Forced Internment, Reserves & Native Settlements

1. The Spatial Strategy of Enforced Segregation

From the mid-nineteenth century through the late twentieth century, the colonial and state governments of Western Australia executed a deliberate spatial policy of forced internment, confining surviving First Nations populations to segregated reserves and native settlements.¹ This strategy served two distinct objectives: it removed Aboriginal people from fertile pastoral and urban lands desired by white settlers, and it subjected the dispossessed population to total administrative surveillance, discipline, and cultural containment.²

2. Typology of Reserves: Town Reserves, Missions, and Penal Settlements

The state created three primary categories of institutional internment:³

• Town Reserves: Small, peripheral plots situated outside country towns (such as Brookton, Gnowangerup, Kellerberrin, and Narrogin), typically located adjacent to municipal rubbish dumps or sewage treatment works, lacking running water or sanitary services.⁴
• Church Mission Settlements: Religious outposts (such as New Norcia, Roelands, and Mount Margaret) where state wards were placed under Christian denominational control, forced to abandon traditional rituals and language in exchange for basic food rations.⁵
• State Native Settlements: Centralised, authoritarian concentration compounds (such as Moore River and Carrolup) directly administered by the Department of Native Affairs, featuring locked dormitories, armed guards, and forced labor regimes.⁶

3. Subhuman Living Conditions and Institutional Neglect

Conditions across the reserves were deliberately kept at bare subsistence levels.⁷ The 1934 Moseley Royal Commission documented appalling living conditions at Moore River and town reserves: severe overcrowding, uninsulated corrugated iron shacks, contaminated well water, rampant trachoma, skin infections, and systemic malnutrition resulting from cheap, rotten government rations.⁸ Medical care was minimal or non-existent, resulting in infant mortality rates exceeding 25%—more than five times the rate among white Western Australians.⁹

4. The Reserves as Crucibles of Sovereign Solidarity

While designed as instruments of subjugation, reserves ironically became crucibles of sovereign solidarity and political consciousness.¹⁰ Bounded together within forced compounds, families from different subnations intermarried, unified linguistic dialects, shared stories of ancestral country, and formed the leadership networks that spearheaded modern land rights and civil rights movements in the 1960s and 1970s.¹¹ The historical memory of the reserves remains a powerful foundation of modern Bibbullmun identity.¹²