Placed in Care: a new biography of a Christian missionary in Aboriginal Australia

A biography about Millie Shankelton and her work in forcibly removing children from their homes focuses on her belief she was saving them from a life of despair.

Lorna Cubillo (far right, seated on truck fender) outside Retta Dixon home in Darwin. She was raised by Christian missionaries in the home after being removed from an Aboriginal camp.

On 23 July 1947, a Christian missionary named Millie Shankelton climbed into the passenger seat of a truck bound for the Aboriginal camp at Phillip Creek in the Northern Territory.

Her aim?

To scoop up 17 of the camp’s “half-caste” children, load them into the back of the truck, and return with them, to live at the Retta Dixon children’s home in Darwin.

Many of the children screamed, and their Aboriginal parents cried as they were taken away, but Shankelton would later say that, while the parting was “hard” she believed she was saving the children from a life of poverty and despair.

Placed in Our Care is a new biography of Millie Shankelton, who oversaw the removal of “half-caste” children in the Northern Territory in 1947.

Almost 50 years later, one of those children, Lorna Cubillo (nee Nelson) sued the Commonwealth, arguing that her forced removal from the camp in fact caused her immense pain and suffering. It is now understood that some of the Christian missionaries who served at the Retta Dixon Home raped, beat and abused the children in their care.

Cubillo v The Commonwealth was the first, and is among the most famous of the “Stolen Generation” cases. Many Australians believe that Cubillo must have won. In fact, she lost, and when she tried to appeal the decision, she lost again.

Her attempt to have the matter heard by the High Court also failed.

Lorna Cubillo sued the Commonwealth for pain and suffering after Shankelton organized her removal from an Aboriginal camp at Phillip Creek in 1947.

We can speculate as to how Cubillo might go today, but the question as to why her case failed is one that the former public servant turned writer, Douglas Brown, attempts to answer in a new biography of the woman who personally oversaw Cubillo’s removal from Phillip Creek.

“I have attempted to be fair and accurate,” he says. “I have not set out to denigrate Millie, or her evangelical Christian beliefs. I have not set out to write a hagiography, either.”

That said, he believes that Shankelton, in taking those children, saved the lives of at least some of them, and he accepts that opinion “won’t be popular with everyone.”

Brown says he first encountered Shankelton’s name in the context of his work as policy officer for the NSW Department of Corrections in the 1990s.

“I was reading things like the report into Aboriginal deaths in custody, and the names of the missions, and the missionaries, were coming up all the time,” he says. “I decided to look into her life, and I discovered there was no biography.”

He didn’t plan to be the one to write one, but upon his retirement, Brown decided to do a course on research for writers, and for the purposes of that course, he needed to choose a subject.

He chose Shankelton.

“Over time, the question for me became, when she took the children from Phillip Creek, did she cause them harm, or did she rescue them?

“I believe she rescued them. But I also wanted to examine missionary work, and the history of indigenous policy in Australia, and how it has changed.”

It was tough going. The only biographical material he could find came from the Northern Perspective, which described Shankelton as “a selfless Australian born woman who denied herself a husband and children, to devote her life to the wellbeing of Aborigines and ‘half-caste’ children.”

But the same article also said: “Her death in 1990, at the age of 88, spared her the realisation of the damage done to those in her care through emotional deprivation and loss of identity.”

Millie Shankelton in 1975 (picture courtesy her biographer, Douglas Brown).

Brown was able to establish that Amelia, or Millie, Shankelton was born in Glebe, NSW, in 1902. Her father, a salesman for an ice company, died when she was eleven. At eighteen, she had an intensely religious experience, and was “born again”. She would spend the rest of her long life working with the Indigenous community, including a long stint as superintendent of the Retta Dixon Home.

Brown says “it’s hardly fashionable now, of course” to try to tell stories about missionaries in the Top End, “except to say the missionaries did terrible things. And some of them did. The Retta Dixon home was unfortunately not immune from poor behaviour. But on the other hand, the Aboriginal camps where children lived before they were taken into care were also highly dangerous places.

“I can’t prove this, of course, but I believe that if those sixteen children that Shankelton picked up from Phillip Creek had stayed there, they would have died. Perhaps not all of them. But it was a dilapidated, unhealthy place, with no sanitation, and no clean water. We can apply the thinking of 2024 to the situation, and say, well, that doesn’t mean you have to take the children, but this was a camp outside Tennant Creek, just after World War II, and the thinking was, get the children out of there, and save them.

“The people who were doing it weren’t trying to do the wrong thing. They were trying to do the right thing.”

Brown says his biography of Shankelton is “not a history of the Aboriginal Inland Mission, which ran the Retta Dixon Home … it is a narrative of Shankelton’s life and work.” That said, he relied heavily on the mission’s own records, which are held by the NSW State Library.

A sign restricting access to Aboriginal camps in the Northern Territory.

The book’s title – Placed in Our Care – comes from an article published in the September 1958 issue of the missionary newsletter, Our Aim, which says:

“Three little ones were admitted to the Home at 9.45pm last night … Another destitute mother with her eight days old baby were brought in this week ... Also another six weeks old baby was placed in our care as her mother had died at the birth. Two more neglected little ones are expected in today, bringing the total up to 14 in the Nursery.”

Brown writes: “But who had done the placing? One of the themes of this book is that Shankelton and her staff did not go looking for Aboriginal children to draft into Retta Dixon Home. Rather the Northern Territory Administration, and Aboriginal parents, would turn to Retta Dixon Home, again and again, as a solution to pressing human problems.”

To which one might say, but of course they did: the plight of Aboriginal people at that time was dire, and powerlessness was near absolute; many could not read and write; they did not earn equal wages, and some were in servitude. And there’s also no question that some children were taken by force.

In her statement to the Federal Court in 1996, Cubillo described the day that she and other part-Aboriginal children were taken away: “It was early in the morning. A truck was backed up to the shed where we slept. We were told to get onto the truck. We thought we were being taken on a picnic. But I soon realised that we were not going on a picnic. There was a lot of crying and commotion going on … There was a panic in the place.

Aboriginal children in the care of missionaries in the Northern Territory in the 1940s.

“Only the half-caste Aboriginal children were told to get onto the truck. We took nothing with us. Other children and mothers gathered around the truck. They were crying and screaming out. The truck had only a tray back. There was chicken wire on the sides of the tray. Otherwise, there was no protection or cover. Seventeen of us were ordered onto the truck … The very young children were still drinking mother’s milk … As the truck left Philip [sic] Creek everyone was crying and screaming. I remember mothers beating their heads with sticks and rocks. They were bleeding. They threw dirt over themselves. We were all crying on the truck. I remember that day. Mothers chased the truck from Philip [sic] Creek screaming and crying. They disappeared in the dust of the truck …”

Brown says it was “probably morally wrong” for Shankelton to pretend the children were being taken to a picnic, but argues that “her deception is understandable. The mothers and children were upset. There was much crying and, it seems, some mothers self-harmed to give vent to their distress. Shankelton herself would have been stressed. She may have been intent on removing the children as quickly as possible to relieve her own mental anguish.”

Brown says in his book that the missionaries were met with “no physical resistance from a large number of Aborigines” at Phillip Creek, “who had their traditional weapons with them and knew how to use them”.

But of course, they’d have known the consequence of armed resistance, in 1947.

He notes that while seventeen children were loaded onto the truck, only sixteen children arrived at Darwin, because of them, Peter Hansen, jumped from the truck as it left Phillip Creek, ran into the bush, and could not be found.

While some missionaries tried to argue that Aboriginal parents did not really miss their children because they never bothered to mention their children again after they were taken, Brown accepts that “the mothers could have been so traumatised by the removal of their children that they could not (even) bring themselves to mention it.”

He notes that thirteen months after the removal of the Phillip Creek children, “all the mothers of the half-caste children (who are in the Darwin Home) made up little parcels of balls, combs, mirrors, necklaces” and asked for those parcels to be delivered to them.

“We can conclude with certainty that the mothers had not forgotten about their children,” he writes.

“We are left with the picture of Aboriginal mothers screaming when their children were taken from them, of the mothers hitting their heads with sticks and rocks, of mothers bleeding … How could they not feel grief for the rest of their lives?”

Yet, he says, “the evidence strongly favours the answer that Millie Shankelton rescued those part-Aboriginal – and, it must not be forgotten, part-white – children and gave them a chance to enter fully into mainstream Australian society.”

Brown came to his task having been raised in a “strongly Baptist” family himself.

“It’s interesting to read about missionaries, who gave up their whole lives for causes that are today considered very unfashionable,” he says. “And yet some of the big (private) schools still have schemes to bring Aboriginal kids to their schools, as resident students ... it’s the same thing being done again, to take them out of a difficult environment and give them a schooling in a residential setting.”

Of course, it isn’t at all the same thing: the children who attend private schools in Sydney aren’t there against the will of their parents, who know exactly where they are.

“And when Millie Shankelton died, a group calling themselves ‘the boys and girls of Retta Dixon Home’ placed an ad in The Sunday Territorian,” says Brown. The children, who knew Millie by a pet name, Laelie, said: “Laelie, you never forgot our birthday or a Christmas gift, but the greatest gift of all was the love you gave to each of us’.”

“I understand that there is room for a more thorough analysis of what conditions for Aboriginal people in Australia were at that time – illiterate and not earning equal wages and so forth – but I think we are applying the thinking of today to 1947, when Australia was still reeling from the Second World War, if we say that all the children in the homes suffered, or that the missionaries weren’t trying to do the right thing,” says Brown.

“And remember, the children that were taken had white heritage as well. They had one white parent. They wasn’t a case of taking a full-blood Aboriginal person and putting them on a truck and sending them away.

“Lorna Cubillo’s father was a white soldier who had shot through shortly after she was born. She had white heritage, in that sense. And if she had stayed at Phillip Creek, she would not have been denied the opportunities being given to other white children in Australia at that time. I’m not saying the Retta Dixon home was perfect, not at all. I certainly don’t say that. But I do think some lives were saved, and they were saved by Millie Shankelton.”

Placed In Our Care, Millie Shankelton, missionary to Aborigines: Her Role in the Stolen Generations Story by Douglas Brown, with a foreword by Nicholas Hasluck, published by Eider Books, 423pp, out now.