Jane Duren

Jane Duren (1867 – 1947) was an Aboriginal Yuin woman from Moruya.

She came to prominence as a member of the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association (AAPA), an early and united Aboriginal activist group, for two very significant reasons: in 1926 she wrote to King George V alerting him of plans to move the Batemans Bay Aboriginal community from its reserve in the town and advising him that Aboriginal children were being excluded from the local primary school, and then in 1927 for her advocacy for the repeal of the existing Aborigines Act and for its replacement by another Act that was more acceptable to Aboriginals and which would make no distinction between Australian Aboriginals and whites.

Jane Duren, therefore, was a significant local pioneer campaigner for Australian Aboriginal civil-rights.

The causes she championed date back to 1902 when an area of nine acres was ‘reserved for the use of Aborigines’ in Batemans Bay township. By 1918, however, that reserve was standing in the way of the town’s expansion, so the Batemans Bay Progress Association requested revocation of the reserve and the removal of its Aboriginal residents. Naturally, the local Aboriginal population strongly opposed this move. And, at the same time there was a push to exclude Aboriginal children from the Batemans Bay Public School, even though local Aboriginals had been attending the school for 25 years. (This was particularly significant because if the Aboriginal children were not attending school they could be deemed neglected under the Aborigines Protection Act, and then be placed in a training home or assigned out to a white employer.)

The AAPA was having no success from its appeals to the Minister for Education, the Child Welfare Department, the Aborigines Protection Board or Members of Parliament, so Jane wrote direct to the King ‘on behalf of the Quadroon and Half-Caste Children of Batemans Bay.’

The King sent the letter back to Australia’s Governor General who, in turn, sent it to the NSW Aborigines Protection Board – the very body that Jane Duren’s letter was primarily criticising!

The NSW Aborigines Protection Board had a practice at that time of making decisions behind closed doors, was secretive and exercised unquestioned executive powers, so Jane’s direct approach to the King must have been, if nothing else, highly unsettling.

In April 1927 a Child Welfare Department Inspector was sent to Batemans Bay and discovered that white parents had no personal objections to the schooling of Aboriginal children, but were concerned about a possible influx of Aboriginal families from surrounding areas that might lead to health problems. A compromise was reached: the Aboriginal children would have to pass a medical examination before attending the local school and were to be seated apart from the white students in their classes.

Also in 1927 Jane was one of seven Aboriginal members of the AAPA who tackled the Church of England and the Australian Board of Missions about racial inequality with whites, the stripping of Aboriginals of their land, and about a proposal to establish a separate ‘Aboriginal State’ in some arid remote location in Northern Australia. Again, their efforts did not result directly in any immediate changes, but their calls did receive substantial press coverage with Jane being quoted, for example, as observing ‘The Aborigines Protection Board was a nice name…but when this kind of thing occurred (the exclusion of black children from the State school at Batemans Bay) where did the protection come in?’

Jane’s active involvement with the AAPA is significant because it illustrates that Aboriginal women were heavily involved in the leadership and activities of the organisation – an organisation which, like so many others at that time, could have easily functioned as an exclusively male-only, whites-only organisation.