The name is absent

Despite his desire to be humanitarian, Tindale was a man
of his times in that he saw the Aboriginal problem not as one
caused by white people, but one to be solved by white people,
and solved by an act as inhuman as the treatment already accorded
the Aboriginal people. He put forward a solution of ’dispersal'
in the 1940s:

It would appear that the more ready means of bringing
about a process of physical and social assimilation
of the Australian mixed bloods into the community
would be by the simple device of ensuring that a
maximum dispersal or spread of the minority group
will take place (Tindale, 1941:119).

It should be noted that this particular version of 'assimilation*
is a form of nihilation - the Aboriginal people are to disappear
from sight.

The problem would disappear because Aborigines as a race
would disappear - they would either become extinct or completely
absorbed into the population by compulsory, ’maximum' dispersal.
Such dispersal would lead to total assimilation.

It may be accepted that two successive crossings
with white blood the second accompanied by reasonable
living conditions and normal education enables the
grand-child of a full-blood Aboriginal woman to take
a place in the general community (Tindale, 1941:115).

By the fifties assimilation had become official policy.

8.43>   Assimilation as a policy

In 1951 Hasluck, the then Minister for Territories, reported
to Parliament that the Native Welfare Conference held in Canberra

... agreed that assimilation is the objective of

native welfare measures. Assimilation means, in
practical terms, that, in the course of time, it
is expected that all persons of Aboriginal blood
or mixed blood in Australia will live like white
Australians do (Hasluck, 1953:13).

In 1963 a further conference of Commonwealth and State Ministers
was held in Darwin and resulted in a more detailed statement on
the meaning of the policy of assimilation.

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