‘Our people say that they want their children to be able to become doctors, nurses, teachers’: contesting education and schooling for Aboriginal children in south-eastern Australia in the 1930s

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how government approaches to education were contested by Aboriginal communities in the late 1930s, through organised political actions designed in part to ensure access to the same standard of education and schooling available to non-Aboriginal people. It explores some of the ways that Aboriginal campaigns for education were enacted, focusing on the Cummeragunja Aboriginal reserve in New South Wales, when, in 1939, hundreds of residents walked off to protest to the New South Wales Aborigines Protection Board over the repressive conditions, the reserve manager, and the teacher and curriculum of the Cummeragunja school. The strike aimed to generate several changes at Cummeragunja, including the appointment of a new teacher, and the delivery of curriculum that was at the same standard as that delivered in other government schools in NSW. These demands were not unique to the Cummeragunja community as, throughout south-eastern Australia, Aboriginal communities were fighting for access to education alongside campaigns for land and greater civil rights.

KEYWORDS:

• Aboriginal schooling
• segregated schooling
• equal education
• protest
• Australia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ For example, see Rachel Standfield, ‘The Parramatta Māori Seminary and the Education of Indigenous Peoples in Early Colonial New South Wales’, History of Education Review 41, no. 2 (2012): 119–28; J. Brook and J. L. Kohen, The Parramatta Native Institution and the Black Town: A History (Sydney: UNSW Press, 1991). Amanda Barry’s PhD thesis is a rare cross-state study: ‘Broken Promises: Aboriginal Education in South-eastern Australia, 1837–1937’ (PhD diss., University of Melbourne, 2008). For more on NSW schooling, see John Ramsland, ‘The Aboriginal School at Purfleet: A Case Study of the Segregation of Aboriginal Children in NSW’, History of Education Review 35, no. 1 (2006): 47–57.

² J. J. Fletcher, Clean, Clad and Courteous: A History of Aboriginal Education in NSW (Carlton, NSW: J Fletcher, 1989).

³ Writing of Coast Salish territory spanning Canada and the United States, Michael Marker has noted the strategic potential of colonial borders to negotiate and resist racist schooling: ‘Indigenous Resistance and Racist Schooling on the Borders of Empires: Coast Salish Cultural Survival’, Paedagogica Historica 45, no. 6 (2009): 757–72.

⁴ For an overview of the policy in Victoria in the 1960s, see P. E. Felton, ‘Education for Aborigines: Present Needs and Facilities’, in Aborigines and Education, ed. S. S. Dunn and C. M. Tatz (Melbourne: Sun Books, 1969), 4–16. For a case study of assimilation policy through school systems in Victoria from 1961 to 1968, see Beth Marsden, ‘“The System of Compulsory Education is Failing”: Assimilation, Mobility and Aboriginal Students in Victorian State Schools, 1961–1968’, History of Education Review 47, no. 2 (2018): 143–54.

⁵ This statement was made by the Victorian representative at the national 1937 Aboriginal Welfare Conference by H. S. Bailey, the Chief Secretary and Chairman of the Aborigines Protection Board of Victoria. Bailey attended ‘principally as an onlooker’, a position he explained by stating that ‘[q]uestions relating to the aborigines [sic]’ affected states like Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia, ‘more than Victoria’. While attempting to minimise the number of Aboriginal people in Victoria, Bailey also asserted the ‘substantial provision for the aborigines [sic]’ made by the state: Aboriginal Welfare Conference, Canberra, Australia, April 21-23, 1937, 5.

⁶ There has not yet been a sustained historical examination of schooling for Aboriginal children in Victoria. For some focused case studies see Amy Thomas and Beth Marsden, ‘Surviving School and “Survival Schools”: Resistance, Compulsion and Negotiation in Aboriginal Engagements with Schooling’, Labour History 12, no. 1 (2021): 33–55; Marsden, ‘“The System of Compulsory Education is Failing”’; David McCallum, Criminalizing Children: Welfare and the State in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

⁷ See, for example, Alick Jackomos and Derek Fowell, eds., Living Aboriginal History of Victoria: Stories in the Oral Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and Aboriginal Elders’ Voices: Stories from the ‘Tide of History’ (Melbourne: ACES, 2003).

⁸ In A History of Australian Schooling, Craig Campbell and Helen Proctor acknowledge that, in the field of education history, ‘the most alarming absence … is the lack of consolidated and reliable histories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander schooling’ (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2014), xiii. In ‘Separate and Equal: An Outline of Aboriginal Education 1900–1996’, Quentin Beresford surveys the existing scant historical literature in Reform and Resistance in Aboriginal Education: Fully Revised Education, ed. Quentin Beresford, Gary Partington and Graeme Gower (Perth: UWA Press, 2014), 85–119.

⁹ For histories of schooling and education systems in Australia and Victoria, see Alan Barcan, A History of Australian Education (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980); Richard Teese, For the Common Weal: The Public High School in Victoria in 1910–2010 (North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing Pty, 2014).

¹⁰ Leonie Stevens and Kat Ellinghaus examine the role of the 1951 school strike in Alice Springs in subverting restrictive policies in ‘Mind the Gap: Micro-Mobility, Counter Networks and Everyday Resistance in the Northern Territory in 1951’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 19, no. 2 (2018), doi:10.1353/cch.2018.0013. Anna Haebich identifies instances where Aboriginal communities and families challenged the exclusion of Aboriginal children from schools as well as the inadequacy of schooling on Aboriginal reserves and stations through protests and discursive activism, in Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families 1800–2000 (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2002), for example, 238–68; 273–7; 395–7; 511. Fletcher’s Clean, Clad and Courteous includes examples of campaigns fought by families and communities for improved school access in NSW, 273-277; 395-397.

¹¹ Haebich, Broken Circles, 252–3.

¹² Contributors to Gary Foley, Andrew Shaap and Edwina Howell’s edited collection, The Aboriginal Tent Embassy: Sovereignty, Black Power, Land (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014) draw lines between Aboriginal political organisation and ideology of the early twentieth century through to the 1960–1970s. See especially Gordon Briscoe’s ‘The Oorigins of Aboriginal Political Consciousness and the Aboriginal Embassy, 1907–1972’, 42–53; and Leith Duncan, ‘Aboriginal Protest’, 54–66.

¹³ John Maynard, ‘Marching to a Different Beat: The Influence of the International Black Diaspora on Aboriginal Australia’, in Indigenous Networks – Mobility, Connections and Exchange, ed. Jane Carey and Jane Lydon (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 262; John Maynard, ‘Tracking Back: Parallels between the 1920s Aboriginal Political Movement and the 1972 Tent Embassy’, in Foley, Shaap and Howell, The Aboriginal Tent Embassy, 84–97.

¹⁴ Maynard, ‘Marching to a Different Beat’, 263.

¹⁵ Heather Goodall, Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics in New South Wales, 1770–1972 (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1996), 247–59; Richard Broome, Aboriginal Victorians since 1800 (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2005), 259–61; 262–4; 268–9; Richard Broome, Fighting Hard: The Victorian Aborigines Advancement League (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2019), 4–6; Fiona Davis, Australian Settler Colonialism and the Cummeragunja Aboriginal Station: Redrawing Boundaries (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2014); Fiona Davis, ‘Calculating Colour: Whiteness, Anthropological Research and the Cummeragunja Aboriginal Reserve, May and June 1938’, in Creating White Australia, ed. Jane Carey and Claire McLisky (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2009), 103–19. Bain Attwood and Andrew Markus have detailed the use of petitioning by William Cooper and other residents of Cummeragunja in the late 1800s and early 1900s in appealing for land rights: see Thinking Black: William Cooper and the Australian Aborigines League (Canberra: AIATSIS, 2004), 7–11.

¹⁶ Ann R. Shorten, ‘The Legal Context of Australian Education: An Historical Exploration’, Australia and New Zealand Journal of Law and Education 1, no. 1 (1996): 2–32.

¹⁷ The exception to this is the Northern Territory, which was administered by the Commonwealth Department of Territories during the period under study in this paper, meaning that responsibility for schooling, and for Aboriginal people, lay with the federal government. For an overview, see Suzanne Parry and Julie Wells, ‘Schooling for Assimilation: Aboriginal Children in the Northern Territory, 1939–1955’, History of Education Review 26, no. 2 (1997): 49–63.

¹⁸ Shorten, ‘The Legal Context’, 10.

¹⁹ Ibid.

²⁰ See Fletcher, Clean, Clad and Courteous for a comprehensive overview.

²¹ Cited in ibid., 158.

²² Shorten, ‘The Legal Context’, 17.

²³ See, for example, the case of Caroona in 1963, in Fletcher, Clean, Clad and Courteous, 249.

²⁴ At Lismore South, Aboriginal children were barred from the public school on the grounds that they should instead attend the school at Cubawee, a 25-kilometre return trip: Fletcher, Clean, Clad and Courteous, 128.

²⁵ This changed in 1937 when teachers began to be appointed by the Education Department. In 1936, there were 40 schools (established by the Board) operating in the state: New South Wales Legislative Assembly, Report of Board for Protection of Aborigines for the Year ended June 30, 1936, 2.

²⁶ Fletcher, Clean, Clad and Courteous, 220. As well as these policy-based barriers to school access, Aboriginal children’s schooling was further restricted by the influence of the local government and town council who sometimes used school access to control where and how Aboriginal people lived. For example, in Moree, in 1933, the local council worked with officials from the Health Department and the Child Welfare Department sympathetic to its position to produce reports it then used to pressure the Education Department to exclude Aboriginal children. This was successful and meant that Aboriginal families found themselves with little choice but to leave their homes on the edge of town and move to a newly established reserve so that their children could access the (substandard) school there: see Goodall, Invasion to Embassy, 174–7. Individual medical officers and district school inspectors did not always follow the wishes of white parents or the Education Department. When, in 1938, Drummond, keen to maintain segregated schools for Aboriginal children, deliberated on the expulsion of Aboriginal children from the Brewarrina Public School in 1938, the school medical officer submitted a report that there were no health or cleanliness issues as had been claimed by white settler families. Drummond rejected this report, and the exclusion was upheld: J. Donnellan, school medical officer and oculist, report on children at Brewarrina, April 1, 1938. Dept. Ed. File 40/34/1978, Box 10/41233/NSWSA, cited in J. Fletcher, Documents in the History of Aboriginal Education in New South Wales (Carlton, NSW: J. Fletcher, 1989), 140.

²⁷ Fletcher, Clean, Clad and Courteous, 144.

²⁸ Ibid., 146.

²⁹ Howard Groome has examined how, in particular, publications produced by psychologist and eugenicist Stanley Porteous contributed to the construction of ‘imagined differences’ between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal children that had ‘long term effects on the education of Indigenous children’, lasting well into the 1950s, and were used to justify policies ‘of deliberately limiting Indigenous students to lower levels of achievement’, in ‘Education: The Search for Relevance’, in Aboriginal Australia: An Introductory Reader in Aboriginal Studies, ed. Colin Bourke, Eleanor Bourke and Bill Edwards (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1994), 176. Barry Down has shown that in Western Australia in 1967, recommendations made by the Native Welfare Department towards the development of a technical education curriculum in Western Australia demonstrate how educability was fixed with race in 1829. The 1967 recommendations made by the WA Welfare Department described the typical ‘Aboriginal child’ as ‘unable to achieve success with the conventional academic course’, with a tendency to ‘rebel against the more formal types of schoolwork’, and Down has argued, ‘recommended channelling Aboriginal students into low status practically oriented courses because of their “well-known” intellectual inferiority’. The Education Department’s response was to develop a ‘different, more practical type of course’. ‘A Different, More Practical Education’, 55. See also Sophie Rudolph, ‘The Past in the Present: Identifying the Violence of Success and the Relief of Failure’, in The Relationality of Race in Education Research, ed. Greg Vass, Jacinta Maxwell, Sophie Rudolph and Kalervo N. Gulson (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017).

³⁰ Ash Francisco, ‘Creating the Space for Exemption’, in Black, White and Exempt: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Lives Under Exemption, ed. Lucinda Aberdeen and Jennifer Jones (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2020), 43–7.

³¹ Barry, Broken Promises, 195.

³² Minister for Education to Premier Stevens, October 28, 1937, Premiers Department file 62/1515, cited in Fletcher, Documents in the History of Aboriginal Education in New South Wales, 172.

³³ For Aboriginal families’ protests in NSW, see Fletcher, Clean, Clad and Courteous, 138–9, 141–3, 151–2, 161.

³⁴ See Fletcher Clean, Clad and Courteous, 124–5, 128–9.

³⁵ Goodall, Invasion to Embassy, 182.

³⁶ There were at least 25 groups involved in petitioning the government to abolish the Board in 1937 and 1938. They comprised Aboriginal-led organisations, as well as ‘trade unions, housewives associations, feminist groups, churches and professional organisations’: Fletcher, Clean, Clad and Courteous, 160–1.

³⁷ Goodall, Invasion to Embassy, 238–42.

³⁸ Ibid., 242–3.

³⁹ In the first edition of Abo Call, Patten declared ‘We are NOT an inferior race, we have merely been refused the chance of education that whites receive’: Abo Call, April 1, 1938.

⁴⁰ Goodall, Invasion to Embassy, 230.

⁴¹ Abo Call, April 1, 1938.

⁴² Goodall, Invasion to Embassy, 211–14.

⁴³ Fletcher, Clean, Clad and Courteous, 161.

⁴⁴ William Cooper, ‘Aborigines Want a Royal Commission’, The Australian Worker, May 10, 1939, 15. Bill Ferguson had served as organiser for the Australian Workers Union and member of the ALP prior to moving to Dubbo in 1933; he used this experience and connections to support the Murri community of Talbragar, outside Dubbo city limits, fight against school exclusion at Brocklehurst. Their campaign was bolstered by the support of members of the white Left, including the Dubbo ALP and union organisers: Goodall, Invasion to Embassy, 183.

⁴⁵ Fletcher, Clean, Clad and Courteous, 161.

⁴⁶ Francisco, ‘Creating the Space’, 52–3.

⁴⁷ See Russell McGregor’s Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory 1880–1939 (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1997), for a discussion of anthropologists’ involvement in academic and political debates regarding policy and legislation targeting Aboriginal people during the 1930s.

⁴⁸ Cooper to the Minister of the Interior, ‘From an Educated Black’, 3, March 31, 1938, National Archives Australia, A659, 1941/8/58.

⁴⁹ Goodall, Invasion to Embassy, 245; Abo Call, July 4, 1938.

⁵⁰ Abo Call, July 1, 1938; Patten and Ferguson, ‘Aborigines Claim Citizen Rights! A Statement of the Case for the Aborigines Progressive Association, 1938, reproduced in Bain Attwood and Andrew Markus, eds., The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights: A Documentary History (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1999).

⁵¹ Mrs Mary Clarke recalled that non-Aboriginal children living in Victoria were sent by their parents to Cummeragunja in order to be taught by James. See Jan Critchett, Untold Stories: Memories and Lives of Victorian Kooris (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1998), 8. This was also reported in the press: ‘A Model Settlement’, World’s News (Sydney), September 1, 1923, 8; ‘Break Up Ceremony: Cummeragunja School’, Riverine Herald, December 20, 1924, 5.

⁵² Broome, Fighting Hard, 14. In 1908, some white parents on the NSW side of the border demanded that a separate school be established for their children. This campaign was unsuccessful, and ended when the Victorian government built a school at Barmah: Davis, Cummeragunja Aboriginal Station, 26–7.

⁵³ Lola James, in Aboriginal Elders’ Voices, 38–9.

⁵⁴ Daniel James is Thomas James’s great-great-great-grandson: ‘The Scholar’s Hut’, The History Listen, ABC Radio National, https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/the-history-listen/the-scholars-hut/12736892 (accessed January 4, 2021).

⁵⁵ Goodall, Invasion to Embassy, 130.

⁵⁶ ‘Cumeroogunja Mission: Story of Its Early Days’, The Riverine Herald, August 15, 1946, 3.

⁵⁷ Diane Barwick, ‘Aunty Ellen’, in Fighters and Singers: The Lives of Some Australian Aboriginal Women (Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1985), 189. Another example of Aboriginal children being excluded from a public school attended by their older relatives was at Baryulgil Public School in 1935 – a situation protested by adult family who had themselves previously attended the school: Fletcher, Clean, Clad and Courteous, 168.

⁵⁸ Cooper to the Premier, Mr Stevens, of NSW, November 15, 1936, New South Wales State Archives and Records (NSWSAR), NRS 905, A1000 [2/7584.1].

⁵⁹ In Austin’s discussion of the school and students at Cummeragunja, he focuses on health, appearance and discipline. He makes no mention of learning or academic achievements. See NSWSAR, NRS 905, A1000 [2/7584.1].

⁶⁰ See Goodall, Invasion to Embassy, 247–58, for a detailed account of the lead-up to the Cummeragunja walk-off.

⁶¹ Cooper to the Premier of NSW, February 20, 1939, NSWSAR, NRS 905, A1000 [2/7584.1].

⁶² Christine Brett Vickers, ‘“The Mother of the Home”: Jennie Parsons Smith’, in Uncommon Ground: White Women in Aboriginal History, ed. Anna Cole, Victoria Haskins and Fiona Paisley (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2005), 44–5. Austin’s own son did not attend the school at Cummeragunja, instead crossing the river each day to go to the Barmah State School in Victoria: Public Record Office Victoria (PROV), Barmah State School Records, VPRS 14419.

⁶³ Cooper to the Premier of NSW, February 20, 1939, NSWSAR, NRS 905, A1000 [2/7584.1].

⁶⁴ Austin to the Inspector of Schools Broken Hill, February 27, 1939; Austin to McQuiggan, January 20, 1939, NSWSAR, NRS 905, A1000 [2/7584.1].

⁶⁵ Austin to Broken Hill Inspectorate, June 29, 1939, NSWSAR, NRS 3829 School files [14/7444].

⁶⁶ Austin to the Inspector of Schools Broken Hill, February 27, 1939; Austin to McQuiggan, January 20, 1939, NSWSAR, NRS 905, A1000 [2/7584.1].

⁶⁷ In 1915, the NSW legislation changed to give the Board greater powers to remove children. Under threat of removals, 16 families were able to cross the river to Victoria: Davis, Cummeragunja Aboriginal Station, 36–7. This strategy was effective: there were no recorded removals of children between 1922 and 1928, with the Board seeking legal advice in 1927 about how it could extend its powers to control the children who had been taken to Victoria. See Goodall, Invasion to Embassy, 130.

⁶⁸ Barwick, ‘Aunty Ellen’, 194; see also Lettie Nicholls in Living Aboriginal History, 110.

⁶⁹ Fletcher, Clean, Clad, Courteous, 161; Beth Marsden ‘Destination of Pupil “Unknown”: Indigenous Mobility between Schools in Victoria and New South Wales’, in Aberdeen and Jones, Black, White and Exempt, 104–21.

⁷⁰ Shorten, ‘The Legal Context,’10.

⁷¹ Beth Marsden, ‘Histories of Aboriginal Education and Schooling in Victoria, 1904–1968’ (PhD diss., La Trobe University, 2021), 44–74.

⁷² Victorian Education Department, 1909–1949, Register for Applications for the Establishment of State Schools, PROV, VPRS 3861/P0000/1.

⁷³ ‘Aboriginal Children at Barmah School’, Shepparton Advertiser, February 21, 1929, 2.

⁷⁴ Australian Aborigines League Annual Report, 1938.

⁷⁵ William Cooper to Premier Betram Stevens, February 20, 1939, NSWSAR, NRS 905, Chief Secretary Records relating to Aboriginal Affairs (1938–1949). File number A1000 [2/7584.1].

⁷⁶ ‘Blacks’ Change of Citizenship’, Courier-Mail (Brisbane), February 7, 1939, 2; ‘300 Aborigines Leave Mission’, Advocate (Burnie), February 8, 1939, 5; ‘Aborigines Leave Mission Station as Protest’, Weekly Times, February 11, 1939, 5; ‘Aborigines Adamant in Ban on Camp’, Herald (Melbourne), February 16, 1939, 2; ‘Native “Strike” Still On’, Herald (Melbourne), February 17, 1939, 2; ‘Aborigines Discontent: Why They Left Settlement, Feared for Children’, Border Mail (Albury), February 22, 1939, 6; ‘Cummeragunja Stir’, The Riverine Herald (Echuca) March 11, 1939, 2; ‘Why Blacks Left Camp’, Daily Advertiser (Wagga Wagga), February 28, 1939, 7; ‘Why Blacks Left’, Argus (Melbourne), February 27, 1939, 2; ‘Crossing the Border: NSW Aborigines’, Argus (Melbourne), April 29, 1939, 2; ‘Aboriginal Unrest: Natives Leave Station’, Argus (Melbourne), March 4, 1939, 3; ‘Aborigines Who Left Station’, Sydney Morning Herald, February 27, 1939, 13; ‘Cummeragunja Exodus’, Riverina Herald (Deniliquin), May 22, 1939, 2.

⁷⁷ Goodall, Invasion to Embassy, 252.

⁷⁸ Barwick, ‘Aunty Ellen’, 191; ‘Blacks Seek Refuge Across Border’, Daily Telegraph (Sydney), Wednesday February 22, 1939, 2. Hyllus Briggs was a signatory to the petition calling for an inquiry into the management of Cummeragunja on November 2, 1938, sent to the Chairman of the Board, NSWSAR, NRS 905, A1000 [2/7584.1].

⁷⁹ Aunty Olive Jackson, ‘Growing Up Running from the Welfare’, in Aboriginal Elders’ Voices, 25.

⁸⁰ This is as far as settler historians are aware and have established in academic scholarship.

⁸¹ As Maynard points out in ‘Tracking Back’, media attention and the support of the white public and trade unions has been key to more recent movements: the Freedom Rides, the Gurundji walk-off, and the Aboriginal Tent Embassy. Sophie Rudolph makes a similar argument regarding the 1967 Referendum and the Uluru Statement in ‘Demanding Dialogue in an Unsettled Settler State: Implications for Education and Justice’, History of Education Review 50, no. 2 (2020): 181–95.

⁸² ‘Mission Stations “Should be run by Aborigines”’, Newcastle Herald and Miners’ Advocate, February 9, 1939, 16. As Attwood and Markus have shown, the Australian Aborigines’ League considered one of their central tasks to be ‘enlightening the Australian public about the true situation of Aborigines’, and that this education had the potential to put ‘pressure on governments to adopt new policies. See Attwood and Markus, Thinking Black, 17. Goodall also has shown that, certainly for Cooper, exposing the shortcomings of British ideals concerning justice and freedom and the lived reality for Aboriginal people was an important aim for groups like the AAL and APA at this time: Invasion to Embassy, 249–50.

⁸³ Maynard, ‘Tracking Back’, 95.

⁸⁴ The Victorian government understood that there was support for Aboriginal causes in Victoria, noted at the 1937 conference when Chapman noted that Aboriginal people would ‘receive support from white people’ should the government try to bring in more restrictive legislation: Conference on Aboriginal Welfare, 1937, 17.

⁸⁵ Goodall, Invasion to Embassy, 253.

⁸⁶ Australasian Council of Trade Unions, to the Premier of NSW, March 22, 1939, NSWSAR, NRS 905, A1000 [2/7584.1].

⁸⁷ Goodall, Invasion to Embassy, 253.

⁸⁸ Barwick ‘Aunty Ellen’, 191.

⁸⁹ ‘Sustenance to Cease: Aborigines Plight’, The Age, October 12, 1939, 12.

⁹⁰ ‘Minutes of a deputation to the Minister of Education, Sir John R. Harris’, October 11, 1939, Melbourne, NSWSAR, NRS 3829 School files [14/7444].

⁹¹ ‘Minutes’, NSWSAR, NRS 3829; School files [14/7444]. Please note, in the original document the spelling ‘Cumeroogunja’ is used, as it often was during this period. I have changed it in the text for consistency.

⁹² ‘Aborigines at Barmah’, The Herald, October 11, 1939, 10. The deputation was supported by the Aborigines’ Fellowship, the Australian Aborigines League, and the Aborigines Assistance Committee.

⁹³ ‘Minutes’, NSWSAR, NRS 3829 School files [14/7444].

⁹⁴ Ibid.

⁹⁵ ‘Sustenance to Cease: Aborigines Plight’, The Age, October 12, 1939, 12.

⁹⁶ Department of Education, October 23, 1939, NSWSAR, NRS 3829 School files [14/7444].

⁹⁷ Pollock, Inspector of Schools Broken Hill, to NSW Education Department, October 6, 1939, NSWSAR, NRS 3829 School files [14/7444].

⁹⁸ Department of Education, Source of Instruction for Aborigines’ Schools, 1940, in Fletcher, Documents in the History of Aboriginal Education in New South Wales, 186–7.

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Beth Marsden

Beth Marsden is a historian of education specialising in the fields of Aboriginal education, Australian history and critical archival studies. Her PhD thesis, ‘Histories of Aboriginal Education and Schooling in Victoria 1904–1968’, was the first examination of Aboriginal peoples’ engagement with settler education policy and practice, situated within broader cultures of resistance. Her work has been published in Australian Historical Studies, Labour History and Aboriginal History, among others. She is currently Research Fellow at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education working on a history of progressive education and race in Australia.