Bringing them home: Indigenous Veterans and the Stolen Generations
While Indigenous soldiers experienced some degree of equality while serving with the Australian armed forces during the World Wars, many faced dispossession, discrimination, and exclusion upon their return home. For some, this included the removal of their children.
Better known around Singleton as Billy Swan, William Frances enlisted for service in the Australian Imperial Force in March 1917, claiming to have been born in New Zealand. He was in fact an Aboriginal man from Singleton in New South Wales, with deep ties to the Singleton Mission Home.
Until May 1917, the Defence Act exempted those “not substantially of European origin or descent” from enlistment. Advice in a military recruiting handbook from 1914 clarified the position, stating, “Aborigines and half-castes are not to be enlisted. This restriction is to be interpreted as applying to all coloured men.”
Despite this, many Indigenous men enlisted and served. The backgrounds of those who did not live in a traditional environment, or who had been raised in white households, for example, could be overlooked by recruiters. Claiming to be from New Zealand was a well-recognised strategy for evading enlistment restrictions.
Having successfully enlisted, Frances left Australia on 10 May 1917, joined a training battalion in England, and was allocated to the 36th Battalion. After training, he arrived on the Western Front to replenish the troop numbers lost in battles in the Ypres Sector.
Following an attack on the 36th Battalion on 26 April 1918, the local paper in Singleton reported, “an aboriginal soldier, Private William Francis (better known here as ‘Billy Swan’), has been gassed and classed ‘wounded’, while fighting in France.”
After his recovery, Frances returned to active duty with the 34th Battalion in August, tasked with defending the approach to Amiens around Villers-Bretonneux. Amid fierce fighting, Frances was again wounded on 26 August.
Released back to his unit in November 1918, five days after the Armistice, Frances was discharged. Twice wounded in action, he had been involved in climactic battles that resisted the final German assault before securing allied victory.
Whatever equality Frances found on the Western Front, however, would not return home with him. By the time Frances arrived home in July 1919, both his sons had been seized by the state.
While he was at war, the Singleton Mission Home had been taken over by the Aborigine Protection Board, which had powers over all Aboriginal children in New South Wales. The board began removing children from their families and placing them in the Singleton Aboriginal Mission.
Frances’s sons, Arthur and Eric, were two of the children already living in the mission. Arthur had entered the home at the age of 8, having come “from the Aboriginal Reserve at Mt Olive, also known as St Clair just outside Singleton – under the care of Aboriginal Inland Mission”. Arthur’s younger brother, Eric, was noted as having Indigenous family living in the area: Wonnarua Country.
In February 1918, Arthur, then 14 years old, was removed from the Mission Home by the Aborigines Protection Board, separated from his brother and placed under control of the State Children’s Relief Board. Arthur spent three months at the Farm Home at Mittagong, while Eric remained at the Singleton Mission Home. In May, Arthur returned to the Mission Home, while Eric was surrendered to the Depot at Oxford Street in Paddington with instructions for his mother not to be given his address.
William Frances’s experience was not unique.
Yorta Yorta man Jack Patten, an outspoken and widely recognised interwar Indigenous activist, enlisted in the Second Australian Imperial Force in December 1939. Private Patten left Australia for the Middle East with the 6th Division in February 1940. One of the Black Rats of Tobruk, he was discharged in 1942 with shrapnel damage to his knees. After the war, while camping on the Clarence River between Grafton and Baryulgil, six of Patten’s seven children were stolen by the Aborigines Protection Board.