Such accounts also show how the practice of stealing their children is at the root of many problems experienced by Indigenous people today, particularly substance abuse.
“My parents were continually trying to get us back. Eventually they gave up and started drinking. They separated. My father ended up in jail. He died before my mother. On her death bed she called his name and all us kids. She died with a broken heart.”
Non-Indigenous families who adopted children were also lied to – told that mothers who were searching for their child were dead, or had refused to take responsibility for them. Some of these families told the inquiry they are wracked with guilt and regret that they were unknowingly complicit in such barbarism.
“We would never have deprived any mother of her child, or any child of its mother…The doctor told me how this child’s mother was very young [she was actually 20]…plus the baby was never wanted right from the start. If this was true, why did she take her poor frail baby home…? He would not feed. She took him back [to the hospital] and it was the last she saw of him. She said they would not give him back…”
“In 1960 my wife and I applied to adopt an Aboriginal baby, after reading in the newspapers that these babies were remaining in institutionalised care…Later that year we were offered a baby who had been cared for since birth in a Church run Babies Home…We were told, and truly believed, that his mother was dead and his father unknown…”
Despite the love of his adoptive family, this child, Ken, grew up feeling isolated and alienated, subjected to constant racism, and several times attempted suicide.
“…When Ken was eighteen he found his natural family, three sisters and a brother. His mother was no longer living. She died some years earlier when Ken was four. Because of the long timespan, strong bonds with his family members could not be established.”
Although supposed neglect provided the justification for removing children from their parents, many children never experienced such terrible conditions and abuse until they were taken away.
“And for them to say she [mother] neglected us! I was neglected when I was in this government joint down there. I didn’t end up 15 days in a hospital bed [with bronchitis] when I was with me mum and dad.”
“These are people telling you to be Christian and they treat you less than a bloody animal. One boy, his leg was that gangrene we could smell him all down the dormitories before they finally got him treated properly.”
The luckier ones were adopted; others went to foster families, sometimes a succession of them. But even those who were fortunate enough to be placed with loving families felt and regretted the effects of separation (see the discussion of “benefits” below). Often too, the adoptions or fostering arrangements didn’t work out. Possibly the most notorious case of this was that of James (Russell) Savage, who was not only removed from his family, but from the country when his adoptive family moved to the USA. Like most stolen children, Russell had severe problems growing up, and ended up thrown out on the streets at the age of twelve. Worse was to come: several years ago, after getting involved with drugs and alcohol like so many other stolen children, he ended up in jail for life on murder and rape charges, narrowly escaping the death penalty. The scandal surrounding this case put a spotlight on the whole practice of stealing Indigenous children.
In keeping with the objectives of the assimilation policy, many children were not told of their Indigenous background. Children were bullied into adopting white ways of living and thinking, only to suffer abuse and denigration at home and school for the darkness of their skin. Others were taught racist attitudes towards Indigenous people only to find – often because of constant taunting about their complexion – that they themselves belonged to the people towards whom they felt disgust. The denigration of all things Aboriginal was one of the most common experiences reported to the inquiry.
“During this placement [with a foster family], I was acutely aware of my colour, and I knew I was different from the other members of their family. At no stage was I ever told of my Aboriginality…When I’d say…‘why am I a different colour?’ they would laugh at me and tell me to drink plenty of milk, ‘and then you will look more like us.’ The other sons would call me names such as ‘their little Abo’ and tease me. At the time I didn’t know what this meant, but it did really hurt…”
“We were told our mother was an alcoholic and that she was a prostitute and she didn’t care about us. They [foster family] used to warn us that when we got older we’d have to watch it because we’d turn into sluts and alcoholics, so we had to be very careful. If you were white you didn’t have that dirtiness in you. It was in our breed, in us to be like that.”
But generally speaking, those who fared the worst were those – the vast majority – who were put into mostly Church-run institutions, such as Sister Kate’s Home, Kinchela Boys’ Home, Cootamundra Girls’ Home and so on. The experiences from these institutions remain like a nightmare. Many inmates remember the constant hunger:
“There was no food, nothing. We was all huddled up in a room…like a little puppy-dog…on the floor… Sometimes at night time we’d cry with hunger, no food…We had to scrounge in the town dump, eating old bread, smashing tomato sauce bottles, licking them. Half of the time the food we got was from the rubbish dump.”
On top of that, there were cruel punishments for the slightest “offence”:
“I remember once, I must have been 8 or 9, and I was locked in the old morgue. The adults who worked there would tell us of the things that happened in there, so you can imagine what I went through. I screamed all night, but no-one came to get me.”
“I’ve seen girls naked, strapped to chairs and whipped. We’ve all been through the locking up period, locked in dark rooms. I had a problem of fainting when I was growing up and I got belted every time I fainted…I’ve seen my sister dragged by the hair into those block rooms and belted because she’s trying to protect me.”
The infamous A. O. Neville (WA Chief Protector 1915-40) wrote a book in 1947 in which he listed some of the punishments meted out by his staff – tarring and feathering, chaining girls to table legs (this was done by “an ex-Missionary, and a good man too” whom Neville clearly regrets having to dismiss), shaving heads and so on.
But some stories were even more horrendous:
“Cootamundra…was very strict and cruel…Mum remembered once a girl who did not move too quick. She was tied to the old bell post and belted continuously. She died that night, still tied to the post, no girl ever knew what happened to the body or where she was buried”.
A key aspect of the assimilation project was to prevent the children speaking their own language. No effort was spared on this, because it was one of the most effective ways to permanently separate the children from their parents and communities.
“Y’know, I can remember we just used to talk lingo. [In the Home] they used to tell us not to talk that language, that it’s the devil’s language. And they’d wash our mouths with soap. We sorta had to sit down with the Bible language all the time. So it sorta wiped out all our language that we knew.”
This meant that even when children and parents were subsequently reunited, they often couldn’t speak to each other except through an interpreter.
The accounts given to the Stolen Generations inquiry also abound with examples of sexual abuse of both girls and boys, which fits with the revelations about sexual abuse in churches and institutions everywhere (though the report notes that for girls in particular, “the risk of sexual assault in a foster placement was far greater than in any other”). Almost one in ten boys and just over one in ten girls reported that they were sexually abused in a children’s institution, while one in ten boys and three in ten girls reported the same for foster placements.
“There was tampering with the boys…the people would come in to work with the children, they would grab the boys’ penises, play around with them and kiss them and things like this…It was seen to be the white man’s way of lookin’ after you. It never happened with an Aboriginal.”
Girls who reported sexual assaults were told to stop telling lies and often beaten.
“…my foster father molested me. He would masturbate in front of me, touch my private parts and get me to touch his. I remember once having a bath with my clothes on ’cause I was too scared to take them off. I was scared of the dark ’cause my foster father would often come at night. I was scared to go to the outside toilet as he would often stop me on the way back…So I would often wet the bed…I once attempted to tell the local Priest at the Catholic Church and he told me to say ten Hail Mary’s for telling lies. So I thought this was how ‘normal’ non-Aboriginal families were. I was taken to various doctors who diagnosed me as ‘uncontrollable’ or ‘lacking in intelligence’.
A young Koori woman, with the help of an employer, tried to have a former employer who had raped her charged with the offence. Although two medical examinations confirmed the rape, the Protection Board officials to whom the matter was reported first accused the victim of being a “sexual maniac” and then had her committed to Parramatta Mental Hospital where she remained for 21 years.
A total of 777 people and organisations from all over Australia provided evidence or submissions to the inquiry. This chapter provides only some samples of the experience of the stolen generations and their communities. The total picture is a devastating account of racism and the attempted destruction of an entire people and its culture.
“We may go home, but we cannot relive our childhoods. We may reunite with our mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, aunties, uncles, communities, but we cannot relive the 20, 30, 40 years that we spent without their love and care, and they cannot undo the grief and mourning they felt when we were separated from them. We can go home to ourselves as Aboriginals, but this does not ease the attacks inflicted on our hearts, minds, bodies and souls, by caretakers who thought their mission was to eliminate us as Aboriginals.”
Bringing them home utterly refutes the claims made by the likes of Howard and Hanson, as we shall see below. That’s why Howard and Minister for Indigenous Affairs John Herron have gone to such extraordinary lengths to undermine it, before and after its release.
Howard claimed, for example, that the inquiry President, Sir Ronald Wilson, was “biased” because, in his capacity as a church representative, he had offered an apology to Indigenous people for the church’s role in the treatment meted out to Aboriginal and Islander people. It is crucial that those who support Indigenous rights equip themselves with the facts and arguments, and disseminate them as widely as possible.
Indigenous children were forcibly taken from families well into the seventies – merely twenty years ago. The Broken Hill Aboriginal Legal Service told the inquiry “there were children removed from Wilcannia in the 1970s in much the same way [as] in the 1960s”. A woman told how she was adopted by a white family, without her mother’s knowledge, in 1973:
“I was taken off my mum as soon as I was born…What Welfare wanted to do was adopt all these poor little black babies into nice, caring white families, where they’d get a good upbringing. I had a shit upbringing. Me and [adopted brother who was also Aboriginal] were always treated different to the others…”
In 1964, Paul was stolen from the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne as a baby, when he and his mother were both ill. His mother was told his removal to a Babies’ Home was a temporary arrangement until she got better. But Paul was first made a ward of the State and then offered for adoption when the courts dispensed with his mother’s consent. The adoption placement failed because the family was racist, and Paul was returned to an orphanage, subsequently being fostered until the age of 17. In this family too, he experienced cruelty, abuse and racism – which he didn’t understand until he was discharged from State wardship. It was a bombshell.
“In May 1982…the Senior Welfare Officer…conveyed to me in a matter-of-fact way that I was of ‘Aboriginal descent’, that I had a Natural mother, father, three brothers and a sister, who were alive…He placed before me 368 pages of my file, together with letters, photos and birthday cards. [His mother had never given up looking for him.] He informed me that my surname would change back to my Mother’s maiden name…”
The Home at Bomaderry in NSW, notorious for holding Indigenous children, was not closed until 1980.
And according to National Party MP Bob Katter – hardly a sympathiser of the Aboriginal cause – the removal of Aboriginal children, presumably under child welfare legislation, is still going on today in areas of Queensland and other parts of the country. So we are not talking about “ancient history” here, but a pattern of racist oppression which has continued in different forms from settlement right up to today.
In fact, Bringing them home devotes a whole chapter to “Contemporary separations”. Though “assimilation” is no longer official government policy, there are still ways to break up Indigenous families and communities. Although Indigenous children and youth aged 10-17 accounted for only 2.7 per cent of the total youth population in 1993, they made up 20 per cent of the numbers in care, with the main reason cited as “neglect”. In 1997, Indigenous children were almost six times more likely than non-Indigenous children to be removed from their families and placed in protective care, according to a survey by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (and in fact this was an underestimation, because NSW was unable to provide details on Aboriginality).
Of perhaps even greater concern is the juvenile justice system and the way it is administered in respect of Aboriginal youth. Indigenous youth (and adults) are routinely arrested for minor “offences” such as drunkenness, offensive language and so on, which when committed by whites lead to at most a caution. The Royal Commission into Black Deaths in Custody recommendation that these offences be dropped from the criminal code – like most of its other recommendations – was ignored.
A study by researchers from the University of Melbourne’s criminology department found that over-representation of Kooris in the Victorian criminal justice system has worsened since the findings of the Royal Commission on Black Deaths in Custody in 1991. Between 1989-90 and 1993-94 the number of Koori “offenders” aged 17 and under jumped by 69 per cent, and the rate of charges against Kooris increased by 17.3 per cent over the same period. Kooris are 14.5 times more likely to be charged with being drunk than non-Aborigines and 10 times more likely to be charged with robbery.
After funding of the Victorian Aboriginal Community Services Association Inc was cut in 1996 (as a result of Federal government cuts to ATSIC), the number of young Victorian Aborigines in custody nearly doubled in less than a year.
In November 1996 Western Australia introduced a “three strikes” law which makes a minimum 12 month jail sentence mandatory for anyone – adult or juvenile – convicted of a third home burglary offence. Under this law, a 12-year old Aboriginal boy was jailed for a year for acting as a look-out. There was outrage in December 1997, when a magistrate jailed two Aboriginal children for (quite understandably) spitting at the racist MP Pauline Hanson. Fortunately, the public outcry led to their release.
In August 1995, a National Police Custody Survey illustrated, according to an analysis done by the Australian Institute of Criminology “the continuing heavy involvement of Indigenous children (compared to non-Indigenous children) in the criminal justice system, in particular the elevated proportion of Aboriginal children being held in the cells by police.”
Of 1,753 juveniles aged from 10 to 17 years held in police custody in the survey period, 704 – about 40 per cent – were Indigenous children and young people. Similarly, some 36 per cent of youth in juvenile correctional institutions in June 1996 were Indigenous, with a rate of incarceration of 540 per 100,000, compared to 25 per 100,000 for non-Indigenous youth.
These scandalous figures again highlight the systematic, ingrained racism of Australian society and its institutions. And as the WA Aboriginal Legal Service submission to the Stolen Generations inquiry points out, “The detention of Aboriginal youth is a form of child removal.”
The separation from their families and communities of Indigenous children and youth detained in correctional institutions is even worse when you consider that the detention centres are often hundreds or even thousands of kilometres away from the communities, especially in Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory, where the rates of removal are particularly high compared with the national average.