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Memory and marginalisation--aboriginality and education in the assimilation era.

Article Excerpt
In the mid-twentieth century many Aboriginal Australians moved to live in Australian cities in search of life opportunities that were not available to them in rural areas. This article explores the life history narratives of three Indigenous people who were brought to live in Sydney as children during this period. It considers the processes by which, in spite of the dominant policy position of assimilation at the time, they were alienated from the school education system and failed to make the most of their talents. None of them could recognise themselves in the meritocratic narratives held up to them. In addition, each experienced obligations to family and/or to home country that were incompatible with the rhythms of life associated with school education.

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In the period after the end of World War II most Aboriginal people living in rural areas in New South Wales faced situations of brooding and intractable racial conflict. Most were excluded from the ambit of the postwar social democratic settlement, denied the welfare entitlements enjoyed by other Australians and lived as beleaguered minorities on the fringes of redneck towns. In spite of the formal state policy of assimilation, it was common practice for Aboriginal children to be excluded from NSW schools. The Teachers' Handbook in the 1950s and 1960s stated that a principal could recommend to the Department of Education that such action be taken where: there are circumstances in the home conditions of Aborigine children, whose enrolment is sought which justify refusal or deferment of enrolment or if he is aware that substantial opposition to such enrolment exists in the local community (quoted in Fletcher, 1989, p. 192). The 30 years after 1945 saw the migration of large numbers of Indigenous people from the bush to large towns and cities, particularly with the introduction of a new Aboriginal housing program by the NSW Housing Commission in 1969 (Morgan, 1999, 2000). Many were pulled by the opportunities for better-paid employment and the excitement of city life. Others were pushed to population centres by rural racism, the decline in agricultural and pastoral employment, and the experience of persecution by police and welfare authorities. Many moved to escape from the stigma and surveillance that blighted their lives and to pursue opportunities for social mobility that were not available to them in the bush. This article presents life history case studies of three people I interviewed in the 1990s, whose parents moved them to Sydney when they were children in the 1950s and 1960s. It explores their memories of schooling and the ways in which they have made sense, with hindsight, of their departure from formal education before they could make full use of their talents.

Oral history has had considerable appeal to those working in Aboriginal studies. Several authors have compiled collections of transcribed oral narratives (Gilbert, 1977; Rintoul, 1993; Tatz & McConnochie, 1975). Such narratives connect with oral traditions and contemporary yarning cultures (Sabbioni, 1996), and usually present different versions of events to those contained in official histories. But it is important to move beyond the empiricist frame that characterises much oral history and to recognise the multiple influences on oral testimony. Unlike much autobiographical writing, life history transcripts often contain contradictions and fragmented accounts. As Bloom (1998) argues, interviewees may express a number of different identity positions in their conversations with researchers. This should not be considered a 'problem', but rather a symptom of the complex and multi-faceted nature of subjectivity. While, for my subjects, Aboriginality was a key identity position, the registers of both gender and class appeared in their accounts.

The methodological approach adopted here is sociobiographical (Chamberlayne, Rustin & Wengraf, 2002). The narratives represented are the product of single interviews and involve individual biographical reflection (albeit relational reflection, see Mason, 2004), and the exercise of sociological imagination, in which interviewees grapple with the social dimensions of individual experience (Wright Mills, 1959). The process of remembering and speaking of the past is, like all history writing, shaped by contemporary concerns and social processes (including collective/communal influences). Biographical narratives are often teleological. They throw into sharp relief those events and aspects of life which stand in contrast to, or appear to have determined, contemporary social situations. Many oral historians, in the pursuit of the empirical truth, pay little attention to the subjective, cultural and political processes involved both in recalling/speaking of the past and in writing accounts based on those recollections. Both oral testimony and the resultant written history are culturally encoded....

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