Palm Island Aboriginal Settlement
Palm Island was mentioned in the Bringing Them Home Report as an institution that housed children removed from their families, part of the Stolen Generation.
In 1916 he found Palm Island to be "the ideal place for a delightful holiday' and that its remoteness also made it suitable for use as a penitentiary" for "individuals we desire to punish".
[7][11] On 3 February 1930, in an incident known as the 1930 Palm Island Tragedy, the first Superintendent of the Settlement, Robert Henry Curry, who had been a strict disciplinarian, shot and wounded two people, and set fire to several buildings, killing his two children.
Curry, as punishment for misdemeanours such as speaking their own language or gambling, was to exile men to Eclipse Island, and sometimes Curacoa, with only bread and water, sometimes for weeks at a time.
[14][7] South Australian anthropologist Norman Tindale visited the island in 1938, and recorded the genealogies of people representing a large number of tribal groups from across mainland Queensland.
[3] The Act effected a change in policy: instead of protection and segregation of Indigenous people, it instead focussed on assimilation into the "white community".
[19][11] They were removed from across Queensland as punishment; being "disruptive", falling pregnant to a white man, or being born with "mixed blood" were among the "infringements" that could lead to the penalty of being sent to Palm Island.
[20] New arrivals came after being sentenced by a court or released from prison, or they were sent by administrators of other missions wishing to weed out their more ill-mannered or disruptive Aboriginal people.
[7] Palm Island was used as a penal institution for Indigenous people who ran afoul of the 1897 Protection Act, as well as those who had committed criminal offences.
[22] On the reserve there was a "hospital, two schools, a Female Welfare Organisation with a Home Training Centre, an Old People's Home, a Child Welfare Centre with baby and child clinics, dormitories for children, women and youths, churches of various denominations, a curio shop, sawmill and logging operations, and a workshop where training was undertaken in carpentry, joining and plumbing".
[23] It was recorded that there was almost military-like discipline in the segregation between white and black, and that inmates "were treated as rather dull retarded children".
[21] The catalyst for the strike was the attempted deportation of Indigenous inmate Albie Geia who committed the offence of disobeying the European overseer.
Armed Police arrived by RAAF launch from Townsville, and the "ringleaders" and their families were deported in chains to other Aboriginal settlements.
[7] Seven families were banished from the Palm Island in 1957 for taking part in a strike organised to protest against the Dickensian working conditions imposed by the Queensland Government under the reserve system.
The majority of the current population descend from peoples occupying the region between Bowen and Tully, from north-western Queensland, and from the Cape York Peninsula.
[29] The "largest and historically most punitive of Queensland's Aboriginal reserves",[11] Palm Island was mentioned in the Bringing Them Home Report (1997) as an institution that housed children removed from their families, part of the Stolen Generation.
[31] Economist Helen Hughes wrote in 2007 that the state of affairs was largely due to the establishment of the "penal settlement in 1918 for Aborigines unwilling to be docile, underpaid bush and domestic workers", and historical and current "apartheid-like" policies: the Queensland Government was failing the community by "stalling the Commonwealth's efforts to improve policing, education and health and to introduce private property rights".
