PHOTO COURTESY OF WONGUTHA CAPS
5 MI N U T E H I S T ORY
Wongutha CAPS BY KARLI FLORISSON
Wongutha CAPS is a boarding school for Aboriginal students, located on a farm near Esperance. Wongutha has been a longstanding part of the Esperance community and has been providing vocational education for young Indigenous people from all over the state for over sixty-five years. In 1921, a missionary called Rodolphe Schenk came to the Goldfields of WA from Victoria. Schenk and his wife Mysie established the Mount Margaret Mission near Laverton, 350 kilometres north of Kalgoorlie. Schenk became unpopular with the local station owners because of his policy of paying wages (albeit very modest wages) to the Aboriginal people who came to work at the mission. From 1927 onwards, Mount Margaret Mission became home for some of the Aboriginal children who were removed from their parents under the government policies at the time, children who became part of the ‘Stolen Generation’.
Mount Margaret Mission differed from some of the other facilities in that the families of the children who were taken away were allowed to come and stay at the mission, and other families could bring their children freely to gain an education. The Mission did not have the same reputation for cruelty as the Moore River government settlement near Perth. Mount Margaret Mission also became a rationing station for the area, distributing the Government rations to the Aboriginal people who had lost access to their land as settlers moved in. The Mission had a strong emphasis on education and practical vocational training which has left a lasting legacy in the area. In 1954, Rodolphe Schenk’s son Rod, an agriculture school graduate, decided to establish a training centre for young Aboriginal men from the Goldfields to gain vocational training. At the time, there was a high demand for farmworkers in the Esperance district, as farming land was being taken up at a fast rate. Twenty-year-old Rod purchased 1,000 acres of land near Gibson at the cost of three shillings an acre and, together with his friend John May, began to establish Wongutha Mission Training Farm. The farm was named ‘Wongutha’ after the language group of the Aboriginal people of the Mount Margaret area where Rod grew up. Rod and John started clearing the land and built a ten by twelve foot shed to store their super and seed, and also to sleep in. In their first year, two young Aboriginal men joined them, learning the basics of farm work and finding employment in the district. In their second year, four young men came to Wongutha. The establishment of Wongutha coincided with a period of rapid growth; at the start of the 1950s, the population of Esperance was only 700 people. By 1962, with hundreds of new farms added in the district, the population of Esperance had increased to over 4,000.
