Assimilation policy (Australia)

Assimilation policies in Australia were created by the government during the first three-quarters of the twentieth century and affected the rights and lives of the country’s Indigenous people. These policies, based on false notions of racial differences, limited where Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people could live and work. In many cases, the children of Indigenous and mixed-race families were removed from their homes and sent to boarding schools or foster care to assimilate them into Western culture. The policies created what came to be known as the Stolen Generations and caused financial and educational deficits among First Nations people of Australia. Assimilation policies were discontinued in the 1960s and early 1970s and reparations were paid to many affected by them.

Background

When ships from Great Britain arrived in Australia in 1788, between 300,000 and one million First Nations people lived on the continent. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people had centuries of established culture and spoke an estimated 250 languages. During the late eighteenth century, Great Britain transported approximately 162,000 prisoners to the Botany Bay colony that it established in Australia’s New South Wales. During the mid-1800s, these Europeans were joined by thousands more when gold was discovered. In addition to the Europeans, thousands of Chinese people also arrived and established towns and cities. By 1901, the Commonwealth of Australia was formed.

However, the arrival of all these people from outside Australia had a devastating effect on its Aboriginal people. European and other settlers brought diseases to which the Indigenous people had no immunity. Thousands died of smallpox, influenza, measles, and other diseases carried by the new arrivals. In addition, brutal massacres occurred as colonists sought land and other resources, sometimes taking it by force. During the 1800s, numerous efforts were made to address what became known to many non-Native Australians as the “Aboriginal problem.”

From the 1820s to 1830s, reserves or reservations were established by the colonial government through Aboriginal protection policies. In theory, these policies were to protect the Indigenous Australians from mistreatment by separating them from the settlers. However, when the Indigenous population largely refused to relocate from their ancestral lands to the reserves, force was applied to gain compliance. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander populations were attacked, and their food or water sources were poisoned to force them from areas where they were not wanted. According to estimates, more than 170 Indigenous people living in eastern Australia between the 1790s and 1870s were massacred.

Aboriginal people were often mistreated or abused when working with or for Europeans. They could do very little about this because few, if any, penalties existed for flogging or otherwise assaulting them. They were also underpaid, not allowed to vote, and subjected to strict segregation rules, some of which remained in effect until the 1960s.

Overview

Beginning in the 1930s, the policies to address the “Aboriginal problem” were refocused on assimilating the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander populations into a European lifestyle. The goal was to eradicate the language, culture, religion, and other practices of the Aboriginal people and replace them with English culture and Christianity. These policies were promoted to better the lives of the Indigenous population but were undertaken without their input or approval. Ultimately, the government intended to blend the Aboriginal people into the Western culture so thoroughly that the Indigenous population would be indistinguishable from the people from other parts of the world. Many viewed this as a benefit to the Aboriginal people, whose numbers were in great decline because of European illnesses and attacks on their villages and ancestral lands.

Beginning as early as 1869, Australian officials attempted to speed up this assimilation process by “civilizing” mixed-race children who were part Aboriginal and part White. They thought that these children could be educated and trained to work like White people if they abandoned their Aboriginal ways of living. This was suggested to protect them when the Aboriginal population eventually became extinct, as many assumed it would. Over the next several decades, numerous laws were passed in different parts of Australia authorizing various government officials to remove both mixed-race and Aboriginal children from their families.

For example, The Native Administration Act 1936 gave the Commissioner of Native Affairs nearly complete control over the Aboriginal and mixed-race population in Western Australia. This commissioner had the authority to remove any Aboriginal child from their parents without justification. Other officials in other parts of the country held similar powers.

Officials used this authority to remove tens of thousands of children as young as infants from their parents. Many children were taken to boarding schools, often called missions, while others were placed in foster homes. Most of the boys were trained as agricultural workers, while the girls were taught to be domestic household help. It is uncertain how many children were removed from their homes as part of these assimilation policies, but it is estimated that at least one-hundred thousand children were taken from their homes between the late 1880s and the 1970s. They became known as the “Stolen Generations.”

Assimilation policies began to decline in the 1960s and ended completely in the early 1970s. However, the effects continued to linger into the twenty-first century. Information gathered by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) indicated that those removed from their homes by assimilation policies lost most connections with their ancestral heritage. They often lost any connection or claim to ancestral land and were unable to participate in religious and cultural rites that are important to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander populations. In many cases, their rights to their ancestral heritage were permanently lost. Studies determined that those removed due to assimilation policies were more likely to have missed at least some aspects of education, more prone to mental and emotional health problems such as depression, and more likely to have encounters with law enforcement.

In the late twentieth century, all Australian state and territory governments and the Commonwealth government apologized to the affected populations. Resources were provided to assist with family reunification and help those affected regain the lost language and cultural and religious aspects of their heritage. In 2021, an $800 million program to help restore what was taken from Aboriginal populations through assimilation policies was announced. It included a one-time payment of $60,000 to those affected by the policies. Several states and territories also introduced their own reparation schemes. Victoria launched a Stolen Generations Reparations Package in 2022, offering up to $100,000 to eligible survivors along with access to healing programs and official apologies.

Despite these efforts, a 2025 report titled Are You Waiting for Us to Die? revealed that only 6 percent of the recommendations from the 1997 Bringing Them Home report had been fully implemented. In response, the Healing Foundation called for a national healing package to ensure consistent, long-term solutions across all regions of Australia.

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