Early History

1889 – 1901: Prelude to One Nation
Throughout the 1880s and more so in the 1890s, native-born white Australians campaigned across the country for some form of federation of all of the Australasian states, including New Zealand and Papua New-Guinea, as white-controlled territories under one government. White natives felt very strongly that they, and not foreign-born Englishmen, should rule Australia, and should be able to expel Asians on the one hand and to confine Aborigines to reserves on the other. All classes of white society supported these ‘solutions’: employers in the North were almost as hostile against Asians as most workers, and rural workers generally were more opposed to Aboriginal employment of any sort than rural employers.
As workers formed strong unions, opposition to the employment of Aboriginal people forced them either out of the work-force altogether and back onto the missions, or forced the segregation of work-places: through the 1890s, even shearing sheds became all-white or all-Aboriginal, or segregated. The betrayal of any solidarity with Aboriginal people by the white working class was to continue for at least another fifty years.
In the 1890s, the South Australian economy was coming out of the 1880s depression, with the usual replacement of labour by machines. The rapid development of industrial enterprises in the towns and city, and of mechanisation in the rural economy, coupled with the breaking up of large pastoral estates into smaller blocks and cooperative settlements for the unemployed, allowed a few more people to settle on the land but, on balance, eventually forced many more out of the countryside into the city, to and through which more and more economic activity was being channelled (Williams, 1975: 83-86). But of course, Aboriginal people were barred from joining this movement to the city and were to be condemned to remain in the job-scarce countryside for another seventy years and more.
In the countryside, improved farming techniques, better use of water, and more irrigation schemes long the Murray, as well as attention to improvements in soil productivity, made farming on smaller blocks more viable, but paradoxically more people on the land meant less employment for farm labourers. By the 1880s, and certainly the 1890s, shearing (and associated tasks: crutching, felsing, dipping, and so on) was becoming one of the only occupations for farm labourers, and that only seasonal. Ngarrindjeri men – employment for women hardly extended even to domestic work – were forced back more and more onto the mission for employment. This pattern did not really change much until the railways felt the need for fettlers and workers for their more outlying operations in the 1950s. So one must ask, what sort of education did authorities envisage for Aboriginal people to suit their declining employment opportunities ? The answer came around 1910.
Ngarrindjeri people had lost their land to the invaders. Spiritual people they may be, but they could not exist on fresh air: so how were they to get by if employment in the mainstream was made more difficult to secure, or even being denied to them altogether ? Three options were pursued, each with its own educational implications:

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  begging in the streets of Adelaide, and when this was prohibited, in the towns: educationally, this required little but the ability to act dumb and quaint, to play up to the stereotype of the dying-out blackfellow;
  

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  to work on the mission, at any task that was required: this required being reconciled to a circumscribed life of poverty, submission to orders and short-term and variable low-skill employment;
  

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  striking out on one’s own block or section: this required an ethos of self-reliance and hard work, away from the mission and one’s relations.
  

Up to the 1920s, some people kept trying the first option, but it carried many dangers with it: very few people today are descended from these poor people and this option did not really have any positive outcomes. Many people stayed at the mission and worked there all their lives, leaving only to work seasonally as shearers or fruit-pickers. And from 1890 to 1910, many families set out on their own: those of Alfred Cameron, George Karpany, George Muckray, William McHughes, Joseph Koolmatrie, Peter Gollan and Henry Lampard, as well as others, spread out on blocks from Wellington down past The Needles.

Blackwell and Gregory

After the death of Fred Taplin, the AFA confirmed David Blackwell as Superintendent, on a salary of £ 125 per year, and after viewing more than twenty applications appointed Ambrose Redman to take his place as Farm Overseer and deputy superintendent, on £ 80 per year plus rations. There were still complaints about Blackwell’s suitability as superintendent: Mark Wilson wrote to the AFA criticising their choice (AFA Minutes, 23.8.1889) but received no reply.

The number of children at the School kept growing: in fact, it was the largest school in the district from the time it was opened until the early 1950s, when Meningie began taking pupils from Ashville, Spring Hill and from down the Coorong. From the 1880s, the AFA was insistent that the Education Department regularly inspect the Point Mcleay School, as it did with all other schools, so that it would not be ignored and allowed – or forced – to offer a lower-level education to Aboriginal children. These were the times when little or nothing was expected of Aboriginal people except to die out: school achievements were neither expected nor, as it turned out, welcomed. How times change ? By 1894, the Education Department was regularly inspecting the school, often twice each year.
Blackwell was concerned that his powers were too weak to compel children to attend school, that is, to comply with the terms of the Education Act. As he wrote to the Protector, Edward Hamilton: ‘Several natives have removed their children from the school. I would like your opinion as to whether I may refuse them rations until they return the children, otherwise there is good reason to fear that the school will be almost broken up.’ (16.8.1889)