Australian Dictionary of Biography

Harry Giese, 1978

Library & Archives NT, PH0095/0059

Harry Christian Giese (1913–2000), teacher and public servant, was born on 9 December 1913 at Greenbushes, Western Australia, a small town 250 kilometres south of Perth, eldest of four children of Victorian-born Harry Christian Giese, miner and later schoolteacher, and his Western Australian-born wife, Lilian May Montgomery. Harry senior was killed by a falling tree when his eldest was fourteen.

Giese attended Greenbushes State School and Bunbury High School before winning a Hackett bursary to the University of Western Australia (BA, 1938; DipEd, 1940). He distinguished himself by becoming president of the Guild of Undergraduates (1938) and excelling at sports, including as captain of the university cricket team, and by playing rugby union for the State. He worked as a schoolteacher, and in March 1939, as war loomed, enlisted in the part-time Citizen Military Forces, rising to sergeant in the 25th Light Horse (Machine Gun) Regiment. In 1940, he was one of three Western Australian graduates selected to undertake a two-year course in physical education at the University of Melbourne (BEd, 1942; DipPhysEd, 1942; MEd, 1951). This course, the first of its kind in Australia, had been set up by Fritz Duras, a refugee from Nazi Germany. Many of his students, including Giese, considered him a major influence on their lives. The course was a component of a national fitness movement which was championed by J. H. L. Cumpston, the first Commonwealth director-general of health, and adopted as policy under the terms of the Commonwealth National Fitness Act in 1941.

Beginning full-time military duty, he had brief postings to the instructional staff of the Army School of Physical and Recreational Training, Frankston, where he helped to develop a physical education curriculum, and then to the 29th Garrison Battalion, in the north-west of Western Australia. In September 1942 he joined the Royal Australian Air Force as an aircraftman to train as an education officer. The tall and fit Giese impressed his recruiters as ‘an outstandingly fine type with a particularly striking and pleasing personality’ (NAA A9301).

In November 1942 Cumpston successfully obtained Giese’s discharge and appointed him director of national fitness in Western Australia. Two years later, he became the inaugural director of physical education in the Queensland government’s Department of Public Instruction. Lacking staff and facilities, he began by appointing all nine graduates from the University of Queensland’s recently established Department of Physical Education as a ‘flying squad’ that traversed the State. One of the graduates, Nancy (Nan) Wilson, a schoolteacher, married Giese on 4 May 1946 at St John’s Anglican Cathedral, Brisbane, and went on to have a distinguished career of her own in education and community service.

The Gieses in 1947 moved to Canberra where Harry served as Commonwealth national fitness officer in the Department of Health until 1953, when he became assistant principal training officer at the Public Service Board. From here he was recruited to the position that would define his place in the history of Indigenous policy in Australia. On 15 July 1954 he was appointed to the newly created position of director of welfare in the Northern Territory administration. He also became an official member of the Northern Territory Legislative Council, which at the time was made up of both elected and appointed members.

Giese’s task was to enact a policy of assimilation which the Commonwealth government had formally adopted almost three years earlier, only to become bogged down by legislative and administrative complications. These arose in part because (Sir) Paul Hasluck, minister for territories and the architect of the policy, insisted on expunging any reference to Aboriginality from the legislation, and defining the subjects of the new Welfare Ordinance 1953 as ‘wards’ who were temporarily in need of ‘guardianship and tutelage’ (Hasluck 1952). Aboriginality, for Hasluck, implied biological distinctions that had been central to the protectionist policies of the past but had no place under an assimilation policy.

Although the ordinance had received assent before Giese took up his position, the law could not become operational until an inventory of wards had been compiled. It would be another three years before a list containing details of approximately 13,000 Aboriginal people was accepted by the Legislative Council. In the meantime, the delays did little to impede Giese. Over the next few years, new reserves were created, and educational, training, pre–school and health services expanded. Between 1954 and 1960, the Welfare Branch grew from sixty-four to 281 officer positions. Behind this activity lay an approach grounded in his belief, nurtured through the national fitness movement, in the capacity of social planning, guided by experts, to create the conditions in which people’s lives could be transformed.

In 1965 Giese was appointed MBE. However, his activities had by then begun to attract criticism from several sources. Legislative Council colleagues resented the expenditure on Aboriginal reserves while the budgets allocated to other government functions suffered. In Canberra, senior officers in the Department of Territories fretted over what they saw as Welfare Branch overreach, particularly in the fields of education and health. Most critically, the assimilation policy itself, and its implementation under Giese in particular, were portrayed by critics—Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal—as destructive of traditional culture and incompatible with Aboriginal aspirations for self-determination. International currents, in particular decolonisation in Asia and Africa, the Cold War, and the rise of the civil rights movement in the United States of America, all stimulated increased concern over the rights of indigenous minorities.

The referendum of 1967 that saw overwhelming majority support for two constitutional amendments—one recognising Aboriginal people as part of the official national population, the other giving the Commonwealth concurrent powers with the States to make laws with respect to them—became a watershed for Aboriginal policy. Prime Minister Harold Holt established a Council for Aboriginal Affairs to advise the government, comprising the economist and long-time public servant H. C. ‘Nugget’ Coombs as chairman, the anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner, and the diplomat Barrie Dexter. The CAA called for greater recognition of Aboriginal capacity to determine the extent to which they would merge with the dominant society.

Following Holt’s death in December 1967, neither (Sir) John Gorton nor (Sir) William McMahon as successive prime ministers upheld the CAA’s policy agenda, which also faced opposition from Country Party members of their cabinets. Giese was effectively sidelined in 1970 by being elevated to the new position of assistant administrator (welfare), nominally senior to the director of welfare. The election of the Whitlam Labor government in December 1972 saw the CAA approach adopted as the foundation of government policy. Within a few weeks, the Welfare Branch—including Giese’s position in it—had been abolished and its functions incorporated into the new Commonwealth Department of Aboriginal Affairs. Giese became an unattached officer of the department, and was advised by Dexter, the department’s secretary, that he would not hold any future position involving direct contact with Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory. Giese’s position as a member of the Legislative Council also ended shortly afterwards. He left the council as its longest serving member.

Over the ensuing decades, Giese turned his energy to helping establish several community organisations in Darwin, including a crisis line telephone counselling service, the Marriage Guidance Council, and a centre for treating the disabled that was named for him. After Cyclone Tracy flattened Darwin on Christmas Eve 1974, he was appointed chairman of the Darwin Disaster Welfare Council. In 1978, following attainment of self-government by the Northern Territory, he was appointed as the territory’s first ombudsman and spent the last six months of his public service career establishing this office. He chaired the Northern Territory committee of the Menzies Foundation (1979–85), set up to honour the vision of the former prime minister, and played an important role in setting up the Menzies School of Health Research, a Darwin-based institute focusing on tropical and Indigenous health. In 1991 he was made an honorary fellow of the University of Sydney, and in 1997 was appointed AM.

Nan Giese also played a prominent role in the Northern Territory community, particularly in post-secondary education, and the visual and performing arts. She served (1993–2004) as chancellor of the Northern Territory University (Charles Darwin University from 2003) and was appointed MBE (1971; elevated to OBE in 1977), and AO (1997). In 2004 she was awarded an honorary doctorate of education by the university.

To his admirers Giese was an administrator of prodigious energy, dedicated to transforming Aboriginal people’s well-being and opportunities, whose achievements following the discarding of assimilation have not received due recognition. His detractors saw him as one whose desire to control the processes of Aboriginal social change became an obstacle to Aboriginal self-determination. Giese died in Darwin on 4 February 2000, survived by Nan and their children Diana and Richard, and was cremated. His ashes were scattered on the tropical garden he and Nan had created around their home of fifty years.