In 1995 the Australian Equal Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission was asked to investigate the history and circumstances of the Aboriginal children removed from their families when they were children, and to make recommendations regarding compensation, counselling and the establishment of principles allowing indigenous communities control over their own children. The massive report Bringing Them Home, drawing on 535 Indigenous oral and written submissions, was presented in Melbourne, May 1997. Despite much favourable media attention, the government distanced itself from the report. The Prime Minister refused support for any expressions of sympathy such as a national 'sorry day', a national memorial or apology on behalf of the nation. The government made its formal response to Bringing Them Home on 16 December 1997. John Herron, Minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs, presented a package of $63m in 'practical assistance', including provision for the Australian Archives to copy and preserve files, the tape recording of life histories, development of family support programs, a national network of Link-Up services, the employment of new counsellors and the expansion of regional counselling centres.[1] Criticism of the report was made, obliquely, by the government, and more directly by newspaper correspondents, some columnists and Dr Ron Brunton of the Institute of Public Affairs. In this article I consider the important points made by the critics of the report.

In all of the current politicised debate, many fail to accept that the alternative for many Aboriginal children was a sentence to a dismal lifestyle with very poor health prospects.[2]

A great deal of the poor health and dismal lifestyle which Aboriginal people experienced was not alleviated but caused by the so-called Aboriginal Protection Boards themselves. The worst malnutrition, the deepest boredom, the most decrepit housing commonly occurred on the very stations which were controlled and overseen by the state authorities.

Contrast the history of two Aboriginal living areas in south-central New South Wales. The Aborigines of Narrandera NSW lived from 1925 to 1940 in tin huts of their own construction in an area eight kilometres from the town, known as the Sandhills. There were no rations, shops, transport, running water, electricity or school. From this unofficial settlement not a single Aboriginal child was removed in fifteen years. The residents of Cowra Aboriginal station, by contrast, lived in wooden houses built by the Aborigines Protection Board, with a stove, community taps, church, school, rations, all supposedly maintained by the manager. In the same period, at least a dozen children were removed. Similar examples can be multiplied from all over the country. Aboriginal children were separated not only to 'rescue' them from unalleviated malnutrition but because station managers used separation as a tool of control and punishment.

The alternative of having children moved into better circumstances was an attractive one for concerned parents.[3]

Some parents did ask the authorities to care for their children for a time, and a few thoughtful adopting parents and institutional carers made sure that the children kept their contacts with their own families by encouraging visits and letters.

But the parents who handed their children to the authorities often did so understanding that they would be returned to them as soon as home circumstances improved. They were not returned. After reading all the thousands of child care records of the NSW Aborigines Protection Board, I can think of many instances of parents asking unsuccessfully for their children to be returned, but not of a single where the child actually was returned. The authorities exploited some parents' desire for a temporary transfer by breaking their side of the agreement.

The churches and government authorities genuinely thought that this was a beneficial and kindly procedure. [4]

Governments and churches certainly did not always act with the best of motives, nor until the 1950s, did they bother about concealing them. Consider these extracts drawn from government or bureaucratic sources:

Governments

New South Wales, 1921

The continuation of this policy of dissociating the children from camp life must eventually solve the Aboriginal problem forever.[5]

Western Australia 1904

[A] half-caste who possesses few of the virtues and nearly all the vices of the whites, grows up to be a mischievous and very immoral subject... it may appear to be a cruel thing to tear and Aborigine child from its mother, but it is necessary in some cases to be cruel to be kind.[6]

Northern Territory 1930s

Generally by the fifth and invariably by the sixth generation, all native characteristics of the Australian aborigine are eradicated. The problem of our half-castes will quickly be eliminated by the complete disappearance of the black race, and the swift submergence of their progeny in the white...[7]

Queensland, 1930s

[The Queensland Act allowing the removal of children] should include the illegitimate children of half-caste mothers, the children of parents both half castes...reported...to be living in low conditions and a menace to health and discipline'.[8]

Queensland 1960

... the Government is not going to allow white and near white children whether their parents are black or white to remain on the Settlements at the cost of the tax payer.[9]

Naturally there were some sympathetic police, kindly administrators and gentle church people. But while the churches were no worse than the state in obtaining children and implanting them with shame and disgust at their Aboriginality, they were entirely complicit in their co-operation with the secular desire of government to break up Aboriginal families. These are the words of the famous Victorian missionary Hagenauer about an Aboriginal family which the Victorian Protection Board was trying to evict from a station:

The Board cannot grant rations to Henry Albert and family as they are half-castes, but every assistance will be given to place their children into the Industrial Schools and get them boarded out to respectable families.[10]

Sometimes, indeed, the church missions were criticised by the state officials for being over-zealous:

The Mission representatives say that if the girls are left in the bush they only become the prey of white men and become mothers at a very early age. My experience has been removing them to towns and to institutions does not overcome this trouble and only accentuates and increases it.[11]

Just as some church people were admirable, some were despicable. Consider Bringing Them Home confidential evidence No. 557:

... Sister A, poor thing, who's dead-I know she was upset because the priest that had that young girl living in his place. He used to come and get her out of the dormitory every night. He used to sneak in about half past twelve, one o'clock in the morning and take her. We'd get up in the morning and she'd be just coming in the door.[12]

Neither the policy statements nor oral history demonstrate that governments acted 'at most times with the very best of motives'.[13]

You can't judge past practices by today's standards[14]

Critics of the day condemned separation by the standards of their own day, not ours. Bringing Them Home quoted this report from the newspaper Queenslander written more than one hundred years ago

the aboriginal inhabitants are treated exactly in the same way as the wild beasts or birds the settlers may find there... Their goods are taken, their children forcibly stolen, their women carried away, entirely at the caprice of the white men.[15]

Nor was criticism confined to journalists. This is an extract from a Report of the Queensland Chief Protector of Aboriginals himself:

Kidnapping of boys and girls is another serious evil... Boys and girls are frequently taken from their parents and their tribes, and removed far off whence they have no chance of returning.[16]

Aboriginal parents have never concealed their feelings from the authorities. This letter, for example, was sent to the Protector of Aboriginals in Alice Springs in April 1941:

I myself, and my wife, both half castes we understand, do not want any of our children removed, out of this Central Australia their country.
It would not be fair to us, the loss of them. Also not fair to them, the loss of their parents, causing crying and fretting....
Will you please place this Protest, as we do not understand any forcible removal, of any of us, from this Central Australia, our birthright country.[17]

There has never been a time in Australia when the separation policy was not strongly criticised.

[The Minister] wanted to know more about others involved in the process, including missionaries, administrators, police and adoptive and foster parents. 'For a complete understanding we need to know their motivations and their perceptions, as well.'[18]

What underpinned almost all the separations perpetrated by church and state, and of many hundreds of well meaning adopting parents, was the general principle that Aboriginality itself was worthless. It is this deep, sometimes unconscious, groundswell of conviction which Aboriginal people find hardest to forgive. It underlay every policy, every action. This extract is from J. Devaney's The Vanished Tribes, recommended reading for the NSW Sixth Class in the 1941 curriculum. That principle of Aboriginal worthlessness, so entrenched in this last generation of Australians to carry out mass separations, is here embodied in every phrase and adjective:

I say, Dick, he called, 'Who's the greasy old buck nigger outside here?'...
'That's old Koorooma, one of the local nigs... He's the last of his tribe, a crazy, harmless old coot, but one can't do anything for him, that's the trouble'.
'Cadging tucker, of course' said Sitherley. 'Darn the abos, they were always but a confounded nuisance everywhere, and it's best for us and themselves that they're just about finished'.[19]

Parents and children alike may choose to recall more congenial family circumstances than actually existed.[20]

Some do, though bad memories of life on the reserves as infants also keeps Aboriginal adults from returning home or even confronting their memories. It is true also that some institutions provided gentle and safe environments for separated Aboriginal children. Sally Morgan's mother Gladys, placed in the institution Parkerville in Perth, evidently recalled with gratitude the bush and the birds, the trips to the pictures and the zoo.[21] Whether remembered or actual home life was better or worse than that which replaced it, is irrelevant. Aboriginal children were entitled to an Aboriginal home life.

Sometimes, naturally, alcohol or sexual abuse rendered home life impossible. Most of Australia's Child Welfare Acts now require authorities, in such circumstances, to seek alternative Aboriginal placements beginning with the close kinfolk. That these compulsory provisions did not exist before 1980 indicates not that the extended kin networks were unwilling to care for other children, but that the authorities did not want them to.

Harrowing anecdote is used in an attempt to force compliance with the report's recommendations. [22]

Not 'to force compliance'. A statutory commission like the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission cannot 'force compliance' on anybody. But the inference remains that Commissioners relied too heavily on spoken testimony in the absence of corroborative written evidence.

Each chapter of Part II of Bringing Them Home(dealing with state histories) has a comprehensive documentary history of the separation policy, almost all drawn from public documents such as annual reports. As a Link Up field worker I routinely, with permission, obtained the file of every person whom I was asked to help find their family and Aboriginality. I can think of only one instance of hundreds where the record did not closely corroborate the individual's own narration.

Corroboration can also be made by inference. Here is one of hundreds of 'harrowing anecdotes', in which a Victorian Koori related how he began stealing:

I reckon all my trouble started when I was living in them homes. That's when I first started stealing because you wasn't allowed to have anything and if I wanted something the only way I could get it is get it off someone else, get me brother or sister to buy it or just take it. We were sort of denied everything we wanted, just got what was given and just be satisfied with that. I felt second-rate. I didn't feel like I got the love I was supposed to get; like a kid's supposed to get at that age, because they're more vulnerable at that age. They just follow people that seem to look more after them. That's why I got in with the wrong crowd, I suppose. They seemed to care. [23]

The written records of the State Archives directly or indirectly support such assertions. The following extract indicates how depriving an adolescent of love and self-confidence is likely to turn a normal child into an abnormal adult.

The extract is the section marked 'Disposal' which was the last entry of the one-page record kept by the NSW Aborigines Protection Board on each of its wards.[24] Note the final comment that the ward, at the age of twenty, and after three or four years in a mental institution, has returned to her family, perhaps thereby to confirm what 'everybody knew' about the emotional instability of part-Aborigines. Yet by another interpretation this woman had been driven insane by the state itself.

The girl left the Cootamundra Girls Home for an intended life as a domestic service at the age of 15: but she only lasted there five days.

Disposal . Transferred from Cootamundra to Longueville [Sydney suburb] 9.2.28. Sydney Rescue Home 14.2.28; Brewarrina Aboriginal Station 17.2.28; service at Rowena [pastoral property] 6.5.28; returned to Brewarrina 17.6.28; service at Avondale [pastoral property] 21.7.28, unmanageable, sent to police station Collarenebri; taken charge by sister 21.12.28; taken Reception House [asylum] 24.1.29; transferred Urunga Aboriginal Station 5.2.29; service at east Bellingen, 11.2.29, uncontrollable; returned Urunga 4.2.29; tried again at service 6.4.29, again became uncontrollable and violent, sent back to station; brought to Sydney and admitted Reception House. Admitted Callan Park Mental Hospital by order of Court, 1.5.29; 1933 heard that she had returned to Darlington Point and living with sister.

Were there no happy outcomes, no adoptive families that grew in strength through the nurture of a 'stolen' child, no lives shaped successfully from orphanage beginnings that might have taken a different course in a tribal environment hostile to half-castes?'[25]'

Of course there were. I have worked with several people who have remained very close to their adopting parents. The majority took in Aboriginal children from honourable motives and tried very hard to make the adoption work. Some remain perplexed to this day that it did not. But the fact that there were and are loving and unprejudiced adopting parents, and dedicated foster and institutional carers, is not the point. Discrimination against Aborigines in the society outside the home was never far away, and a close and loving family was no more able than an unloving one to provide an Aboriginal support network in that hostile world.

The proportion of home and institutional placements which broke down is very much greater than those which succeeded. From observations I have made within Aboriginal communities for more than two decades, I agree that Aboriginal life in country towns was generally pretty rough even in the 1970s. But in general, those Aborigines who remained with their families, are today stronger and better adjusted adults than those who did not.

[The authors of Bringing Them Home ] must have known that in the 30s there was very strong Aboriginal support for incorporation into white society.[26]

The indigenous leaders of the 1930s did not agree on everything, including the ultimate fate of Aborigines living in southern Australia. Nevertheless, it is easy to misread their speeches and writings.

Those who make this assertion base their evidence on the Australian Progressive Association's six-issue broadsheet Abo Call. This is one extract frequently cited:

So far all Aborigines in Australia who want the privileges and benefits of civilisation for the welfare of their wives and children should get behind this movement. Say goodbye to the damper and ashes, and to the compounds! We want to be absorbed into the Nation of Australia and thus survive in the land of our forefathers, on equal terms.[27]

The key word in this passage by the New South Welshman Bill

Ferguson is 'survive', for that was the focus of all the 1930s spokesmen. The editorial from which this quotation is selectively quoted is not a request for assimilation but a savage attack upon the reserve system which kept Aboriginal people prisoners. A fiery sentence shortly before this passage reads 'the wrecking of our physical condition through inadequate food supplies, has only one object - Extermination!'

The Aboriginal leaders generally intended to end the abusive and oppressive reserve system by the only means that seemed feasible at the time - the eventual abolition of the reserves and their hated managers.

It could be seen as somewhat ironic that many who are now protesting about the issue are only alive today because of the fact that they were given a chance of survival from the appalling conditions they would otherwise have had to face.[28]

Archival records reveal that authorities sometimes left houses unrepaired in order to force people to leave the reserves, or to provide an excuse for removing the children. Nor has any Aboriginal national leader separated as a child, whatever their circumstances, nor members of their family, have stated that their removal from Aboriginal people was the better option. Surely the irony is in the way in which the separated children have turned the education they were given not to become better non-Aborigines, but to use those skills in the service of their people.

[T]he government does not support an official national apology. Such an apology could imply that present generations are in some way responsible and accountable for the actions of earlier generations, actions that were sanctioned by laws of the time, and that were believed to be in the best interests of the children concerned.[29]

We've already seen that at certain periods in our history, the 'protection' authorities did not conceal that the separation laws were in the interest of the Whites, not the Aboriginal children. One of the basic tenets of responsible government is that successive administrations are responsible for the financial and other decisions of their predecessors. Without that understanding government could not proceed.

An apology does not necessarily imply responsibility; rather it acknowledges that actions and policies once thought right (or at least, utilitarian) by government now are revealed to have been wrong. An apology should express this belated realisation to those affected Australians. Only the Australian government can apologise on behalf of all Australians.

Also it is hurtful to the many decent people who adopted or cared for Aboriginal children to carry their burden of responsibility alone, while the federal government continues to slip from its own historical role. Such people were assured by the state that adoption met its approval; sometimes their child's Aboriginality was deliberately concealed from them. Now they need reassurance that their actions were not wicked but mistaken. Since the Report, non-Aboriginal Australians have enough to carry in the knowledge of what they have done intentionally or unintentionally without bearing also the weak and immoral evasions of governments which sanctioned and encouraged the separations.

That [Japan's atrocities in World War II] was war and this wasn't.[30]

Yes it was. How can 20, 000 Aboriginal dead, 50, 000 children deprived of an Aboriginal identity, and thousands of adults forcibly evicted from camps and reserves to end their association with each other - be anything but war? There is only peace when opposing sides agree that there is peace, and Aborigines have never done so. On the contrary, there was war because the Aboriginal people felt it to be so. Listen to William Ferguson in the 1930s.

If you would openly admit that the purpose of your Aborigines Legislation has been, and is now, to exterminate the Aborigines so completely so that not a trace of them or of their descendants remains, we could describe you as brutal, but honest. But you dare not admit openly that what you hope and wish for is our death! You hypocritically claim that you are trying to 'protect' us; but your modern policy of 'protection' (so called) is killing us off just as surely as the pioneer policy of giving us poisoned damper and shooting us down like dingoes![31]

When we admit that whatever our intentions, the end result of the separation policy would have been the extinction of Aboriginality, then we are ready to apologise to the stolen generations. When we apologise to them we concede that separation by the state was an act of aggression. When we ensure that the war is over we can seek reconciliation. Without that reconciliation there can be no peace between us.

[1]Senator John Herron. Media Release. Canberra 16 December 1997.

[2]Allen N. Bennett. Correspondent in Advertiser 6 February 1998.

[3]Allen N. Bennett. Correspondent in Advertiser 6 February 1998.

[4]Allen N. Bennett. Correspondent in Advertiser 6 February 1998.

[5]Aborigines Protection Board, NSW. Annual Report, 1921.

[6]J.M. Drew. WA Parliamentary debates, 1904. Quoted by Biskup. Not Slaves Not Citizens. QUP: St Lucia, 1973, p.142. In Bringing Them Home.

[7]Chief Protector Cecil Cook. Quoted by Marcus 1990, p. 93. In Bringing Them Home. p.137.

[8]J.W. Bleakley. Chief Protector and Director of Native Affairs. Quoted by Kidd 1994, p.362. In Bringing Them Home. p.73.

[9]Director of Native Affairs, Queensland. Quoted by Rosalind Kidd. "Regulating Bodies: Administrations and Aborigines in Queensland: 1840-1988". Unpublished thesis. In Bringing Them Home. p.529.

[10]Rev. Hagenauer. General Inspector of the Board. 9 September 1897. Quoted in Chesterman and Galligan. "The Citizenship Divide in Victorian Aboriginal Administration", 1995, p. 20. In Bringing Them Home. p.59.

[11]Chief Protector of Aboriginals. August 1932. Quoted in Bringing Them Home. p.119.

[12]Bringing Them Home. p.148

[13]Courier Mail 15 December 1997. Editorial.

[14]Minister for Aboriginal Affairs. Sydney Morning Herald 17 December 1997.

[15]Queenslander 1883. Quoted in Kidd, p.83. In Bringing Them Home. p.71.

[16]Archibald Meston. "Report on the Aboriginals of Queensland". Queensland Government. Brisbane, 1896, p.4. In Bringing Them Home. p.73.

[17]W. Bray to Protector of Aborigines. April 1941. Reproduced in R. MacDonald and Australian Archives. Between Two Worlds. IAD Press: Alice Springs, 1995, p.47.

[18]Minister for Aboriginal Affairs. Australian 17 December 1997.

[19]J. Devaney. The Vanished Tribes. 1929, pp. 230-1. Quoted in Lucy O'Connor's history thesis "The More Things Change". University of Sydney, 1998. Published in J. Kociumbas ed. Maps Dreams History. Sydney Studies in History: University of Sydney, 1988, p.249.

[20]Frank Devine. "Bringing the truth back home". Australian 5 March 1998.

[21]Cited by Geoffrey Partington. Hasluck versus Coombs. Quakers Hill Press: Sydney 1996, pp.30-31.

[22]Frank Devine. "Derisory offerings deserve only contempt", Australian 15 January 1998.

[23]Confidential evidence 146. In Bringing Them Home. p.191.

[24]The one-page records were kept between 1916 and 1936. After that date longer files were maintained on each state ward.

[25]Frank Devine. "Derisory offerings deserve only contempt". Australian 15 January 1998.

[26]Quoted in Canberra Times 26 February 1998.

[27]Abo Call. Editorial. June 1938.

[28]Father Doncaster at the South Australian Anglican Synod. West Australian 2 February 1998.

[29]Senator John Herron to Father Frank Brennan. Quoted by Robert Manne. "The Stolen Generations". Quadrant 343 (Jan-Feb 1998), p.55.

[30]Minister for Aboriginal Affairs. Advertiser 17 December 1997.

[31]Quoted by Marcus, pp.178-9. In Bringing Them Home. p.46.