What do we mean by 'Elderly'?

Far enough back that ‘billy’ was still a novel word, at least in Adelaide, one that had to be placed in quotes, this little tale appeared in a South Australian newspaper:

Lionel Lindsay, Ruins, wood engraving.

...we fell in with an elderly man who was tailing cattle. Having just boiled the “billy,” we invited him to partake of a pannican of tea, which he accepted.
— South Australian Register, 3 November 1857, 3.

The old man turned out to be an old lag, but how old was he, really? What did they mean by "elderly".

My curiosity all started with the 1931 case that shows up as the last item in the short list. I had come across that particular snippet some years ago, and for the present work I am doing on Australian English I went back, looking for that curious paragraph.

I may rate as elderly in their terms, but my search skills are still good, so I found it, Then I cast the net wider, seeking more evidence of how we thought when life expectancy was lower. 

My samples are telling. Watch the changing (and unchanging) meaning of ‘elderly’, below:

1900:

An elderly man was walking along the Port Melbourne pier, near the railway station, when he suddenly fell unconscious … and was afterward conveyed to the Melbourne Hospital by Constable Dooley. On examination in the casualty room the unfortunate man was found to be dead. The deceased was about 55 years of age…
— The Argus, 2 January 1900, 5.

1901:

A fatality occurred at Daly's Baths in the Royal Arcade to-day. This afternoon, an elderly man between 55 and 60 years of age … went to Daly's, and paid for a warm bath … efforts [were] made to resuscitate him, but without avail.
— Mount Alexander Mail (Vic) 30 July 1901, 3.

1915:

An elderly man named John Roberts died suddenly in the killing pen of John Smith, butcher, yesterday afternoon … He was 53 years of age…
— The Inverell Times, 9 February 1915, 4.

1928:

ELDERLY WOMAN INJURED. Knocked down by a motor car in Wellington-parade, near Cliveden Mansions, Teresa Evans, 53 years, of Jolimont, was yesterday admitted to Melbourne Hospit[al] suffering from a fractured skull.
— The Age, 8 May 1928, 10.

1931:

The alleged victim of the assault, an elderly woman, 46 years of age, said she resided with her husband and children at Boulder.
— Kalgoorlie Miner, 6 June 1931, 7.

So now you know what I claim to be of advanced middle age!

When did we start saying that?

Updated 27 March: there is now a new title.

Picking up from where I left off in my last post, I have decided to convert a former database, banjaxed when iinet trashed my websites without warning, but rescued and placed here, and make a book of it.

In the process, I am finally doing a serious trawl through Trove, and Oz literature: I have largely completed the Trove portion, and I am reading a lot of my old favourites from the 19th century (On Our Selection alerted me to the Cockatoo fence, for example). It is already over 194,000 words, but I will trim some fat before it goes out.

My original aim was to provide myself with the wherewithal to write historical fiction by establishing when, for example, people talked about a billy or a damper, or sly grog.

When I dropped the historical fiction plan, I shared the database. This is, on one level, a writer's tool, but it is also fun to just leaf through. I had fun pinning down the origins of fairy bread, and I can share that. Likewise duffer, stringybark and Jack the Painter.

On the right, you can see the working title on a vastly overloaded dummy title page (it got a new title on 27 March). Now looking back, I see that I have trotted out the yarn below, three times before, but it needs a new trot around the paddock.

***

In a short story, His Country—After All, Henry Lawson tells of a conversation he heard on a coach in New Zealand, where an Australian declares he will never go back to that “mongrel desert”, meaning Australia. Then he smells Australian gums before seeing them, but they are in New Zealand. The trees have strange, not-Australian, shapes, but they smell like Australian gums, and next he sniffs out a camp fire which also has a familiar smell.

There was a rabbit trapper’s camp amongst those trees; he had made a fire to boil his billy with gum leaves and twigs, and it was the scent of that fire which interested the exile’s nose, and brought a wave of memories with it.

‘Good day, mate!’ he shouted suddenly to the rabbit trapper, and to the astonishment of his fellow passengers.

‘Good day, mate!’ The answer came back like an echo—it seemed to him—from the past.

Suddenly, this declared ex-Australian, this total never-again and former Australian wants to head back to Australia. Smell can do that, and so can the laugh of a kookaburra—for most Australians. The sight of gum trees in foreign climes works a sort of spell, and the red of the country around Uluru may do it for us as well, but language is the Big One. Hearing our own Oz words and Oz intonations in a foreign place always stops us dead.

Sit in a crowd as I have done, in a pub in Riga; a wine bar near Rome’s Spanish Steps; a hamburger joint in Siem Reap; a reindeer restaurant in Bergen; a Greek café in Banff; a chippie in Glasgow; a tapas bar in Cuzco; Murphy’s curry and Guinness house in San Francisco; high tea at Singapore’s Raffles Hotel; a coffee shop at Heathrow; a tea shop in Kandy; or a bangers-and-mash restaurant in Reykjavik. When you hear Australian tones (and trust me, you will), project your voice and call out “G’day!” with a hint of a rising terminal, but do it with your lips hardly moving, and your vowels as flat as a roadkill goanna after a road train convoy has passed through.

It always works: sit silently, unblinking and poker-faced, watching as Australian heads turn, urgently seeking their unseen compatriot who may, perhaps, have news from back home. It also makes them home-sick. That’s the home we care about, and that single “G’day!” reminds us all of where home is. It’s the place where they talk like us, but I have always wondered how we came to talk our way, and by fossicking around, I know our national voice was alive, two centuries ago.

Our society is divided…We have…first, the Sterling and Currency, or English and Colonial born, the latter bearing also the name of corn stalks (Indian corn), from the way in which they shoot up. This is the first grand division.
—Peter Cunningham, Two Years In New South Wales, third edition, vol 2, 1828, p. 108.

The names Currency and Sterling, he said, were conferred by ‘…a facetious paymaster of the 73rd regiment quartered here—the pound currency being at that time inferior to the pound sterling.’ By 1827, Cunningham had sailed to Australia four times as a surgeon, supervising convicts, and he clearly felt he was an Australian by then, writing of ‘our’ Currency lads and lasses.

Cunningham said currency and sterling each looked down on the other. ‘The Currency lads’, he told us, was a popular standing toast, after it was given by Major Goulburn at an Agricultural Society dinner, while ‘The Currency lasses’ was a favourite colonial tune. These currency lads and lasses, he said, were good workers, but they preferred taking up a trade, or going to sea, rather than doing farm work, which he thought they saw as work fit only for convicts. Currency lads and lasses made good servants on a wage of £10 to £15 per annum.

He also noted that thieves’ slang terms (like plant and swag), along with Dharuk (Sydney Aboriginal) words like jirrand (afraid) might be heard in currency slang. To others in Australian society, speech was a mark of class, but words poured in from all over the world and these new Australians were already using words like bandicoot, verandah and bungalow, all from India, and creek and bush from North America. Various Aboriginal languages gave us names of many plants and animals (like kangaroo, wombat, waratah and yabby) as well as bunyip, woomera and waddy, cooee and yakka.

In time, the Australian language would unite us, but that came later, once new words and phrases were coined and adopted. What united all Australians for most of the 19^th century was either their experience of a long sea voyage to Australia, or the family tales of that voyage. In 112 years, less time than it took for the “Hundred Years’ War” (which lasted for 116 years!), Australia went from a peaceful and settled land, sustainably managed under independent land-holders, to an unsustainable but united continent-nation with its own ways, myths and legends.

Some Australian habits, practices, terms and assumptions were imported from Europe, some came from America, a few were acquired from the original inhabitants, and some were invented from scratch. Many of them we cannot explain with any certainty, but others are more explicable. Take just two verses of a song, familiar to and understood by all Australians, where the words in bold would be confusing to most other speakers of English:

Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong,
Under the shade of a coolabah tree,
And he sang as he watched and waited till his billy boiled,
Who’ll come a Waltzing Matilda with me.

Down came a jumbuck to drink at that billabong
Up jumped the swagman and grabbed him with glee,
And he sang as he shoved that jumbuck in his tucker bag,
You’ll come a Waltzing Matilda with me.

Those bolded terms had all entered the Australian language before 1901, and they all reflect an Australian way of thinking, our own way of life.

So had many other expressions like dunny*, ironbark, stringybark, sheoak, budgerigar, kookaburra, chooks, numbat, goanna, redback, galah, waler, squatter, fossick, bludger, bingie, kangaroos in the top paddock, bushranger, digger, mate, bowyangs, larrikin, wowser, jackeroo, gunyah, fair dinkum, spruik, coolamon, cooee, damper, lamington, shout, sly grog and willy-willy—to list just a few.

* I just ran a check, and dunny wasn't there, but it is now:

dunny: 1942

South Western Times (Bunbury, WA), 30 July 1942, 7. This appears to be the earliest newspaper use of the d-word

I actually had to take a different brand of cigarette than the sort I've been smoking since Dad caught me lighting up the first attempt behind the “dunny.”

dunny: 1956

The Argus, 14 July 1956, 12. This is a savage book review. The book was not for an Oz audience…

In “Not to Mention the Kangaroos” we find Australian characters, who have escaped the penetrating vision of Steele Rudd, Tom Collins, Henry Lawson, and Edward Dyson, to inflict themselves, per favor of Mrs. Corben, on the unenlightened readers of today … In the suburbs, the backward people are still in transports of delight over the installation of flush toilets in their houses. One young wife speaking to Mrs. Corben refers airily to the “dunny cart man,” who, according to Mrs. Corben's informant, was, until quite recently, a familiar sight in the streets and streets of “clapboard” houses of suburbia.

dunny: 1969

Noosa News (Qld), 8 August 1969, 2. Letter to the editor.

Words, excuses and promises do not conceal non-existent results. We have also to put up with a dusty, boggy car park with a promise of “We have a plan for it”. Visitors, both rural and interstate, have been horrified when they have utilized the change sheds, the outside shower and the smelly dunny cans so mis-named ‘Toilets’.

dunny: 1974

The Canberra Times, 10 July 1974, 2. The dunny is still a rara avis in print.

Speaking of toilets, another such regional word is “dumpty” which was the standard word for toilet, dunny, etc in the colleges of the University of Melbourne when I lived in Ormond, but which I've not encountered anywhere else.

***

In mid-2023, I heard a Cooee! near Salzburg in Austria, but lately many old and special words have been slipping away, Still, even as they disappear, the attitude that underlies them remains. Australian custom was made in a very short time, and it lives on, mutating as long as it lives, and as long as I live, I will be observing and annotating it. For example: The term New Australians has three distinct meanings!

A friend (Losang Zopa) wondered why I was not doing “I’m as dry as a dead dingo’s donger”. The answer is that Barry Humphries' lovely coinages are professional, and in slang, I prefer the amateur game. (The line that she quoted came from The Adventures of Barry McKenzie).

So I'm not sulking, just reading 19th century prose...and I am on a break, starting at Easter.

That mongrel language, English

Here is a common version of something James Nicoll wrote in a discussion group many moons ago (the source is long gone, as I wasn't there):

English doesn't “borrow” from other languages: it follows them down dark alleys, knocks them over, and goes through their pockets for loose grammar and valuable vocabulary.

My miserably pedantic and uncreative Arts-graduate father persisted in foisting on me the crapulosity of parsing sentences, and curtailed my boyish adventurism in rifling the pockets of other languages. He is one of the reasons I have always hoped I was adopted. (My perennially unstable mother was the other.)

There is no such thing as proper English: I have no problems with loan words or evolving words. If they make sense, they are fine. In 1490, William Caxton felt the ground of his language moving under him, a century after Chaucer:

And certaynly our langage now used varyeth ferre from that whiche was used and spoken whan I was borne. In so moche that in my dayes happened that certayn marchauntes were in a shippe in tamyes, for to have sayled over the sea into zelande. And for lacke of wynde, thei taryed atte forlond, and wente to lande for to refreshe them. And one of theym named sheffelde, a mercer, cam in-to a hows and axed for mete and specyally he axyd after eggys. And the goode wyf answerde, that she coude speke no frenshe. And the marchaunt was angry, for he also coulde speke no frenshe, but wolde have hadde egges, and she understode hym not. And thenne at laste a nother sayd that he wolde have eyren. Then the good wyf sayd that she understod hym wel. Loo, what shode a man in thyse dayes now wryte, egges or eyren. Certaynly, it is harde to playse every man, by cause of dyversite and chaunge of language.

William Caxton, Preface to Eneydos c 1490.

Here is a quick parallel translation: clumsy in a way, but easier to follow than an elegant version.

And certainly our language as it is now used varies greatly from that which was used and spoken when I was born. Insomuch that in my days certain merchants were in a ship in the Thames, ready to sail over the sea to Zealand. And for lack of wind, they tarried at Foreland, and went to land to refresh themselves. And one of them named Sheffield, a mercer, came into a house and asked for meat and especially he asked after eggs. And the good wife answered that she could speak no French. And the merchant was angry, for he also could speak no French, but would have had eggs, and she understood him not. And then at last another said that he would have eyren. Then the good wife said that she understood him well. Lo, what should a man in these days now write, egges or eyren. Certainly, it is hard to please every man, because of diversity and change of language.

Why do I care about this right now? Well, I am taking an old website, now stored here, and testing it to see if there is a book in it. Working title Early print instances of Australian language use, it looks at how special Australian words crept into out language. Conceived originally as a handy guide for writers of historical fiction, I have pinned down terms like billy, damper and even doover, probably coined as an April Fool's joke in 1942. I have yet to work out why it morphed into dooverlacky, because I am busy mining Henry Lawson's prose works, which I read at age 12 as an antidote to my parents' unpleasant pro-British stance.

And where did goanna come from?

Did you know that scab, once the sheep herder's enemy, became the squatter's friend and the shearers' enemy? Did you know that in the early 1800s a bushranger was never a thief, just a person who ranged the bush?

Did you know that what the Brits call pavement, and the Yanks call sidewalk was already a footpath in Australia in 1803? The pie floater I can take back to 1923, and it seems to have held firm in its meaning, unlike many other colloquial Australian items.

Our society is divided…We have…first, the Sterling and Currency, or English and Colonial born, the latter bearing also the name of corn stalks (Indian corn), from the way in which they shoot up. This is the first grand division.
—Peter Cunningham, Two Years In New South Wales, third edition, vol 2, 1828, 108.

The names Currency and Sterling, Cunningham said, were conferred by ‘…a facetious paymaster of the 73rd regiment quartered here—the pound currency being at that time inferior to the pound sterling.’ By 1827, Cunningham had sailed to Australia four times as a surgeon, supervising convicts, and he clearly felt he was an Australian by then, writing of ‘our’ Currency lads and lasses.

He also noted that thieves’ slang terms (like plant and swag), along with Dharuk (Sydney Aboriginal) words like jirrand (afraid) might be heard in currency slang. To others in Australian society, speech was a mark of class, but words poured in from all over the world and these new Australians were already using words like bandicoot, verandah and bungalow, all from India, and creek, diggings, funnelweb, squatter and bush from North America. Various Aboriginal languages gave us names of many plants and animals (like bingie, kangaroo, wombat, waratah and yabby) as well as bunyip, woomera and waddy, cooee and yakka.

So bother me not over changing words, or I shall give you a standing ovation on my definition. This involves placing you upright against a wall, and pelting you with eyren.

As it happens, I habitually speak cultivated (once, educated) English, and I was in Alex Mitchell's original sample of several thousand Australians, from which he discerned three Australian dialects: educated, general and broad, but educated (we call it 'cultivated' now, and it is what I used on the ABC). It  gave me the most fun as an undergraduate, because the poodles who had been to a Public School would hear me speak in tones that said People Like Us to them, and wag their tails, asking what school had I gone to?

Remember that Henry Lawson was one of my boyhood heroes. Their faces would crumble when I used the beautifully rounded vowels that all my family use, to name my local (albeit selective) high school. "But you don't sound like a state school boy..."

Did I mention I was a natural Third Speaker? No matter, I am. I would smile gently, take them by the upper arm and explain to them that some people needed to go to a special school to learn how to speak. "With some of us, though," I would say gently, "it's just a matter of breeding."

I love the squishing sound of wilting poodles. After maybe twenty of those, word must have spread, because when they saw me coming, the poodles would cross their fingers, eyes, legs and the road. I used to try to time my delivery so there was a bus coming (not out of cruelty, just as social, genetic and environmental improvement), but I never got the timing right.

So with that unkind anecdote out of the way, on to an unkind hobby, also related to accent and speech.

Sit in a crowd as I have done, in a pub in Riga; a wine bar near Rome’s Spanish Steps; a hamburger joint in Siem Reap; a reindeer restaurant in Bergen; a Greek café in Banff; a chippie in Glasgow; a tapas bar in Cuzco; Murphy’s curry and Guinness house in San Francisco; high tea at Singapore’s Raffles Hotel; a coffee shop at Heathrow; a tea shop in Kandy; or a bangers-and-mash restaurant in Reykjavik. When you hear Australian tones (and trust me, you will), project your voice and call out “G’day!” with a hint of a rising terminal, but do it with your lips hardly moving, and your vowels as flat as a roadkill goanna after a road train convoy has passed through.

It always works: sit silently, unblinking and poker-faced, watching as Australian heads turn, urgently seeking their unseen compatriot who may, perhaps, have news from back home. That’s the home we care about, and that single “G’day!” reminds us all of where home is. It’s the place where they talk like us, but I have always wondered how we came to talk our way, and by fossicking around, I know our national voice was alive, two centuries ago, and that is what I am now chasing.

I am, you are, we are Australian, and we can talk as we wish hijacking words and amending their meaning as we go, just as our forebears* did.

Why? Because their forebears* did: just look up Amusing, Awful, and Artificial.

-------------------------------------------------------

* The forebears knew nothing of Goldilocks...

The apprentices who were taught nothing

This is another sample from the work I have just completed, Keeping People is Wrong.

The Colonial Secretary in Sydney, Alexander M’Leay announced in 1831 that a bunch of colleens were about to arrive and would be divided up among the deserving rich. They would not be slaves, though; they would be paid just over nine pence a week (though they would not be allowed to spend any of it, until they were out of their indentures).

Some girls about fifteen years of age were to be sent from “one of the Public Institutions in Ireland, where they have been brought up with much care and attention to their moral and religious duties; and it being desirable that they should be disposed of in a manner the most likely to render them useful members of society…” In other words, these would be convenient and obedient servants, and the governor wanted to know who would like one, given that they would be bound as apprentices.

*

When slavery was abolished in British colonies on 1 August 1834, 770,280 slaves became free, and a number of sops were thrown to the slave-owners. First, they were massively compensated for their “property loss”, but then they were not stripped of their property at all. The African slaves were just “apprenticed” for six years. They were semi-dependent on their masters for that period of time, while having some rights as free men, and not able to be sold.

The idea was to “prepare” them for the responsibilities of free labour and economic independence (we will see that this is a recurrent theme, whenever a downtrodden group seeks proper pay: “You aren’t ready for it, all that money will go to your head, it will spoil you…”)

The “indentured Negroes” were blunt, wondering why it should take them six years to learn what they had been doing all their lives. So there was form for using indentures to entrap, or maybe even enslave. It became common in the 19th century to muddle up the indentures of apprenticeship with the indentures of a one-sided labour contract, the idea being to imply that the victims of indentured servitude were bound, hand and foot, to do the will of their rightful masters.

*

A girl apprentice

All too often the indenture system was used, not to train apprentices, but to create an underclass of manual labourers and domestic servants. Sarah Rankin appears to have been one such victim, coming from the Randwick Asylum for Destitute Children, which was created to care for abandoned children or for those whose parents were ‘dissolute characters’. Single parents could place children there if they paid a fixed sum for the child’s maintenance, but we have no information on how Sarah ended up in the Asylum.

It was neither an orphanage nor a workhouse, but Randwick was not pleasant. In 1867 there were 77 deaths there from whooping cough, so perhaps Sarah Rankin was lucky to be apprenticed from the Asylum to Julien Scriber—or was she all that lucky? For starters, Julien (or Jules or Julius) appears to have had no trade, although he had a farm and some cattle, and the apprenticeship was for six years. There was also a Mrs Scriber, whose behaviour led Sarah to write a letter to the Asylum,

…complaining of ill-treatment by Mrs. Scriber, and stating, that in consequence of ill-usage, and a fear that Mrs. Scriber would kill her, she had left.
—The Kiama Independent, and Shoalhaven Advertiser 3 August 1877, 2.

The Kiama Police court was told by Mr Connell (P.M.) that there would be no difficulty in obtaining another more suitable place, and she had asked for permission to do so. On the other hand, there was a second letter from Mr Scriber to the Asylum stating that Sarah Rankin had, without just cause or reason, left his indentured service, and requesting either that she be sent back, or he be released from his responsibility in regard to her.

In evidence, Sarah said she had no fault to find with Mr Scriber, who was a kind master, but Mrs Scriber was so violent of temper and had abused her so that she could not and would not live with her. There were times when Mrs Scriber had knocked her down, dashed her against the fireplace, dragged her by her hair, kicked her, beaten her with a whip, and threatened to kill her.

Mrs Scriber said the girl had been in their service for nearly three years, and had been a good, willing servant until about three months ago, when some relationship was discovered between her and the Boyles, who were neighbours. After that she had been saucy, indolent, careless, and apparently under some sinister and adverse influence. She conceded that, under provocation, she chastised Sarah with a small riding-whip (which she produced), the same as she would chastise her own children; but it was absolutely false to say she had knocked her down, dragged her by her hair, kicked her, or threatened to kill her.

Mr Scriber said Sarah had never wanted for money or clothes, and at the end of each year he had paid her the balance of pocket money due to her. This applied to the first two years only, as the third had not yet expired. He was willing to take the girl—who was now living with Mrs Boyle—back again if she promised to reform, or he was willing to agree if the indentures should be cancelled.

Sarah Randall [sic!] stoutly and pertinaciously denied ever having received a farthing of pocket money. On one occasion she went with the family to a picnic when the master paid 9d for her admission, and gave her 6d for herself, and that was the only money she had received.

Mr. Connell advised the girl to go back to her service, pending the decision of the Asylum Committee; but she absolutely refused to go back on any consideration, and Mrs. Boyle, who was present, said she would keep the girl till she got another place.
—The Kiama Independent, and Shoalhaven Advertiser 3 August 1877, 2.

Anybody seeking further detail will need to know that Scriber (as he was listed in the newspaper) normally used his birth-name, Schreiber, and so far as I can find, this man's only 'trade' was farmer. Nothing in the evidence ever suggested that Sarah was being educated in any trade, and it is reasonable to suspect that her “apprenticeship” was just as much a sham as that of the slaves in the Caribbean four decades earlier. The indenture was no more than a fetter to tie her down.

Now we will look at some other cases, where the apprenticeship was clearly a sham for entrapment:

The Stolen Generations

The Stolen Generations were Aboriginal children taken away from their parents and families. The people taking the children away believed that Aboriginal culture was inferior to European culture, but many of the children they took away grew up feeling that they had no people, no family, no country, and no place. These four things are all a central part of a continuing culture in Aboriginal society.

Looking back, it now seems very cruel to take children away from their parents, so why did white people do it? As well as wrongly believing that Aboriginal people were inferior, many thought that the Aboriginal race would die out. They also believed, again wrongly, that all Aboriginal people had black d Aboriginal children had ‘white blood’ and therefore needed to be ‘rescued’.skin, like many of those in the Northern Territory. So they assumed that any pale-skinne

Saving the children
Some Aboriginal adults worked out ways to stop the government from taking their children away. For example, children would be encouraged to sit quietly in a hole in the ground, covered by a few pieces of corrugated iron, when “the welfare” came to find children to take away.

I had this horror tale from a work colleague, who told me that as a child, she had a problematic pale skin, not unusual in her kin group, far paler than the skin of the “full bloods” of the Northern Territory. If they saw her, “the welfare” would have concluded she was ‘part white’, and torn her away from culture and a loving family. So she hid, patiently.

Most of the people who took the children of the Stolen Generations from their parents sincerely believed they were doing the right thing. When the truth came out, most of the few white participants who were still alive were upset to learn what harm they had really done.

The children who were taken were placed in 480 institutions with differing degrees of gentleness, and many were fostered or adopted by non-Indigenous families. Many were given new names and forbidden to speak any language but English and there was little or no formal education, because they were expected to become manual labourers or domestic servants.

Around 1900, a gullible writer claimed that on cattle stations indentures protected Aboriginal women. The agreements had to be witnessed by either Resident Magistrates, Justices of the Peace, persons appointed under the Act, or officers of the police force. These people, said a letter writer, just a little bit naïvely, were unlikely to witness an agreement between employers and natives unless the natives were willing to make such agreement, and were under no fear, coercion, or constraint.

Until 1900, the Police Act had made it an offence to tamper with or detain another person’s native servant, and a breach led to a fine of from £20 to £40, when costs were added in. The writer then cited a case where a white man in the Gascoyne district had lured away “a rather nice looking native girl”. Her employer took out a summons, the man was fined, and the girl was ordered to go back to her service “where she is still”.

This was too much for the editor, who did the sums and expostulated: “Still there after eight years; the 12 months agreement is evidently pretty durable.” Men, on the other hand, were “caught and apprenticed to a kind master at about nothing and sixpence a year”, said a writer in The Bulletin, as quoted in a Perth newspaper.

Westralia is proud of its slave system on the ground that it prevents native girls being led astray by wandering white men of the swagman and prospector description [but] doesn’t make the seduction of aboriginal girls a punishable offence. It doesn’t protect them to any extent that is worth a straw against their own white boss, the squatter. Before they are “apprenticed” or enslaved, or after their period of enslavement has expired, the law takes no notice of their morals, and does nothing in particular for their protection.
— West Australian Sunday Times 1 April 1900. 8 (taken from The Bulletin).