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been evacuated to Sydney and at that time were living in a flat with her sister Violet. Each morning Nan had to get
up early and take Johnny and Cecil (born 15 February 1941) to a park for the day because Violet was not supposed
to have children staying in her flat.
Babe’s application was successful and he went to work packing fruit in Mildura and working at Nestles’ factory
in Warrnambool. After the war Babe did a stint cutting cane in Innisfail but Nan, Johnny, Cecil and Nancy (born
9 July 1943) headed home. Babe had said he wanted the children educated in the South but Nan wanted to be back
in the Top End. Soon after returning from the south Babe got a job as a truck driver with the Council where he
remained until 1955.
On his return the family were allocated a Sydney Williams hut in Stuart Park, then a house of the Hawksley
design in Coronation Drive, before moving to the corner of Worgan and Stretton Streets, Parap, in 1956 where
they stayed until 1988.
On Sunday night 4 March 1951 Jack McGuinness called a public meeting in the Parap Hall to protest the
enforcement of the Aboriginal Ordinance as it applied to people of partial Aboriginal descent. The meeting formed
the Aboriginal Half-caste Progress Association (AHPA) and elected Jack President and Babe Damaso Secretary.
‘It was agreed with full citizenship rights the AHPA would be in a better position to work for the rights of the
traditional Aboriginals’. On the following day Patrol Officer Ted Evans, who was basically sympathetic and
had attended the 300 strong meeting, wrote to F H Moy, then Director of Native Affairs, noting that the Acting
Secretary of the North Australian Workers Union, Yorky Peel, drew substantial applause when he declared with
pride that his wife and children were of Aboriginal descent. Evans wrote, ‘He introduced irrelevancies in the form
of references to full-bloods... He concluded his oration with the remark ‘Don’t talk about blacks, don’t talk about
whites, don’t talk about coloured people but call me comrade’.’
Moy, in a briefing to the Administrator three days later, was defensive but generally supportive of the basic
aims of the meeting. Yet he could also write ‘I think that the core of the whole meeting is contained in the remarks
of Messrs Peel and Brown who wished to use the coloured as a means for further proselytizing their doctrine’.
The Minister for Territories, Paul Hasluck, on 7 July 1952 wrote, ‘We need to watch carefully the progress and
the activities of the Australian Half-Caste Progress Association and any similar bodies to ensure that they do not
become instruments for a new form of exclusiveness and separateness which may prove an obstacle to the success
of a policy of assimilation... We do not want half-castes to organise themselves as half-castes except for the
purpose of assisting their reception into the general community. We do not want them to build up their own colour
consciousness’.
In January 1953 the Legislative Council removed people of partial Aboriginal descent from the provisions
of the Aboriginal Ordinance. When Hasluck visited Darwin in February of that year it was Babe Damaso who
formally thanked him for ‘freeing half castes from provisions of the Aboriginal Ordinance’. Gaining this victory
dissipated the energies of the Association; it did not go on to wage the bigger fight to get full citizenship rights for
all Aboriginal people. Though at times the Association acted in support of Aboriginal people of total descent there
were elements of contradiction, which lingered for many years. Darwin was the colonial capital of the Top End
and despite many examples of inter racial harmony, the differences that existed between ‘coloured’ and Aboriginal
Darwinians were exploited by the authorities in a divide and conquer manner not dissimilar to other colonial
situations.
Two issues that were to haunt the Aboriginal debate in the Northern Territory from the 1950s to the 1990s were
the development of a separate Aboriginal identity, supplementing tribal and regional self-conceptions, and a fear of
Communist influence. These manifestations are clearly observable in the official response to the emergence of the
AHPA. The methods used to handle them stayed remarkably constant for the next 30 years. Attempts were made
to incorporate potential leaders and critics and if that did not work they were distanced. In 1955 Babe became the
first Aborigine employed as a welfare officer in the old Welfare Branch in Darwin.
Babe’s work in the Branch included going on patrols from Maningrida to Port Keats, checking on conditions of
Aboriginal people living on stations, stock camps and tourist enterprises such as Allan Stewart’s Nourlangie; as well
he provided assistance in the Darwin area. In his last 10 years in the Branch he was its representative at funerals.
This role was undervalued by many newly arriving ‘professionals’ from the south, who failed to understand the
importance that Aboriginal people placed on this aspect of Babe’s work. It strengthened and extended his contact
with Aboriginal people from all over the Top End. He worked there until his retirement in 1975. During the land
rights struggle, apart from the direct help he could supply through his job in the Welfare Branch, Babe played a
role as elder statesman.
The practice of taking children of partial Aboriginal descent from their Aboriginal family began before the
turn of the century and continued well into the 1980s. By the 1960s the techniques had changed, no longer did
the local policeman just arrive in a camp and round up all the light coloured kids and take them away: fostering
or adoption programs and the Part Aboriginal Education Scheme were the main vehicles used to separate children
from their families. Babe, in his role as a welfare officer, worked to keep families together and to link or reunite
them after separation. His own family had first hand experience of this destructive practice. Nan’s mother had been
taken from her mother Minnie (Missy) who was from Roper River when she was young. Nan would have suffered
a similar fate but for Ada’s relationship with stockman John McLennan. Another way by which children were
removed from their Aboriginal community was through the actions of the non-Aboriginal parent. Nan’s brother
John Farrar had taken Dave to Brisbane and when he became sick Dave was left in a Salvation Army children’s
home. During the 1950’s Babe turned up at their house in Parap with Dave Farrar. Until then Nan had not realised
Dave was alive—he died in Darwin in 1961 from cancer.