The South Australian Northern Territory Aborigines Act 1910 was passed.
The Chief Protector of Aboriginals to be appointed under the Act was made ‘the legal guardian of every Aboriginal and every half-caste child’ up to the age of eighteen years, except for State children under the South Australian State Children Act 1895, regardless of whether the child had parents or other living relatives.
The Northern Territory was transferred from South Australia to the Commonwealth. The Northern Territory Aborigines Act 1910 remained in force, but was thought to be insufficient in some respects for Northern Territory circumstances. Changes were introduced by the Northern Territory Aboriginals Ordinance 1911, which was to be incorporated and read with the 1910 South Australian Act.
The Chief Protector was empowered to have the ‘care, custody or control of any Aboriginal or half-caste for him to do so’. This and the powers elaborated in the 1918 Ordinance underpinned the removal of children and their committal to institutions.
The original Bungalow had started in 1913 and by 1914 children were being compulsorily removed to the Alice Springs institution. This was later relocated to Jay Creek until November 1932 and returned to Alice Springs to new premises in the Old Telegraph Station and continued to be known as The Bungalow.
“We used to sleep out in the open; there were no beds, no chairs, no tables – only tables inside there; but fixed to the floor for wet weather times…ordinary tables made out of bush timber, and the beds – we used to sleep up during the summer time we just used to camp out on the flat – like a mob of sardines – in one bed. And the kids grew up, you know, like brothers and sisters”.
Milton Liddle Perrurle.
Taken from ‘ Alice Springs – Its History & The People Who Made It’ by Peter Donovan 1988.
The Aboriginal Ordinance was amended to make provision for the Chief Protector to declare a person to be ‘deemed not a half-caste’, in other words to be exempted from restrictions contained in the Ordinance. This exemption could be revoked.
The First ‘Native Patrol Officer’ in the Northern Territory (TGH Strehlow) was appointed.
Throughout the 1930’s and early 1940’s before evacuation many children were moved from one institution to another, separating them even further from their families and also separating them from their ‘second families’, their companions in the homes. Shortly before the outbreak of war, children identified as Church of England were taken from government institutions to Groote Eylandt, and were later evacuated to NSW.
In 1941, the first children were admitted to the new Garden Point and Croker Island Missions, including children transferred from the government institutions at Darwin and Alice Springs and the Home re-opened at Pine Creek for children awaiting transfer to the missions.
Transfer of all children from government institutions to missions was interrupted by wartime evacuation early in 1942. Part-Aboriginal women and children, with some exceptions were evacuated from towns, government institutions and missions to southern states. By 1946 many of the women and children evacuated in 1942 were returned from southern states to the Northern Territory.
Jessie Perrurle White was one of those young part-Aboriginal women with children who was taken away from her home town of Alice Springs and sent to work in Katherine, Pine Creek and Darwin. As part of the wartime evacuation she was forced to travel from Darwin to the southern states taking with her only one of her two children and leaving behind her eldest child later evacuated to Queensland.
“Throughout our family there were many different religions applied to many members and part of that policy was to take the native out of the children, western style education also separated families from our culture”.
“The language was forbidden to be spoken where English had to be the first language spoken. Aboriginal people weren't allowed to practice their beliefs, their culture… but it was still done, carried on by the people. They went out to the bush and that was where they were revived with our culture”.
“Our crime was the colour of our skin. Where some kids were allowed to carry on with their culture…most of us couldn't… we weren't allowed to.
“My mum still had her language, she never had a problem with communication she still had it and so did my young brother, he was like her. That's why…when she came back looking for Nanna Carrie, she was able to communicate with her families, she still had the language. They took the girl out of the country but they didn't take the country from the girl.”
“I was robbed of that, to speak back to my families in Arrernte but I could still hear my language”. Cynthia Mallard, April 2005.