Advocates publish Yinjilli leaflet to help people understand entitlements 

Although many Aboriginal people became eligible for government payments in 1959, it was still difficult for people to get their entitlements. Government processes were often discriminatory and information for Aboriginal audiences was lacking.

To help people claim payments, the Federal Council of Aboriginal Advancement (FCAA) wrote to the government about these issues.

Following the government’s response, the FCAA created their own leaflet for Aboriginal people explaining the 8 payments they were entitled to.

Difficulties Aboriginal people faced getting payments

Shirley Andrews wrote to the Department of Social Services (DSS) after the FCAA’s December 1962 Cairns Conference. Andrews reported that conference participants were frustrated by the ‘unjust and patronising’ practices around applying for payments and how officials decided if someone was eligible. She said that ‘every difficulty and obstruction’ was put in the way of Aboriginal applicants. She also pointed out that many Aboriginal people didn’t even know what payments they were eligible for because the government didn’t try to communicate with them.

Andrews also discussed the issue of ‘protectors’ who worked in state governments and often decided whether Aboriginal people got a payment. She included a story of a non-Aboriginal journalist and his wife who witnessed a protector denying Aboriginal people payments because ‘he didn’t feel in the mood to pay out the social service money that day’.

Information to help: the Yinjilli leaflet 

To address some of the FCAA’s issues, Andrews said she was drafting a leaflet for Aboriginal people that would help them access payments. Andrews asked 11 questions of the Director of the Department of Social Services (DSS) to collect information for the leaflet.

Andrews used information from DSS’s response to co-author the Yinjilli leaflet with Rodney Hall.  The leaflet explained to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people which payments they were entitled to and how to apply.

Advice to apply directly to DSS  

Andrews and Hall knew about the discrimination Aboriginal applicants faced. They noted that people often had ‘trouble getting the benefits due to them ... because they've been told to apply to “protectors” or Aboriginal Welfare Departments’. The ‘protectors’ they referred to were state government welfare officers who previously had control over who got payments. For example, the Western Australian Government published a booklet about citizenship and payments and told readers to apply for payments through their welfare officer.

The Yinjilli leaflet advised people to apply directly to DSS to ensure they got their full payment.

Fri, 2022-07-29 17:07

genevieve.dashwood

A Yinjilli Leaflet p. 2

Advice about how to prove eligibility 

Another issue the authors gave advice about was proof of age requirements. For a long time, the government didn’t give Aboriginal people birth certificates. This made it very hard to prove age and access payments such as Old-age Pension.

Under the part about Old-age Pension they wrote:

If you know somebody who is not an Aborigine, who can help to prove your age, take this person (or a written statement from him) to the Social Services Department. This does not mean that the Department will only believe people who are not Aborigines. It is because they have proof of the age of these other people.

Leaflet distribution

Historian Sue Taffe (2001:188-189) found that the FCAA distributed 5,000 copies of the Yinjilli leaflet. They sent them throughout Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory.

Despite the FCAA’s good intentions, the text-based leaflet may not have been effective because of the literacy levels of the audience. However, this leaflet is an important example of the FCAA’s efforts to communicate to Aboriginal people about their entitlements.

As well as communicating to Aboriginal people, the FCAA also advocated to government for change. For example, they fought for equal wages for Aboriginal people and access to more payments, such as Tuberculosis Allowance.

Better information from government

Memos between departments from 1964, the year after Andrews published the leaflet, show that the government wasn’t supportive of it.

DSS said they were worried people would think it was an official DSS document. They also said that information published for a general audience, like the Commonwealth social services handbook, was good enough.

It would take many years for the government to improve how they communicated with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people about payments, for example, by translating information into language.