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Tales from the working life of Des Donley

November 5, 2003 - The following summarises the hard and eventful early years and working life of Melrose Desmond (Des) Donley who is now retired and lives at Summerland Point in NSW. Des has kindly made his written recollections available to the Guardian and has been interviewed by on several occasions.

Stolen Wages, Stolen Generations, Stolen Lives

Queensland Council of Unions Stolen Wages Rally August 8 2003

Des Donley was born in a Salvation Army home in Breakfast Creek -- a suburb of Brisbane — in 1914. In many ways, Des' life has been typical of his generation. He was given only a rudimentary formal education. He worked at a series of hard and often tedious jobs on the farms and in the forests of Queensland before applying his carpentry skills on building sites, both big and small, in places as far away as Sydney and Darwin.

His education and working life were characterised by neglect on the part of the authorities and the enforcement of codes of behaviour that permitted ruthless exploitation. Those years were also punctuated by efforts at resistance — spontaneous ones in the early days and, later, with conscious activity in his union and as a member of the Communist Party of Australia on building sites.

However, in a number of significant ways Des is not typical. For a start he has made several written accounts of his experiences. He is also a survivor of the genocidal policies of various state and federal governments, carried on over decades, which were designed to "assimilate" Aboriginal people biologically into the broader population and to destroy them culturally. The victims of this shameful era are now known as the Stolen Generations. Des is one of the many carrying painful memories:

"I didn't know anything about my parents. It's funny that it's only a few years ago I knew that I really had parents and whether my mother was still alive. But I didn't know anything about her or couldn't find out about her all through my life up to when I was about 70 years of age.

"She was still alive but I didn't know anything about her. I got on the right path about her and found out where some of the relativeswere and went down and they said she was in a nursing home in Taringa. I went to the nursing home but I didn't know she had married again and I didn't know her married name.

"That put me off. So I had to go through the whole rigmarole again to find out. She passed away just a couple of weeks before I did find out. I didn't know anything about my father. It was only through Lionel Murphy — when he put that Freedom of Information Act in place — that I had a chance to find out about relatives... My father got killed in the Second World War over in Europe...

"My background when you go back to it is Aboriginality. I wouldn't really know, perhaps my great-grandfather or grandmother would be three-quarter caste or full-blooded, I couldn't tell you. I was born quarter caste. That's why I was taken away..."

Des' older brother had already been adopted out. That might have been a lucky break. Des has had to read between the official lines of departmental documents to piece together the story of his origins. At every turn, it is a tale of "special treatment" for the Aboriginal mother and her "illegitimate" children:

"... the report about my mother was unwarranted. The authorities of those days were brutal in the way they handled your case and published it. This is what they said about my mother in distress, saying of my mother (whose name was Annie Georgina), 'she was a rather discontented kind of a girl in the home, ready to grumble at frivolous things'. Who wouldn't grumble if they had been treated like my mother?"

Des was put in a state home in Wooloowin — another Brisbane suburb. For a time he lived with a number of foster parents. Even in those days, the state would subsidise the costs for the children fostered out.

Des does not accuse any of the parents specifically of any ill treatment but he now feels exploited by the regime of chores they maintained. While in the care of Miss Machonie [from the age of six], one of these chores was to collect the "pot meat" for the chooks from the slaughterhouse in tins aboard his billycart:

"The pot meat consisted of the beast that had been slaughtered from the knees down, the stomach, the head after the brains were taken out. These were placed in a huge cast iron boiler and boiled for a long time. Then the fat was syphoned off and put into huge steel vats, then put into huge wooden casks to be taken away and made into soap and candles, etc. The remaining pot meat from the boiler was fed to the pigs, mixed with bran and pollard."

He remembers with bitter irony having sung Rule Britannia at school and, in particular, the verse that goes "Britons never, never, never shall be slaves". Instruction seemed limited to "learning how to add up, multiplication, divisions, and we learnt for history all about the kings and queens of various countries".

First encounter with religion

Of course, religion was a major influence on the lives of people. Des now feels that he and the other foster children were spruced up and sent to religious services and Sunday school as a public sign that they were being looked after. This was his first encounter with religious hypocrisy.

At church Des and the girls of his foster family would put the coins they had been given on the collection plate, as expected of them, while the congregation sang "dropping, dropping, hear the pennies fall every one for Jesus, he shall have them all."

"As kids we got curious. So we stayed back one day after church to see Jesus pick up the pennies — he didn't come, so the next Sunday we gammoned to put the pennies in the plate and went to the shops after."

There the children spent the money on boiled lollies, ice cream or broken biscuits, instead. On one occasion, they bought cigarettes and went to the cinema.

This relatively carefree period came to an end. Still a young boy, he was delivered into the care of the Salvation Army once more. The treatment of the "state boys" at the Salvation Army home at Indooroopilly was appalling.

Their diet was mostly bread with jam or golden syrup ("cockies' joy") washed down with skim milk. Fatty mutton flaps and corned silverside, and bland tapioca and macaroni dishes also featured, as did a regular dosing with castor oil. The Officers, who ate at a table near the boys, would dine on far more appetising fare.

The lads, some as young as seven or eight, slept in a dormitory that was too far away from the toilet, so a kerosene tin was placed at one end of the sleeping quarters. The boys were terrified that any mishaps using the tin (prayers and lights out were at 7.30pm) would be severely punished. They were monitored during the night and prevented from sleeping on their front — a puritanical precaution against "impure thoughts".

Arbitrary rules and brutality

While all the boys were caned for minor transgressions, Des still recalls the severity of the discipline meted out to one lad in particular:

"There was an Aboriginal lad who came from the home. His name was Billy. They hated him at the home, teachers hated him at school, and he was continually being caned by the headmaster. You could hear him yelling at the top of his voice to Billy. He would have the door closed ... the next thing Billy would pick up the first thing and throw it at the teacher, then run away from school and the home.

"The Headmaster would come into the classroom and ask us who were good runners. A lot of us would put up our hands, he would say you and you and you and we would take off after Billy. We had no intention of catching him, as soon as we got over the hill out of sight from the school, we would sit down and let Billy go his hardest. They would send the Police out after him and after a few days, they would return him to the home."

Billy would then be locked up in the shower block for up to two weeks. Salvation Army Officers used barbed wire to stop up possible escape routes. One day, the campaign against the boy went too far. Billy had allegedly made remarks about two Officers making love. He was given a public flogging:

"So Billy was told to take off his clothes and lay across the chair. Adjutant Rogan started to weigh into him with the cane, hitting him from the shoulders to the bum and we had to stand there amazed, say nothing or do nothing. We were told by the adjutant if any one of us made a similar remark, we would get the same treatment."

The Adjutant and his wife were transferred to New Zealand after this incident but the atmosphere brought about by arbitrary rules and heavy punishment remained. None of the lads were shown affection or counselled about the many obstacles facing a ward of the state in those tough times.

In fact, life at the home was highly militarised and clearly designed to prepare the boys for a lifetime of heavy, unquestioning toil. Groups of laughing children were broken up in case they were telling dirty jokes. An annual picnic — organised by the state automobile association — provided an infrequent break to the routine of chores and classes.

One of Des' duties brought him into contact with an Aboriginal laundry maid, a woman who, for some reason, didn't have the status that other adults had:

"The Aboriginal woman had perspiration simply running off her. Her dinner was brought into the laundry and she had to stand up and eat. She had no dinner break like the officers, who could sit around and have a chat. The Aboriginal woman wasn't allowed to sit at the table.

"In the afternoon I would help to take the sheets and pillowslips off the line, fold them and put them through a big wooden mangle. It was my job to turn the mangle while the Aboriginal woman fed them through and when they came out the other side you would think they had been ironed. It was hard yakka for a kid."

The exertion required by this task would pale beside some of the responsibilities soon to fall onto Des' shoulders. The state government had a policy of placing girls into households as domestics and boys onto farms.

Most of us would probably not look back and feel that whole periods in our lives were defined entirely by government policy. Then again, most of have not been subjected to the sort of ruthless intervention that Des Donley experienced in his young life as a ward of the State in Queensland in the first half of the last century.

When he was born in 1914, the various State and Federal governments already had a policy of removing Aboriginal children, including "half caste" children from their parents and placing them with foster parents or in what was euphemistically called a "home". These children are now known as the stolen generations.

As a consequence, Des spent the first 14 years of his life in the care of foster parents and, for the greater part, the Salvation Army home at Indooroopilly. The Queensland Government had another policy that meant that, at age 14, wards of the state would end their schooling and be put to work. Girls were usually sent to work as domestic help in private homes while the boys laboured on farms across the State.

Not exactly the Hilton

Des has vivid memories of this transition:

"The State Department had me prepared for the job. They issued me with a tin trunk, which I still have today after 60 odd years. In the trunk was a couple of pairs of blucher boots with hob nails in the soles to make them last longer (when I put them on I looked like puss in boots), four pairs of working shorts, a good suit (which I never wore out), two felt hats, four flannel shirts for work and a gaberdine coat.

"The boss was anxious to see what was in the tin .

"His agreement with the State Department, as well as the two shillings and sixpence a week and keep, included keeping me in clothes. He could see a couple of years he wouldn't have to supply me with any clothes."

The boss in this instance was Thomas Bell — the owner of a family-run mixed farm and dairy on the outskirts of Ipswich. An officer from the State Department delivered Des to him at the Ipswich Railway Station. The young "state lad" was then introduced to the hard work and rudimentary accommodation that had been reserved for him. Des can still describe the six by ten foot space (approximately 2 by 3 metres) at the rear of a wooden garage that he calls his "refurbished flat":

"The furniture was of a modern nature: a kerosene box with a hurricane lamp on it, the wardrobe consisted of three-inch [7.5cm] nails nailed into the studs to hang my clothes on. The flat was air-conditioned all year round. It consisted of half-inch gaps in the floor, the doors and shutters had gaps between them, and the locks were nails and a piece of wire.

"My mattress consisted of chaff bags filled with oaten hay and my pillow was a sugar bag stuffed with hay. No pillowslips, no sheets and my blankets were corn bags sewn together with a bagging needle.

"The hay used to poke through the hessian bags. I was rockin' 'n' rollin' long before Elvis Presley to stop the hay sticking into me hide. That would relieve it for the time being.

"To top this off, my mattress was put on an old wire framed bedstead that sagged in the middle so that you had to curl up like a black snake."

Other annoyances included the resident Red Back spiders and occasional visits from brown snakes! Des was bitten by red back once after it had crawled into a pair of pants that had fallen from his "wardrobe" onto the floor. He treated himself with iodine and sweated through the dangerous, uncomfortable episode.

Hard yakka

The day Des arrived he was put straight to work milking the cows and not given anything to eat until 9.30 that night.

He would have to become accustomed to this cycle of hard work and scant food. Occasionally he would try to steal some bread with jam or golden syrup from the downstairs kitchen before heading off to milk his share of the 60 cows on the property. Very occasionally, he got away with it.

On frosty mornings he would warm his chilblained feet on the patch of ground vacated by the reclining cows or even in a steaming cowpat! Des would be hard at work at 3.30 am while the household slept on.

The farmer's boys never faced the world without first having a cup of tea and something to eat. The younger son boarded at the Grammar School during the week. Both were bone lazy, which only aggravated the sense of injustice that Des felt even at the time.

After milking the cows and separating the skim milk from the butter, Des would scald all the dairy utensils and put them in the sun. Breakfast was cracked corn, some golden syrup or bread and dripping. Lunch was something similar washed down with billy tea. It was often taken in the hot fields where Des cemented reputation for being a hard worker:

"The boss got cunning when he could see I was doing well at ploughing. He would bring down a fresh pair of horses to plough with. They would go faster and more land was ploughed. I never thought at the time he had no consideration for me. I suppose he had the same idea as a general in the army: if they wipe out a thousand men, there are thousands to take their place.

"When I went to plough the only shade was fence posts. I had to sit in the open with my back against a post to eat lunch.

"Sometimes working in the paddocks, cutting thistles or digging lantana and you felt thirsty, you would drink anything, where the cows come to drink you would drink on the opposite side of the dam because they would shit and piss in it."

A day of ploughing, sowing, harvesting, weeding, scarifying or cutting oats, barley and wheat would be rounded off with the milking of the cows again. Work ended for the day at about 9 pm. This was the unbroken pattern of life every single day of the year.

Des carried out the full range of duties on the farm and faced up to the full range of hazards.

Ignorant of hazards

"Through my ignorance and being young and inexperienced, I used to do work that was dangerous to my health. I used to use the most dangerous of poisons, arsenic pentoxide, for poisoning prickly pear and lantana, and killing trees after they had been ringbarked. We would mix it, pour it into old tins or kettles, which would make it easier to pour. We would get it on our hands, sit down and have our lunch out in the open."

Des accepted all of this and even came to enjoy most aspects of the physicality of the tough life on the farm. One day, however, the disregard of the farm boss became too outrageous. The family went to town one day shortly after Des' 18th birthday, leaving all the work in the fields and the dairy to the young farmhand.

When they returned after midnight, Des had fallen asleep against the side of a cow that he was milking. Nobody offered to prepare any food for Des and the farmer even saw fit to joke about Des' predicament.

"I told the boss, in a good Australian term, he could stick his job up his arse." The next morning the farmer drove him to town to start out on a new life. Des was finally leaving behind the authority of the Queensland Government to tell him, as a ward of the state, where he must live and work.

There was never to be, however, a squaring of the accounts of what was owed to the young "state lad" for his four years of hard yakka.

"I felt so vulnerable. I faced the world on my own. I was like a bird who'd been caged up all its life, some one opens the cage door and it doesn't know what to do, where to go."

It is only during the last few years that Des has been able to talk about this period.

When he was first placed with Thomas Bell to work on his farm, Des was told that his paltry wages were being put in a trust fund held by the Queensland Government until his 18th birthday at which time he could withdraw the entire amount owing to him.

This was meant to be at the rate of six shillings (6/-) a week during the first year on the farm, then an additional 2/- a week in the second and third years. In his final year, Des was to be paid a further 5/- a week on top of all that. (1/- became 10 cents with the introduction of decimal currency — approximately 14% of basic wage at the time.)

"I approached the head of the State Department to find out who my mother was and where she might be. I received no information from Mr Smith — the head — who refused to see I got my wages."

According to information later obtained from the government, "Each child is, according to age, paid a small sum as weekly pocket money. The balance of the money is paid to the Department and deposited in a trust account for each child. When the child is discharged at the age of eighteen years he is entitled to draw by instalments one-fourth of the money held by the Department, the balance being paid to him when he reaches the age of twenty-one years."

(This also applied to girls, except that their wages were half that of boys at the age of 14, rising to two-thirds by the age of 17.)

Wages denied

"I was so ashamed to tell anybody about my experience, thinking they might think I was an idiot. But I had no say in the matter, having no guidance, I had nobody to advise me, as I never came into contact with the outside world."

Other approaches in later years were almost as humiliating. Des was told that no wages were ever paid to the department or that the records of such payments had been destroyed during the floods that occurred in Brisbane many years later. All the time, the expectation from official quarters was that Des could and should forget the whole thing.

Today, as a result of persistent campaigning, there is recognition from the Queensland Government that there is an unresolved matter of these "stolen wages". In 2002 they offered $4000 to some former labourers and $2000 to others in a take it or leave it deal. This has been rejected by most of the people abused by the system and used as slave labour in those years.

Des was not amongst those offered even that paltry payment. The Government knocked back his claim on the basis that his money was not held in trust under Aboriginal "protection" Acts but under different child protection legislation which also included white children!

The Government's offer only relates to those whose slavery and theft of wages was under Indigenous Acts — a matter of semantics as far as Des is concerned.

"I was a small baby when taken from my mother. I was taken because my mother was Aboriginal, but it's not like I had a choice which Act I was taken under."

After all a trust account is a trust account, regardless of which Act it was administered under.

The campaign continues while Des, on the verge of his 90th birthday, waits for sincere efforts on the part of the authorities to act with compassion and to close a disgraceful chapter in Australia's history.

Source: The Guardian (Australia)

Further information:

• Stolen Wages information and clippings

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