Clean, Clad, and Courteous: A History of Aboriginal Education in New South Wales

This book examines early unsuccessful experiments in educating Aborigines; the revival of interest in Aboriginal affairs in the 1870s and 1880s and the development of the policy of protection; the establishment of the Aborigines Protection Board and its policies and practices for the next 80 years; and the changes which occurred in the 1930s, especially the impact of the Great Depression, which culminated in the Australia wide adoption of a policy of assimilation. It then examines the use of the school in achieving assimilation; the decline of the separate Aboriginal school system; Aboriginal affairs from the end of the Second World War to the end of the 1960s; the involvement of the Commonwealth government in Aboriginal affairs following the 1967 referendum; evidence of poor school performance by Aboriginal pupils; and the changes which have occurred in the 1970s and early 1980s. The book devotes special attention to the evolution of the separate and inferior Aboriginal school system which operated from the 1880s to the 1960s, setting it firmly in a background of political and social change in Aboriginal affairs; in so doing it provides considerable evidence of racial prejudice and discrimination.