Sarah Holland-Batt

‘I intend to do for myself’

Examining Indigenous lives under exemption

Marilyn Lake

Black, White and Exempt: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander lives under exemption

edited by Lucinda Aberdeen and Jennifer Jones

Aboriginal Studies Press $39.95 pb, 224 pp

In the process of British colonisation, Aboriginal people lost their country, kin, culture, and languages. They also lost their freedom. Governed after 1901 by different state and territory laws, Aboriginal peoples were subject to the direction of Chief Protectors and Protection Boards, and were told where they could live, travel, and seek employment, and whom they might marry. They were also subject to the forced removal of their children by state authorities. Exemption certificates promised family safety, dignity, a choice of work, a passport to travel, and freedom. Too often, in practice, exemption also meant enhanced surveillance, family breakup, and new forms of racial discrimination and social segregation.

In 1934, a petition was presented to the West Australian Royal Commission, a body appointed to investigate matters in relation to the condition and treatment of Aboriginal Australians by a group of women calling themselves the ‘Halfcastes of Broome’. They detailed the demeaning consequences for their employment and marriage prospects, and the familial hardships entailed in living under ‘the Aborigine Act’. ‘We ask for our freedom,’ they wrote, ‘so that when the chance comes along we can rule our lives and make ourselves true and good citizens.’ In Western Australia, the Aborigines Act 1905 provided for exemption but, as the petitioners noted, this could be cancelled at the whim of police, who constantly demanded ‘favours’ of the women and punished them if they refused. One of the women’s requests was that male police be replaced by ‘lady protectors’.

In the Northern Territory, where Indigenous peoples (including those of mixed descent) were governed by the Commonwealth Aboriginal Ordinance of 1918, the Australian Halfcaste Progressive Association (AHPA) was active alongside the Northern Australian Workers’ Union in mobilising a campaign to amend the Commonwealth Ordinance to provide for ‘exemption certificates’ following the model of the 1897 Queensland Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act. As Leonie Stevens reports in Black, White and Exempt, a path-breaking collection of essays on the Indigenous experience of exemption across four Australian jurisdictions, the political campaign for exemption in the Northern Territory was led by William Ah Mat, a local football legend and secretary of the AHPA. What they longed for, he explained, was ‘to be free from the Aboriginal Act to control their own destiny and affairs’. His people wanted full citizen rights, he told the federal Minister for the Interior, Thomas Paterson. In 1936, the Ordinance was duly amended to offer the possibility of exemption to some individuals of mixed descent. As anthropologist A.P. Elkin later commented to Robert Menzies, exemption turned ‘black into white’, but it was a provisional whiteness, always able to be revoked by the Chief Protector.

Black, White and Exempt is an engaging historical collection that seeks to illuminate ‘the lived experience of exemption’ and the agency of Aboriginal people themselves as they negotiated with authorities for their freedom and agitatedfor reform. In attending to the complexity and diversity of Aboriginal lives in the twentieth century, and in drawing on a mix of oral sources, personal family accounts, and archival research, the editors, Lucinda Aberdeen and Jennifer Jones, have produced an exemplary work of history, alert to ambiguity and ambivalence. Accompanying photographs render individual stories vivid and intensely personal. The book deserves a wide readership.

Originating in a symposium in 2018 led by Indigenous researchers and Elders Kella Robinson and Judi Wickes at La Trobe University’s Shepparton Campus in Yorta Yorta Country in regional Victoria, this collection introduces us to a range of different stories and viewpoints. The subject matter was difficult and its legacies remain controversial. The involvement of Elders and community members ensured, the editors report, that ‘the symposium reflected First Nations’ cultural values and priorities’. As a joint production of Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers and writers, the book is a triumph.

Interestingly, all but one of the eleven contributors are women. John Maynard, a Worimi man from the Port Stephens area of New South Wales and Chair of Aboriginal History at Newcastle University, provided a keynote address to the symposium – another was presented by La Trobe University historian Katherine Ellinghaus – and spoke of the persistence of racial segregation in New South Wales in the twentieth century regardless of the possibilities of exemption. His grandfather Fred Maynard was a founder of the Australian Aborigines Progressive Association, which sought full citizen rights for Indigenous peoples in a framework of declared self-determination.

The Aboriginal desire for self-determination – the desire to rule their own lives – is a key theme of the collection. Jessica Horton writes of the activism of Victorian Aboriginal families who pursued pathways to ‘self-determined exemption’ in order to be free from the control of the Victorian Board for the Protection of Aborigines. ‘I intend to go off the Boards hands altogether and do for myself,’ one man wrote. ‘I want to make a home for my children.’ The obligation of breadwinning was a common motivation among Aboriginal men.

In a collaborative chapter, ‘Playing the Game’, Lucinda Aberdeen, Kella Robinson, and Judi Wickes write about the experience of exemption in Queensland and New South Wales with reference to the lives of Wickes’s grandfather Roy Smith, exempted in Queensland in 1926, and Robinson’s grandfather Alf Kelly, exempted in New South Wales in 1945. In Queensland, Roy Smith wanted to live and work as a free man. His wife, Daisy, kept diaries that show that ‘the Smith family was free to vote, go to the movies, travel on public transport, visit family and friends, as well as entertain at home’. In New South Wales, where exemption was introduced much later than in Queensland, Alf