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| please report any broken links or other errors to › want to come back later? click here to add this page to your bookmarks / favourites A cruel case of absurd historical denial By ROBERT MANNE November 15, 1999 - Several weeks ago I appeared with Lowitja O'Donoghue and Paddy McGuinness on ABC television. Our discussion centred on the separation of "half-caste" Aboriginal babies and children from their mothers, families and communities. McGuinness described the claims about the so-called "stolen generations" as fiction. He denied there had ever been in Australia a policy of systematic Aboriginal child removal. When asked to explain how it came about that hundreds of Aborigines were now testifying about their removal and its consequences, McGuinness claimed, without a hint of evidence, all had fallen victim to "false memory syndrome". It was made clear at the beginning of the program that Lowitja O'Donoghue was a member of the stolen generations. She had been taken from her mother at the age of two, and had not seen her again for 40 years. McGuinness treated the story that had shaped her life with apparent indifference. It was, in the circumstances, breathtakingly cruel. In this month's Quadrant, McGuinness returns to the fray. The Aboriginal stories about child removal are now likened explicitly to fake stories of childhood sexual abuse. There might have been, McGuinness now concedes, some cases of child stealing but certainly no systematic policy at any time. If children were removed it was essentially, he implies, because of "parental neglect". Before the removal, parental consent was, anyhow, obtained. There is, he claims, no evidence of any Australian government ever separating "half-caste" children as part of a policy of biological assimilation, or "breeding out the color" as it was called. While there may have been individual racists among administrators, he questions whether racism dominated Aboriginal policy "everywhere" or, indeed, "anywhere". Let us examine some of McGuinness's claims. The idea that Aboriginal policy, especially before the Second World War, was not in the deepest sense "racist" seems to me simply absurd. In several states, Aborigines who had committed no crime were forced to live, virtually as permanent prisoners, on government reserves. Throughout Australia, the administrators spoke of Aborigines as an inferior people, destined to die out. Throughout Australia, they spoke of "half-castes" as a growing social menace and a threat to White Australia. In 1934 the Under-Secretary of the Home Department in Queensland, Lothar Gall, seriously advocated the sterilisation of all "half-castes". In 1937, the Chief Protector in Western Australia, A. O. Neville, in the presence of every key Aboriginal administrator in the country, looked forward to the time, 50 years hence, when we could "forget that there were any Aborigines in Australia". Before the war, in Aboriginal policy, racism was indeed "everywhere" to be found. Nor can the existence of systematic policies concerning the removal of "half-caste" Aboriginal children be seriously a matter of doubt. In several states, in the first half of the century, a near blanket policy of removing the "half-caste" children from the Aboriginal camps prevailed. Although precise conditions varied from state to state and from decade to decade, between 1900 and the late 1960s thousands of children were removed. According to McGuinness, in separating the "half-caste" children "forms of parental consent" were invariably involved. As a generalisation, this is simply untrue. Systematic child removal, for example, began in the Northern Territory in 1911. The requirement for a form of maternal consent was not introduced until the mid-1950s. According to McGuinness, no government in Australia ever adopted or implemented, as a dimension of child removal, the policy of biological assimilation of "half-castes". Once again this is simply untrue. A. O. Neville implemented a policy of biological assimilation in WA in 1936, with an ambitious legislative program. For his part, the Chief Protector in the NT, Dr Cecil Cook, became notorious as a broker of marriages between the "half-caste" girls and single white males.
McGuinness's misunderstandings concerning all these matters are partly to be explained by his ignorance of the field of Aboriginal history. At one point in his editorial, McGuinness explains that no single piece of documentary evidence has ever been discovered concerning the 19th century story about settlers poisoning Aboriginal flour rations. It took me 10 minutes, browsing in my modest private library, to discover a dozen primary sources on this question, cited in a book on colonial Queensland, entitled Exclusion, Exploitation and Extermination. Words are, I suppose, cheap. To deny the existence of evidence of a 19th century crime might seem merely mischievous. However, to speak of Aboriginal testimony about their 20th century suffering as "false memory syndrome" and "confabulation" is something else again. For those who have suffered injustice there is nothing more important than to feel able to speak freely, to be listened to and to be understood. Over the past few years, for the first time, the indigenous peoples of Australia have felt able to speak to us openly about what the removal of their children has meant. Thus far, non-indigenous Australians have listened with sympathy to their stories. As I read McGuinness on the collective hysteria of Aboriginal witness I began to wonder how long our open-heartedness would last. Robert Manne is associate professor of politics at La Trobe University.E-mail: r.manne@latrobe.edu.au Clip from The Age
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