Institutional Dormitory Regimes & Linguistic Prohibition

1. The Total Institution: Moore River and Carrolup Dormitories

Between 1918 and the 1960s, the Western Australian Department of Native Affairs operated closed institutional dormitory regimes designed to achieve total cultural deculturation.¹ The primary institutions in the Southwest were the Moore River Native Settlement (Mogumber) established in 1918 and the Carrolup Native Settlement near Katanning.² Operating under the direct supervision of Chief Protector A.O. Neville, these settlements functioned as carceral concentration compounds where stolen Aboriginal children were interned behind locked gates and barred windows.³

2. Physical Confinement within Gender-Segregated Dormitories

Children entering the settlements were stripped of personal clothing, sprayed with chemical disinfectants, and assigned serial numbers.⁴ They were locked into large, overcrowded wooden dormitories segregated strictly by gender.⁵ At Moore River, the girls' and boys' dormitories were locked from the outside at 6:00 PM each evening, with barred windows and external padlocks.⁶ Inside, children slept on bare hessian sacks filled with damp straw on concrete or timber floors, sharing buckets for sanitation.⁷ Runaways who escaped into the bush were tracked down by mounted police and native trackers, returned in chains, and locked into solitary confinement cells (the "boob") on bread and water rations.⁸

3. Systematic Linguistic Prohibition and Cultural Eradication

The institutional regime enforced strict linguistic prohibition.⁹ Matrons and superintendents strictly forbade children from speaking a single word of the Bibbullmun language.¹⁰ Children caught speaking native words had their mouths washed out with carbolic soap or were subjected to public caning before the assembled school.¹¹ Family contact was systematically destroyed: letters from parents were censored or destroyed, and parents visiting the settlement were confined to outer perimeter camps, permitted to see their children only through wire fences under guard supervision.¹²

4. Generational Resistance and the Unbroken Spirit

Despite the brutality of the dormitory regimes, children forged deep bonds of solidarity that survived state violence.¹³ In secret whispers under blankets at night, children practiced forbidden words, shared stories of their parents, and preserved memories of their ancestral country.¹⁴ The survival and resilience of settlement inmates—immortalized in works such as Doris Pilkington Garimara's Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence—stands as an eternal triumph of First Nations courage over institutional cruelty.¹⁵