AO Neville

Auber Octavius ​​Neville , better known as AO Neville , (born October 20, 1875 in Northumberland , † April 18, 1954 in Perth ) was a civil servant in Western Australia and most recently head of the Aboriginal affairs department.

Life

AO Neville was born in England but immigrated to Australia with his family as a child. In 1897 he moved to Western Australia and became a civil servant. He quickly made a career there and in 1915 became Deputy Chief Protector of Aborigines for Western Australia. Originally, the Protector's task was to uphold and implement the rights of the indigenous people of Australia and to ward off grievances and violence against them. Over the years, however, in some states in Australia, work shifted towards "social control" over the Aborigines. The Protectors now determined where and how the Aborigines had to live, up to and including the decision whether and whom they were allowed to marry. Until his retirement in 1940, AO Neville determined the lives of mixed race children, children of whites and Aborigines. By law he was now the guardian of all Aboriginal descendants and, against the will of their families, collected them in correctional homes, where they were brought up very conservatively under the control of mostly church organizations. The aim of this measure was to alienate the children from their families and their Aboriginal traditions in order to better integrate them into the “civilized life of the white people”, but mostly as servants and farm helpers.

Neville was a staunch supporter of eugenics, which was particularly popular in the western world at the time . He believed that the Aboriginal race could be slowly displaced by constant mixing with "white" blood. Before a committee of inquiry in 1934, he vehemently defended his policies of forced relocation, separation of children from their families, and conservative methods of upbringing with surveillance, discipline and punishment, arguing that "they [the Aborigines] must be protected from themselves, whether they are." like or not. They cannot understand what they are like. But the pathological must come out of a body so that the healthy can survive, even against the will of the patient ”.

Towards the end of his career, AO Neville published in his book "Australia's Colored Minority" his views on the "biological absorption of the Aborigines into the white race" and was an advocate of this theory until the end of his life. His practice continued until the early 1970s. Under the term "The Stolen Generations" (English for the stolen generations ) this chapter of Australian history became a synonym for the racism against the indigenous people of the fifth continent.

media

In 2002, Long Walk Home was a film on the subject of Aboriginal children and mixed race. The Northern Irishman Kenneth Branagh embodied the AO Neville here. Regarding the person of Neville, he said: “It was the classic product of the British Empire in its final stages. As a real bureaucrat, he was convinced of the patriarchal, interventionist politics. His top priority was to educate so-called lesser races to be better people through compulsive assimilation. "

Web links

• “Save us from our saviors” . In: Die Welt , May 28, 2003.

swell

1. ↑ LONG WALK HOME ( Memento from September 28, 2007 in the Internet Archive )