In an official report commissioned by the Queensland government in 1896, Archibald Meston wrote:
“Kidnapping of boys and girls is another serious evil…[They] are frequently taken from their parents and tribes, and removed far off whence they have no chance of returning; left helpless at the mercy of…white people responsible to no-one and under no supervision by any proper authority…Stringent legislation is required to prevent a continuance of abuses concerning the women and children.”
In 1915, the NSW parliament passed the Aborigines Protection Amending Act, giving the Protection Board total power to take children away without having to prove neglect, and abolishing the minimum age at which Aboriginal children could be apprenticed. There was strong opposition to this Act by MPs who argued that it was an “act of cruelty” to “steal the child away from its parents”, that the real intention was “to gain absolute control of the child and use him as a slave without paying wages” and that this was tantamount to the “reintroduction of slavery in NSW.”
South Australia’s 1923 Aborigines (Training of Children) Act made it easier for the state to remove Indigenous children, justified on the basis that such a separation was “less traumatic” for Indigenous than for white children. It was strongly opposed by Aboriginal families who organised a petition to the government, and they won some public support. The South Australian magazine Daylight editorialised: “There is not and never should be occasion for the Children to be taken away from their parents and farmed out among white people.” As a result of the protests, the operation of the Act was suspended in 1924, although it was subsequently revived in another form.
In 1925 the Australian Aborigines Progressive Association (AAPA) was formed in NSW and immediately called for an end to the stealing of children. One of the AAPA’s supporters was the MP for Cobar, whose questions in parliament led to a Parliamentary Select Committee into the Aborigines Protection Board and a further inquiry in 1938.
In Western Australia in the early 1930s, a series of articles appeared in the local and international press, containing allegations of slavery, mistreatment of Aborigines and abuse of Aboriginal women. The resulting publicity forced the government to hold a Royal Commission. Bessie Rischbieth, president of the Australian Federation of Women Voters, gave evidence: “In most instances I should prefer to see the children left with their parents…the system of dealing with the parents should be improved in order that they might keep their children”. In her opinion, governments preferred to remove children “because it was cheaper than providing the same system of support which operated for white children.”
Another prominent critic was the feminist Mary Bennett, who taught from 1932 at the Mt Margaret Mission in Western Australia. She described the removal of children as the “official smashing of family life”. Feminist politics of the time were strongly maternalist, and this led feminist groups such as the Australian Federation of Women Voters, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the British Commonwealth League to take up the issue of the stolen children. They supported Aboriginal women giving evidence to a WA Royal Commission in 1934, though they failed to win the legal rights for Aboriginal mothers that they were seeking. Their evidence was dismissed by Royal Commissioner Moseley as “hearsay…interesting, but valueless”.
In 1937 the Commonwealth Minister of the Interior, John McEwen, visited The Bungalow and Half-Caste Home in Darwin, and was shocked at what he saw:
“I know many stock breeders who would not dream of crowding their stock in the way these half-caste children are huddled.”
Though not documented in the report, a major source of opposition to racist government policies towards Aborigines was the trade union movement, and especially the unions influenced by the Communist Party. In the film Lousy Little Sixpence (itself evidence that many people knew about and opposed forcible removal), an Aboriginal activist fondly recalls the financial support given by wharfies of the Waterside Workers’ Federation, who “gave like anything”.
In the light of the Howard government’s current attacks on maritime workers, it is well worth recalling the wharfies’ proud history of support for Indigenous people – indeed it is precisely this record of solidarity with the oppressed which is one of the main reasons the government and employers have set out to smash the Maritime Union of Australia.
In 1964 Faith Bandler, the NSW Secretary of the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, wrote to the Waterside Workers’ Federation (WWF – predecessor of the MUA) secretary: “The main support of the FCAATSI [in the struggle for scholarships for Aborigines to receive skills training] comes from the Trade Unions, and among the Trade Unions, the WWF has a special place in my heart because it has so often been the first and most generous in response to our appeals.”
The next year, the WWF levied every member around Australia to build a new bakery at Moa, a Torres Strait Island, after the Queensland government had refused to help. With other groups of well-organised workers, such as the Newcastle branch of the Operative Bakers, Seamen and the Transport Workers’ Union, the WWF organised the purchase, delivery and installation of the bakery.
In the run-up to the 1965 FCAATSI conference, Aboriginal wharfies held lunch hour meetings to explain the issues to their fellow workers. In 1968, with other unions, the WWF bought a car for Aborigines in northern Australia campaigning for their rights. By 1969, the WWF was one of seven unions which had set up committees to organise support for Aborigine and Torres Strait Islander demands at the request of the FCAATSI.
According to the definition of genocide under international law and used by the UN – yes. Australia is a signatory to a number of UN Charters, Conventions and Declarations which outlaw the very practices carried out here. The 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (ratified by Australia in 1949) made it clear that genocide includes any actions which have the effect of “destroying, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.” It defines genocide as: “…killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting…conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; forcibly transferring children of the group…”
Australia’s treatment of Aborigines qualifies as genocide on every single count.
So at the same time as Australian governments were grandstanding internationally, they were deliberately ignoring their own commitments, and they continued their genocidal practices for decades afterwards.
“There are certain restrictions which must remain imposed on Aborigines even though they are at variance with the complete ideals of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”
The UN Conventions also make it clear that acting out of “good intentions” is no excuse – it’s the effects which count, not the purpose. Nor can a state use the excuse that “it was lawful under its own laws”. For example, the Holocaust was genocide, even though much of the persecution of the Jews in Germany was legal under the Nuremberg Laws of 1938.
“Official policy and legislation for Indigenous families and children was contrary to accepted legal principle imported into Australia as British common law and, from late 1946, constituted a crime against humanity. It offended accepted standards of the time and was the subject of dissent and resistance. The implementation of the legislation was marked by breaches of fundamental obligations on the part of officials and others to the detriment of vulnerable and dependent children whose parents were powerless to know their whereabouts and protect them from exploitation and abuse.”
UN Conventions also stipulate that, where genocide is established, reparation must follow. Australia would not be the first country to do this. The report documents a number of cases where it has been done, and more recently the Canadian government made an apology to its indigenous people for similar practices and allocated substantial funds towards a reparations program.
While nothing can adequately compensate for the damage, the prospects for healing are further reduced in the absence of acknowledgement and reparation.
Financial compensation is only a part of this. Equally important are an open and official acknowledgement of and apology for the past, the establishment of mechanisms to help people find out about themselves and to reunite with their families where that is possible and legislation to ensure that nothing like this can ever happen again. These and the other recommendations of the inquiry should be implemented immediately, but the Howard government has rejected most of them.
The government response to the report, announced in December 1997, is nothing less than an insult to the stolen generations. The paltry sum of $63 million dollars will be spent – over four years – on such things as counselling, regional support networks, family support programs, link-up services, a culture and language maintenance program and an oral history project. Minister Herron once again reiterated the tired old Coalition party line justifying the government’s refusal to offer an apology: “You might as well go and ask the British for an apology for coming to Australia with the convicts”, he said. “You can’t judge past practices by today’s standards.”
Herron also ruled out any financial compensation, saying “It was believed cash compensation to individuals would not achieve a great deal.” Meanwhile, stolen children who want to seek compensation for abuse in government and church institutions through the courts are being prevented from doing so by lack of money to fight the cases and what lawyers describe as an almost impossible hunt for documentation. Matthew Storey, senior solicitor for the NT Stolen Generation Litigation Unit, has been told that government records dating back to the crucial period of the 1950s have been destroyed.
Although most States have not undertaken to adopt the report’s recommendations on adoption, child welfare and juvenile justice procedures, Herron said Commonwealth action to force their compliance was unnecessary. This is a repeat scenario of what happened with the recommendations of the Black Deaths in Custody Royal Commission, where the States’ failure to implement them has meant that the problem has not only continued, but got worse. Since 1990, according to the Australian Institute of Criminology, 92 Indigenous Australians have died in prison or police custody (including deaths in police operations such as sieges and pursuits). More than 17 per cent of all custodial deaths were Aborigines or Torres Strait Islanders, who make up 1.4 per cent of the adult population.
With all this plus the racist 10-point plan, it is little wonder that the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission has passed a vote of no confidence in Herron, and refused to have further dealings with him. Even the conservative, Liberal-appointed head of ATSIC, Gatjil Djerrkura, who was a Country Liberal Party candidate for a Northern Territory Senate seat in 1980, has called for Herron’s sacking. In a recent interview Djerrkura described Herron as “a person who believes he knows best for us. He has a paternalistic attitude.” And one of his staffers described the relationship between Herron and Howard as “the uninformed informing the uninterested.” Howard has repeatedly demonstrated his lack of interest in the issue, perhaps most notably when he actually left the parliamentary chamber just as Labor opposition members started to read out some of the experiences of the stolen children.
Howard wants to be “fair” to pastoralists, many of whose fortunes were built on both dispossession and cheap or unpaid Aboriginal labour. He has no problem with setting up special funds for things such as drought relief or gun buy-backs, or funding the redundancies of wharfies sacked by Patrick Stevedores. Clearly, he feels some loyalty and sense of responsibility to those constituencies. But he rejects any compensation for Aborigines.
With its attacks on native title, ATSIC, Abstudy and so on, the Howard government is carrying on the racist traditions of its predecessors and adding further insult to the grievous injuries already suffered.