The Stolen Generation

t h e s t o l e n g e n e r a t i o n

Amid 1910 and 1970 up to 100,000 Aboriginal children were taken forcibly or under compulsion from their families by police or welfare officers. A number of these children were taken at birth and in their childhood years. The babies and children were sent either to Ð''special intention' establishments or in later years especially, to foster homes. In a small amount of instances mothers or families knew where their children had been taken and were able to maintain some progressing relationship with them. In other occasions they had no idea of the whereabouts of their babies or children who had been taken from them. In some cases within the institutions and the foster homes the children were treated well, although occasionally with frequent condescension. In other occurrences physical mistreatment, sexual exploitation and further intense forms of humiliation were recurrent. The physical and emotional damage that the Aborigines received was very intense and eternal. This was the consequence of the Ð''stolen generation'.

In the earliest decades of the twentieth-century a new development, a form of consequence of human relations on the border of European settlement, became evident. This was the materialisation of mixed descent children. These were children that were born to Aboriginal mothers after sexual encounters Ð'- occasionally fleeting, exploitative and occasionally permanent or even matrimonial Ð'- with European males. Almost customarily, the Australian settlers in the first half of the twentieth-century thought of these mixed descent children, and of the descendants of these children Ð'- whom they labelled, almost zoologically, as half-castes or crossbreeds Ð'- as an increasing, concerning social dilemma.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the educated opinion in Australia was the general view that the full-blooded Aboriginal people represented a dying race, condemned in the breadth of time towards extinction. It was alleged that the theoretically Ð''lesser' cultures could not survive contact with higher civilisations. Australians generally thought that the races of mankind could be fitted neatly into an evolutionary hierarchy overlain by an inspiration of moral worth and of fitness to survive. North Europeans were on the highest tread of this civilisation ladder; Aborigines on the lowest tread. In relation to the half-castes there was cultural contempt and public apprehension. The Perth Sunday Times in 1927 put it thus: "Central Australia's half-caste problem ... must be tackled boldly and immediately. The greatest danger, experts agree, is that three races will develop in Australia: white, black and the pathetic sinister third race which is neither".

To recognise a throng of individuals as a Ð''problem', lead to the desire for a rigid Ð''solution'. In April 1937, the key administrators of Aboriginal affairs congregated in Canberra. It was the original such conference in Australia's history. It was at this convention that the association between half caste policies and child removal was most unmistakably exposed. A.O Neville was the intellectually overriding figure in the Canberra consultation. He began his official address with the following statement: "The problem of the native race, including the half-castes, should be dealt with on along- range plan. We should ask ourselves what will be the position, say, fifty years hence". Neville proposed that if the half-caste problem was to have an adequate solution, the half caste babies or infants must be taken away from their families before the age of six. By puberty, it was Ð''too late'. Under Western Australian law, he had to the authority to remove by force, and to institutionalise any Aboriginal under the age of twenty one. It was not significant that the child was with their parents or if the parents were legally married. The query of neglect was not even raised.

Eventually, all the states and territories passed the legislation of child removal in the early years of the twentieth-century. This gave Aboriginal protectors responsibility privileges over Aboriginal people up to the age of sixteen or twenty-one. In all states and territories, policemen or other agents of the state, began to locate and transfer babies and children of mixed descent, from their mothers or families or communities into institutions. In these Australian states and territories, half-caste institutions, government or missionary, were established in the early decades of the twentieth-century for the treatment of these separated half-caste children. These children were separated permanently from family and they were taught to despise their Aboriginal inheritance. If they were brought up without the knowledge of that inheritance, they were sent to work as domestic servants or station hands in the hope that they would eventually merge into European society and marry out. If they were sent to foster homes, the knowledge of their Aboriginality was deprived. Many of the Aboriginal children that were sent away to either the institutions or foster homes experienced sexual abuse, as well as poor living conditions. It is viewed today that this was done, not as a social welfare measure, but as an attempt to break the cultural connection between the children of mixed descent and their Aboriginal families and cultures; to drag the children out of the world of the native settlements and camps and prepare them for a place in the lower branch of European society.

The physical and emotional damage to the Aboriginal people that were taken was profound and everlasting. The majority of half-castes grew up in a hostile environment without family ties or cultural identity. This affected their adulthood as many of the Aborigines suffered insecurity, lack of self esteem, feelings of worthlessness, depression, suicide, violence, delinquency,