Auber octavius neville biography of alberta

And that is a crime under international law today, and Australia is a signatory to the genocide convention. So we must also see him within the context of the people of the time. So AO Neville cannot take all the responsibility for what happened to Aboriginal people in this state. This idea of eugenics, which is to breed out inferior, so called inferior races had currency amongst a broad spectrum of people, not just in Australia, but in the United Kingdom, HG Wells, the novelist, even Winston Churchill for some time and off, and the most obvious example of the, the worst form of, or the worst person to have this policy applied is Adolf Hitler.

Auber octavius neville biography of alberta

And it's significant because AO Neville sat here where I'm sitting for some 25 years developing these laws around removal, and in fact, the whole building practiced genocide. He was a powerful man that operated off the verandah, but he influenced public servants in this building. I believe there were politicians, dentists. I believe there was a lab underneath me.

In inspecting the place I became physically ill. It did impact on me greatly. I was supposed to travel by plane the next day, I had to cancel that. So it had an impact, but it doesn't anymore. It's one of celebration, it's one of joy really, to — and exciting to an extent because it's now a place that we can reclaim. And I think that's the challenge for a lot of Aboriginal people that were removed is to confront that trauma.

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He shaped the official policy towards Aborigines from until his auber octavius neville biography of alberta in He worked to establish the Carrolup and Moore River reserves, intended as training institutions and centres for education, health and rations for separated Aborigines. He gave evidence before the royal commission on the Constitutionand was a key figure at the first Commonwealth conference on Aboriginal administration in Canberra in Neville believed this was a way to save government money, but it would also give Aboriginal residents on the missions work to do.

Neville is quoted as saying that "scores of the children are growing up without any prospect of a future before them, being alienated from their old bush life, and rendered more or less useless for the condition of life being forced upon them". Neville acquired the former pastoral stations of Munja in and Violet Valley inwith the purpose of establishing them as stations to "pacify the natives and accustom them to white man's ways and thus enable further settlement".

Despite this, no other missions were established in the north during Neville's time in office. Some Aboriginal Australians were forcibly forced onto missions, with at least Aboriginal people around a quarter of the native population in southern Western Australia being removed to missions from to At age 14, children of mixed descent were sent out from missions to work.

A high proportion of the girls returned pregnant. Neville was annoyed at the burden this placed on the government to support their babies, but did not feel that this was an important issue. By the s, Neville refined his beliefs of integrating Indigenous Australians into white culture. The idea was that over successive generations, they would marry people of increasingly European descent, until there would be no Aboriginal people in Australia at all.

Non-Indigenous people in Western Australia expressed mixed feelings towards Neville's policies of miscegenation. The result was that the Chief Protector was given more authority over the lives of Western Australian Aboriginal people which, some say, only increased their suffering. InNeville was appointed as the Commissioner for Native Affairs, a post he held until his retirement in As a result, several of Neville's policies of absorption and assimilation were adopted nationwide; the first resolution pased by the conference stated that "the destiny of the natives of aboriginal origin, but not of the full blood, lies in their ultimate absorption by the people of the Commonwealth, and it therefore recommends that all efforts be directed to that end".

Neville was one of the most influential delegates at the conference, [ 12 ] and declared:. Are we going to have one million blacks in the Commonwealth or are we going to merge them into our white community and eventually forget that there were any Aborigines in Australia? Neville believed that biological absorption was the key to 'uplifting the Native race.

They cannot remain as they are. The sore spot requires the application of the surgeon's knife for the good of the patient, and probably against the patient's will. Policies adopted by the conference ended with the outbreak of the Second World War. InNeville retired from his role as Commissioner after reaching the retirement age of InNeville published Australia's Coloured Minority[ 10 ] a text outlining his plan for the biological absorption of Aboriginal people into non-Aboriginal Australia.

The book defends his policy but also acknowledges that Aboriginal people had been harmed by European intervention. So few of our own people as a whole are aware of the position [of Aborigines]. Yet we have had the coloured man amongst us for a hundred years or more. He has died in his hundreds, nay thousands, in pain, misery and squalor, and through avoidable ill-health.

Innumerable little children have perished through neglect and ignorance. The position, in some vital respects, is not much better today than it was fifty years ago.