‘What’s this about a new mission?’: Assimilation, resistance and the Morwell transit village

This article demonstrates the destructive intent of assimilation policies through attempts at forced movement into artificially created ‘communities’, such as the Morwell transit village in Victoria, Australia, in the 1960s. It argues that the resistance by Indigenous people to forced assimilation was strong, and that the challenges that they, and their supporters, made to assimilation and housing policies, were effective in contesting attempts to disconnect Indigenous people from their land. In June 1965, the Victorian Aborigines Welfare Board (the Board) was offered a 15-year lease on 4 acres of swampy land on the outskirts of Morwell, in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley. The site was wedged between the railway line and the busy Princes Highway, prone to flooding, and zoned for industrial use.1 The Board planned to use the site to develop a ‘transit village’, in order to ‘bring to Morwell all the aborigines [sic] now living at Lake Tyers’.2 This announcement drew condemnation from Aboriginal leader Doug Nicholls. In a statement on behalf of the Aborigines Advancement League, Nicholls attacked the ‘setting up of a new fringe settlement’ in Morwell, suggesting the plan was a ‘continuation of the Government’s policy of arbitrarily acquiring land and placing Aboriginal families thereon in areas which are alien to them’. Nicholls challenged the government’s approach to assimilation, 1 National Archives of Australia (hereafter NAA), B357, 77; Fletcher, Chesters and Drysdale, ‘Past, Present, Future’, 22. 2 ‘Deadlock on Plan to Settle Aborigines’, Morwell Advertiser, 17 May 1965, 1. ABORIGINAL HISTORY VOL 43 2019 94 declaring that no government or person had the right to say that Aboriginal people ‘must assimilate and live in a particular area’.3 Nicholls’s protests – and those of other Aboriginal leaders and activist groups – against the Morwell transit village were part of the broader and longer campaign by Aboriginal people to stop the closure of the last remaining Aboriginal reserve in Victoria, at Lake Tyers. By the end of 1965 the Morwell transit village scheme had been abandoned by the Board, and the threat posed to Lake Tyers was defeated in part due to their protests. This article provides a detailed examination of the short-lived Morwell transit village scheme. This research contributes to the examination of the longer history of attempts to dispossess and control Aboriginal people in Victoria through missions, reserves and housing programs. Penny Edmonds has examined the colonial construction of urban spaces as ‘ordered and civilised’ where Aboriginal people were subjected to a range of ‘civilising’ influences.4 The reordering of space under the hand of missionaries at Ebenezer and Ramahyuck as examined by Jane Lydon and Bain Attwood respectively shows the importance invested in controlling and managing spaces with the aim of affecting the behaviour of Aboriginal people.5 In particular, this article examines the intended assimilatory effects of transitional housing settlements informed by the motivation of government to disrupt Aboriginal communities and connection to land. Historians Jo Woolmington and Heather Goodall have interrogated the intended assimilatory effect of Aboriginal housing programs in New South Wales, and Corrine Manning has examined the spatial politics at work in transitional housing settlements in Victoria in the postwar era.6 These scholars have shown how the intended educative and transformative influence of housing was key to assimilation policies in the mid-twentieth century. As the last attempt of the Victorian Government to develop an overtly assimilationist transitional housing program, the Morwell transit village scheme provides an insight into how government aimed to use highly controlled housing settlements to further their assimilationist aims. The ongoing campaign to save Lake Tyers, which has been detailed elsewhere, was part of the broader movement of Aboriginal activism: within this story, the fight against the Morwell transit village demonstrates the complexity of grassroots resistance and political activism against government policies of assimilation in Victoria.7 3 Doug Nicholls, ‘Statement on Aboriginal Affairs by Mr Rylah’, 1 April 1965, Council for Aboriginal Rights (hereafter CAR) Papers, State Library Victoria (hereafter SLV), MS12913, Box 3/7, emphasis in original. 4 Edmonds, ‘Intimate, Urbanising Frontier’, 129–54. 5 Lydon, Fantastic Dreaming, 100–18; Attwood, Making of the Aborigines. 6 Woolmington, ‘The “Assimilation” Years’, 25–37; Goodall, ‘Assimilation Beings in the Home’, 75–101; Manning, ‘A Helping White Hand’, 193–208; Manning, ‘Victoria’s Transitional Aboriginal Housing Policy’, 221–36. 7 See Attwood, Rights for Aborigines; Broome, Aboriginal Victorians, 194–99, 217–57; Taffe, ‘Fighting for Lake Tyers’. The publicity surrounding protests both internationally and within Australia resulted in issues of race becoming more prominent in the public consciousness. Groups such as the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines ensured the dissemination of ideas and strategies for Aboriginal activists and their supporters. The Wave Hill walk-off, the Yirrkala petition and the Freedom Rides were well-publicised symbols of Aboriginal resistance, see Chesterman and Galligan, Citizens without Rights.