From the late nineteenth century until as late as the 1970s, the governments of Australia pursued policies that entailed the forcible removal of Aboriginal children from their families to be taken and placed into institutions in white communities. These people are now known as the 'stolen generations'. The reigning attitude and strategy of this époque was 'assimilation'. This involved the slow absorption of Aboriginal blood into the white stock, and the cultural assimilation of Aborigines into the white Australian mainstream. However, whilst many non-indigenous Australians of the past, and some of those of the present, consider assimilation to have been in the best interests of both parties--the Aborigines as well as the Europeans--new versions of this past have begun to surface, enabled by the new 'multicultural' atmosphere of the 1970s onwards.
The Bringing Them Home (1997) report, of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission (HREOC) outlined a new version of assimilation that directly contested the white Australian account of caring benevolence on their behalf, and that depicted a story of a great grief and loss suffered by the Aboriginal people. The report caused much shock and public debate, which was subsequently transformed into a right/left wing political divide. This discourse is essentially a battle about history; about the right to represent the past and to construct a future based on that reading. Thus, the description of history that is eventually decided upon will have very concrete material effects for the shaping of Australian society in future generations, and especially for the individual and community life of the Aboriginal people. This essay will examine the policies of Aboriginal child removal in Australia and the various ways in which those who are involved in the political debate have sought to win Australia's 'soul' on the issue.
From the beginnings of European settlement, Aborigines were treated by whites as "savages in the popular sense of the time, inimical to civilization in their 'treachery', even bestial, and so unworthy of human consideration" (Beckett, 1988: 196). This type of thinking was given a perceived scientific rationality by the ideas of Social Darwinism, which put whites at the pinnacle of an evolutionary scale, with apes at the bottom, followed closely by the Australian aborigines. However, although miscegenation (the sexual union of whites with non-whites) was "looked upon...with undisguised distaste and alarm" (Manne, 1998: 56), inevitably whites (usually males) would sexually liaise with Aborigines, resulting in the births of what came to be termed in the mainstream community as 'half-caste' children (Beckett, 1988: 198). The Aboriginal mothers most often raised these children with little if any assistance from their white fathers. Nevertheless, as the numbers of 'half-caste' children steadily rose, white public and state aversion became apparent over the practice of leaving such "children with 'British blood' to the 'blacks'" (ibid.) This concern was what came to be known as the 'half-caste problem' (Manne, 1998: 56). Whilst it was generally believed that the 'full blood' (or 'pure blood') Aborigines would eventually 'die out' due to the nature of their traditional tribal practices, the spread of disease, and the decimation of land and resources that had provided their subsistence, the solution to the 'half-caste problem' was seen to be their selective 'assimilation' into the white community through government policies. Of the various aspects that constituted 'assimilation' policies (such as the prevention of whites from marrying Aborigines and the banning of whites from entering Aboriginal reserves), the removal of 'half-caste' children from their Aboriginal families was perhaps the most poignant and regrettable.
Aboriginal child removal by whites had in fact been practiced ever since the early days of settlement. During the nineteenth century, employers took Aboriginal children away from their families to be brought up as laborers on farms (Hoebich, 2000: 292-3). These children were often maltreated or abused and were rarely paid any wages for the work that they did. They were also often swapped and sold from employer to employer (Hoebich, 2000: 298-9). Therefore, some Aboriginal Protectors, such as Walter Roth in Queensland, wanted the government to assume the responsibility for child removal to protect the children from the bad treatment of white employers, as well as from what they saw as the unsavory conditions of Aboriginal camps.. The children were instead to be removed to government sanctioned missions (Hoebich, 2000: 302). Thus, in 1897, despite the loud opposition of employers, the Aborigines Protection and Restriction on the Sale of Opium Act was passed which gave Aboriginal Protectors greater powers to remove children for a variety of reasons, without a court order, and the prohibited employers from doing so (Hoebich, 2000: 289). Nevertheless, employers continued to take Aboriginal children until as late as the 1920s, either illegally, or by exploiting legal loopholes in the Act (Hoebich, 2000: 311).
The 1897 Queensland Act proved to serve as a model for the other states and territories, which enacted similar bills throughout the early twentieth century. The legislation allowed for the Protectors to assume full guardianship rights for the children until they were as old as twenty-one (Manne, 1998: 57).
In 1937, following a Premiers Conference in Adelaide, at which it was agreed that there was a need for uniformity in the implementation of Aboriginal policy, the Initial Conference of Commonwealth and State Aboriginal Authorities was held in Canberra. It was here that assimilation and child removal became official policies of the federal government.
That this Conference believes that the destiny of the natives of aboriginal origin, but not of the full blood, lies in their ultimate absorption by the people of the Commonwealth and it therefore recommends that all efforts be directed to that end (Commonwealth of Australia, 1937: 3).
It is difficult to determine just how many Aboriginal children were taken away from their biological mothers and extended families during the assimilation years. However, Manne, having recently surveyed the evidence, has estimated the number as at least somewhere between 20,000 and 25,000 (or one out of every ten) Aboriginal children, by 1970 (Manne, 2001: 27).
Nevertheless, there was not complete unanimity amongst the Australian public in the acceptance of these policies. In the interwar years there was vigorous political activism by Aboriginal leaders, such as Jack Patten, William Ferguson, Fred Maynard, William Cooper, Pearl Gibbs, and Margaret Tucker, as well as women's groups (predominantly white), and international advocacy agencies, such as the British Commonwealth League (BCL) and the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society (ASAP). They agitated both against child removal policies and more broadly against the repression of Aborigines (Hoebich, 2000: 312, 326-8). The extent of public concern in South Australia was particularly strong, with overwhelming public outrage at the passing of the Aborigines (Training of Children) Act in 1923 (which was designed to facilitate the removal of Aboriginal children) causing the South Australian government to suspend the Act (Hoebich, 2000: 315-20).
However, with the arrival of the Second World War, Aboriginal issues and "the rights of Aboriginal children and mothers [were] shelved and eventually forgotten" amidst the general confusion and turmoil of the war years and of postwar reconstruction (Hoebich, 2000: 340). Stanner has famously characterized the era from 1939 to 1955, in Australian history, as 'the great Australian silence' in regards to Aboriginal issues (Stanner, 1968: 22).
Yet the Aboriginal children continued to be taken away from their mothers by the Australian government and 'Aboriginal families did not sit passively as their families were broken up" (Hoebich, 2000: 288). In a number of cases welfare officers were confronted violently by Aborigines as they attempted to take children away from the mothers, and children were often paranoically hidden whenever strangers appeared in the neighborhood. As well as this, Aborigines increasingly engaged in forms of political protest against child removal (ibid.).
In general, though, the voices of the Aborigines were not heard. There was an underlying belief amongst the Australian public that whilst traditional Aboriginal culture and Aborigines were 'doomed', 'half-caste' Aborigines were becoming relatively successful in the white community (e.g. in areas such as "painting, singing, soldiering, playing sport, studying [and] housekeeping"), and that therefore assimilation policies had somehow been validated (Becket, 1988: 201-2). Manne writes:
It is impossible to read the stories of the separation of Aboriginal children without stumbling, time and again, upon non-Aboriginal Australians for whom incapacity to grasp the depth of suffering of Aborigines lies at the heart of the harm they inflict (Manne, 1998: 60).
It was not until the 1960s and 1970s that Aboriginal issues again made any real impact on the Australian political mainstream. The referendum of 1967 gave Aborigines national citizenship and voting rights; the Tent Embassy in 1972 put land-rights firmly onto the public agenda; the Whitlam Labor government (1972-5) saw a move away from assimilation to multiculturalism; and the Racial Discrimination Act was passed in 1975. Yet, although Aboriginal child removal reform had begun, little had been achieved in the way of reuniting Aboriginal children with their families (Hoebich, 2000: 570). In 1980, Link Up in New South Wales, and in 1988 Link Up in Queensland, were created which helped to locate families and children, but it was not until the Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal Children from their Families was set up in 1995 that the nature of the 'stolen generations' (as the removed Aboriginal children came to be called) was brought into the full and immediate attention of the mainstream public forum.
The Bringing Them Home report of the Inquiry, presented to the Federal Attorney General in 1997, was based on the testimony of 777 people and organizations, 535 of whom were Aborigines (HREOC, 1997: 4-5). The findings of the 700-page report unearthed many of the injustices committed against the 'stolen generations'. These included: poor institutions, poor conditions, poor standards of education, non-payment of wages to child workers, and physical and sexual abuse, among others. The report stated "the experiences of forcibly removed children overwhelmingly contradict the view that it was in their 'best interests' at the time" (HREOC, 1997: 27). It also declared that Aboriginal child removal was a "gross violation of human rights" and that as a member of the United Nations (since 1945), Australia had violated its commitment to end racial discrimination through the continuation of the practice (HREOC, 1997: 27). Perhaps most shockingly to the peace of mind of many ordinary Australians, the report conclude:
Forcible removal was an act of genocide contrary to the Convention on Genocide ratified by Australia in 1949. The Convention on Genocide specifically includes 'forcibly transferring children of [a] group to another group with the intention of destroying the group (HREOC, 1997: 27).
Hoebich has commented that after the report was published, the claim "'I just didn't know', was repeated by leaders and members of the public around the country" (Hoebich, 2000: 563). However, although the report jolted many Australians out of their ignorance, very soon some conservative intellectuals began what Manne has called "the campaign against Bringing Them Home", and the 'stolen generations' issue soon became "a bitter, polemical struggle between left and right" (Manne, 2001: 30-1). From the highest level, the refusal of Prime Minister John Howard to apologize to the 'stolen generations' was a rejection of the Inquiry's first recommendation for reparation to them. Howard's reasons for not apologizing were stated as:
The government does not support an official national apology. Such an apology could imply that present generations are in some way responsible and accountable for the actions of earlier generations, actions that were sanctioned by the laws of the time, and that were believed to be in the best interest of the children concerned (cited in Manne, 1997: 55).
Although this refusal can be regarded as a move to evade compensation payouts (which were also recommended by the report), it was also a view that was shared by other Australians.
Some of the critics, following the publication of Bringing Them Home, merely restated the former views of assimilation; that Aboriginal child removal was in the 'best interests' of the welfare and education of the children.
Others attacked the report itself, claiming for instance, that the report had drastically overestimated the numbers of children whose experiences had been positive (Manne, 2001, 27, 32-3). Yet others brought forward individual Aborigines who supported their arguments, such as Ron Brunton, who pointed to a manifest of 1938 by two Aboriginal activists that had specifically endorsed assimilation policies, or the Aborigine, Marjorie Harris, who went on the public record as having been thankful to the government for her removal to an institution as a child (Manne, 2001: 36, 82). Nevertheless, Bringing Them Home had made mention of these types of isolated occurrences, although it was the 'overwhelming' instances to the contrary that had occupied most of its pages (see HREOC, 1997: 17).
Finally, since the early days of white settlement, arguments for the removal of Aboriginal children have been made on the basis of negative idealizations of the pre-colonial Aboriginal past. Mining executive, Hugh Morgan, in arguing against Aboriginal land-rights, has characterized traditional Aboriginal culture as consisting primarily of such traits as "warfare, cannibalism, subincision, polygamy and brutal punishments" (Beckett, 1988L 209-10), whilst Peter Howson, the former federal minister for Aboriginal Affairs has said, that prior to 1788 Australia's Aborigines were on the brink of extinction [and] that those who suffered most in this condition of life, particularly the women, seized the opportunity to escape from it when, miraculously, missionaries and pastoralists turned up and offered sanctuary (cited in Manne, 2001: 56).
Thus, in this view, the 'stolen generations' had been 'rescued' by white Australians and not 'stolen'. Nevertheless, as Morgan and Howson both point out, the Left has also been guilty of this kind of primitivism, and has often emphasized the reverse elements of Aboriginal culture, such as 'Mystical Wisdom, Oneness with the land, Ecological Reverence, and Social Harmony" (Keesing, 1989: 30).
However, both of these types of romanticism rely heavily on fetishized views of "Aboriginal culture...[as] enshrined in museums, galleries, demonstrations and institutionally framed 'sites of significance'" (Beckett, 1988: 207). They are thus constructed by various 'authorities' on Aboriginal culture, such as anthropologists, missionaries, and artists (usually non-Aboriginal) (Ariss, 1988: 135), and "incorporate Western conceptions of Otherness" that "pervasively and eternally distinguishes Them from US" (Keesing, 1989: 29, 33). They may therefore bare little resemblance to Aboriginal culture as it was actually lived-out by Aboriginal people in the pre-colonial past, but may instead serve as tools of political leverage in the present cultural context (Keesing, 1989: 19).
Indeed, Aboriginal identity in the present and the future, at the public level, may very well depend upon such renegotiations of knowledge about the past. Whereas previously Aborigines have had little say about the construction of Aboriginal identity in the public domain due to the dominance of the state of their own exclusion (Beckett, 1988: 193), they are now beginning to intervene and to challenge some commonly held notions. To quote Ariss,
The overriding concern of this discourse is to construct a continuity of Aboriginality through the linking of the traditional and the contemporary via the common suffering of all aborigines at the hands of the European intrusion, and through that to project a course for the future (Ariss, 1988, 134).
Or Sutton,
If the tradition you had in the past was taken from you, you must reconstruct one (Sutton, 1988: 259).
Thus, "there have been two histories of Australia" since white settlement (Edwards, 1988: 111). Whilst that of the whites is well known to most Australians (i.e. the one that usually begins with the arrival of the fleet of Captain Cook), a new history has started to emerge which features that Aborigines in greater prominence. This other history includes the events that are often forgotten by whites, such as the shooting massacres of Aborigines at white settlement, and the heartbreaking experiences of the mothers and families whose children were 'stolen' from them.
However, because Aborigines have not usually kept written records of their histories, and have instead passed down information orally from generation to generation, many white historians have refuted the claims made by them. Sutton has noted:
The fact that Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal historians often have different approaches to verification, for example, is sometimes interpreted as arising from different levels of intellectual scholarship quality (Sutton, 1988: 263).
Yet, as this difference between white empiricism and Aboriginal 'storytelling' is a cultural one, it begs the question as to 'who has the right to represent Aboriginal culture and identity?'
Sutton has also pointed out that these contemporary reconstructions of the past are not widely different from traditional Aboriginal conceptions of history (Sutton, 1988: 264-5). Thus, in the Aboriginal pre-colonial past, when the myths of The Dreaming were handed down to the next generations, although the myths were the ancient stories of Ancestral Beings, the newly initiated actively engaged with them, and often reinterpreted the stories in the light of contemporary political, social, and economic circumstances (Elkin, 1938: 243). Therefore, as Edwards has shown, while white Australians were debating as to how "to deal with 'the Aboriginal problem," Aborigines were on their side attempting to come to terms with 'the white Australian problem', that is with how to fit the white settlement into the Dreaming (Edwards, 1988: 111).
Allan Noble, the author of this article, has a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Politics from La Trobe University, Melbourne. He is currently studying a Master of International Studies, at the University of South Australia, Adelaide. His interests include politics, sociology, anthropology, international studies, and philosophy. Allan is available for research and consultancy.