Queensland law was quite clear on the illegality of sexual relations between Aboriginal people under the Aborigines Protection Act and white, coloured or exempt people not under the Act. The enforcement of this segregation was, as Walter Bowen of Hopevale explains, largely directed at keeping Aboriginal and white men and women apart.
Them days see it’s a different law altogether. The Australian law, see, if I were to put a hand on a white girl like this, I’m finished. The police just pick me up, put me up, lock me up … I can’t even go and talk to a white girl, as long as they see me that’s it. Whether you’re a half-caste or full blood don’t make any difference.[49]
The legislation prohibiting inter-racial sexual relationships had been framed as protective, with reference to white men cohabiting with black women, which was seen — and it sometimes was — to be exploitative. In practice, Aboriginal women, as the ‘victims’, were the ones punished. Attempts by Aboriginal people to enforce their own laws in response to white men’s transgressions, particularly through individual spearings in the early period of invasion, were met by the armed force of the settlers. Whole communities could be ‘punished’ because of allegations of illegal relationships between Aboriginal women and white men.[50] Numerous women were removed from Cape York Peninsula in the first half of the twentieth century, including ‘VD suspects’, considered as a category of immoral behaviour.[51] Concerns over the spread of infectious diseases in Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal populations were valid but greatly exaggerated in the interests of moral and social control, accompanied by issues of ‘racial purity’.
European resistance to miscegenation was manifest also in the treatment — usually removal and institutionalisation — of ‘half-caste’ children. When Nancy Ross married she already had a child to a white man. Nancy had been taken from her own family, near Alice River, because her biological father was white. White pastoralists, who knew her father, raised her. As a young single mother Nancy was sent to a dormitory at Yarrabah Mission.
I wasn’t used to mission, you know, I wanted to get out.
My husband came down … I told him I wanted to get out, you know.
We wrote a letter to him, to tell him to come down …
I was happy in a way, I had a lot of girlfriends there you know.
I just wanted to get out of there, so I got married.[52]
Nancy wanted out of the dormitory but she only agreed to marry when her prospective husband promised to adopt her son as his own.[53]
Bamboo Friday and Wampoo Keppel married women to stop them from being removed by the police. These were arranged marriages, agreed to by family and following traditional laws: ‘Gotta be right man, any close to family won’t let her marry.’[54] Ruby Friday would have been sent to a government settlement or mission because her father was white. Ruby was born in 1942 but married at only 14 years of age to stop her from being taken away. Her husband Bamboo Friday was 19 years older.[55] Wampoo gives a more general reason for removing young unwed women from the bush: ‘If any woman [don’t] get married send ’em to Palm Island … They didn’t want any young girls walking around bush, outside, white man making trouble with them.’[56]
The cohabitation of white men with black women was commonly tolerated throughout the Cape.[57] Some men enjoyed the freedom from social (and legal) restraints of living in isolation. They were not legally married. Many had more than one de-facto wife. Those men who wanted to marry their chosen companion had to apply to the Department of Native Affairs for permission, which was sometimes, though not always, granted.[58]
The gendered focus of the Act reflects the cultural assumptions of Europeans about the likelihood of white women having relations with black men. A wife’s social standing was determined by her husband, and a white woman could not be placed under the Protection Act. For an Aboriginal man to marry a white woman, it was necessary for him to be exempt from the Act. Authorities appeared reluctant to liberate men on the basis of affection formed with a woman. Exemption was more readily granted to ‘half-caste’ women to marry non-Aboriginal men.[59]
Aboriginal men who did have relationships with white women were subject to violent beatings by white men. Some are even now uncomfortable about how they might be judged. The guilt associated with these relationships is so strong that men fear being criticised. Many accounts of personal relationships and conflict, though spoken about openly, were specified as not to be made public. One man spoke of his ‘best friend’ as a white woman he was unable to get permission to marry.
Peter Costello experienced beatings motivated by racial discrimination and sexual jealousy; a beating he received from American soldiers left him with a broken jaw and ribs.[60] An Italian farmer he worked for agreed to Peter marrying his daughter, but he shied away from marrying a white woman: ‘I was shy, you know, shy to come near because of racial, heavy racial … She had it in mind too, but I wasn’t ready.’[61] Claiming poverty, he left.
Marriage is not only about partnership but one’s place within a community. Where communities are divided, the bond of marriage challenges that division. In some cases spouses are accepted within closed communities but in times of conflict the couple may just as easily be isolated and excluded.