Would it be Problematic if A.O.Neville was 'indigenous'?
Professor Richard Broome AM, FAHA, FRHSV is the author of fifteen books and many articles in Australian and Indigenous History. He lectured at La Trobe University from 1977-1981, before trying his hand at becoming a commissioned historian for six years.
He returned to La Trobe in 1987, being appointed Associate Professor in 1992, and Professor in 2009 until his retirement in 2012. - Source La Trobe University
Professor Broome seems to be a fan of Bruce Pascoe’s book, Dark Emu, he himself having written of Pascoe that,
- “He has done a great service in bringing this material to students and general readers, and in such a lively and engaging fashion”
- (Richard Broome, Agora magazine, as quoted in Dark Emu 2018 Reprint p.3,), and
- “Pascoe researches this book extensively and in part from a careful [sic] reading of many explorers’ journals - Mitchell, Eyre, Sturt, Stuart, Giles and others”.
- Richard Broome, Kritikos Book Review, Agora Magazine
Given the praise for Pascoe’s Dark Emu that Professor Broome, a distinguished academic of Aboriginal studies, has given, we thought we would look up some of Professor Broome’s other work.
Professor Broome & Chief Protector A.O.Neville - Time for a ‘reconsideration’ as an indigenous man?
A.O. Neville, Chief Protector of Aborigines in WA was descendent from a branch of John Rolfe’s (Pocahonta’s husband) family.
American Indian ‘princess’ Pocahontas, wife of John Rolfe (married 1614)
In his 2012 lecture series on Australian Aboriginal History, Professor Broome includes a chapter on May 9th 2012 titled, ‘The Separation of Aboriginal Children’ where he discuss the background to the ‘infamous’ A.O. Neville, the Chief Protector of Aborigines in WA from 1915-1936.
Professor Broome tells us that,
“[A.O.] Neville is an interesting person because he was an Englishman, born in England, son of a clergyman and he was a descendent of British man Rolfe who married Pocahontas.
He [Neville] was the descendent of this union of, what was it, John Smith [sic] and Pocahontas, and so he had in his family tradition that race mixing was positive.
And he became Protector of Aborigines in Western Australia. He was Protector for 30 years [sic] up to 1939.” Listen here from 15:45
[sic – fathered by John Rolfe, not John Smith; should be 25 years as Protector & Commissioner].
Professor Broome
Professor Broome implies that A.O. Neville had a deep understanding, in fact a ‘family tradition’, of the positive effects of a ‘mixing of the races.’
In our Pascoesque world, is Professor Broome hinting that A.O. Neville may have had some inner, deep ‘Indigenous knowledge’ - some remnant kinship understanding from his American Indian ‘princess’ ancestor - of what it meant to be indigenous and of mixed race? Would Bruce Pascoe and A.O.Neville have been able to ‘share a beer together’ with the common bond of being Indigenous men in ‘white’ skins?
Maybe, modern day critics of Neville and his policies should re-assess their idea of Neville from the usual, ‘bad white and racist Protector, who promulgated the stealing of Aboriginal children’ as depicted in the film, Rabbit Proof Fence, to perhaps a, ‘good, deep-down well-meaning, American indigenous man who tried his best with limited resources to protect ‘half-caste’ young Aboriginal children from harm’?
One wonders that if Neville had, like many Australians of today, publicly promoted his ‘indigeneity’ and that his actions came from a deep seated ‘indigenous knowledge’ and kinship tradition that the mixing of races was a positive, progressive policy, as Professor Broome implies, then maybe Neville’s legacy would be more positive amongst the Progressive commentators of today?
Maybe Neville was just a product of his times, one of the Progressives of the early 20th century, who were proponents of the policy of eugenics?
Professor Marcia Langton - Uni. of Melbourne
Indeed, the Progressives of today such as Professor Bruce Pascoe and Professor Marcia Langton are both employed by that former ‘Eugenics Centre of Excellence’, The University of Melbourne.
It seems strange that these two Professors, so critical of the ‘indigenous man’, A.O.Neville and his eugenics-based policies, would be willing themselves to get jobs at the University of Melbourne, with its ‘shameful’ eugenics past.
Indigenous Enterprise Professor Pascoe - Uni. of Melbourne
Dr Roberta “Bobbi” Sykes- Source Wikipedia
But then maybe not.
It seems the University of Melbourne has no problem in using ‘slippery’ definitions to suit whatever end result is required. When something is ‘problematic’ they just undertake a few definition manipulations and claim all is OK.
Or maybe not? We will let our ethical Australian readers decide.
Consider the example of Roberta "Bobbi" Sykes (1943 – 2010), an Australian poet and author. She was a lifelong campaigner for Indigenous land rights, as well as human rights and women's rights. Sykes received a PhD in Education from Harvard University in 1983. According to Wikipedia, ‘she was the first black Australian to graduate from a United States university’. She returned to Australia where she continued her life as an activist and was appointed to the Nation Review, as Australia's first (presumed) indigenous columnist.
However, her mother has revealed that her father was not Aboriginal, but rather an African-American soldier, Master Sergeant Robert Barkley. Although Sykes fought hard for Australian Aboriginal rights, she herself was not of Australian Aboriginal descent. She was sometimes criticised for not correcting the record when others assumed she was Aboriginal. - Source Wikipedia
Aboriginal activist and NSW magistrate, Pat O’Shane was instrumental in declaring Sykes’s identity as ‘fraudulent’.
Nevertheless, Melbourne University offers the Roberta Sykes Indigenous Education Foundation Scholarship, in the name of Roberta Sykes, who the University of Melbourne describes as,
Roberta Sykes graduated from Harvard in 1984 as the first indigenous Australian to graduate from an American university. The Roberta Sykes Indigenous Education Foundation established The Roberta Sykes Scholarships to provide funding to Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander postgraduate students who wish to undertake studies at recognised overseas universities. - University of Melbourne
To us normal, average Australians, something does not seem quite right here. Bobbi Sykes put herself out as an Aboriginal activist, even though her ‘black skin heritage’ is descended from her African-American father. She is commonly described as a ‘black Australian’ or a small “i” indigenous Australian, even though she has no Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent and she would not pass the Commonwealth’s ‘3-part rule’ for the definition of Aboriginality in Australia.
But according to the University of Melbourne, all one needs to do is drop the case from a capital “I” to a small “i’ in the word ‘indigenous’ and use the Pascoesque technique of letting the reader assume themselves that Bobbi Sykes is an ‘authentic’ Indigenous Aboriginal and not a ‘fake’ one, like so many others (and as she herself was finally exposed to be).
But on that basis, aren’t all Australian-born people, small “i” indigenous as well? Why did Bobbi Sykes get accepted politically as being ‘indigenous’, whereas we non-Aboriginal Australians aren’t? If it is just due to skin colour, then that is a prima facie case of ‘racism’ isn’t it?
Like the poor, is seems that the racists will always be with us, and our University staff need to re-acquaint themselves with the words of Dr King Jr. every once in a while.
Is the University of Melbourne promoting ‘racism based on skin colour’?
But maybe things are changing at the University of Melbourne?
All our good work at Dark Emu Exposed might be paying off. We note now that the University of Melbourne website might be engaging in some real critical thinking, as they have dropped any mention of the tribal descent of their new Enterprise Professor in Indigenous Agriculture, Bruce Pascoe.
Like ‘the artist formerly known as Prince’, it appears Melbourne University’s Professor Bruce Pascoe, ‘formerly the artist known as a Yuin, Bunurong and Tasmanian man’ is now simply described as, ‘Indigenous author and advocate.’
Is Melbourne University now using the classification of ‘indigenous’ to be anyone born in Australia, no matter what the their background, a la Bobbi Sykes, and now applying it to Prof. Pascoe?
On the University of Melbourne’s, ‘Find-an-expert’ website [sic], Professor Pascoe is further ‘demoted’ and simply referred to as, ‘a writer and farmer.’
Is the University of Melbourne admitting that Bruce Pascoe is not Aboriginal?
If he really is Aboriginal, wouldn’t the correct and respectful form of address be, ‘Proud Yuin, Bunurong and Tasmanian man, Professor Bruce Pascoe’?
Interesting.
On a side note, we notice the University of Melbourne website for the Roberta Sykes Foundation Scholarship Award, includes a profile of one the more famous recipients, ‘Auntie’ Kerrie Doyle, who says the Award,
“…allowed me to attend Oxford University and gain a MSc in Evidence Based Social Intervention and then go to complete a research PhD at the National Centre of Indigenous Studies at ANU.”
Our understanding is that ‘Auntie’ Kerrie is the first Australian Aboriginal person to attend Oxford University.
Is she really?
We advise our readers to watch this space over the coming weeks as events unfold!
Does Indigeneity Really Matter?
Now back to A.O. Neville.
We should try to check Professor Broome’s claim that Neville was indeed a descendent of the American Indian ‘princess’ Pocahontas. Without going through the expense of doing a formal genealogical search, we have only been able to find one corroborating source for Professor Broome’s claim. Indeed, we suspect that this is where Professor Broome may have sourced his evidence from.
In 1990, West Australian writer, Jan Jacobs published a thorough biography of Auber Octavius (A.O.) Neville, Mister Neville, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1990.
Pat Jacobs writes,
The Nevilles were comfortable with the past. [Sir Walter] Scott's' The Marmion Cantos' stayed on Auber's [A.O.Neville’s] bookshelf all his life, a key to his own history and a reminder of family bonds.
For Hastings [A.O.Neville’s father] and his sons, investigating the veracity of Scott's account of Flodden was a literary pastime…A branch of the family, Neville Rolfe, had their estate at Heacham Hall, Norfolk, and Auber was sometimes sent there for a holiday.
At Heacham Hall he absorbed the family history of eminent naval officers and the adventurous Captain Neville Rolfe who married Pocahontas and brought her home to Heacham Hall where she lived the remainder of her life.
- Mister Neville, p.21.
Pat Jacob’s book Mister Neville, looks very detailed and the few sources we checked were accurate and overall the work looks scholarly. Reading Pat Jacob’s description of A.O.Neville’s family history it seems that she too suggests that Neville is a descendent of Pocahontas via a ‘branch of the family'.
Some caution may be in order however, as we have located a reference to the ‘fact’ (?) that the Neville Rolfe family may have acquired the Rolfe estate and name in 1837, and hence have a lineage back to Pocahontas on ‘paper’ rather than through actual descent.
Nevertheless, let’s give Professor Broome the benefit of the doubt and ponder the consequences, if any, of A.O. Neville actually being an American Indigenous man. Hmmm
Extract of page 28 from Forgotten Books.
Further genealogical work would be required to determine if in fact A.O. Neville was a direct desecendent of Pocahontas and therefore ‘indigenous’ American.
Further Reading
1. The No-win of, ‘White Politics and Australia’s Aborigines’ (See Partington, G., Hasluck versus Coombs, Quaker Hill Press, 1996)
2. It is very easy to be shocked by some aspects of the Aboriginal policies that A.O.Neville was employed to develop and administer in the years 1915 to 1939, especially for us looking back from the comforts of 2021.
As Les Murray from his poem, An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow, says,
Some will say they were shocked and would have stopped him
But they will not have been there
But it should not be for us today to feel guilty because of what A.O.Neville and our Australian society may, or may not have done, one hundred years ago that is now perceived as being harmful to Aboriginal people. A.O.Neville was considered a Progressive of his day and he had much support for his policies; but they were also vigorously debated and opposed as well.
The Australian public of his time are responsible for what happened then, not us today. Consider the typical battles that raged against A.O.Neville’s policies from the likes of teacher and advocate of Aboriginal rights, Mrs Mary Bennett (Note 1), who confronted Neville at the 1934/5 Moseley Aborigines Royal Commission. As a modern Australian it is hard not to agree with her. But then, it is hard not to agree to his response either.
Mary Bennett Testimony
The most emotional issue of the inquiry was the question of removing part-Aboriginal children from their mothers. Mary Bennett, influenced by her feminist interest in the rights of Aboriginal women, attacked the Government and Neville bitterly:
‘The deplorable social and economic position of Aborigines and people of Aboriginal origin is caused and conditioned by the victimisation of the Aboriginal women ... Two chief contributing causes of the increase in first-generation half-castes are: starvation by dispossession and the condonation of the property status by the squatters and the administration...Many of these poor children are parted from their mothers... but first for years they suffer the misery of hunted animals, always running away from the police ... always in fear that at any moment they may be torn away, never to see them again. They are captured at all ages, as infants in arms, perhaps not until they are grown up, they are not safe until they are dead…’
- Jan Jacobs, Mister Neville, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1990, p234
A.O.Neville Testimony
Neville argued the Department's case for removing children from their mothers from a different standpoint than Mary Bennett. In Neville's view it was the future of part-Aboriginal children that mattered. To him, the children's plight was a human tragedy that concerned him more deeply than any other aspect of his work. He placed a higher value on the child than he did on the parental bond and the environment which had produced them.
I say emphatically there are scores of children in the bush camps who should be taken away from whoever is looking after them and placed in a settlement...If we are going to fit and train such children for the future they cannot be left as they are...I want to give these children a chance. I do not want to remove them wholesale from stations. I want to make them fit and able to work on stations. But, these children, left to the devices of the men who fathered them, are going to be no better than those who have produced them and looked after them; in other words, they are going to be white natives. Unless those children are removed, social conditions in those places will go from bad to worse... I want to teach them right from wrong. How are the children to fight against these conditions? The conditions, in the absence of teaching, are going to become inflnitely worse than they are now.
There was no point on which Neville and Mary Bennett could come together. She saw the system as inhuman in its savagery towards women and children and Neville saw it as intolerable that children should be left in conditions which negated their chances in the world they would encounter. He had argued, on other occasions, that they were conditions no civilised community should tolerate. There was little satisfaction in trying to explain the lengths he went to to try and prevent exploitation of the women and children. Where Mary Bennett had inferred that children were being 'hunted' indiscriminately, he quoted the statistics for the previous three years in which sixty-four unattended or orphan children had been admitted to Moore River out of a total of 1,067 persons.
It cannot be said that the department has unduly exercised its powers in this direction... The children who have been removed as wards of the Chief Protector have been removed because I desired to be satisfied that the conditions surrounding their upbringing were satisfactory, which they certainly were not before their removal…’
In one of the little brown-covered notebooks he carried in a pocket while travelling were recorded details of cases of child abuse, abduction, rape and violent death that would have shocked the community. They were the cases in which he was attempting to bring the culprits before the courts or to suspend their permits for employing Aborigines.
- Jan Jacobs, Mister Neville, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1990, p234-36
Put yourself in Neville’s shoes for a moment.
The photograph on the left is from the 1939 book, White Settlers in the Tropics, by the Australian scholar A. Grenfell Price.
The caption reads,
“Aboriginal girl, age 12, rescued by police living with and being maltreated by a white man, Central Australia.”
If you were Neville and the police informed you of the plight of this poor girl, a mere child of 12, what would you do?
Send her on her way, back to her family, who may or not exist, or may or may not, want her back? And then rest assured that activists 100 years later will not pillory you for your ‘child-removal’ policies?
Or take her into one of your settlements with a view to protecting her and educating and training her for an initial life as a domestic servant and ultimately as a married woman, but away from contact with her immediate family (should she have one), thereby securing your legacy as the callous ‘Mr Devil’ to future generations?
Perhaps, the question we should be asking ourselves is, have we overcome the supposedly ‘bad’ policies of A.O.Neville such that 12 year old girls like this one merely exist in old photographs?
Or, have our modern Progressive policies also failed, so that this girl, and many like her, are still with us?
Addendum
Note 1. - A short time after posting this article, a reader, Andrew, pointed out to us that our description of Mary Bennett as an ‘activist’ was not appropriate and, on reflection, we agree. Andrew wrote,
‘“Mrs Bennett’ was not an ‘activist’ (an anachronistic expression, surely). She was a long term missionary teacher at Mount Margaret, a mission of the United Aborigines Mission. She and her mission leader, Rod Schenk strenuously opposed A.O. Neville’s eugenics policies, particularly his disapproval of ‘half castes’ marrying ‘full bloods.’ Interestingly, not so much opposing the removal of children. ‘Mt Margaret: A Drop in a Bucket’ by Margaret Morgan (Mission Publications of Australia’, 1986) indicates that at least some white people, and these were evangelical Christians, had an enlightened understanding of indigenous issues and gave their lives living in appalling conditions to improve their lot, rather than being Twitter warriors.”
and in a follow-up email, Andrew continues,
“The book, ‘Mt. Margaret: a Drop in a Bucket’ is probably out of print. Generally missionaries were avid authors; and had to write newsletters back to their supporters, though these may be lost. I am sure that such books and newsletters (if obtainable) are a great source of first-hand information about the condition of the aborigines before the government pushed missionaries out and took over. Rod Schenk was a missionary on the West Australian goldfields for 30 years (1921-1953). I’d like to see someone like Pascoe do that”.
The stories of the realities of life for Aboriginal people and the missionaries is not commonly known today, so for those interested readers, it is worthwhile reading the Australian Dictionary of Biography entries for Mary Bennett and Rod Schenk for a glimpse of what life was like then, and how some of their ideas differed from A. O. Neville’s and some other anthropologists.
As to what was ‘right’ and what was ‘wrong’, with regard to the degree of government and/or missionary intervention in ‘removing half-caste Aboriginal children’ from their mothers, families or communities, the jury at Dark Emu Exposed is still out. We are not yet in agreement with many modern Australians that the ‘Stolen (Lost) Generations’ is an open and shut case of being 100% wrong. We sense that the real history is a lot more complicated and the actions of many people today, who use their ‘eyes and views’ of 2021 to condemn the actions of our ancestors in 1920, might not only be foolish and unfair, but as British writer and commentator, Douglas Murray reminds us, dangerous (watch here).
