From The Enigmatic Mister Deakin (Judith Brett, 2017) pp120-3
Deakin’s other significant legislative initiative during 1886 was to sponsor the Aboriginal Protection Amendment Act, requested by the Board for the Protection of Aborigines. The 1869 Aboriginal Protection Act, which gave the board wide-ranging powers over the lives of Aboriginal people, defined Aborigines in terms of community affiliation rather than race. The 1886 amendment differentiated between the treatment of people of full and mixed Aboriginal descent, and was the first piece of Australian legislation to use race as its operative criterion. Known as the Half-Caste Act, it removed people of mixed descent from the reserves with the intention, he told the parliament, ‘of making the half-castes useful members of society, and gradually relieving the State of the cost of their maintenance’.
This had terrible consequences for Victoria’s indigenous people, breaking up families and kinship groups on racial criteria that they themselves did not observe, and was the beginning of child abductions by the state. It also deprived the reserves of the workers they needed to become self-sufficient farming communities. A deputation from Coranderrk, a reserve for Aborigines near Healesville, led by the remarkable Aboriginal elder William Barak, persuaded Deakin to take out some of the more punitive clauses, but he did not abolish the board’s authority over the reserves’ inhabitants as they requested.49
Deakin was not unsympathetic to the claims of the remnant of Victoria’s Aboriginal population. As premier, Graham Berry had always given a sympathetic hearing to their grievances against the board’s petty tyranny, and Deakin followed suit. In 1882 he asked questions in parliament about the severity of a sentence on the Coranderrk resident Thomas Bamfield, whom the board regarded as a troublemaker. Later, when he was chief secretary and the board, supported by the local settlers, proposed to give the Framlingham reserve near Warrnambool to the Council of Agricultural Education, Deakin granted a request from the local member, John Murray, that ‘out of the millions of acres that had been taken from the blacks of the western districts – including some of the best land in Australia – the remaining blacks should be allowed some 500 or 600 of very inferior land.’
But Deakin was not a fighter, and he had no emotional capacity for lost causes, no matter how just. Nor did he ever question the legitimacy of the land grab on which white settlement was based. Along with the other goldrush immigrants, William and Sarah Deakin had arrived in Victoria after the pastoral invasion. The land was already taken and the chief imperative was its productive development.
Deakin accepted the consensus view that Aborigines were doomed to extinction as a separate race. The key issue for the Half-Caste Act was government expenditure. It would, Deakin told the parliament, enable the state to ‘get rid of the maintenance of the half-castes and quarter castes’. Asked if they were to merge into the general population, Deakin replied: ‘That was the intention.’52 The legislation was rushed through in the last sitting days of 1886 and Deakin made no mention of it in his notes on the year’s events. As the historian Patrick Wolfe has observed, ‘White people’s intentions did not need to be consciously hostile for their actions to have devastating consequences.“
Deakin turned thirty in August 1886 and marked the occasion with an elegiac poem whose theme was to be repeated many times in the years to come:
My youth has gone and with my youth much more
Glances & dreams & visions – there were stars
Crowning the world of night – beyond life’s bars
Souls set sail on a sea without a shore.”
It is hard to know how to read this mood, though he may well have been feeling the weight of his family responsibilities. His second child, Stella, was born on 3 June 1886, and Deakin’s cousin William Bill was building the growing family a fine free-standing, two-storey house on the block in South Yarra that Deakin’s father had purchased in 1882. Deakin was always conscious of the material sacrifice Pattie had made in marrying him, and the house was much more like the Brownes’ handsome house in Wellington Parade than his own parents’ single-storey dwelling. They called the Walsh Street house Llanarth, after Sarah Deakin’s birthplace. The Deakin coat of arms was in the stained-glass window above the front door, and a window of ivy and stars on the main stairs celebrated their two daughters.
Choices had limited his life’s horizons – they always do – but they had also brought achievements. On New Year’s Eve he summed up 1886 as ‘a successful year publicly – still rising higher and higher. Contemplating the inevitability of a public fall, he warned himself not to become too attached to success and assured himself that its loss would not bother him: ‘Secure in my confidence in my principles I shall not be subject to suffering or injured by apparent failure and misfortune.‘ As the entry goes on, it becomes a rambling prayer of gratitude to the Light for his success and dedication to its continuing service: ‘to realise the Light to see clearly by it, to walk by it, trust it and spread its radiance through my life and thought.“
Tgk1946's Blog 