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click below for more about these issues

  • native title
  • Aboriginal history and heritage
  • Aboriginal identity and culture
  • australia's human rights record
  • reconciliation, social justice, the constitution and a treaty
  • the stolen generations

     

     download ENIAR Issues fact sheet {34kb PDF}

     


  • informationissues

     » Text(.txt) version of this page

    The Stolen Generations

     

     

     

    "breeding out the black" : Kenneth Branagh playing AP Neville in Rabbit-Proof Fence
    "Mr Neville holds the view that within one hundred years the pure black will be extinct. But the halfecaste problem was increasing every year. Therefore their idea was to keep the pure blacks segregated and absorb the half-castes into the white population....The pure black was not a quick breeder. On the other hand the half-caste was. In Western Australia there were half-caste families of twenty and upwards. That showed the magnitude of the problem In order to secure the complete segregation of the children..(they) were left with their mothers (only) until they were two years old. After that they were taken from their mothers and reared in accordance with white ideas."
    A.P. Neville, Brisbane Telegraph, 1937.

     

     

     

     

    Rabbit-Proof Central:
    all our info about the hit film which brought the issue of Australia's 'Stolen Generations' to the world's attention.

     Trailers Windows Media

    » high-broadband
     » low-modem

     

     

     

     

     

     

     


    Restoring Identity final report - 730kb PDF

  • Restoring Identity (703kb PDF)
    Final report of the Moving Forward consultation project.
  • Restoring identity - achieving justice for the stolen generations
    27 September, 2002 - Media Release, Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC); Media Release, Public Interest Advocacy Centre.
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    ENIAR Issues fact sheet (34kb PDF)
  • download
  • print out and
  • hand out
         the ENIAR Issues fact sheet (34kb PDF)

     

     

     

     

  • from rabbit-proof fence
    "What I'd hope [Rabbit-Proof Fence] might encourage is for all Australians to understand the deeply felt emotions that have fuelled some of the debates on the stolen generations issue and on reconciliation in general."
    Director Phil Noyce.

     

     

     

    external links

  • Bringing them Home
    Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families.
    HREOC Website: Bringing them home: Education Module
    The Bringing them home education module provides an opportunity for students and teachers to research and consider this history and to assess how far the nation has come in achieving a home coming for those children.
  • `Stolen Children Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs')
  • Stolen Children Sermon
  • journeyofhealing.com
  • Face the Facts
    Excellent introductory guide to the issues, written by the Federal Race Discrimination Commissioner — Who is an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person? What is Reconciliation? What is self-determination? Where do Indigenous people live today? ...
    You can also download this file from the ENIAR site in PDF format (490kb file)


  • see the stolen generations section of links in the information pages of this website
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    the Sorry Ribbon

    the Sorry Ribbon

     

     

     

     

    Between 1910 and 1970 up to 100,000 Aboriginal children were taken forcibly or under duress from their families by police or welfare officers .

    Most were under 5 years old. There was rarely any judicial process. To be Aboriginal was enough.

    They are known as the ‘stolen generations’.

    What happened to them?

    • Most were raised in Church or state institutions. Some were fostered or adopted by white parents.
    • Many suffered physical and sexual abuse. Food and living conditions were poor.
    • They received little education, and were expected to go into low grade domestic and farming work.

    Why were they taken?

    They were taken because it was Federal and State Government policy that Aboriginal children - especially those of mixed Aboriginal and European descent - should be removed from their parents.

    Between 10 and 30% of all Aboriginal children were removed, and in some places these policies continued into the 1970s.

    • The main motive was to ‘assimilate’ Aboriginal children into European society over one or two generations by denying and destroying their Aboriginality.
    • Speaking their languages and practising their ceremonies was forbidden
    • They were taken miles from their country, some overseas
    • Parents were not told where their children were and could not trace them
    • Children were told that they were orphans
    • Family visits were discouraged or forbidden; letters were destroyed.

    What were the results

    The physical and emotional damage to those taken away was profound and lasting:
    • Most grew up in a hostile environment without family ties or cultural identity.
    • As adults, many suffered insecurity, lack of self esteem, feelings of worthlessness, depression, suicide, violence, delinquency, abuse of alcohol and drugs and inability to trust.
    • Lacking a parental model, many had difficulty bringing up their own children.
    • The scale of separation also had profound consequences for the whole Aboriginal community - anger, powerlessness and lack of purpose as well as an abiding distrust of Government, police and officials.

    What is being done?

    A National Inquiry was set up in 1995. Its 1997 Report ‘Bringing them Home’ contained harrowing evidence.

    It found that forcible removal of indigenous children was a gross violation of human rights which continued well after Australia had undertaken international human rights commitments.

    • It was racially discriminatory, because it only applied to Aboriginal children on that scale, and
    • It was an act of genocide contrary to the Convention on Genocide, (which forbids ‘forcibly transferring children of [a] group to another group’ with the intention of destroying the group.)

    The Report made 54 recommendations, including opening of records, family tracing and reunion services and the need for reparations’ (including acknowledgement and apology by Governments and institutions concerned, restitution, rehabilitation and compensation).

    The Government increased some funding but has refused to apologise or offer compensation.

    A Senate committee has investigated the Government’s response to the Report.

    People of the stolen generation have started legal actions for compensation against the Government .

    The cases have been hard fought, as Government lawyers are arguing that removal of children was done for their own good.

    A statement by the former Aboriginal Affairs Minister John Herron which denyied existance of the ‘stolen generations’ caused distress and anger among those affected. Denial has marked much of the commentary.

    'Moving forward: achieving reparations' is a project conducted in partnership with ATSIC, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, the National Sorry Day Committee and Northern Territory stolen generation groups.

    It's report 'Restoring identity', proposing a reparations tribunal for the stolen generations, has widespread support by Indigenous people.

    Ministers for Aboriginal Affairs in Victoria, Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia issued public statements welcoming the report and detailing their initiatives to implement the recommendations.

     

     

     

    line
    Selected further reading and links:





     

    • Stolen Generations case may go before UN
      7 June, 2004 - Legal avenues are being explored to take the case of the Stolen Generations to the United Nations Human Rights Commission.
    • Finding home amid the stolen memories
      May 8, 2004 - Larissa Behrendt greets me at her office in the University of Technology, Sydney, carrying a bundle of legal documents. There's no room on the desk and she sighs at the stacks of papers. Behrendt, 35, appears both confident (especially when discussing complex legal arguments) and slightly guarded. She is nervous, she says, about how her debut novel, Home, winner of the 2002 David Unaipon award, will be received.
    • Australian Journalist Questions ‘Stolen Generation’
      March 11, 2004 - Cultural Survival - In Australia’s Sunday Mail on February 29, journalist Andrew Bolt, in what he claims is an innocent attempt at finding the truth, denounces the existence of the ‘Stolen Generation,’ a group of 50,000-100,000 children taken from their Aboriginal parents for racist purposes by racist governments in the early years of the twentieth century, supposedly in the peoples ‘best interests.’ Claiming that not one person who was stolen can be identified anywhere on the continent, Bolt’s naïve and misguided attempt at objective reporting is causing an uproar, particularly because Australian papers are prepared to print his inflammatory remarks.
    • The art of saying sorry
      April 3, 2004 - When we were growing up, my generation knew nothing and cared less about Aboriginal culture. Indeed, those two words - Aboriginal and culture - seemed a contradiction in terms, a classic oxymoron. The view from the Melbourne suburbs? Aborigines were a dying people and a dead issue.
    • Urgent steps towards healing - the NSDC view
      13 November 2002 - National Sorry Day Committee (NSDC) - Extract from a paper presented at a seminar entitled "Are We Bringing Them Home?" by Dr Peter O'Brien.
    • Govt accused of short-changing stolen generation
      November 8, 2002 - The Central Australian Stolen Generation and Families Corporation says it wants to know what has happened to $63 million earmarked for members of the stolen generation.
    • Federal Government still needs to say sorry
      4 November 2002 - ATSIC NT Central Zone Commissioner, Ms Alison Anderson - Speaking on CAAMA (Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association) Radio in Alice Springs this morning, Mr Howard said he is "sorry as an individual" but he again ruled out a formal apology from his Federal CoalitionGovernment.
    • First compensation win for the stolen generation
      October 18 2002 - Sydney woman Valerie Linow was shaking and overwhelmed yesterday after becoming the first member of the stolen generations to win monetary compensation for her cruel treatment after authorities removed her from her family.
    • Stolen generations fury at memorial `whitewash'
      May 27 2002 - Representatives of the stolen generations will ask the Federal Government for land in Canberra to build their own memorial because they consider references to their history at the new Reconciliation Place to be a whitewash.
    • Genocide, Ethnocide, Or Hyperbole? Australia's "Stolen Generation" and Canada's "Hidden Holocaust"
      25 April, 2002 - Cultural Survival - A decade awash in genocide and deadly conflict has passed since Jason Clay lamented that "it is impossible for concerned activists and scholars to agree on which cases constitute genocides, much less how interested people would go about documenting them." The learning curve when it comes to genocide, however, is conspicuously uneven. The challenge lies not in cultivating and maintaining an awareness of the phenomenon -- a task the mass media has demonstrated itself more than capable of handling -- but in recognizing its universal implications.
    • Aborigines' international hero unites warring parties
      August 10, 2001 - "Jack Beetson fights for the stolen generations," says the TV clip to be shown around the world about the Aboriginal leader the United Nations has named as one of only 12 Unsung Heroes.
    • Victim of Australia’s ‘Stolen Generations’ appeals for reparations
      May 18, 2001 - Minority Rights (UK) - The UN Working Group on Minorities which is meeting in Geneva this week heard the testimony of Audrey Ngingali Kinnear, an Indigenous woman from Australia...’.
    • Right and wrong
      March 31, 2001 - Conservative efforts to deny the existence of the stolen generations are a sinister cultural development, argues Robert Manne, and are designed to undermine the very notion of Aboriginal dispossession.
    • Only understanding will bring down the fence dividing a nation
      March 21, 2002 - Organisations that support members of the stolen generations are crying out for proper funding, writes Doris Pilkington Garimara.
    • Where did all the children go?
      July 5, 2000 - The Independent (UK) - Stolen, one of several Australian plays about the abduction of Aboriginal children, has caused audience members to have heart attacks. Why is it so powerful?
    • First their children were stolen …… now their land too?
      November 1997 - The Independent (UK) - An open letter to the Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, the Queen of Australia: 'We write to appeal to you as Australia's constitutional Head of State. We do so as a matter of some urgency and not without hope.

     

    • there are also more clippings covering these issues in the press clippings section of the news pages




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