The minutes of the boards show they mostly dealt with matters of requests from religious bodies for financial relief and reports from resident or police magistrates pertaining to trials and convictions of Aboriginal people under their jurisdiction.
The Victorian Half-Caste Act of 1886 gave the Board extensive new powers over the lives of Aboriginal people, including regulation of residence, employment and marriage.
Aboriginal children were removed from their families for various welfare reasons and transported to Kinchela and Cootamundra, where they were often abused and neglected while being taught farm labouring and domestic work, many of them ending up as servants in the homes of wealthy Sydney residents.
[10] The Western Australian Aborigines Protection Board operated between 1 January 1886 and 1 April 1898 as a statutory authority.
[13][14] The 1886 act was enacted following the furore over the Fairburn Report (which revealed slavery conditions among Aboriginal farm workers) and the work of the Rev.
There was no provision in the 1886 Act for contracts to include wages, but employees were to be provided with "substantial, good and sufficient rations", clothing and blankets.
The 1886 act provided a resident magistrate with the power to indenture 'half-caste' and Aboriginal children, from a suitable age, until they turned 21.
Governor Broome insisted that the act contain within it a clause permitting traditional owners to continue hunting on their tribal lands.
Nearly half of the Legislative Council voted to amend the act for contract labour as low as age 10 but it was defeated.
McKenzie Grant, the member for The North, claimed that child labour of age six or seven was a necessary commonplace, as "in this way they gradually become domesticated".
[15] By the late 1960s, all states and territories had repealed the legislation allowing for the removal of Aboriginal children under the policy of 'protection'.