About this record
This is the Aboriginals Ordinance Act 1911. This law, which applied in the Northern Territory, sets out the powers of the ‘Chief Protector’. These powers were broad and included the power to remove First Australians from their families.
In 1911, the Australian Government took responsibility for the Northern Territory, which had previously been governed from South Australia. The first piece of Northern Territory legislation passed by the Australian Government was the Aboriginals Ordinance Act 1911. This law, together with the earlier South Australian Northern Territory Aboriginals Act 1910, established the Northern Territory Aboriginals Department and the role of the Chief Protector, who had sweeping powers over all aspects of the lives of First Australians in the Northern Territory.
The Chief Protector was empowered to ‘undertake the care, custody or control’ of every First Australian child and could forcibly remove First Australian children from their families and communities. First Australian children were sent to live in government institutions, in missions or with white families, where they were forced to assimilate into white society and speak only English—disrupting the transmission of language and culture.
Legislation of this sort applied across Australia, and the 1997 Bringing Them Home report found that, between 1910 and 1970, between one in three and one in ten Indigenous children had been taken from their families. The loss of these ‘Stolen Generations’ caused trauma that affects First Australian communities to this day. The report recommended that the Australian Government deliver a national apology to Australia’s Indigenous Peoples, and in 2008 Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologised for ‘the law and policies of successive Parliaments and governments that inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss’.
