So it’s very strange that he was prepared to give a personal apology (albeit a very grudging, mean-spirited one) at the 1997 Reconciliation Convention, but utterly refuses to countenance an apology by the Federal Parliament, on behalf of the nation. And since he followed up his stilted, two-sentence “expression of regret” with an angry, lectern-pounding tirade defending his government’s policy on native title, it’s hard to believe in his sincerity. No wonder a quarter of the audience turned their backs on him in disgust.
It might appear that Howard just doesn’t get it. A majority of people (according to the polls), most newspapers, churches, a host of eminently respectable public figures, and even some State Liberal governments can recognise that an acknowledgement of and apology for past crimes against the Aboriginal people is not a matter of people today admitting individual or collective guilt – a word which, as the inquiry President Sir Ronald Wilson has pointed out, is never mentioned in Bringing them home.
But Howard isn’t really that dumb. His refusal to consider either an official apology or compensation arises out of his determination to pursue a course that involves not only continuing racist oppression, but stripping away some of the gains, small as they are, that Indigenous people have made in recent years.
Howard’s 10-point plan in response to the High Court’s Wik judgement takes away from Indigenous people and gives to the miners and pastoralists, and all the millionaires who stand to make windfall profits from the effective upgrading of pastoral leases to freehold ownership. So Howard’s response (or lack of it) to the Stolen Generations report is entirely consistent. He doesn’t want to acknowledge the past because he plans to continue it in other ways.
A sincere acknowledgment and expression of regret for the wrongs done to Australia’s Indigenous people has nothing to do with guilt. But it does imply that you take responsibility for trying to redress the wrongs by fighting for, or at least supporting, greater rights and a better deal for Aborigines today.
The reason Howard is so obsessed with guilt is that, unlike most of us, he actually does have reason to feel some.
But of course, Howard doesn’t want to be seen as the racist he is, nor does he want the Australian economy damaged by international perceptions of Australia as a racist country. Hence his condemnation of what he calls “the black armband view” of Australian history. Howard prefers what the historian Henry Reynolds refers to as the “white blindfold view”. (And the whitewashing continues. Following the release of Bringing them home, government departments have been instructed not to refer to “stolen” children, but to use the more sanitised term “separated” instead.)
There is no rigid barrier between the past and the present – or between the present and future for that matter. There is a continuity in history – things that happen in one year or decade shape what comes after, as the victims of the assimilation policy know only too well.
“I have six children. My kids have been through what I went through…The psychological effects that it had on me as a young child also affected me as a mother with my children. I’ve put my children in Bomaderry Children’s Home when they were little. History repeating itself.”
The social and economic position of Aborigines today is a direct result of what has happened to them in the past. And on a personal level, the effects ripple through the generations in a vicious cycle of despair and alienation.
In fact, as the report clearly shows, existing laws were often flouted and common law rights were certainly ignored. British common law rights were promised to all the Indigenous peoples of the British Empire. But in far-flung colonies, before the development of mass transportation and communications, local authorities could get away with murder – literally. And the Australian colonies were the most notorious. The report shows how the following common law rights were routinely violated with regard to Indigenous people: deprivation of liberty (by removing Indigenous people to reserves and missions and by detaining children and confining them in institutions); abolition of parental rights (by making the children wards or by assuming custody and control); abuses of power (in the removal process) and breach of guardianship obligations (on the part of Protectors, Protection Boards and other “carers”).
Moreover, a host of special legislation was devised to provide legal cover for the atrocities committed against Indigenous people. For example, a Welfare Ordinance was introduced in the Northern Territory in 1953. Its purported objective was to “subject all Aboriginal people to the same welfare legislation as non-Indigenous people. Accordingly, it made no mention of race, referring instead to ‘wards’. A ward was any person who ‘by reason of his manner of living, his inability to manage his own affairs, his standard of social habit and behaviour, his personal associations, stands in need of special care.’”
These “wards” had no rights whatsoever; they were completely in the power of the Director of Welfare. But when there were protests from non-Indigenous Territorians who feared the Ordinance might be applied to them, the wording was changed to make it clear that only Indigenous children were to be targeted. This was simply done, still managing to avoid any reference to race – people with voting rights could not be made wards. Before the 1967 referendum, this excluded few apart from Aborigines.
Australia voluntarily pledged itself to certain standards of conduct under the banner of international human rights – the UN Charter of 1945, the UN Resolution of 1946 declaring genocide to be a crime against humanity, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and so on. At this time “assimilation” was in its infancy, and it was to continue for several more decades, despite the fact that the policy itself, and practices such as the forcible removal of children, were both generally and specifically outlawed under the various declarations Australia had signed (see also the discussion of genocide below).
Let’s turn now to the treatment of Indigenous children and how it fits with the ideas of the time about the raising and treatment of children.
In our society, the family is held up as the foundation of all that is worthwhile – it is where we are supposed to be nurtured, loved and prepared for life in the wider world. This is not a new idea. Millions of words were written from the 1880s to the 1970s about the damage children suffer when removed from their parents, in particular the mother, and about the problems institutionalised care causes for child development.
In 1951 the United Nations released a report based on studies of maternal deprivation and its effects. The report stressed that the focus of child welfare services should be on assisting families to keep their children with them. This thinking underpins a lot of child welfare policy-making this century.
In 1955 the Australian High Court unequivocally confirmed the rights of parents to keep their children except in the most extraordinary circumstances.
“It must be conceded at once that in the ordinary case the mother’s moral right to insist that her child shall remain her child is too deeply grounded in human feeling to be set aside by reason only of an opinion formed by other people that a change of relationship is likely to turn out for the greater benefit of the child.”
Yet during all these years, in the name of “assimilation” into white society, Indigenous children were deliberately stolen from their families, then systematically lied to in order to keep them out of their families. They were prevented from having any contact with their families by the suppression of letters, being moved to inaccessible places, having their files destroyed, even having their names and birthdates falsified. By and large, these things did not happen to white children who were removed from their families. And indeed, the trend with regard to white children was to return them to their families wherever possible, to arrange fostering if not – at the same time as the pace of removal of Indigenous children was increasing.
“Unlike white children who came into the state’s control, far greater care was taken to ensure that [Aboriginal children] never saw their parents or families again. They were often given new names, and the greater distances involved in rural areas made it easier to prevent parents and children on separate missions from tracing each other.”
Many of the officials who oversaw and implemented the removal of the children tried to justify their actions with the racist claim that family bonds among Indigenous people were not as strong or as important as among whites.
“I would not hesitate for one moment to separate any half-caste from its Aboriginal mother, no matter how frantic her momentary grief might be at the time. They soon forget their offspring.”
Yet if this was the case, why did government departments go to such extraordinary lengths to make it difficult for parents to find out where their children were?
“They changed our names, they changed our religion, they changed our date of birth…That’s why today, a lot of them don’t know who they are, where they’re from. We’ve got to watch today that brothers aren’t marrying sisters; because of the Government. Children were taken from interstate and they were just put everywhere.”
“When I finally met [my mother] through an interpreter she said that because my name had been changed she had heard about the other children but she’d never heard about me. And…every morning as the sun came up the whole family would wail. They did that for 32 years until they saw me again.”
Parents and other relatives tried desperately to find or maintain contact with the children, meeting with obstacles and threats at every turn.
Murray’s mother was initially allowed to visit her children (under supervision) at the Townsville State Children’s Orphanage. But the visits were stopped because they had “destabilising effects”:
“That didn’t deter my mother. She used to come to the school ground to visit us over the fence. The authorities found out…They had to send us to a place where she couldn’t get to us. To send us anywhere on mainland Queensland she would have just followed – so they sent us to…Palm Island Aboriginal Settlement…I wasn’t to see my mother again for ten nightmare years.”
Paul’s mother never gave up looking for her son.
“She wrote many letters to the State Welfare Authorities, pleading with them to give her son back…All these letters were shelved. The State Welfare Department treated my mother like dirt, as if she never existed. The department rejected and scoffed at all my Mother’s cries and pleas for help.”
Records were destroyed, often deliberately. For example, in the Northern Territory, personal files were “culled back to only 200 records in the 1970s due to concerns their contents would embarrass the government”. And even today, it remains extraordinarily difficult to gain access to the remaining records.
The first Annual Report of the newly-established Ministry for Aboriginal Affairs in 1968 expressed concern about the illegal removal of children in Victoria, citing “unauthorised fostering arrangements” and informal separations where children were taken and their names changed to prevent their parents finding them. Government reports by this time recognised that Indigenous children were best left in their own communities, yet despite all this, the number of Aboriginal children who were forcibly removed continued to rise, from 220 in 1973 to 350 in 1976.
Economic rationalists like Howard and Herron, of course, see “benefits” only in material terms. They seem incapable of understanding the trauma of separation and the deprivation of things most Australians take for granted.
“I’ve often thought, as old as I am, that it would have been nice to have known a father and mother, to know parents even for a little while, just to have had the opportunity of having a mother tuck you into bed and give you a good-night kiss – but it was never to be.”
Another stolen child, Penny, reports that three of her siblings are under psychiatric care, and one of them, Trevor, has been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and sometimes gets suicidal. Yet because he has had a job for most of his life and owns a house and car,
“People…look at [Trevor] and say, ‘He’s achieved the great Australian dream’. And they don’t look behind that…They look at us and say, ‘Well, assimilation worked with those buggers’. They see our lives as a success.”
Some submissions to the inquiry acknowledged the “love and care provided by non-Indigenous adoptive families (and foster families to a much lesser extent)” or recorded “appreciation for a high standard of education.
Access to education is the most frequently-cited “benefit” that stolen children are supposed to have enjoyed. Yet more often than not, their educational aspirations were denigrated and opportunities denied.
“I wanted to be a nurse, only to be told that I was nothing but an immoral black lubra, and I was only fit to work on cattle and sheep properties…I [got] that perfect 100% in my exams at the end of each year…only to be knocked back…Our education was really to train us to be domestics and to take orders.”
“I was the best in my class, I came first in all the subjects…[At age 15] I…wanted to continue in school, but I wasn’t allowed to…I was sent out to the farms just to do housework.”
The first Aboriginal magistrate, Pat O’Shane, recalls her ambitions to study medicine, but her teacher “responded that I didn’t have the brains to go on to high school…notwithstanding that I had always had an above average record through school.”
A three-year study in Melbourne during the 1980s of both children taken from families in childhood (33 per cent) and those raised in their communities found that those removed were: less likely to have undertaken tertiary education; much less likely to have stable living conditions; twice as likely to have been arrested by police and been convicted of an offence; three times more likely to have been in jail; and twice as likely to be using illegal drugs.
A national survey by the Bureau of Statistics in 1994 found no significant difference in standards of education, ability to find work, or the large numbers living on incomes under $12,000 between those removed and those not. But those removed were twice as likely to have been arrested more than once in the last five years. And 70.9 per cent of those taken away assessed their own health as good or better, compared with 84.5 per cent of those not taken.
The effects of the atrocities of the past haunt people’s lives to this very day. And in any case, those children who could point to some positives such as education to weigh up against the devastation of separation are very much in the minority.
A majority of the stolen children spent all or part of their childhoods in institutions, and in many cases, this was a prelude to a life in and out of other institutions, such as prisons and psychiatric hospitals.
“They grew up to mix with other troubled children in Tardon…they only knew how to mix with the other boys they grew up with and these boys were into stealing, so my sons went with them. I couldn’t tell them anything…because they felt that coloured people were nothing…
“One of my sons was put into jail for four years and the other one died before he could reach the age of 21 years. It hasn’t done my sons any good, the Welfare…taking them away from me, they would have been better off with me their mother.”
To say that any stolen child “benefited” from the experience is not only utterly false with respect to material advantage for the vast majority, it also reflects the racist view that there is nothing of value in Aboriginal culture and denies the significance of cultural identity for Indigenous people.
Howard says that he “understands” the concerns and anxieties of those white Australians who feel their cultural identity is under threat (people who are attracted to Pauline Hanson’s One Nation for instance). He is also an active promoter of “family values”. Yet he shows absolutely no sympathy for or understanding of the cultural identity and family relationships of Indigenous people. This, plus his contemptuous dismissal of the report and its recommendations, is further evidence of his inherently racist world view.
There are none so blind as those who will not see. Bringing them home documents criticism of and opposition to the practice and methods of forcible removal, as well as the extreme cruelty and abuse suffered by children, from the very beginning, and all around the country. It quotes Members of Parliament, government officials (including police and patrol officers), newspaper editorials, welfare organisations and of course Aboriginal organisations.
The historian Henry Reynolds has recently published a book, The Whispering in Our Hearts (Allen and Unwin 1998), about opposition to the treatment of Aborigines from 1790 to 1940. He notes that the word “reconciliation” was used in the 1830s in much the same way as it is used today, showing that “this tradition has much deeper roots than people suppose.”