Genocide:
The Australian Way
The Truth about the Stolen Generations
Tess Lee Ack and Sandra Bloodworth
The removal of indigenous children from their families is one of the darkest chapters in the history of Austrlaia. Hundreds of thousands of children were stolen, leading to the devastation of their families and communities. In 1997, the full extent of the horror was revealed by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission in its report, Bringing them home.
“Assimilation” (and other names by which the practice of stealing children was known) was a genocidal policy. Its purpose was the destruction of indigenous culture and community, and as such it played a key role in the dispossession of indigenous people.
This pamphlet examines the evidence in the report and debunks the racist arguments used by today’s government to deny full acknowledgement and reparation. It argues that the government’s aim is to perpetuate the oppression of indigenous people to the advantage of the Australian ruling class, especially in the mining and pastoral industries.
a socialist alternative publication /Published 1998
Contents
Took the children away
Introduction
Chapter 1 – What Happened?
Chapter 2 – Answering the lies
Chapter 3 – The Socialist Alternative
Further Reading
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Took the Children Away
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This story’s right, this story’s true
I would not tell lies to you
Like the promises they did not keep
And how they fenced us in like sheep
Said to us come take our hand
Sent us off to mission land
Taught us to read, to write and pray
Then they took the children away
Took the children away
The children away
Snatched from their mother’s breast
Said it was for the best
Took them away
The welfare and the policeman
Said you’ve got to understand
We’ll give them what you can’t give
Teach them how to really live
Teach them how to live they said
Humiliated them instead
Taught them that and taught them this
And others taught them prejudice
You took the children away
The children away
Breaking their mother’s heart
Tearing us all apart
Took them away
One dark day on Framlingham
Came and didn’t give a damn
My mother cried go get their dad
He came running fighting mad
Mother’s tears were falling down
Dad shaped up he stood his ground
He said you touch my kids and you fight me
And they took us away from our family
Took us away
Snatched from our mother’s breast
Said this is for the best
Took us away
Told us what to do and say
Told us all the white man’s ways
Then they split us up again
And gave us gifts to ease the pain
Sent us off to foster homes
As we grew up we felt alone
Cause we were acting white
Yet feeling black
One sweet day all the children came back
The children came back
The children came back
Back where their hearts grow strong
Back where they all belong
The children came back
Said the children came back
The children came back
Back where they understand
Back to their mother’s land
The children came back
Back to their mother
Back to their father
Back to their sister
Back to their brother
Back to their people
Back to their land
All the children came back
The children came back
The children came back
Yes I came back
© Archie Roach
Reprinted with the author’s permission
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Introduction
To read Bringing them home, the report from the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families[1] (otherwise known as the Stolen Generations Inquiry), is to be overwhelmed with rage and horror. Your mind reels before the record of cruelty and misery it records, the kind of reaction you feel when you read about the Holocaust or the killing fields of Cambodia. The only thing that makes reading the report bearable is the knowledge that this attempt at genocide, while causing terrible suffering, could not stamp out the human spirit and could not prevent Indigenous people asserting their identity and demanding the sympathy of masses of ordinary people.
You read of Indigenous families shunted into shanty towns on the fringes of towns because of racism, denied work because of employers’ prejudices, denied social security because they weren’t recognised as citizens in their own land. The Catch-22 was that these very conditions provided the “legal” pretext to take their children away to be “assimilated” into white society, trained only for the most menial occupations to be a cheap (or often unpaid) labour force.
Many people will not be able to read the 689 pages of the report, but what was done to the stolen generations, their families and their communities must never be forgotten. Together with the report from the National Inquiry into Black Deaths in Custody, Bringing them home provides a damning indictment of the genocidal policies used against Australia’s Indigenous people, past and present. Taken together, the reports document the systematic racism which has made Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders the most disadvantaged group in Australian society, and among the most disadvantaged on the face of the planet.
The two reports are among the most important documents in Australia’s history. Yet Federal and State governments have done little or nothing to even acknowledge, much less make good, the tremendous damage they record, damage which amounts to crimes against humanity.
Indeed, in response to the High Court’s Wik decision, the Coalition government under John Howard has introduced amendments to the Native Title Act (known as the 10-point plan), which aim to extinguish native title in all but name, perpetuating the cycle of dispossession and alienation. In what has been described (not only by socialists and Aborigines themselves) as “the biggest land grab since 1788”, Howard’s legislation takes from the Aborigines to give to the richest pastoralists in the land. At the time of writing, the Senate has rejected this legislation for the second time, setting the scene for a double dissolution and a general election.
Howard derides what he calls the “black armband view of history” – that is, a history which tells the truth about what happened to the Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders and how Australia’s wealth was built on the theft of their land. He does so for both pragmatic and ideological reasons: to advantage his rich mates and make Australia safe for the mining companies, pastoral interests and capitalism generally, and to justify his assault on the gains Indigenous people have made in recent years, meagre as they are.
The Howard government has also given the go-ahead to Energy Resources Australia’s Jabiluka uranium mine, situated on the traditional lands of the Mirrar people in the World Heritage-listed Kakadu National Park, in direct contravention of the wishes of the traditional owners. Once again, the rights of Indigenous people have been trampled over in the rush to make profits.
The government therefore wants to sweep the Stolen Generations report under the table.[2] A crucial aspect of its strategy to enrich the miners and pastoralists is to deny any spiritual or traditional connection with the land as the basis for a native title claim – and this is the only kind of claim many of the stolen generations can make.
They must not be allowed to get away with it. In the past, Indigenous people have won rights through struggles – such as the freedom rides, the Gurindji strike and the Aboriginal Tent Embassy[3] – in which they and their supporters took to the streets to gain popular support. Today, we need that kind of fight again.
Opinion polls, the numbers who attend demonstrations in support of Indigenous rights and the establishment of organisations like Defenders of Native Title and the Jabiluka Action Groups show that there is widespread support for justice for Indigenous Australians. That support needs to be mobilised into a powerful movement that can stop Howard and turn the tide against the rising racism that he has fostered.
This pamphlet looks at some of the issues raised by the Stolen Generations report – and in particular addresses the criticisms and disclaimers emanating from the Howard government and its supporters in big business – not to mention Pauline Hanson and her racist One Nation organisation. In order to build the kind of movement described above, we need to be able to counter Howard’s arguments with the real facts. Hopefully this pamphlet is a small contribution to building such a movement.
– May 1998
Stolen Aboriginal children at Bomaderry Home, NSW
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Chapter 1 – What happened?
1
In 1949, Millicent was four years old. That’s when she and five of her siblings were taken from their parents and placed in institutions. She never saw any of them again, apart from one brother who was subsequently removed to another institution.
The authorities told Millicent that her parents didn’t want her, when actually they prevented them from visiting her. After a horrific childhood consisting largely of domestic servitude, beatings and religious indoctrination, Millicent was sent into unpaid domestic service, where she was raped, bashed and slashed with a razor for resisting. On reporting the rape, she was beaten for lying. The resulting pregnancy earned her yet more beatings. Millicent was overjoyed to have a baby – someone she could love – but her joy was shortlived. They took her baby away and told her the infant had died – a lie only revealed when the two were reunited many years later.
The immense human tragedy of the stolen generations is made up of thousands of stories like Millicent’s.[4]
The practice of forcible removal of Indigenous children from their families has a long and dishonourable history, dating back to the very beginning of European settlement in Australia. The early settlers often simply kidnapped children to work for them, as personal or domestic servants, or on the land. They were effectively enslaved: paid no wages and supplied with only the barest necessities of food, shelter and clothing. In the north of Australia, this type of thing was happening up to the early twentieth century.
While settlers stole children purely for personal gain, governments and churches came up with a range of ideological justifications for the practice of systematically removing children from their families. These justifications, though on occasion presented as in some sense “benevolent”, led to the same outcome for their Aboriginal and Islander victims – lives of misery and physical, cultural and spiritual deprivation.
The motivation of the missionaries and governments also reflect a deep underlying racism. Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders were seen as backward and barbaric, incapable of determining their own future and therefore without rights. They had to be “civilised”, their languages, culture and way of life destroyed, so that they could take their place – a subordinate one, naturally – in European society. Crucially, they were to be inculcated with European values and work habits so that they would be fit for service to the colonial settlers.
You didn’t have to scratch the surface very far to find the real motivations behind seemingly “altruistic” actions. In 1814, for example, Governor Macquarie funded a school for Aboriginal children. Within a few years, however, it became obvious to Indigenous families that the real purpose of the school was to distance the children from their families and communities. This was an essential step in the process of separating Indigenous people from their land, which was necessary to free the land for capitalist exploitation.
Meanwhile, colonial authorities were doing nothing to curb the brutal activities of the settlers. It was the British government, embarrassed by reports of frequent massacres and atrocities, which moved to appoint a Select Committee into the condition of the Aboriginal people. But the result of this, far from providing any relief for Indigenous people, was the establishment of legal mechanisms to control the Indigenous population, restrict their movements and rights and remove their children. All this went on in the name of “protection”.
Along with “protection” went segregation. Many Aborigines, thrown off their land, deprived of the means of subsistence and forced into dependence on government handouts, drifted to the towns and set up camps. The inevitable poverty, malnutrition and disease in the camps made them an embarrassment to the settlers and the colonial governments. So it was planned to remove Indigenous people to reserves in areas the Europeans didn’t want, segregating them from the white population and restricting their movement. By 1911, the Northern Territory and every State except Tasmania had some form of “protectionist legislation”, giving the government-appointed Protection Board or Chief Protector virtually total control over every aspect of Aborigines’ lives, and, crucially, legal guardianship of all the children. The sham of “protection” was indicated by the fact that the enforcement of protectionist legislation was carried out by “protectors” who were usually police officers.
The exception, Tasmania, simply removed all its Aboriginal inhabitants to Cape Barren Island and thereafter claimed it had no Aboriginal population, just a few “half-castes”.
Throughout the nineteenth century, massacres, disease and malnutrition took a heavy toll, leading to a serious decline in the full descent Indigenous population. However, the mixed descent population was increasing, due no doubt to the widespread practice of the rape of Aboriginal women and girls by white settlers. These developments led to a somewhat different approach from the authorities. In social Darwinist “survival of the fittest” terms, the Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders were “doomed races”, destined to extinction because they couldn’t compete with a more “advanced” society. The task of government and missionaries was therefore to “smooth the dying pillow”. Indigenous people of mixed descent, however, were to be absorbed into European society and forced to join the workforce. This policy of “merging” would both save the government money and provide cheap labour for the developing capitalist economy, and it made the removal of children an even more vital part of the process, to keep full descent and mixed descent Aborigines apart.
Definitions of “Aboriginality” were arbitrarily changed to fit government policy and facilitate the break-up of families and communities. Across the country, there were some 67 definitions of “Aboriginality”, enshrined in over 700 pieces of legislation. People were defined as “full blood” or “half caste” and there were further offensive divisions such as “quadroon” and “octoroon”.
The first national discussion of the “Aboriginal problem” took place in 1937, at a Commonwealth State Native Welfare Conference. It was here that the notion of “merging” became the policy of “assimilation”, which formed the basis for government action right up to the 1970s. The difference between “merging” and “assimilation” was largely one of degree: an intensification and extension of control over the Indigenous population. Though couched in seemingly high-minded phrases about enabling mixed descent Aborigines to “take their place in the white community on an equal footing with the whites” and “improving their lot”, the authorities began from the implicit notion that there was nothing of value in Aboriginal culture. Aboriginality was to be destroyed by removing “half-caste” children from their communities, their language and their cultural heritage. Assimilation was not a sharp break from what had gone before, simply a refinement.
Moreover, the practices which occurred under assimilation were racist through and through. To return to Millicent’s story: the reason given for taking the children was that “the authorities decided us kids could pass as whitefellas”. But at the notorious Sister Kate’s Home in Western Australia where Millicent spent her childhood, she got a very different message:
“They said it was very degrading to belong to an Aboriginal family and that I should be ashamed of myself, I was inferior to whitefellas. They tried to make us act like white kids, but at the same time we had to give up our seat for a whitefella because an Aboriginal never sits down when a white person is present.”[5]
All States had child welfare legislation which allowed children – black or white – to be taken from their parents if the children were deemed to be “neglected”, “uncontrollable” or “destitute”. Prior to 1937, however, most States preferred to use the protectionist legislation when taking Indigenous children, because that way they didn’t have to justify anything before a court. The authority of the Chief Protector or the Board was sufficient.