Bias Against Aborigines Seen

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30636, 30 December 1964, Page 9

Bias Against Aborigines Seen

(Special Crspdt. N.Z.P.A.) SYDNEY, Dec. 29. D i s c riminat i o n against aborginal children by their white schoolmates and different standards of education for two groups have been alleged by the research officer of the Teachers’ Federation. Mrs Gloria Phelan, whose fact-finding about aboroginal

children caused a sensation at a recent meeting of the federation, said this week that the Education Department did little to improve the understanding by white children of their coloured schoolmates. In her fact-finding mission she revealed that: “Aboriginal children had little incentive to learn because education had little relevance to their lives in tin shacks and ‘humpies’ made from empty sacks on the fringes of country towns.” At the meeting the federation adopted the report, but according to Mrs Phelan the whole question of aboriginal

welfare should be thoroughly investigated. Aborigines had lived for so long in depressed communities that they had nothing left with which to pull themselves up, she said. Mrs Phelan’s research began as something of a "statistical exercise,” but when the replies came, in her own words, she got "good and mad" with the situation. “Life for them goes on in a vicious circle and we need to break the circle at all points by providing better housing, improving their education and creating job opportunities, but noone seems to care,” she said. Australia's attitude to apartheid in South Africa has been condemned by some who say that Australia should first put its own house in order so far as treatment of aborigines is concerned.