news| media clippings

please report any broken links or other errors to › want to come back later?  click here to add this page to your bookmarks / favourites

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

When Melbourne's Herald Sun published on its front page last month an exclusive report by Andrew Bolt on a shock admission by one of Australia's most respected Aboriginal leaders, its essence was captured by the huge headline "I wasn't stolen". The basis of this story was nothing more than Lowitja O'Donoghue's belief that, because she was handed over to the missionaries by her Irish father rather than taken by the government, the word "removed" rather than "stolen" better suited the circumstances of her case.

That morning, John Howard seized his opportunity. He told a commercial radio audience in Melbourne that the revelation that O'Donoghue was not stolen was a "highly significant" fact, one, he implied, which vindicated his Government's famous denial of the existence of the stolen generations and his own even more famous refusal to apologise. Howard called on Australians to cease their "navel gazing" and to move on.

Bolt's article and Howard's response were not isolated incidents. They were the most recent moves of a long campaign to change the political and moral balance with regard to the issue of the stolen generations. This campaign had been gathering momentum for three years. The O'Donoghue affair showed how much ground had been made.

No inquiry in recent Australian history appeared to have, at least in the short term, a more overwhelming reception and a more culturally transforming impact than the one conducted by Sir Ronald Wilson and Mick Dodson into Aboriginal child removal. In May 1997, after Bringing Them Home was tabled in Federal Parliament, the Leader of the Opposition, Kim Beazley, wept openly in the House. Over the next few days Opposition members read stories contained in Bringing Them Home into Hansard during the adjournment debates. Almost without exception the media in Australia accepted the general findings of the Wilson-Dodson inquiry and acknowledged the gravity of what their report had revealed. The question of Aboriginal child removal moved rapidly from the margin to the centre of Australian self-understanding and contemporary political debate. The quest for what we have come to call reconciliation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians would be determined by the nature of our response to the issue of the stolen generations.

Not all Australians shared in this mood. Gradually, critics of Bringing Them Home emerged. Some of the criticism came from former administrators of Aboriginal affairs; some from former patrol officers; some from conservative journalists; some from right-wing think-tanks. As it happens, however, it was Quadrant magazine, under the editorship of P.P. McGuinness, which marshalled the troops and galvanised the disparate voices of opposition into what amounted to a serious and effective political campaign.

McGuinness was appointed to Quadrant after I resigned the editorship in November 1997. Technically my resignation was triggered by the unwillingness of the old guard on the Quadrant board of management, Dame Leonie Kramer and Professor David Armstrong, to offer support when Les Murray, the magazine's literary editor, began to conduct, in his own words, a "feud" against me. In fact the resignation was more a consequence of the bad blood caused by articles and editorials written in 1996 and 1997 by myself and a close friend, Raimond Gaita, about Aboriginal politics in general and the question of genocide and the stolen generations in particular. In the letter Les Murray sent me in June 1997, which convinced me that our working relations were at an end, he wrote that he regarded, as my "most serious" failure, my behaviour on the Aboriginal front. According to Murray, I had started to take "the received leftist line on Aborigines ... letting the man Gaita trumpet against dissent on this matter. I began to wonder, if the Melbourne Left succeeded in duchessing you and getting you to bring Quadrant over to them, where voices on this matter not as yet howled down by the claques, voices like say Geoffrey Partington, might hope for a platform." Nor was Murray alone. At the November 1997 meeting of the Quadrant committee of management, where I resigned, the criticism from the Kramer-Armstrong old guard was dominated by discussion of Quadrant and the Aborigines.

In the last issue of Quadrant I edited, I published, as my parting shot, a long essay on the stolen generations. In the same issue the newly appointed editor, P.P. McGuinness, made clear the new direction the magazine would take. He intended, he wrote, to discard the "mawkish sentimentality" that had, in recent years, overtaken discussions concerning the Aborigines. While McGuinness promised "genuine debate" on the stolen generations and Bringing Them Home, he was also very critical of the report, characterising its call for an apology to the "stolen children", for example, as "pharisaical breast beating" and even as an attempt at "thought control". At the time I wondered whether characterising those with whom McGuinness disagreed as mawkish sentimentalists and as totalitarian thought police was the best way to encourage "genuine debate".

My scepticism was not misplaced. Over the next three years and at an accelerating pace, Quadrant became devoted to ever wilder and more extreme attacks on every cause and belief of the contemporary Aboriginal political leadership and its support base. In the final four issues of Quadrant in 2000, McGuinness published an article by Geoffrey Partington on the failure of Aboriginal education; an article by Keith Windschuttle concerning the supposed "Break-up of Australia" that was to come as a result of the "separatist" thinking in the work of Henry Reynolds and Nugget Coombs; no fewer than five long articles celebrating, from different angles, the Commonwealth victory in the Cubillo-Gunner stolen generations test case; and, most astonishingly of all, three lengthy articles by Windschuttle, supposedly exploding the left-wing "myth" of the 19th-century frontier massacres and its "manufacture of a vastly inflated death toll".

Within three years, under the editorship of P.P. McGuinness, Quadrant had moved from the promise of "genuine debate" on Aboriginal policy to the reality of atrocity denialism in the David Irving mode. By their public silence, I can only assume Leonie Kramer, David Armstrong and Les Murray are pleased. The campaign against Bringing Them Home and the idea of the stolen generations might not have had much influence if it had been conducted exclusively in one right-wing magazine. It became important largely because of the enthusiastic participation of certain opinion columnists in both the quality and the popular press McGuinness himself in the Herald, Frank Devine in The Australian, Christopher Pearson in The Australian Financial Review, Andrew Bolt in the Herald Sun; Piers Akerman and Michael Duffy in what is probably the most influential newspaper, with regard to public opinion, in contemporary Australia, Sydney's Daily Telegraph. These journalists invented no new arguments and uncovered no new facts. What they did, however, was to make the main lines of the anti-Bringing Them Home campaign available to the general public and to create, in regard to the idea that many thousands of Aboriginal children had been removed from their families unjustly and for racist reasons, scepticism or outright disbelief.

The campaign, as it gained momentum in the daily press through the writings of these journalists, went, roughly speaking, like this. The "half-caste" Aboriginal children who had been removed by governments over the course of the 20th century had not been "stolen" but "rescued" from a traditional society in which, if they survived the threat of infanticide at birth, they became abused outcasts. "It needs to be stressed," Pearson pointed out, "that, from a traditional perspective, children with a non-Aboriginal parent had no place in the scheme of things." Was it not typical of the "sorry industry", Akerman argued, that they could not admit that even now "there can be no place in tribal law for so-called yeller-fellers"? McGuinness was outraged when a fellow journalist accused him of propagating the myth of the "rescued generations". This was, he wrote, "pure invention ... I have never, ever used the word `rescue' or `rescued' in my newspaper writing in connection with Aboriginal issues". Never ever? In the Herald of January 10, 1998, McGuinness explained Aboriginal child removal like this: "In many, if not all, cases it was a policy of rescuing children of mixed blood who were not likely to become full members of a tribe not having the proper 'skins', from marginalisation and abuse by tribal Aborigines." Far from never, ever referring to rescued children, McGuinness, as editor of Quadrant, where he had published two influential articles on this theme, was largely responsible for creating the myth of the "rescued generations". Apparently it did not occur to him, or to anyone else involved in the anti-Bringing Them Home campaign, that the majority of Aboriginal children removed from their parents came not from "tribal" situations in the Northern Territory or the north of Western Australia but from the mixed descent communities of New South Wales, Victoria and the southern parts of South Australia and Western Australia, where traditional law had altogether broken down and where, accordingly, the "rescued generations" argument was not only false but self-evidently so.

Sometimes different arguments about the motives of the child removalists were suggested. Akerman regretted the passing of that generation of Australians "who believed that young Aboriginal people would have a better chance of living a healthy, rewarding and fulfilling life if they were removed from the unhealthy humpy dwellings that used to cluster on the outskirts of rural settlements". He claimed, moreover, that throughout 20th-century Australia Aboriginal children could only be removed from their parents in cases where neglect had been proved before a court. He was, for example, bitterly contemptuous of the Boyer lecturer Inga Clendinnen for "ignoring the reality that the removal of Aboriginal or part-Aboriginal children from their homes was covered by legal process in all the States and required court approval". Akerman abused the authors of Bringing Them Home in the most vicious and extravagant language, time and time again. However, if he had bothered to read the report he would have discovered that the health and material wellbeing of the separated children was certainly no better and probably marginally worse than of the children who had not been removed and that, in regard to the Northern Territory, Western Australia, Queensland and NSW, for a considerable part of the 20th century, Aboriginal children could be taken from their parents without any need to refer the matter to a court.

If, then, the overwhelming majority of the separated Aboriginal children had been rescued from tribal exclusion or parental neglect, why was it being put about that they were "stolen"? On that, the right-wing campaign spoke in a single voice: the "loose and hazy", "threadbare", "scandalous", "malevolent", "moralistic" Sir Ronald Wilson "propaganda forum" was to blame. In one of his opinion columns, McGuinness bemoaned the hostility of the Left to what he called a "nuanced discussion" of the question of the stolen generations. His own contribution to such a nuanced discussion was to label Bringing Them Home a "Big Lie".

In general the attack on the Wilson-Dodson inquiry proceeded through repetitive abuse rather than analysis. Insofar as any arguments were provided to justify the attack, they followed even the most absurd elements of the anthropologist Ron Brunton's initial methodological critique, in a pamphlet he had published called Betraying The Victims. Both Devine and McGuinness, for example, flailed the authors of Bringing Them Home for their failure to quote verbatim extracts from all the 535 Aboriginal witnesses it had heard. According to the campaign, the man who had to shoulder most of the responsibility for the failures of Bringing Them Home was the co-chair of the inquiry, Sir Ronald Wilson.

The extremity and the persistence of the attack on Wilson one of the most humane and self-effacing Australians I have ever met has to be read to be believed. Because Wilson was once a Presbyterian elder and had sat on the board of the Perth "quarter-caste" home Sister Kate's, he was accused of gross moral hypocrisy and even of harbouring a secret agenda to defend the financial interests of the Uniting Church. Wilson was at first criticised merely for "failing to call" potential defenders of the child removal policy public servants, patrol officers, missionaries to give evidence. It was not long, however, before other journalists followed Akerman's lead in accusing him, altogether falsely, of "barring" or "excluding" such witnesses "entirely". No evidence for this accusation was produced.

Wilson was seen as the exemplar of that kind of Australian whose besetting sin was what Pearson called "moral vanity". He was christened "Sir Ronald the Evangelist" by Michael Duffy and depicted as a modern-day missionary, whose secret purpose was "to keep the blacks in their place". "The time has come to recognise," Duffy told his Daily Telegraph readers, that Wilson and those like him were "not the liberators of Aboriginal people but just their latest oppressors". Devine was at first offended by the ad hominem nature of Ron Brunton's attack on Wilson. Last September, however, he supported the campaign characterisation of Wilson as a "distributor of malevolent myth".

Over time the targets of the campaign extended to other so-called "serial apologists" such as Sir William Deane ("Holy Billy") or Malcolm Fraser ("the sanctimonious prig"). Like Wilson they were seen as betrayers of their race and class. Even though Mick Dodson had co-chaired the stolen generations inquiry, as an Aborigine he was assumed to be irrelevant to its work and outcome and was, thus, barely visible to the right-wing gaze.

How, then, had Bringing Them Home come to wield such influence? The campaigners generally agreed with Bolt's suggestion that Australia was in the grip of a politically correct "moral mafia" who were determined to "strangle debate". Bolt thought the idea that Australia had a racist let alone a genocidal past a calculated attack on wholesome Australian values. Was it not "weird", he wrote, "that some Australians wanted to believe racist whites their own forebears snatched Aboriginal children from despairing mothers' arms"? These accusations were made, he thought, by people who took pleasure in feeling superior to ordinary, decent folk. More sinisterly, he was of the opinion that such people were using the stolen generations issue to entrench their own "status and power". Following Sorry Day, Bolt suggested the creation of Gratitude Day. He suggested a national apology to the kind of people the elites despised: "those Australians who are just trying to lead a decent life raising families, earning a wage, paying taxes, obeying the road rules, waiting patiently in queues ..."

In essence McGuinness and Duffy shared Bolt's sociological interpretation of the elite enthusiasm for Bringing Them Home. According to McGuinness, the left-wing intelligentsia was, over the question of reconciliation and the stolen generations, trying to change "the moral balance of power" in Australia and, in a mood of deep "self-hatred", to "humiliate" their country by calls for an apology to the Aborigines and by chatter about "shame and guilt". According to Duffy, the pro-Aboriginal intelligentsia were "white maggots" who were trying to "suck the blood" (sic) from the Aborigines. Duffy was of the opinion that most Australians would support the idea of reconciliation so long as the Aborigines and their supporters would agree to "stop talking about the past". He regarded this as "a physically healthy" instinct. In their obsessive concern with the past the intelligentsia were playing with fire. When Sir William Deane suggested a monument to the Aboriginal victims of the frontier massacres, Duffy pointed out that "the process of depriving us of our history is psychologically dangerous for many people". He was particularly concerned about the interest of Jewish intellectuals in Aboriginal history and the links they were, supposedly, making between "Australian history" and "the Nazi Holocaust". "These growing links between Jewish and Aboriginal Australians," he pointed out to his Daily Telegraph audience, "could have a profound effect on how all Australians come to view our past, and therefore ourselves." Perhaps Jewish maggots might in the end do even more psychological damage to their country than the Anglo-Irish maggots like Sir Ronald Wilson and Sir William Deane.

It was clear to those involved in the right-wing campaign that not only self-hating intellectuals but also Aborigines had accepted the Bringing Them Home report. Why? On some occasions the campaigners claimed that the Aborigines who had been removed were using the myth of the stolen generations in order to disguise from themselves their own sad stories of parental neglect. "Forty odd years of trying to make sense out of what must have felt like brutal maternal rejection," Pearson explained, "is something people from stable families can barely imagine." More commonly, however, the strange phenomenon of thousands of Aborigines believing themselves to have been taken from their parents unjustly was explained by the idea that almost all were in the grip of collective hysteria and were, like those who invented childhood sexual abuse or imagined abduction by aliens, suffering from a condition called "false memory syndrome". This grotesque argument was shared by Brunton, Pearson, Duffy and McGuinness.

The campaign against Bringing Them Home was not restricted to right-wing columnists and Quadrant magazine. It was supported enthusiastically by a former Liberal Party minister for Aboriginal affairs, Peter Howson; by the resident anthropologist at the private enterprise think-tank the Institute of Public Affairs, Ron Brunton; and by several retired public servants and patrol officers involved in the removal policy, Reginald Marsh, Les Penhall and Colin Macleod. Even more importantly, the campaign received encouragement from John Howard and his then minister for Aboriginal affairs, John Herron. During the Cubillo-Gunner stolen generations test case in Darwin, the Commonwealth legal team, led by Douglas Meagher, the son of the minister for Aboriginal affairs in the Bolte government of the 1960s in Victoria, argued that the Northern Territory practice of separating "half caste" children from their mothers and communities was not merely well-intentioned but worthy of high praise. Why has so much energy been expended in the attempt to deny, in the 20,000-25,000 cases of Aboriginal child removal which were carried out between 1900 and 1970, that a really terrible injustice occurred?

Individual motives, of course, differ. Some of the anti-Bringing Them Home campaigners are now too old or too proud to reflect on the cruelty of practices in which they were personally involved. Some hanker for a return to the good old days of assimilation when Aborigines were instructed by Europeans on how they were to live. Some are loyal sons who wish to vindicate the memories of their fathers. Some are former leftists who are so obsessed by the conduct of ideological combat against their former friends that they have come to believe that truth is simply the opposite of what they once believed. Some are general purpose right-wingers who hunt in packs and can be relied upon to agree with whatever their political friends believe. And some have so little capacity for empathy that they cannot imagine the harm inflicted on a child taken from the warmth of a family to a loveless institution where their skin colour is regarded as a cause for shame, or what depth of grief and bitterness and powerlessness is experienced by mothers and families who are robbed of their children by welfare workers and police.

Yet while all these explanations help us to understand the motivations of the anti-Bringing Them Home campaigners, none takes us to the campaign's heart. The tense debate over the stolen generations and the attack on the credibility of Bringing Them Home is, in my opinion, part of a larger culture war over the meaning of Aboriginal dispossession.

Since the early 1970s Australians have been struggling to come to terms with the crimes committed during the settlement of their country and with the ways in which the Aborigines were treated by governments and society after the dispossession was complete.

At the time of the British arrival in 1788 there were, according to different demographic estimates, between 300,000 and 1million Aborigines living in Australia. By the 1920s, according to the protectors' censuses, about 70,000 "full bloods" and "half castes" survived. Many had succumbed to previously unknown diseases or died from malnutrition. Many, unable to cope with removal from their lands and the destruction of their world, had lost the desire to procreate. Many thousands, on the frontier, had been shot.

After the dispossession, injustices did not end. Racial condescension was almost universal captured, for example, in the insulting or comical names settlers unselfconsciously gave the Aborigines and in the zoological terminology favoured by the administrators: "full bloods", "half castes", "crossbreeds", "quadroons", "octoroons" and so on. In some parts of Australia, Aborigines were driven into penitentiary-style reserves, like Palm Island in Queensland or Moore River in Western Australia. In other parts, Aborigines worked on cattle stations or in the fishing industry in return for rations but no wages. In the outback the sexual misuse of women, kidnapping of children, arbitrary arrests for cattle theft, use of neck chains to bring prisoners and witnesses to court, farcical trials and long sentences amid appalling prison conditions were all routine. Readers who doubt any of this should turn to the report of the Roth royal commission of 1904 into the condition of the natives of the north of Western Australia.

Even in the more civilised south injustices were commonplace. Aborigines were frequently driven away from the outskirts of the country towns where they tried to settle. Unless they were granted a "certificate of exemption" from their Aboriginality, before World War II even the most intimate and vital details of their lives such as whom they might marry or where they might live were controlled by government officials. Frequently, Aboriginal children were refused permission to attend government schools on the grounds that they were dirty or sexually precocious or suffering from disease. Very frequently, under one pretext or another, Aboriginal children were simply taken away.

Of all the questions concerning the injustices experienced by the Aborigines after the dispossession, Aboriginal child removal perhaps because it concerned a violation universally understood, the separation of mother and child was the one which most deeply captured the national imagination. After the publication of Bringing Them Home many Australians were astonished to discover what had happened so recently in their country's history and what they had previously failed to understand or even to see. This story had the power to change forever the way they viewed their country's history.

Considerable numbers of Australians were not affected in a similar way. They were bored or irritated by the amount of attention Aborigines received. Their scepticism about the injustice done to the stolen generations, which was reflected in the anti-Bringing Them Home campaign, was the most important cultural expression of a growing atmosphere of right-wing and populist resistance to discussions of historical injustice and the Aborigines.

One symptom of this mood was the emergence of a political force in country Australia known as Hansonism. Another symptom was the profound ambivalence of the Howard Government when it came to questions of justice, Australian history and the Aborigines. Yet another symptom was the crystallisation around Quadrant, the Prime Minister's favourite magazine, of an Australian version of historical denialism with regard to what the Governor-General once called our legacy of unutterable shame.

The dispossession of the Aborigines and its long and painful aftermath casts a dark shadow across Australia. The contemporary movement to deny altogether or to soften the meaning of the manifold injustices is a sinister cultural development which serves only to deepen the original offence.

Robert Manne is associate professor of politics at La Trobe University. This is an edited extract from In Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right (The Australian Quarterly Essay, Black Inc) $9.95.

Clip from The Sydney Morning Herald

|| click to go to the top of this page