THE GENOCIDE GENERATION
13.03.1999
MISSION girls . . . removed from their parents.
APOLOGISTS for the privileged ranks of white Australians who grasp at any straw to deny thousands of Aboriginal children were forcibly taken from their parents have found renewed vigour.
Comfort is given them by one of the most privileged of all, former Liberal Party national president John Elliott, who this week expressed his views of fellow Australians in his usual charming and sensitive manner. But Elliott's view should be seen in perspective as the ramblings of a business executive who thought he could barnstorm politics in the same manner he did the boardrooms but turned out to be an abject failure.
Of more concern is the attitude of those who now try to dismiss the findings of the 1997 national inquiry, headed by Sir Ronald Wilson, into the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families.
The ``stolen generation'' is not a recently coined term.
In 1981 the NSW Ministry of Aboriginal Affairs commissioned research by the Australian National University's Peter Read into ``The Stolen Generations: The Removal of Aboriginal Children in NSW 1883 to 1969''.
The goal of the research was ``to reduce the high numbers of Aboriginal children living in non-Aboriginal areas, and prevent Aboriginal children being removed from their families and communities. Part of this process involves reconciling Aboriginal and white perceptions of the situation in New South Wales today, which in turn depends upon an understanding of the historical background.''
That was not done in any atmosphere of political division over ``apologies'' or ``compensation'' or ``black armband views of history''.
Read wrote: ``White people have never been able to leave Aborigines alone.
``Missionaries, teachers, government officials have believed that the best way to make black people behave like white was to get hold of the children who had not yet learned Aboriginal lifeways. They thought children's minds were like a kind of blackboard on which the European secrets could be written. This is the story of the attempt to `breed out' the Aboriginal race . . . attempted genocide.
``Genocide does not simply mean the extermination of people by violence but may include any means at all. At the height of the policy of separating Aboriginal people from their parental the Aborigines Welfare Board meant to do just that. The 1921 report of the board stated that `the continuation of this policy of dissociating the children from camp life must eventually solve the Aboriginal problem' . . . (those) who could not, or chose not to, live as white people wanted them to do.
``The 1926 report put the intentions even more clearly: When children were placed in a `first-class private home' the superior standard of life would `pave the way for the absorption of these people into the general population'.''
Parents were coerced and bribed into giving up their children to be placed in dormitories. When they reached teen age, they were forced into work at slave rates and conditions.
Read cited the 1915 legislation which stated any Aboriginal child might be removed without parental consent if the board considered it was in the interests of the child's moral or physical welfare.
The parents had to show that the child had a right to be with them, not the other way round. No court hearings were necessary; a station manager or policeman could order them removed. The official reason recorded for such separation was ``for being Aboriginal''.
White children deemed neglected were also removed from their parents. But the Act which covered white children allowed mothers to apply for a pension to look after their children; to commit the children to a suitable relative; and they could be returned to their parents after a period of good behaviour. Children could go home for holidays.
``No such provisions existed under the Aborigines Protection Act, for its intention was to separate children from their parents permanently,'' Read wrote.
At an inquiry in 1933 into the welfare of the children, ``the manager of the Kinchella (hostel) was warned . . . he must not be drunk on duty, must no longer use a stockwhip on the boys nor tie them up . . . not use dietary punishments. He was no longer allowed to send the boys out as labour on local farms.
``. . . children were emotionally, spiritually, intellectually and psychologically deprived; the scars might never heal.''
At 15, the children had to leave the homes and were sent to pastoral stations or middle-class homes. The recorded comments of some employers included: ``I asked for a trained mission boy and this one cannot do anything''. And after a boy ran away: ``If you can not find him within a few days, please send a replacement as we need some extra labour for the harvest''.
It is claimed that the separation of the children was for their best benefit.
Wrong. White people played ``God'', forcibly took children from their parents, usually split up families, refused to allow them to know their parents or culture, then put them into forced labour paying little or nothing.
In the 1960s I attended school in western Queensland with Aboriginal children who talked about themselves or their parents having been forcibly separated. My father, a police officer, was ``The Protector of Aborigines'' with the power to veto or approve marriages, employment or movement by Aboriginal people in the district. I have spoken with scores of Aboriginal men and women who spent their young lives in dormitories, some having been taken in chains from their families. They are sad, neglected people, trying against incredible odds to make lives from a dysfunctional base.
To John Elliott and his ilk these may just be unworthy human flotsam. Without his education, opportunities, powerful friends, enormous wealth _ therefore they are lesser beings?
I think not. How loudly a dog barks does not denote its worth.
