'That Was Slavery Days': Aboriginal Domestic Servants in New South Wales in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

The stories of the 'Lost Children' (thousands of children forcibly removed from Aboriginal communities this century) have recently begun to be told.1 That many of these people were forced into childhood apprenticeships is perhaps less well known. Under a scheme devised by the New South Wales Aboriginal Protection Board and lasting from the 1880s until 1969, many hundreds of Aboriginal girls were indentured into servitude for wealthy farnilies in Sydney and effectively cut off from their own communities. In this chapter I would like to explore the nature of that experience for individual Aboriginal women and the long term effects it has had on both individuals and communities. The incomplete nature of the Board's records make it difficult to gauge the exact level of labour market participation by apprenticed Aboriginal females.2 Nevertheless, we do know that 570 girls were apprenticed as wards under the Protection Board between the 1910s and the 1930s.3 Over the course of three decades more than 1200 employers in city and country areas benefited from the services of these 570 girls. During any one year in the 1920s there would have been between 300 and 400 Aboriginal girls apprenticed to white homes. Aboriginal wards thus represented approximately 1.5% of the domestic workforce at this time.4 Whilst Aboriginal wards did represent a small segment of the domestic labour market, their contribution was significant for several reasons. Firstly, Aboriginal girls were a particularly exploitable group of workers, being indentured and very inexpensive. Further, the overall decline in available servants in NSW from 1911 to 1921 was about one percent per year,5 so that the presence of female Aboriginal apprentices delayed the rate of decline.6 A comparable demand for unskilled male labour did not exist in New South Wales.7 Significantly, the apprenticeship scheme had a distinct gender-bias, with the Board's officers concentrating on removing girls.8 In the early stages of the apprenticing scheme, girls were sent out directly from Aboriginal stations to service in white homes in their local rural area. As the Protection Board gained increasing legislative power however, both the scale and the geographical location of its scheme changed. After 1915 the Board used its wide-ranging custodial powers over children to shift hundreds of Aboriginal females from rural areas into service in Sydney. Girls were channelled through the Board's Training Home at Cootamundra, which admitted children from the age of ten and supposedly sent them to apprenticeships at fourteen, although many were sent to service at only twelve or thirteen.9