Camp Cummeragunja

Recognising the validity of comparisons of Nazi persecution of Jews with the institutional abuse of Aboriginal people.

• Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that this piece contains images of people who have died.

On 6 December in 1938, Aboriginal activist William Cooper led members of the Aborigines Advancement League (the League) on a walk from Footscray into Melbourne city. Prompted by the Kristallnacht pogroms in Germany weeks earlier, they presented the German Consulate with a petition condemning the German Nazi Government’s persecution of Jewish people. Three months later Cooper’s fellow League founder Jack Patten addressed residents of the New South Wales Government—run Aboriginal Reserve, Cummeragunja. During his address, Patten warned against the introduction of governmental policies similar to those of Nazi Germany. Seventy years later such “Reserves” are referred to by some Aboriginal elders as ‘concentration camps’. But in 1939, how did Cummeragunja resemble Hitler’s camps? How had it reached such a point? And how did the Aboriginal residents living there finally react?

William Cooper, image from
http://aiatsis.gov.au/exhibitions/aboriginal-natives-shall-not-be-counted

Cummeragunja was born out of the creation of the New South Wales Aborigines’ Protection Board (The Board) in 1883 and the grant of 1800 acres of their own land, to be used by Aboriginal people to create a self—supporting community. Over the two decades, the reserve was filled by former residents of the privately run Maloga Mission. It also welcomed refugees from the south—eastern Victorian Reserve Coranderrk, who were escaping Victorian Government assimilation policies expelling so—called ‘half—castes’ from official reserves. For an idyllic but short period, Cummeragunja grew to become a successful station with “flourishing wheat fields” worked by families “proud of [their] homes...church and...school.” By 1908 it was a thriving community of 394 mostly Yorta Yorta and Bangerang Aboriginal people. However, policy changes in 1909 by the New South Wales Government soon put an end to that. 

The policy forced ‘half—castes’ off Reserves and into largely unpaid work in private homes as domestic servants and labourers. It was to be the beginning of the end for Cummeragunja. The changes saw Aboriginal freedom of movement severely curtailed, and the Board given broad powers over the Reserve’s finances — and children. By the mid—thirties there were just 137 residents remaining. It was in this environment that the League “declared war on the New South Wales [Board and] forced a government inquiry...in [late] 1937”. When the inquiry stalled, League members toured New South Wales collecting evidence against the Board. At the end of November in 1938, Cooper made a complaint to the Board regarding the mismanagement of Cummeragunja and listed matters such as the provision of inedible meat supplies, overcrowding and appalling sanitation. It was in the days following his complaint that Cooper led the League to the German Consulate to present their petition condemning the actions of Nazis in Germany. The Consulate did not accept the petition and the Board never replied to Cooper’s complaints. 

Continuing the tour of New South Wales, on 3 February Jack Patten finally arrived at Cummeragunja and what he witnessed lead him to address the residents in no uncertain terms. Patten described potential consequences for them that closely resembled the actions taken by a Nazi government thousands of miles away. He warned them that “the Board planned to create a ‘closed compound’, take control of their earnings and remove their children to institutions.” The residents believed him but before he could finish, Patten was arrested and charged with ‘inciting Aborigines to leave their reserve’. In a blunt telegram to New South Wales Premier Bertram Stevens, Patten advised:

ABORIGINAL MEN WOMEN LEAVING RESERVE CUMMER—GUNJA CAUSE INTIMIDATION STARVATION VICTIM—ISATION DEMAND INQUIRY IMMEDIATELY...PATEN(sic)

Up to 200 residents walked off Cummeragunja that day, crossing the Murray River to camp on the Victorian side at Barmah. Cooper’s follow-up letter to Premier Stevens a fortnight later demonstrated that he had made the connection between the treatment of Australian Aboriginals on government—run reserves and that of Jews in Nazi—run Germany. “We aborigines are not agitators...We are not an enemy people, and we are not in Nazi concentration camps. Why should we be treated as though we were?” Cooper had witnessed the treatment of his people that he felt dangerously resembled that of the Jews in the lead-up to World War Two.

Cooper could not have imagined Hitler’s impending Final Solution ‒ no one could have ‒ but when Australia declared war on Germany, the prospect of Aboriginal people being sent to fight Nazis greatly dismayed Cooper. According to Bain Atwood in the documentary First Australians, Cooper strongly identified with the persecution suffered by the Jewish and other racial minorities, and believed that if Australia was “going to honestly fight Hitler...” then Aboriginal people should be granted citizenship rights. It was almost another twenty years before Aboriginal people were to be even counted in the Australian census. When Patten warned the Cummergunja residents of changes that he believed would further entrench already dismal conditions, he was speaking from the experience of a man that had been one of the first in the world to protest the treatment of Jews under the German Nazi regime. Decades later, Aboriginal activist, Gary Foley would describe the New South Wales Koori population as living “forcibly on the concentration camps under the old apartheid system” while Victorian Aboriginal elder Uncle Col Walker referred to the use of the word Reserve as “dirty ‒ that was no more than concentration camps.”

To understand the living conditions endured by the Aboriginal internees at Cummeragunja by 1939 is to acknowledge sixty years of government interventionist policies that had forcibly corralled hundreds of Aboriginal people onto such reserves, with every aspect of their lives controlled by white authorities. It is unsurprising then, that leaders of Aboriginal right’s movements see the resemblance between Nazi persecution of Jews and that of their own people in their own land. 

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