The Black Community School (sometimes abbreviated to BCS) was a school founded in 1973 by land rights activist Eddie Koiki Mabo and his friend Burnum Burnum, in Townsville, Australia, for the education of local Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children. Established primarily as an alternative to the State education system, the school aimed to provide a program better suited to Indigenous children's needs, and which would better reflect their culture.
Mabo established the school, variously described as one of the first of its kind in Australia, or even the first of its kind in Australia, in order "to give black children an alternative education more suited to their needs", and that his own children could "share the songs and the language" of Mer, his home island in the Torres Strait, off the coast of Queensland.
According to the AIATSIS, the school was unpopular with the general Townsville community, and it was the target of criticism by the local Townsville Daily Bulletin newspaper as well as some local politicians. The state Minister for Education denounced the motives of the student's parents at the outset of the school in 1973, declaring the school as 'apartheid in reverse' and their attitudes as 'racist'.
Despite the initial pushback from the authorities, the school remained operating for a total of twelve years. The Black Community School eventually closed in 1985, ultimately due to lack of funding and the inability to secure a lease on a permanent site.
Background Schooling in colonial Australia During the colonisation of Australia, Lachlan Macquarie (1762–1824), governor of the British colony of New South Wales from 1810 to 1821, wrote to Lord Bathurst in October 1814 suggesting an Aboriginal school be established in Parramatta (western Sydney) as part of "an endeavour to win the hearts and minds of the younger Aboriginal generation, and to persuade the parents to allow their children to learn some of the European ways". The school, named the Parramatta Native Institution, was opened in 1815 and operated for some time before parents soon started removing their children from it after it was felt its aim was to distance them from their culture and families. According to Wheatley, While Maria (of the Booreeberongal clan) and the other Aboriginal children at the Institution were miserable about leaving home, the loss of these children was also terrible for their families. Two years later, in 1816, the mothers cried and beat their heads in distress when they saw their sons and daughters, all dressed up like white children, at the governor's annual blanket feast.
In 1872, Victoria became the first colony in Australia to pass legislation making education free, secular and compulsory. Following this, through the 1870s and 1880s, all Australian colonial governments passed laws making education compulsory for all children aged from six to twelve. In the following decades, schools of brick and stone were erected in urban areas, whereas "tiny schoolhouses of bark and timber sprouted in out-of-the-way places in the bush".
In these schools, boys were taught in history and geography, whereas girls followed an alternate curriculum in matters of humility and duty, "and were given practical instructions about how to run a household and sew a straight seam". Many private Catholic and Protestant schools continued to operate, with the former primarily catering to the children of poor Irish immigrants, and the fee-paying Protestant schools to the "offspring of wealthy industrialists and pastoralists".
Mabo's early life and move to Australia
Edward (Eddie) Mabo, or Koiki as he preferred to be known, was born on Mer Island, part of the Torres Strait Islands, in 1936.
Mer had been under British control since 1879, when it was annexed by Queensland. The Islands were subsequently classified as being part of the British colony of Queensland and, after 1901, of the Australian state of Queensland, which they have remained. As described by Professor Noel Loos in Mabo's biography: From 1871 permanent settlers from the London Missionary Society were posted on the Island. Not long after, the Torres Strait Islands became part of the pearlshell, bêche-de-mer and trochus shell fisheries, the Queensland Government having extended its border in 1872 and 1879 to control the industry. Throughout the twentieth century, the Queensland Government continued to segregate the Islanders from contact with mainland Australia under the policy of protection, while fostering the development of a cash economy based on the fisheries. The Islanders could sell only to the Government and were paid much less for their trochus and pearlshell. The crew's wages were also meagre in comparison with wages paid on boats owned by white businessmen.
In 1936, the year of Mabo's birth, 70% of the Torres Strait workforce was employed in the fisheries, providing half of the world's demand for pearl shells. The workers were bound under many racist restrictions enforced by a Queensland Government-appointed "Protector", such as not being paid wages proper, but rather paid in "credit that they had to spend in specified stores picked by the government". These restrictions culminated in the 1936 maritime strike by Torres Strait Islander workers which resulted in the government capitulating and making concessions to the strikers.
Mabo's schooling on the island was interrupted by World War Two, when the island's white administrators were evacuated to the Australian mainland city of Cairns for safety. Flotsam from the Battle of the Coral Sea (4-8 May 1942) in the form of American biscuits and powdered milk supplemented the islanders diet at a time when delivery of supplies from the Australian mainland was unreliable or non-existent due to the threat of enemy attack at sea. When the war ended, the white men returned to Mer, and formal education resumed. According to Australian writer Nadia Wheatley in her 2013 publication Australians All: Eddie didn't enjoy school because the white teachers made him speak English instead of his traditional language, but after the war ended, a schoolteacher named Bob Miles arrived on the island. For Eddie, this was a real breakthrough, because Bob asked his pupil to help him learn the Meriam language, and in return, Bob helped the Meriam boy with his English. Eddie even went to live at the teacher's house when Maiga Mabo (his aunt and guardian) became sick, and later he would say that he was glad he'd had the opportunity to learn 'the whiteman way' as well as his traditional heritage.
In addition to a formal state education, Mabo's maternal uncle Benny gave Koiki a traditional education, who also guided his nephew through his first level of initiation. Mabo was instructed in the growing of yams and bananas, as well as "fishing secrets and special rituals associated with rebuilding the ancient fish traps that ringed the east coast of the island." Mabo's father was an ait, or Meriam leader, and Koiki would listen and remember conversations between islanders and his father regarding land disputes, and land ownership issues on the island. Years later, Mabo recalled a time in his youth when he was about fifteen years old, in which he spent: ...four weeks receiving instructions on the laws of Malo (hero-god of Torres Strait Islander people) and how they should be applied; about behaviour towards other males and towards women, how to tend gardens, the right season to plant and the signs to watch.
According to Mabo, the idea of the Black Community School came to him when he was 16. In conversation with Noel Loos, he recalled coming to Thursday Island (TI) and finding "kids there that spoke fluent English and (he) wasn't able to do so". Mabo imagined that if the school had been run by his parents then they would have gone to extremes to find "a right teacher and right equipment to be used in school to educate me". At the time of Mabo's first visit to TI, there was segregation in place between the schools of the black and white children; black children attending a school at a place called Ling's Camp, whereas white children were educated at another location called Green Hills. Mabo was told that the white school offered "much more in terms of the study of science, for example" whereas at the black school all they were taught was reading and writing. "We didn't even study our own history", Mabo recalled.
In the 1950s, men on the island of Mer had limited employment opportunities. They could stay in the Torres Strait Islands working on the pearlshell, beche de mer and trochus luggers, "for less pay than white Australians", or else aim for the "few government jobs, such as an untrained schoolteacher or storeman, which were also poorly paid." A more attractive option was to move to the Australian mainland where Islanders were entitled to draw equal wages to white Australians, even in low status, semi-skilled jobs, such as fettling in the railways or canecutting in the sugar cane industry of Queensland. In the late 1950s, the pearlshell and trochus industries which had sustained the economy of the Torres Strait Islands until that point began to collapse due to competition from newly developed plastics which could mimic nacre, and even more Torres Strait Islanders began to move to the mainland.
In either 1957 or 1958, in his early 20s, Mabo moved to Australia, in a "typically Torres Strait Islander experience... as a member of the Islander crew of a trochus lugger". Between 1958 and 1961, he became part of the small but growing Torres Strait Islander community in North Queensland and found employment on other luggers, cutting cane or working on the railway lines in the vast western region of Queensland. According to Noel Loos in his 1996 biography of Mabo entitled Edward Koiki Mabo. His Life and Struggle for Land Rights: In the jobs he had since 1962, in his creation and administration of the Black Community School from 1973 to 1985, and in the ten-year struggle, from 1982 to 1992, that led to the recognition of native title (see Mabo v Queensland (No 2)), he was working in a world dominated as completely by white Australia as was the Island he had left as a teenager. And this world was enmeshed in alien codes, values and institutions that seemed, to Torres Strait Islanders, designed to disadvantage and humiliate them and to continue the dependence on white authority they had known in the Islands. Koiki Mabo never accepted white dominance or the inferiority and inferior status colonialist history attempted to impose on his people.
In October 1959, Mabo married Bonita Neehow, an Australian-born South Sea Islander, and together they would have ten children. Mabo found work as a labourer with Queensland's state-run railway, his first assignment being 530km inland of Townsville at the maintenance depot of Hughenden, a rural town. Mabo became involved in North Queensland's trade union movement whilst working on the Queensland railways, and later as a labourer for the Townsville Harbour Board in Townsville, after himself and Bonita relocated there in 1960 in order to save money for a deposit on a house. According to historian Paul Turnbull: Queensland's state-owned railways and harbours were active sites of working-class radicalism, in which local union branches established lending libraries and ran study groups in the conviction that through education, working men and women would be equipped to achieve better lives for themselves and their children. Union organisers, especially those associated with the Communist Party, readily supplied books, pamphlets and newspapers to workers on pastoral stations and other rural enterprises.