The Aborigines Inland Mission was founded by Retta Dixon in 1905 in New South Wales, and began work in the Northern Territory in the 1930s. AIM custody of ‘half-caste’ children in Darwin dates from early in World War II, when the Administration (whose Chief Protector 1927–39 had despised all mission efforts) sought mission assistance in looking after just under two hundred children who had by then become the government’s responsibility.

That responsibility stretched back to the eve of the First World War, when homes for children of mixed descent had been established in Darwin and Alice Springs. In Darwin, the focus of Cummings’s study, the ‘Half-caste Home’, had first (1912–24) been within Kahlin compound, then in a nearby street until, in 1939, it was transferred several miles away to Bagot reserve, the new site of the Compound for Aborigines. The purpose of the ‘Home’ had been to let children of mixed descent fulfil their supposed genetic destiny, to escape the influence of the Top End’s ‘full blood’ Aboriginal culture. Child inmates had been prevented from mixing with the nearby ‘full bloods’ at all three sites.

As well as the AIM, Missions of three denominations (Roman Catholic, Methodist, and Church of England) had begun to stake claims over these children’s souls and, when Japanese aggression forced the closure of Bagot by 1942, church help became vital to government custodial efforts. The AIM’s Amelia Shankleton shared care of those evacuated to Balaklava in South Australia. At war’s end, she and eighteen families found themselves back at Bagot. There, ‘the agents and counter-attractions of Satan are many’, she wrote in 1946.

By this time the ‘half-caste’ population about whom such fears could be expressed included three generations who had been under the Administration’s close supervision. Among them, women seem to have predominated, as boys could more easily escape institutional life by getting work on cattle stations. Cummings’s account of the Retta Dixon Home, established within Bagot Reserve in 1947, has more of interest to say about the lives that women made, as girls within the Home, then as wives and mothers beyond it but within its shadow, until its closure in 1979. What emerges is a subtle study of her own milieu of interrelated families, linked by their institutional heritage, a people whose marginality to Top End society is multiple: as women, as ‘half-castes’, and as (at least nominal) Christians.

Aboriginal women’s sexual availability had been an essential feature of colonial frontiers where, typically, men outnumbered women. As Cummings relates, the suggestion that some Protectors be women had been discussed in the 1930s but never given a try because the ‘protection of Aboriginal women from seduction and disease was considered secondary to the protection and security of the white women who would have been employed to deal with the situation’.

The continuing vulnerability of women is evident in Cummings’s account. In 1936, it became possible for ‘half-castes’ to be exempt from the Aboriginal Ordinance. One way to get exemption was to marry a White, an option open to half-caste women, but practically closed to their brothers. Even after 1953, when all ‘half-castes’ became exempt, marriage to a White man continued to be a ‘half-caste’ girl’s way out of the milieu whose centre was, by then, the Retta Dixon Home. Cummings relates that her own recourse to this strategy placed her in an ‘often violent marriage’ so that ‘I returned to the Retta Dixon Home seeking, not refuge, but simply solace’. As she remarks, the chronic shortage of housing in post-war Darwin also made it harder to move out from under the Home’s shadow.

The functions performed by the Home and its predecessors for Top End society therefore need to be understood against this background of a sexual ecology and gender politics whose characteristic product became the matrifocal, or even completely fatherless, family. Though ‘child theft’ remained a power of the state, it appears that many ‘half-caste’ parents, their own lives subject to continuing official scrutiny, thought it best to allow some or all of their children to be brought up in the Home. In this way the Home was not simply an instrument of state and church, it was also a resource internalised (at times fearfully and uncomfortably) into the Top End Aboriginal milieu.

The Home seems to have been both sanctuary for the vulnerable Aboriginal woman and yet, also, the school and guarantor of that vulnerability in the next generation. When legislation of 1953 made ‘half-castes’ no longer subject to Administration oversight, Cummings reports that ‘the cycle of dependency, kin and other social networks created in Kahlin Compound, the Half-Caste Home and the Retta Dixon Home remained untouched ...’ By 1973, though the numbers cared for had declined, the core clientèle of the Retta Dixon Home were second and third generations of Aboriginal children cared for by the AIM.

Cummings’s many potted biographies of fellow inmates and her own recollections give us a vivid sense of the atmosphere and order of the Home in the 1950s and 1960s. We read of Lorna Nelson’s terror when she retaliated against a missionary who beat her with a strap. Absconding, she visited her relatives who were ‘alarmed ... because when children from the Home turned up, it ... meant the possibility of trouble for the relatives, who in order to protect themselves generally took the child back to the Home’.

Across the fence was Bagot Reserve, home to hundreds of ‘full bloods’ many of them young men keen to hop over and explore sexual opportunities in the girl’s dormitory, whence ‘pandemonium would break out and the whole group (of girls) would start screaming’. This response seems to have been a mixture of both girlish pudeur and approved behaviour, for ‘going to church, prayer meetings and other religious practices were part of our upbringing’, its legacy a common adherence to Christian principles among ex-inmates now. Whereas for boys there was basketball and Australian Rules football, girls could join the Girls’ Life Brigade, with its uniforms, ranks, badges of merit, competitions, and weekend camps with outsiders.

Where was Christian family life in all this? Cummings argues that fellowship among the children was promoted by the dormitory system. There had been dormitories since the Half-caste Home’s 1924 move to Schultze Crescent, so the sense of being one among a mass of children had become part of the institution’s culture by the time the Retta Dixon Home opened. However, in 1953, the Home began to replace the dormitories with a cottage system, completing the change in 1961 in new premises about two kilometres from the first Bagot site. Cummings says that the family atmosphere within each of the eight six-bedroom cottages was pre-empted by the high turnover and inexperience of mission staff inclined to see Satan’s work in childish infractions of Home rules. Not knowing what was happening to children in other cottages also exacerbated all children’s insecurity, she reports.

Non-Aboriginal families from all States supported the work of the Home and similar institutions by fostering selected inmates. It was an honour ( though sometimes little more than a tribute to the paleness of one’s skin) to be selected to ‘go South’. To be left behind was to feel second-rate, institutional. Foster homes were generally more lenient and less saturated in Christian observance than the Home, though some girls returned to complain of exploitation and sexual harassment.

The Home fell increasingly into disfavour among Territory welfare workers, for its harshness, its amateurish staff, and its promotion of social isolation. At the closure of the Home in 1979, ex-inmates threw a party, a gesture that Cummings argues demonstrates that the Home’s ‘spirit of kinship’ had been propagated by the children rather than by the missionaries. For her the party’s magnanimity towards the invited officials and missionaries was somewhat ‘surreal’; her recent studies had made her aware of the grotesquely anti-Aboriginal assumptions grounding interventions into the mother-child relationship.

And yet, however incongruous the generous fellowship of the ex-­inmates’ party, one might argue that that event bespoke once again the unique culture created by so intimately aggressive a tradition of child and family welfare, a culture simultaneously of belonging and dependency. The resilience of that culture had been evident since at least 1953, when ‘half-castes’, legally no longer beholden to the Administration, had not found it easy to let go of the paternalistic hand extended to them by White officials and missionaries. The great strength of Barbara Cummings’s book is that its emotionally understated narrative makes sense of these moments of ambivalence towards the culture that has formed her.