IND/Segregation on Reserves and Missions

Reserves and Missions have been established and abandoned for the duration of Australia's colonised history. The drive to ‘protect’ Indigenous people around the turn of the twentieth century supported the establishment of more Government reserves, homes and other institutions. Conditions were often harsh, sometimes abusive. Enforced by legislation, Indigenous lives were subject to poor living conditions and extreme bureaucratic control.

During the 1930s Depression, the aims of the Protection policy in New South Wales changed “as the government capitulated to the demands of rural whites for segregation” (McGrath, 1995, p. 59). Movement onto reserves was at its height in the 1930s when “whole communities” of Indigenous people were “moved hundreds of miles by cattle truck and dumped on the Protection Board Stations at Menindee, Brewarrina, Toomela and Burnt Bridge” (McGrath, 1995, p. 36).

At the same time, Aboriginal people in New South Wales were refused unemployment benefits during the Depression years under a policy that they must prove they had “performed a white man’s work” when applying for unemployment benefits, a clause which was used to exclude Indigenous people from payments (McGrath, 1995, p. 36). Yet in Victoria Indigenous people continued to receive unemployment benefits. This example displays one of the ways that Indigenous people were treated differently in different government jurisdictions.

While missions and reserves were often sites of control and attempted assimilation, they were also places of survival and resistance, and many have become important places for Indigenous communities today (Lydon, 2010).

You can look at maps showing the location of missions across Australia:

You can learn more about the Missions and Reserves in Victoria, at the ABC site ‘Mission Voices’ which includes historical text and oral histories:

This includes, for example, Cummeragunja, which was actually in NSW, right on the banks of the Murray, where the first mission ‘walk off’ took place in 1939:

Or Coranderrk, near Melbourne, the site of many protests:

You can learn more about NSW missions and reserves on the AIATSIS website:

You can learn more about Queensland missions and reserves on the AIATSIS website: