Gazetteer of Historical Australian Places
SORT: Placename | State | LGA | Feature_term | Latitude | Longitude | Start Date | End Date |
This layer contains historical information about Aboriginal people that may be distressing. It also contains names of people who have passed away.
In 1918 the Western Australian Government set up what was intended to be a small, self-supporting farming settlement for 200 Aboriginal people from the Murchison, Midlands and southwest regions. Based at Moore River the settlement very quickly fell well short of the intention (The Book Broken Circles by Anna Haebich, 2000 accurately details life at Moore River Settlement). The land was unsuitable for the kind of farming done at the time and successive superintendents had no farming experience. It became a place where unwell and unwanted Aborigines were dumped and an orphanage for stolen children. Budgets were cut over time so that people were starving, they were turned out to find rabbits and kangaroo. Grandparents of stolen children camped nearby and passed food through the fence to feed the children. Medical help was rarely available, tuberculosis was rife. A six-foot fence surrounded the compound, within it the sexes and children were segregated. A team of trackers, many of whom were not local and had recently been released from prison, hunted down anyone who escaped. It was often likened to a concentration camp.