Between the 1910s and the 1970s, Australian governments removed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families as a matter of policy. The 1997 national inquiry, Bringing Them Home, found that between one in three and one in ten Indigenous children were taken during this period. Records were incomplete and practice varied between states, so the full number is not known.
Removal was legal
The Victorian Aboriginal Protection Act 1869 was among the earliest laws permitting it. In New South Wales, the Board for the Protection of Aborigines was established in 1883, and the Aborigines Protection Amending Act 1915 gave it the power to remove children without a court hearing and without proving neglect.
Western Australia went furthest. The Aborigines Act 1905 made the Chief Protector the legal guardian of every Aboriginal child in the state, ahead of the child's own parents. The Northern Territory did the same under the Aboriginals Ordinance 1918. A parent had no standing.
The reasoning
The stated purpose was welfare. The working purpose was assimilation. Officials held that Aboriginal people of full descent were a dying race, and that children of mixed descent could be absorbed into white Australia within a few generations if they were separated from their families early enough. A. O. Neville, Western Australia's Chief Protector, argued the policy in those terms publicly through the 1930s.
An account from Tasmania
The following was given to the Bringing Them Home inquiry by a woman taken from Cape Barren Island, off north east Tasmania, in the 1960s. She and her seven siblings were fostered separately.
So the next thing I remember was that they took us from there and we went to the hospital and I kept asking – because the children were screaming and the little brothers and sisters were just babies of course, and I couldn't move, they were all around me, around my neck and legs, yelling and screaming. I was all upset and I didn't know what to do and I didn't know where we were going. I just thought: well, they're police, they must know what they're doing. I suppose I've got to go with them, they're taking me to see Mum. You know this is what I honestly thought. They kept us in hospital for three days and I kept asking, 'When are we going to see Mum?' And no-one told us at this time. And I think on the third or fourth day they piled us in the car and I said, 'Where are we going?' And they said, 'We are going to see your mother'. But then we turned left to go to the airport and I got a bit panicky about where we were going ... They got hold of me, you know what I mean, and I got a little baby in my arms and they put us on the plane. And they still told us we were going to see Mum. So I thought she must be wherever they're taking us.
What removal did
Children were placed far from their Country. Many were told their families had given them up or had died. Language and ceremony were not permitted. The effects did not stop at childhood. People who were removed have described a lasting difficulty in knowing where they belong, and the damage carried into the generations that followed.
Many were placed in institutions rather than homes. Kinchela Boys Home near Kempsey and Cootamundra Girls Home, both in New South Wales, trained children for domestic and farm labour in white households. Both have been the subject of extensive testimony about physical and sexual abuse. Survivors of both run their own organisations today.
The extinction story
Tasmanian removals took place alongside an official position that Tasmanian Aboriginal people no longer existed. Truganini's death in 1876 was treated as the end of a people. It was never true, and Palawa families have spent a century and a half correcting it. Children were still being taken from Cape Barren Island in the 1960s.
Read more about colonisation in Tasmania and the Black War.
Bringing Them Home
The inquiry reported in April 1997. It made 54 recommendations, including reparations, and found that the removals met the definition of genocide in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, on the basis that the intent was to destroy Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as distinct groups. That finding remains contested in Australian public debate. Most of the recommendations have never been implemented.
The Apology
On 13 February 2008, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd delivered a formal apology to the Stolen Generations in Parliament. It came eleven years after the report recommended one, and it came without compensation. Redress schemes have since been established in several states and territories. Survivors elsewhere are still waiting.
Finding family
Link-Up services operate in most states and territories. They help people who were removed, and their descendants, to trace family and return to Country. The Healing Foundation works with Stolen Generations survivors and their families. For anyone who needs to talk, 13YARN is a national Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander crisis line on 13 92 76.
National Sorry Day
National Sorry Day is held on 26 May, the anniversary of the day Bringing Them Home was tabled in Parliament in 1997. The first was held in 1998.
National Reconciliation Week
National Reconciliation Week runs from 27 May to 3 June. The dates are fixed for a reason. 27 May marks the 1967 referendum, and 3 June marks the High Court's Mabo decision in 1992.
Read more on National Reconciliation Week.
References
- Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families, Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 1997
- Australian Human Rights Commission, Bringing Them Home education and community resources
- Peter Read, The Stolen Generations: The Removal of Aboriginal Children in New South Wales 1883 to 1969, NSW Department of Aboriginal Affairs, 1981
- Anna Haebich, Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families 1800-2000, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000
- The Healing Foundation
- Kinchela Boys Home Aboriginal Corporation
- Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre
- Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS)
