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Milroy, Jill --- "Book Review - Blood, Sweat and Welfare: A History of White Bosses and Aboriginal Pastoral Workers" [2003] IndigLawB 31; (2003) 5(24) Indigenous Law Bulletin 20


Book Review -

Blood, Sweat and Welfare: A History of White Bosses and Aboriginal Pastoral Workers

by Mary Anne Jebb

University of Western Australia Press, 2002

376p

RRP $34.95

reviewed by Jill Milroy

Blood, Sweat and Welfare is a study of black-white relations in the northern Kimberley over an extended period from 1903 to the 1970s. The initial British ‘exploration’ of the Kimberley for its potential economic value in 1837 was followed by speculative leasing and finally sustained pastoral ‘occupation’ (Jebb never uses the term ‘invasion’) from the 1880s. According to Jebb, the move into Ngarinyin country was not until 1903 due to the protection afforded by the natural barrier of the Northern Ranges.

The book is based on research Jebb conducted in the 1980s and 1990s as part of her PhD. It is a product of extensive archival research (some on police records) as well as significant oral history accounts. Blood, Sweat and Welfare presents us with an impressive array of Aboriginal elders. They are listed as ‘Storytellers and Key Characters’,[1] though they occasionally lose this status in the text, being relegated to the role of ‘informants’. This is a term that historians writing about Indigenous people need to consign to the archives.

The Storytellers provide the book its central narratives. These are powerful stories of struggle and survival, as well as details of relationships and events not part of the general documentary record. To me this is the essential value of the book, though the Aboriginal stories are not always the dominant discourse. Aboriginal voices often get lost when narratives are interrupted by the ‘academic argument’ and overwhelmed by the weight of archival information.

Blood, Sweat and Welfare provides a harrowing account of frontier violence and the climate of terror that extends right through to the 1940s. In the ‘Battle for the New Country’ in chapter three, the unrelenting role of police in ‘removing’ Aboriginal men from the area by mass arrests (often on the pretence of cattle theft or spearing), imprisonment, and even murder is well documented. It is this ‘removal’ of Aboriginal men that frees up the land for the pastoralists, and allows unrestricted access to, control over, and abuse of Aboriginal women and children. The pivotal and punitive role played by police is also the focus of the next chapter where Jebb discusses the ‘leprosy patrols’ by police, who swept through the north removing Aboriginal people suspected of having leprosy and isolating them in the Derby leprosarium. This was also a convenient excuse for removing anyone considered a ‘troublemaker’. The ‘criminalisation’ and over-policing of Aboriginal people has always been a feature of Australian history. It remains a critical issue in Western Australia where the incarceration rates of Indigenous people are among the highest in the nation.

While Jebb’s description of frontier violence is unflinching, some of the terms she uses are unsettling. Jebb’s routine use of terms such as ‘pacification’ and ‘dispersal’ probably needs some qualification, given that such terms were widely used in eastern Australia as euphemisms for the killing of Aboriginal people. Jebb’s assertion that ‘[t]he complex dynamic between violence and protection formed the basis for paternalism which was an enduring characteristic of station culture and life with a white boss’[2] veers dangerously close to the subtle edge of the pioneer myth which still dominates Western Australian history. While Aboriginal families and communities obtained various degrees of ‘protection’ by aligning themselves with white men through their ‘relationships’ with Aboriginal women, it was a desperate choice made in a climate of terror that extends for nearly half a century. An end to the more extreme violence is only brought about, according to Storyteller Jack Dale, by the arrival of white women on the stations. ‘All this wild business they [white men] settled down’.[3]

Covering such an extended period of Kimberley history, Blood Sweat and Welfare enables Jebb to examine the vagaries and exigencies of the State in its various disguises with shifting policy and legislative provisions to be administered or enforced. For example, the enforcement of government policy banning the cohabitation of white men with Aboriginal women radically alters living and working arrangements in the 1930s and 1940s. Further change is brought about in the 1960s with the extension of social security benefits, notably old aged pensions, to Aboriginal people in the Kimberley, and the removal of Aboriginal children to hostels and missions for ‘schooling’.

The culmination of Blood, Sweat and Welfare is the final fracturing of the station relationships in the 1960s and the movement of Aboriginal people to towns and reserves. Jebb argues for an Aboriginal agency in this move that challenges the commonly held ‘eviction after award wages’ theme. According to Jebb, Aboriginal communities, with women again in a pivotal role, make a ‘strategic response’ to changing circumstances, as they have always done, to ensure long-term survival.

Blood Sweat and Welfare is an important addition to Western Australian history, with valuable archival and oral history contributions that add considerably to our knowledge and understanding of events on the pastoral frontier and their aftermath. It’s a bit of a bumpy journey though, along the Gibb River Road, and at times Jebb’s terminology and her conclusions lull the reader into a false sense of security (or even inevitability) about ‘pastoral settlement’. A process that is after all about invasion, theft, and genocide, and needs to be labelled as such.

Jill Milroy is the Head of the School of Indigenous Studies, University of Western Australia.


[1] Mary Anne Jebb, Blood, sweat and welfare: A history of white bosses and Aboriginal pastoral workers (2002) xi.

[2] Ibid 26.

[3] Ibid 200.


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