy and enforced location in rural communities and settlements, ensured that, industrially, they rarely found opportunity to serve other than as migratory labour in the fruit and vegetable industry or as farmhands and forest workers.¹²⁹

As both a forest worker and farmhand, Uncle Norman Baxter’s connection to Robinvale is steeped in the pride he feels in how he helped develop the township into what it is today:

[Uncle Norman Baxter] When we drive out around the fruit block, we can look at a fruit block and say, ‘Right, I helped to build that’.¹³⁰

With regard to his work being acknowledged by the wider community, Uncle Norman says it does not necessarily lie in ignorance:

[Uncle Norman] Well, deep down they know, but they don’t want to admit it. I’d say 99 per cent don’t want to admit that we contributed.¹³¹

Uncle Norman says the Aboriginal contribution to the development of Robinvale was as important as anyone else, and the fact it remains unacknowledged saddens him:

[Uncle Norman] I would say equal to anyone else in the town because of what we done, ’cause of the hard yakka we put into it, not only the development, but the economy you know. We would earn a lot of money, and we’d spend a lot of money in the township. And so there were many ways that we contributed to the wellbeing of this little town. And it’s really sad. It’s really sad.¹³²

The testimonies describing Indigenous labour in Robinvale and surrounds spanning four decades fills a gap in knowledge regarding an important aspect of Robinvale’s heritage. It demonstrates the significant contribution of the Aboriginal community to the urban and agricultural development of Robinvale, as well as its economy. The oral histories speak back to previous perceptions that Aboriginal people from Robinvale were lazy and unemployed. The testimonies also illustrate that Aboriginal people possessed the skills to become self-employed but were denied the opportunity to do so. As Healy notes, ‘new scholarship is paying attention to the ways in which government authorities sought to achieve assimilation through controlling Indigenous movement, use of and access to land’.¹³³ In this instance, we can observe how that control extended to what work people could and could not do, illustrated by Uncle Kevin Pearce’s wish to have his own business making tiles as a landscaper.

The right to ‘speak back’

Michael Dodson points out the way in which relations between settlers and Indigenous people in Australia has been structured by practices of documentation: ‘Since their first intrusive gaze, colonising cultures have had a preoccupation with observing, analysing, studying, classifying and labelling Aborigines and Aboriginality.’¹³⁴ ‘Under that gaze,’ Dodson explains, ‘Aboriginality changed from being a daily practice to being “a problem to be solved”.’¹³⁵ Dodson’s statement captures how some members of the wider community of Robinvale perceived Aboriginal people as a problem, one that was promoted by the local press. Further, it draws out how Aboriginal people have had to insist on self-representation in order to be heard: ‘Nearly suffocated with imposed labels and structures, Aboriginal peoples have had no other choice than to insist on our right to speak back … to build and represent our own world of meaning and significance.’¹³⁶ In this article, the Aboriginal community of Robinvale – once silenced and defined by the opinions of others – has spoken back, particularly against views expressed by people in positions of privilege during the 1960s.

Bruce Elder describes incidents of racism towards Aboriginal people in Australia ‘like individual tiles: put them all together and they form a mosaic of bigotry and racism which is the burden of all Australians’.¹³⁷ While the racism experienced by the Robinvale Aboriginal community can be described as one tile making up a greater mosaic, it is important that it is acknowledged, so that the future generations of the community are not defined by racist perceptions propagated by those in positions of privilege in the past.

Conclusion

Since early settlement, Aboriginal people in Robinvale have worked to eke out a living in a European society while maintaining ties to culture, land and family. After being forced to relocate to the Manatunga housing settlement from their riverside camps from 1960,¹³⁸ they were shifted into houses in the white township. Here they were expected to conform to a way of life that was foreign in many ways to their own, while being racially vilified in the rural press. This article has addressed the silences and gaps in Robinvale’s Aboriginal heritage and has shared the experiences of Aboriginal people regarding assimilation and racism. Likewise, oral histories have illustrated in detail the existence of an industrious Aboriginal labour force in the town.

This article demonstrates how subjugation, oppression and racism significantly affected the voices of members of Robinvale’s Aboriginal community in the 1960s. I have argued that the oppressive regimes of local newspapers and continued reiteration of derogatory remarks about the community led to it being falsely defined as one that was lazy and worthless, even diseased. I have presented testimony illustrating that members of the Aboriginal community believe this perception of them continues to persist. By responding directly to European accounts regarding events that involved and impacted them, the community has allowed both sides of the story to be told and heard.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of this article for their valuable feedback and the Aboriginal community of Robinvale for their continued support.

References

Oral histories

Uncle Fred Baxter

Uncle Norman Baxter

Thelma Chilly

Aunty Barbara Egan

Aunty Rose Kirby

Aunty Marie Murray

Uncle Kevin Pearce

Aunty Lilian (Lil) Pettit

Manuscripts and archives

National Archives of Australia (NAA)

NAA B357, 38, Districts – Robinvale 1958. Department of Aboriginal Affairs, State Office – Victoria.

Government publications

Victoria. Aborigines Welfare Board. Annual Report, 1959, 1960. 1961, 1963, 1965, 1966.

Victoria. Ministry of Aboriginal Affairs. Annual Report, 1968/69.

Newspapers

Australian

Herald (Melbourne)

Robinvale and Manangatang Argus

Sunraysia Daily (Mildura)

Swan Hill Guardian

Television broadcast

Australian Broadcasting Corporation. ‘Robinvale’, Back Roads. 16 July 2018, ABC TV, S04E06, ABC 1, 8:00 pm.

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