Compensate the stolen generations!
Last month, the federal minister for Aboriginal affairs, John Herron, questioned the use of the term "stolen generation" to describe the victims of decades of Australian government policy to forcibly remove indigenous children from their families. He argued that it was not even one generation because "only" 10% of children were affected.
This statement and PM John Howard's persistent refusal to apologise to indigenous people are entirely consistent with the government's approach to Aboriginal affairs: deny the existence of institutionalised racism in Australia, past and present, while ensuring that it continues by undermining the earlier gains of the Aboriginal movement in land rights, educational access and so on.
To respond to Herron's claim, 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly's LESLIE WILLIAMS spoke to DR PETER READ, a senior research fellow at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at the Australian National University in Canberra. Read has researched Aboriginal history since 1976, and worked directly with members of the stolen generations since 1979.
"The stolen children were no secret, not for the white policy makers who received regular reports from administering bodies (whether churches or state 'protection' boards), and especially not for the indigenous families intentionally torn apart", Read said. He argues that the current government's attitude towards the stolen generations is a continuation of the racist approach to Aboriginal people since European colonisation.
"Despite repeated statements from Howard and Herron that the stolen generations are a part of 'history' and that the intent of governments' forced separation policies was 'benign', they cannot continue to claim that Aboriginal 'welfare' was the basis of removal." Read's research shows that there were few, if any, genuine welfare cases and he argues that, to the extent that there may have been some, the answer should have been to place children with their kinfolk, community and culture.
Consistent racism
Australian government policy towards Aboriginal people "is most notable for its uninterrupted consistency", Read said. "For example, Governor Macquarie established the first Aboriginal school in 1814 in Blacktown, NSW, to separate Aboriginal children from their families and culture. The rationale for the school, to educate children to the base level of British workers, was exposed as false in 1827 when it was revealed that more than double the amount of curriculum time was allocated to manual labour compared to literacy skills. An under-class of cheap labour was being produced."
Read argues that governments' aim has always been to eliminate Aboriginality. Since they couldn't remove or kill all the adults, they took the children. "In extreme cases they put a bulldozer through the reserve and farmed the kids out to institutions or white families (who, unlike the authorities, may not have known the children were Aboriginal). Bulldozing the reserve was necessary to ensure the adults didn't return, that they didn't live or associate together.
"It doesn't work of course. People moved on, looking for their children. They congregated in camps outside towns. That's when some townsfolk get police and local MP's to move the people on, remove any further children, and the cycle continues."
The renunciation of Aboriginality was also central to the policy of separating and dividing Aboriginal people. Being granted exemption from the misnamed Aboriginal Protection Act [in some states, people could apply for exemption certificates] made you a "free person", able to associate in broader society. "But it also meant denying all cultural and familial links", says Read. "Racial segregation was essential to shame people into renouncing identity. It meant that almost everyone lost their confidence as an Aboriginal person."
False data
Herron and the government "never were particularly receptive to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission's Bringing them Home report", Read says. "They like to dismiss it as relying too much on oral history, but that's because the oral testimony is so powerful and moving. There is a lot of solid historical evidence presented in the report.
"The current debate has been repeated time after time but it fails to be resolved because successive governments, Labor and Liberal, commonwealth and state, will not provide the resources to address the basic issues of compensation and land rights."
Read shows that the government's figures on the stolen generations are extremely inaccurate. "They say one in seven children were removed in the Northern Territory, based on a 1947 census of 15,000 Aboriginal people in the NT which listed 200 children as being 'in care'. This is wrong.
"If we go back to 1931, we can quote the NT policy at the time, awful as it was: 'Every endeavour is being made to breed out colour by elevating female half-castes to the white standard with a view to their absorption by mating into the white population'. Then, in 1951, the director of welfare stated: 'It's always been the policy of the Native Affairs Branch to remove part-Aboriginal children from their native environments into institutions'.
"Northern Territory policy was totally directed to removing mixed-blood children. Until recently, 100% of mixed-blood children living along the Stuart Highway were removed."
The evidence shows that during the post-world war periods, in the 1920s and 1950s, around one in three Aboriginal children were being removed from their families in southern Australia, said Read. In the 'problem areas', where the adults were more organised and resisted the authorities, it was less, perhaps one in five.
"Overall, around 50,000 children were separated from their families between 1910 and 1970. When the communities and extended kin are taken into account, everybody was affected across many generations."
Read describes a 1937 conference in Canberra attended by the minister for the interior and all state Aboriginal welfare administrators which issued a press release which became the official guidelines for the racist assimilation process until 1954. "The release stated that it is the destiny of all Aboriginal people in Australia, except those in traditional areas in the Northern Territory, to become absorbed into white Australia", Read said.
In 1954, the government revised this approach so that the assimilationist policies applied to all Aboriginal people. Traditional reserves were maintained, said Read, but the authorities attempted to eradicate Aboriginal languages and all other aspects of Aboriginal culture.
By 1970, governments were promoting the idea that there were no ("full-blood") Aboriginal people left in the southern states. At the same time, "they also pushed the notion that only the worst elements of the white population would 'breed' with Aboriginal people". The offspring of Aboriginal women and white criminals, unemployed people and itinerants were thus portrayed as embodying the worst aspects of the black and white cultures.
This idea is still around today, says Read, as is the idea that governments can decide who is and who isn't a "real" Aborigine. "This question should be left in the hands of Aboriginal people, as their right to decide, but of course it is tied to the question of compensating the stolen generations."
In denying the extent of the cultural impact of the stolen generations, one of the biggest myths propagated by Herron, said Read, is that the impact is comparable to that resulting from the huge post-war migration of children removed from their families in England, or to that caused by single mothers being forced by the government to give up their children for adoption.
"In neither of these examples do we have the deliberate racial strategies; there is no attempt in these cases to put a child's traditional culture to an end. If you were British in London, you become a British Australian. And with single mothers, while there was certainly the sexism, punishment and often heartbreak, the child was usually raised in the same culture."
The difference with Aboriginal children taken from their parents, said Read, is that "there was, and still is, a specific aim which can be summed up as: 'Your Aboriginality will cease to exist if we succeed in our policies'."
Members of the stolen generations also point out that the suffering of other people should not be used to negate or minimise the suffering or the uniqueness of the Aboriginal experience. "It becomes an excuse for further divisions between the cultures, and that only benefits governments", Read said.
Aboriginal-white resistance
Australia is "in a downward pendulum in race relations", Read argues. And "I wouldn't hold out great hopes that if the Labor Party got in now we'd see anything fantastic happen for Aboriginal people. Labor promised uniform land rights, for example, but what happened to that?
"The change will come from people, not from the government. Historically there are great examples of united Aboriginal and white resistance — especially in country towns — to racist policy. Even now, in towns like Cootamundra where the infamous Aboriginal children's home destroyed so many lives, there are great things happening."
Read does not believe the government will consider compensation for the stolen generations. "The problem is the government still doesn't acknowledge the wrongness of its policies. But they were wrong and must be atoned for."