When did Australia kidnap Aboriginal children?
Indigenous Australians
During this time, many Aboriginal people were victims of slavery by colonists alongside Pacific Islander peoples who were kidnapped from their homes. Between 1860 and 1970, under the guise of protectionist policies, people, including children as young as 12, were forced to work on properties where they worked under horrific conditions and most did not receive any wages. In the pearling industry, Aboriginal peoples were bought for about 5 pounds, with pregnant Aboriginal women "prized because their lungs were believed to have greater air capacity" Aboriginal prisoners in the Aboriginal-only prison on Rottnest Island, many of whom were there on trumped up charges, were chained up and forced to work. In 1971, 373 Aboriginal men were found buried in unmarked graves on the island. Up until June 2018, the former prison was being used as holiday accommodation. There has always been Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander resistance, from the arrival of colonists through to now. In 1938, over 100 Aboriginal peoples protested one of the first Australia Day celebrations by gathering for an "Aborigines Conference" in Sydney and marking the day as the "Day of Protest and Mourning". In 1963 the Yolngu people of Yirrkala in Arnhem Land sent two bark petitions to the Australian government to protest the granting of mining rights on their lands. The Yirrkala Bark petitions were traditional Aboriginal documents to be recognised under Commonwealth law. On Australia day in 1972, 34 years after the first "Day of Protest and Mourning", Indigenous activists set up the Aboriginal Tent Embassy on the lawn of Old Parliament House to protest the state of Aboriginal Australian land rights. The Tent Embassy was given heritage status in 1995, and celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2012, making it the longest, unanswered protest camp in the world.
Noel Pearson
On 20 June 2007, Pearson argued for the necessity of intervention in relation to Aboriginal child sexual abuse. On 21 June, in response to a report entitled "Little Children are Sacred," Australian Prime Minister John Howard declared that problems of child abuse in Northern Territory Aboriginal communities had reached a crisis point, and he initiated the "national emergency response". The response involved a series of interventions including, among other things, the suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act, compulsory management of Aboriginal people’s income, the deployment of police and health workers, abolition of the permit system, compulsory acquisition of Aboriginal land and a ban on alcohol. Pearson indicated qualified support for these measures, but has received some criticism for doing so. On 18 July, the Indigenous Affairs Minister announced that the federal government would fund the welfare reform trials in Cape York recommended in "From Hand Out to Hand Up".
Nancy Prasad
Nancy Prasad is an Australian woman who at the age of 5 played an important role in changing Australia's immigration policy. The Indo-Fijian was deported from Australia back to Fiji on August 7, 1965.
Charles Perkins, an Aboriginal activist, staged a fake "kidnapping" of her from under the nose of immigration officials at the Sydney Airport on August 6, 1965, the scheduled day of her deportation. The act was done for the purpose of highlighting the injustice of the country’s "White Australia" immigration policy. His stunt had its intended effect, with many newspapers headlining the "kidnapping".
This was one event in Australia's progression toward a multi-racial immigration policy. Even so, Nancy was taken to the airport again and deported to Fiji.
By the year 1973, Australia had a more open immigration policy and under the Labor Party, Gough Whitlam was Prime Minister. In March 1973, Nancy Prasad was allowed to immigrate into Australia, received with great publicity for the government.
Nancy Prasad is still living according to a "Daily Telegraph" article in August 2015, which describes her role in Australia immigration policy history.
Disappearance of the Beaumont children
Jane Nartare Beaumont (born 10 September 1956), Arnna Kathleen Beaumont (born 11 November 1958), and Grant Ellis Beaumont (born 12 July 1961), collectively known as the Beaumont children, were three siblings who disappeared from Glenelg Beach near Adelaide, South Australia on 26 January 1966 (Australia Day) in a suspected abduction and murder. At the time of their disappearance they were aged 9, 7, and 4 years respectively.
Cape Barren Island
Today the residents of Cape Barren Island consist of an Aboriginal community of approximately 70 people. Most of the residents are descended from a community of mixed descent (European and Aboriginal people) who had originally settled on several smaller nearby islands but relocated to Cape Barren Island in the late 1870s. The Colonial Government of Tasmania established a formal reserve in 1881 and commenced providing basic social services to the community. By 1908 the population had grown to 250 people.
More active government intervention began in 1912 with the passage of the "Cape Barren Act". The stated purpose of this act was to encourage the community to become self-sufficient through both incentives and disincentives. Government visits throughout the 1920s and 1930s reported poor health and education and proposals were made to remove children from their parents, ostensibly for their own benefit. Under threat of losing their children many families relocated to mainland Tasmania. By 1944 the population had fallen to 106. From the 1950s the government did indeed remove children from their parents. This forced removal of children was part of a wider policy implemented in many parts of Australia and over a number of decades that resulted in the phenomenon known as the 'stolen generations'. From the 1970s a series of changed government policies were implemented that provided increasingly greater recognition of the personal and social rights of individuals.
Aboriginal land rights in Australia
The passing of Aboriginal land rights legislation in Australia was preceded by a number of important Aboriginal protests, including the 
1946 Aboriginal Stockmen's Strike, the 1963 Yolngu Bark Petition, and the 1966 Wave Hill Walk-Off, as well as the "Aboriginal Lands Trust Act 1966 (SA)", which established the South Australian Aboriginal Lands Trust. The Aboriginal Lands Trust Act 1966 (SA) was the first land rights in modern times and predated the 1967 Referendum. It allowed for parcels of Aboriginal land previously held by the SA Government, to be handed to the Aboriginal Lands Trust of SA under the Act. It was held in perpetuity for the benefit of Aboriginal South Australians. The Trust was governed by a Board comprising solely of Aboriginal people. In the 2013 Review of the Act, the powers of the Trust were reviewed and changed to modernise the Trust and the Aboriginal Lands Trust of South Australia Act 2013 (SA) was created. In the 1970s, Aboriginal Australians (both Australian Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders) became more politically active, there emerged powerful movement for the recognition of Aboriginal land rights.
History of Australia
The removal of indigenous children, by which mixed-race children of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent were removed from their families by Australian Federal and State government agencies and church missions, was a policy actively conducted in the period between approximately 1905 and 1969. The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission argued that these removals constituted attempted genocide and had a major impact on the Indigenous population. Such interpretations of Aboriginal history are disputed by a few historians such as Keith Windschuttle as being exaggerated or fabricated for political or ideological reasons. This debate is part of what is known within Australia as the History Wars.
Prehistory of Australia
Little interest was shown by white settlers in the bulk of the Aboriginal people, and so little is known of their cultures and languages. Diseases decimated some indigenous populations just prior to the period where most Aborigines came into direct contact with Europeans. When Cook first claimed New South Wales for Britain in 1770, the native population may have consisted of as many as 600 distinct tribes speaking 200–250 distinct languages and over 600 distinct dialects and sub-dialects.
Indigenous Australians
Over time Australia has used various means to determine membership of ethnic groups such as lineage, blood quantum, birth and self-determination. From 1869 until well into the 1970s, Indigenous children under 12 years of age, with 25% or less Aboriginal blood were considered "white" and were often removed from their families by the Australian Federal and State government agencies and church missions, under acts of their respective parliaments in order that they would have "a reasonable chance of absorption into the white community to which they rightly belong". Grey areas in determination of ethnicity led to people of mixed ancestry being caught in the middle of divisive policies which often led to absurd situations: In 1935, an Australian of part Indigenous descent left his home on a reserve to visit a nearby hotel where he was ejected for being Aboriginal. He returned home but was refused entry to the reserve because he was not Aboriginal. He attempted to remove his children from the reserve but was told he could not because they were Aboriginal. He then walked to the next town where he was arrested for being an Aboriginal vagrant and sent to the reserve there. During World War II he tried to enlist but was rejected because he was an Aborigine so he moved to another state where he enlisted as a non-Aborigine. After the end of the war he applied for a passport but was rejected as he was an Aborigine, he obtained an exemption under the Aborigines Protection Act but was now told he could no longer visit his relatives as he was not an Aborigine. He was later told he could not join the Returned Servicemens Club because he was an Aborigine.
Arabanoo
Arabanoo (b.1758 - d.1789) was an Indigenous Australian man of the Eora forcibly abducted by the European settlers of the First Fleet at Port Jackson on New Year's Eve, 1788, in order to facilitate communication and relations between the Aborigines and the Europeans. Arabanoo was the first Aboriginal person of Australia to live among Europeans.
Aboriginal history of Western Australia
The "stolen wages" whereby up to 75% of the money earned by Aboriginal workers was seized by the state until 1972 was estimated at $71 million, despite being previously estimated in 2012 at only $2.5 million. The Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Peter Collier was accused of going slow on this settlement, waiting for claimants to die. Gaps continue to increase in child mortality, Aboriginal employment and the difference between Aboriginal and white Western Australian life expectancy.
Indigenous Australians
During the same period, the federal government enacted a number of significant, but controversial, policy initiatives in relation to Indigenous Australians. A representative body, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, was set up in 1990, but was abolished by the Australian Government in 2004 amidst allegations of corruption. The Northern Territory National Emergency Response (also known as the Northern Territory Intervention) was launched in 2007 by the government of Prime Minister John Howard, in response to the Little Children are Sacred Report into allegations of child abuse among Indigenous communities. The government banned alcohol in prescribed communities in the Territory; quarantined a percentage of welfare payments for essential goods purchasing; dispatched additional police and medical personnel to the region; and suspended the permit system for access to Indigenous communities. In addition to these measures, the army were released into communities and there were increased police powers, which were later further increased with the so-called "paperless arrests" legislation.
In 2010, United Nations Special Rapporteur James Anaya found the Emergency Response to be racially discriminatory, and said that aspects of it represented a limitation on "individual autonomy". These findings were criticised by the government's Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin, the Opposition and Indigenous leaders like Warren Mundine and Bess Price. In 2011, the Australian government enacted legislation to implement the Stronger Futures policy, which is intended to address key issues that exist within Aboriginal communities of the Northern Territory such as unemployment, school attendance and enrolment, alcohol abuse, community safety and child protection, food security and housing and land reforms. The policy has been criticised by organisations such as Amnesty International and other groups, including on the basis that it maintains "racially-discriminatory" elements of the Northern Territory Emergency Response Act and continue control of the Australian Government over "Aboriginal people and their lands".
Child migration
310 children were emigrated from Malta to Australia between 1950 and 1965 under the ‘Child Migration to Australia Scheme’ following an agreement between the Australian Catholic Immigration committee and the Emigration and Labour Minister on 9 December 1949. Most of the Maltese children sent to Australia under this scheme came either from government orphanages or Church children's homes and all were said to have left with their parents’ consent. The Australian government had offered to welcome Maltese boys, aged between eight and 11, and girls aged between five and 10 years into Catholic institutions and promised to offer them employment supervised by the responsible Catholic authorities. One of these children became a priest and many others embarked on a career though many grew up hurt knowing that their parents had consented to their departure from home. The Maltese emigrants were included in the Australian Prime Minister's 2009 public apology to those who suffered abuse at the hands of their carers in institutions, orphanages and foster care.
Adoption in Australia
Recognition of the damaging effects of previous adoption policies had burgeoned in the 1970s and 1980s. Beginning in the mid-1970s, all Australian states and territories reviewed adoption legislation and embarked on initially cautious reversals of previous (secretive) practices throughout the 1980s. National Adoption Conferences, convened in Australia in 1976, 1978 and 1982, brought together people affected by adoption with professionals and researchers. These conferences served as important for activism and agitation on adoption law reform. Workers in the field began to tend towards the view that children should be with their biological parents where possible. Sociologist Rosemary Pringle suggested as late as 2002 that adoption in Australia had lost virtually all social policy credibility.
Child abduction
Historically, a few states have practiced child abduction for indoctrination, as a form of punishment for political opponents, or for profit. Notable cases include the kidnapping of children by Nazi Germany (400,000 children kidnapped for possible Germanization), the lost children of Francoism, during which an estimated 300,000 children were abducted from their parents. and the about 500 "Children of the Disappeared (Desaparecidos)" who were adopted by the military in the Argentine Dirty War . In Australia the 'stolen generation' is the term given to native Aboriginal children who were forcibly abducted or whose mothers gave consent under duress or misleading information so the government could assimilate the black population into the white majority.
Forgotten Australians
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children were removed from their families as part of the assimilation policies of the time, and British and Maltese child migrants brought to Australian under child migration schemes spent their childhoods in institutions.
History of the Northern Territory
In 2007, the Australian Federal Government implemented the Northern Territory National Emergency Response (also referred to as "the intervention") a controversial policy package that enforced welfare, law enforcement and land provision measures to address allegations of child sexual abuse and neglect in Northern Territory Aboriginal Communities. The initiative attracted controversy for its implementation - including the overturning of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975, the deployment of over 600 Australian Defence Force personnel into Aboriginal communities, lack of community consultation and compulsory acquisition of townships. To date, there have been no prosecutions for cases of child abuse. It has been condemned as nothing more than a hasty reaction to allegations made in 2006 regarding child sexual assault in Aboriginal communities. As well as this, some view it as another attempt by the government to control these communities.
History of Australia since 1945
In the early 21st century, much of indigenous Australia continued to suffer lower standards of health and education than non-indigenous Australia. In 2007, the "Close the Gap campaign" was launched by Olympic champions Cathy Freeman and Ian Thorpe with the aim of achieving Indigenous health equality within 25 years. In 2007, Prime Minister John Howard and Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough launched the Northern Territory National Emergency Response. In response to the Little Children are Sacred Report into allegations of child abuse among indigenous communities in the Territory, the government banned alcohol in prescribed communities in the Northern Territory; quarantined a percentage of welfare payments for essential goods purchasing; despatched additional police and medical personnel to the region; and suspended the permit system for access to indigenous communities.
Institutional racism
The child removal legislation resulted in widespread removal of children from their parents and exercise of sundry guardianship powers by Aboriginal protectors over Aborigines up to the age of 16 or 21. Policemen or other agents of the state (such as "Aboriginal Protection Officers") were given the power to locate and transfer babies and children of mixed descent from their mothers or families or communities into institutions. In these Australian states and territories, half-caste institutions (both government and missionary) were established in the early decades of the 20th century for the reception of these separated children. Examples of such institutions include Moore River Native Settlement in Western Australia, Doomadgee Aboriginal Mission in Queensland, Ebenezer Mission in Victoria and Wellington Valley Mission in New South Wales.
Pilbara
Working conditions in the pearling and pastoral industries for Aboriginals in the Pilbara region around 1900 have been described as slavery with no wages paid, kidnapping as well as severe and cruel punishments for misbehaviour and absconding all common practices. The first strike by Indigenous people in Australia took place in 1946 in the Pilbara, when Aboriginal pastoral workers walked off the stations in protest at low pay and bad working conditions, a strike that lasted for over three years.
Aboriginal Community Court
There is an over-representation of Aboriginal people in the criminal justice system in Australia. Aboriginal Australians in Western Australia comprise between 3 and 4% of the general population. However, they comprise more than 42% of the prisoners in custody. Indigenous courts are one method in which the Western Australian government is attempting to remedy this imbalance. The involvement of indigenous Australians in the criminal court system has been trialled a number of times in Western Australia. The earliest is perhaps in 1930 when the State government established the Court of Native Affairs. This court dealt exclusively with criminal offences between Australian Aboriginal people against other Australian Aboriginal people. The court ceased to operate in 1954 and was criticised for removing important legal rights for Aboriginal defendants. Defendants were dealt with under tribal law rather than the general criminal law, and probably received sentences more severe than if dealt with under the general law. Another area of indigenous involvement was in the 1970s in the Kimberley region where magistrates informally invited Aboriginal Elders to sit with them when dealing with aboriginal offenders. More recently, magistrates have informally held what was called the “Wiluna Aboriginal Court” in 2001 and also the “Yandeyarra Circle Court” in 2003. The establishment of the current Aboriginal Community Court is a recognition of the benefits of “circle sentencing”. These were local initiatives by presiding stipendiary magistrates and did not reflect a whole of government approach.
Marribank
The "Aboriginal Act" of 1909 denied the rights of parents and made all part-Aboriginal children wards of the state. Aboriginal children were taken from their parents, especially if they had a European or part-European ancestry, in order to break the possibility of being socialised within traditional Aboriginal language and culture, as a part of a government policy which has become known as the Stolen Generations. It was hoped by the Protector of Aborigines that boys would be trained as agricultural labourers, and girls would obtain work as domestic servants. Children living at Carrolup of marriageable age had to obtain official government permission to marry. As the official policy was acknowledged as "smoothing the pillow of a dying race", the "breeding out" of Aboriginal racial characteristics was encouraged. The officials took little or no action in cases of sexual abuse of girls by those officially in charge of them.
Australia
The indigenous population, estimated to have been between 750,000 and 1,000,000 in 1788, declined for 150 years following settlement, mainly due to infectious disease. Thousands more died as a result of frontier conflict with settlers. A government policy of "assimilation" beginning with the "Aboriginal Protection Act 1869" resulted in the removal of many Aboriginal children from their families and communities—often referred to as the Stolen Generations—a practice which may also have contributed to the decline in the indigenous population. As a result of the 1967 referendum, the Federal government's power to enact special laws with respect to a particular race was extended to enable the making of laws with respect to Aborigines. Traditional ownership of land ("native title") was not recognised in law until 1992, when the High Court of Australia held in "Mabo v Queensland (No 2)" that the legal doctrine that Australia had been "terra nullius" ("land belonging to no one") did not apply to Australia at the time of British settlement.
Stolen Generations
Sir Ronald Wilson, then President of the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, commissioner of the "National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families", and co-author of the "Bringing Them Home" report, argued that the policies resulting in the Stolen Generations constitute attempted genocide by the government, as it was widely believed at the time that the Aborigines would die out.
Katherine Mary Clutterbuck
At this time A. O. Neville, the government Chief Protector of Aboriginals, was the architect of an official scheme which oversaw the care, custody and education of Aboriginal and half-caste children under 16 years in the state. The scheme's purpose was to integrate young and part Aboriginal children into white society by separating them from their families. The process by which the separation was done has been widely condemned since a report entitled "Bringing Them Home" was published in 1997 following a federal government inquiry. These people are now known as the Stolen Generations.
Child migration
130,000 children were migrated to Australia under assisted child migration schemes from Great Britain alone, with a small number from Malta. Child migrants were adopted or brought up in children's homes, institutions, orphanages or foster care. A large portion of these children were used in slave labour by the churches in Australia. Many of these children experienced neglect and abuse while in institutional care.
History of Australia
In 1838, at least twenty-eight Aborigines were murdered at the Myall Creek in New South Wales, resulting in the unprecedented conviction and hanging of six white and one African convict settlers by the colonial courts. Aborigines also attacked white settlers—in 1838 fourteen Europeans were killed at Broken River in Port Phillip District, by Aborigines of the Ovens River, almost certainly in revenge for the illicit use of Aboriginal women. Captain Hutton of Port Phillip District once told Chief Protector of Aborigines George Augustus Robinson that "if a member of a tribe offend, destroy the whole". Queensland's Colonial Secretary A.H. Palmer wrote in 1884 "the nature of the blacks was so treacherous that they were only guided by fear—in fact it was only possible to rule...the Australian Aboriginal...by brute force". The most recent massacre of Aborigines was at Coniston in the Northern Territory in 1928. There are numerous other massacre sites in Australia, although supporting documentation varies.
Archie Roach
Archibald William Roach was born on 8 January 1956 in Mooroopna, Victoria. Mooroopna is named after an Aboriginal word referring to a bend in the Goulburn River, near Shepparton in central Victoria. According to Roach, "My name is Archie Roach and I represent 'Nature's gifts' because my song "Took the Children Away" won a human rights award. My lyrics draw attention to, the hardship and humiliation suffered by many Indigenous Australians." In 1956, Roach's family, along with the rest of the area's Indigenous population, were re-housed on Rumbalara mission. Roach and his family subsequently moved to Framlingham, where his mother had been born.
Forced adoption in Australia
Forced adoption was the practice of taking the babies from unmarried mothers, against their will, and placing them for adoption. Former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard offered a national apology to those affected by forced adoptions in 2013. The Australian Senate Inquiry Report into Forced Adoption Practices found that babies were taken illegally by doctors, nurses, social workers and religious figures, sometimes with the assistance of adoption agencies or other authorities, and adopted to married couples. Some mothers were coerced, drugged and illegally had their consent taken. Many of these adoptions occurred after the mothers were sent away by their families 'due to the stigma associated with being pregnant and unmarried'. The removals occurred predominately in the second half of the twentieth century. It was a practice which has been described as 'institutionalised baby farming'.
Keith Windschuttle
Windschuttle argues that his analysis of the records shows that Aboriginal children "were never removed from their families in order to put an end to Aboriginality or, indeed, to serve any improper government policy or program". He found a similar level of misrepresentation and fabrication in the history of the alleged Stolen Generations as he had in his previous study on Van Diemen's Land. He argues that "until the term stolen generations first appeared in 1981, there had been no popular tradition among Aboriginal people that employed either the term or the concept". Indeed, one of the organisations now accused of participation in the removals had Aboriginal rights activists working as members of the board and yet apparently they did not notice that they were "stealing" children. In 1981, a "then unknown white postgraduate history student, Peter Read" wrote, "in the course of just one day", a twenty-page pamphlet to make the case. "He alone was granted the vision denied to all who came before him".
Foster care in Australia
In 2014–2015 the Northern Ireland Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry considered cases of children forcibly sent to Australia. They found that about 130 young children in the care of voluntary or state institutions were sent to Australia in the period covered by the Inquiry, from 1922 to 1995, but mostly shortly after the Second World War.
There is strong emphasis in current Australian policy and practice to keep children with their families wherever possible. In the event that children are placed in home-based care, every effort is made to reunite children with their families wherever possible.
Marriage
During the first half of the 20th century, unmarried women in some Western countries were coerced by authorities to give their children up for adoption. This was especially the case in Australia, through the forced adoptions in Australia, with most of these adoptions taking place between the 1950s and the 1970s. In 2013, Julia Gillard, then Prime Minister of Australia, offered a national apology to those affected by the forced adoptions.
Stolen generation testimonies
Aboriginal children across the country were taken from their families and placed in institutions and foster homes, often not knowing their parents were alive or searching for them. They were taught to reject their Aboriginality, and often experienced abuse and deprivation.
Took the Children Away
Roach was a part of the stolen generation a policy that ran from 1909 until the 1970s where Indigenous Australian children were forcibly removed from their family by Australian government agencies, and placed in an orphanage. Roach wrote "Took the Children Away" about this experience in 1988. He performed the track on a community radio station in Melbourne and on an Indigenous current affairs program. Australian musician Paul Kelly invited Roach to open his concert early in 1989, where he performed "Took the Children Away". His performance was met with stunned silence, followed by shattering applause. The song became significant as it was released at a time when there was increasing public focus on the Stolen Generations.
Fraser Island
In 1859 rumours of two shipwrecked white girls living with the native people on Fraser Island gained some credence when Captain Arnold of the "Coquette" arrived in Sydney with information seeming to confirm the story. Public interest was stirred and Arnold was requested by the government to return to the island with a rescue party, obtaining the right to a £200 bonus if the girls were brought back. The expedition was carried out with the rushing of an Aboriginal camp near Indian Head and the capture of two girls aged about 12 and 18, the group discharging their firearms when the Aboriginals tried to reacquire the girls. On returning to Sydney it became evident through their appearance and through their complete lack of knowledge of the English language that the girls were Aboriginal. However, in order to justify the expense, some members of parliament found it necessary to continue with the shipwrecked "white girls" story. Further discredit was placed on the process when it was found that the Aboriginals who were paid by the search party to find the girls were rewarded in worthless commemorative coins instead of real money. The girls, meanwhile, were named Kitty Mundi and Maria Quoheen. They were kept at the Immigration Depot where they were well-fed but pined for their mother and caught influenza. Three years later, instead of being returned to Fraser Island, they were given up to the Benevolent Asylum in Sydney.
Bill Leak
In August 2016, on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children's Day, a Leak cartoon in "The Australian" depicted an Aboriginal policeman holding a teenage male and telling the youth's father that he needed to teach his son about personal responsibility. The father, with a can of beer in hand, replies "Yeah, righto, What's his name then?". Muriel Bamblett, head of the Victorian Aboriginal Child Care Agency, as well as Roy Ah-See, chair of the NSW Aboriginal Land Council, and Nigel Scullion, the minister for Indigenous affairs, all labeled the cartoon racist. Western Australian Police Commissioner Karl O'Callaghan and academic Jeremy Sammut defended Leak's 2016 cartoon, saying it was an appropriate portrayal of some communities and families. Leak said the cartoon was not racist, reflecting that if the characters he had drawn were white, he would not have been accused of racially stereotyping all white parents as bad parents. A complaint by a woman who said she had been discriminated against as a result of the cartoon triggered an investigation into Leak and "The Australian" by the Australian Human Rights Commission. The complaint was later withdrawn after the woman behind the complaint was subjected to alleged intimidation and harassment from Leak's employers at News Limited. The investigation was thus terminated.
Blacktown Native Institution Site
For Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people the Blacktown Native Institution is an important landmark in the history of black and white relations in Australia. The institution, which operated between 1823 and 1829, reflects the commencement of the historical process of Aboriginal child removal, marking the Colonial Administration's attempts beginning with Governor Macquarie in 1814, to educate and to assimilate Aboriginal children into white society. More specifically, it reflects a colonial policy featuring a belief that Aboriginal children could be "civilised" through removal from their culture, and a policy of confining Aboriginal people within settlements remote from European society.
Aboriginal history of Western Australia
A "Royal Commission on the Administration of Aborigines and the Condition of the Natives" chaired by Dr Walter Edmund Roth (1861–1933), Chief Protector of Aborigines in Queensland, was conducted in 1904, and discussed the growing "half-caste problem[sic]". Most Aboriginal people were living in regional areas, where sexual exploitation of Aboriginal women by whites led to an increasing number of "degenerate" mixed-race children who were subsequently abandoned by their fathers. It led in 1905 to a new Act which extended the definition of Aboriginal to all half-caste[sic] children and made all Aboriginal persons as wards of the state with the Chief Protector of Aborigines made legal guardian in place of the parents, with powers to remove children from their parents' care and place them in custodial situations.
The Blonde Captive
Hearing rumors of a white woman living with an Aboriginal tribe, the expedition eventually makes its way to a very remote area where they find a white women who is the sole survivor of a shipwreck. The woman is married to a tribal Aborigine and is mother to his blond-haired child. After inquiring about her welfare, she refuses to return to civilisation with them.Accompanied by Paul Withington, Clinton Childs and two cinematographers, in 1928 psychologist Stanley Porteus conducted psychological and psychophysical studies of Aboriginal groups in northwest Western Australia and Central Australia. The study was filmed and the resulting documentary was expected to show the results of an officially sanctioned scientific expedition exploring the Indigenous cultures in Northern Australia.
Forced adoption in Australia
On 18 July 2012, South Australia became the second state to formally apologise for forced adoption. "Our apology will recognise that those practices directly affected many of those parents whose children were adopted by force and many of those people who were separated from their parents as children," said Premier Jay Weatherill. "This apology is long overdue but we hope it will be a significant moment for those affected."
It is estimated more than 17,000 children were adopted out before 1980 and some of these involved forced adoption practices.
John Pilger
Pilger has long criticised aspects of Australian government policy, particularly what he regards as its inherent racism resulting in the poor treatment of the country's indigenous population. In 1969, Pilger went with Australian activist Charlie Perkins on a tour to Jay Creek in Central Australia. He compared what he witnessed in Jay Creek to South African apartheid. He saw the appalling conditions that the Aboriginal people were living under, with children suffering from malnutrition and grieving mothers and grandmothers having had their lighter skinned children and grandchildren removed by the police and welfare agencies. Equally, he learned of aboriginal boys being sent to work on white run farms, and aboriginal girls working as servants in middle-class homes as undeclared slave labour.
A. O. Neville
The practice of removing mixed race Aboriginal/European children from their families was advocated at the time as part of a plan to "breed out the black" by having the children brought up as though they were white; then marry people with light and lighter skintones over successive generations, until there would be no Aborigines in Australia at all, as at the time it was believed that the full-blood Aboriginal race were dying out. In 1934, a royal commission was called to examine the current state of Aboriginal people with regard to the role of Chief Protector. This ended up giving the Chief Protector more authority over the lives of Western Australian Aboriginal people which, some say, only increased their suffering. In 1937 Neville declared:
Are we going to have one million blacks in the Commonwealth or are we going to merge them into our white community and eventually forget that there were any Aborigines in Australia?
Stolen Generations
The Stolen Generations (also known as Stolen Children) were the children of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent who were removed from their families by the Australian Federal and State government agencies and church missions, under acts of their respective parliaments. The removals of those referred to as "half-caste" children were conducted in the period between approximately 1905 and 1967, although in some places mixed-race children were still being taken into the 1970s.
Australian native police
As late as 1868, Native Police based at Thargomindah in Queensland conducted patrols down the Paroo River as far as Fort Bourke in New South Wales. Sub-Inspector W.R.O. Hill described one of these patrols. After a dispersal, the troopers had abducted the four-year-old son of an aboriginal man who "had been deservedly shot". The boy spat in the eye of a trooper named Vick who killed the boy by smashing his head into a tree. Although Hill flogged the trooper as punishment, the death squad operations of the Native Police remain clear.
Bringing Them Home
On 13 August 1997, the Tasmanian Premier, Tony Rundle, moved a parliamentary motion that included the words: "That this Parliament, on behalf of all Tasmanians, expresses its deep and sincere regrets at the hurt and distress caused by past policies under which Aboriginal children were removed from their families and homes, apologises to the Aboriginal people for those past actions and reaffirms its support for reconciliation between all Australians".
Stolen Generations
The Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's "National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families" commenced in May 1995, presided over by the Commission's president Sir Ronald Wilson and its Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner Mick Dodson. During the ensuing 17 months, the Inquiry visited every state and Territory in Australia, heard testimony from 535 Aboriginal Australians, and received submissions of evidence from more than 600 more. In April 1997, the Commission released its official "Bringing Them Home" report.
Sixties Scoop
The Sixties Scoop refers to a practice that occurred in Canada of taking, or "scooping up", Indigenous children from their families and communities for placement in foster homes or adoption. Despite the reference to one decade, the Sixties Scoop began in the late 1950s and persisted into the 1980s. It is estimated that a total of 20,000 aboriginal children were taken from their families and fostered or adopted out to primarily white middle-class families as part of the Sixties Scoop.
European exploration of Australia
The indigenous population, estimated to have been between 750,000 and 1,000,000 in 1788, declined for 150 years following settlement, mainly due to infectious disease. Thousands more died as a result of frontier conflict with settlers. A government policy of "assimilation" beginning with the "Aboriginal Protection Act 1869" resulted in the removal of many Aboriginal children from their families and communities—often referred to as the Stolen Generations—a practice which may also have contributed to the decline in the indigenous population. As a result of the 1967 referendum, the Federal government's power to enact special laws with respect to a particular race was extended to enable the making of laws with respect to Aborigines. Traditional ownership of land ("native title") was not recognised in law until 1992, when the High Court of Australia held in "Mabo v Queensland (No 2)" that the legal doctrine that Australia had been "terra nullius" ("land belonging to no one") did not apply to Australia at the time of British settlement.
Queens Park, Western Australia
The largest single land-holder in Queens Park was Sister Kate's children's home which was founded by Sister Kate in 1934 and expanded in 1936 which at the time, A. O. Neville, the government Chief Protector of Aboriginals was the architect of an official scheme which oversaw the care, custody and education of Aboriginal and half-caste children under 16 years in the state. The scheme's purpose was to integrate young and part Aboriginal children into white society by separating them from their families. The process by which the separation was done has since been widely condemned when a report entitled "Bringing Them Home" was published in 1997 following a federal government enquiry. These people are now known as the Stolen Generation.
Forgotten Australians
The Senate Community Affairs Committee commissioned a national report on children in institutional care in 2003, specifically excluding child migrants ('Home Children') and Aboriginal children, who were the subject of previous reports. The Forgotten Australians inquiry considered the plight of more than 500,000 children in care in the 20th century and 'generated the largest volume of highly personal, emotive and significant evidence of any Senate inquiry'.
Apology to Australia's Indigenous peoples
Lyn Austin, chairwoman of Stolen Generations Victoria, expressed why she believed an apology was necessary, recounting her experiences as a stolen child:
I thought I was being taken just for a few days. I can recall seeing my mother standing on the side of the road with her head in her hands, crying, and me in the black FJ Holden wondering why she was so upset. A few hundred words can't fix this all but it's an important start and it's a beginning[...]
I see myself as that little girl, crying myself to sleep at night, crying and wishing I could go home to my family. Everything's gone, the loss of your culture, the loss of your family, all these things have a big impact.
At 9:30am on 13 February 2008, Rudd presented the apology to Indigenous Australians as a motion to be voted on by the house. The form of the apology was as follows:
Bringing Them Home
On 18 June 1997, Bob Carr, Premier of New South Wales, issued an apology on behalf of the people of NSW that included the words: "apologises unreservedly to the Aboriginal people of Australia for the systematic separation of generations of Aboriginal children from their parents, families, and communities".
Stolen Generations
In 2015, many of the recommendations of "Bringing Them Home" were yet to be fulfilled. In 2017, 35% of all children in out-of-home care in Australia identify as being Aboriginal, an increase from 20% in 1997 when "Bringing Them Home" was published.
Genocides in history
Sir Ronald Wilson was once the president of Australia's Human Rights Commission. He stated that Australia's program in which 20–25,000 Aboriginal children were forcibly separated from their natural families was genocide, because it was intended to cause the Aboriginal people to die out. The program ran from 1900 to 1969. The nature and extent of the removals have been disputed within Australia, with opponents questioning the findings contained in the Commission report and asserting that the size of the Stolen Generation had been exaggerated. The intent and effects of the government policy were also disputed.
History of Australia since 1945
During much of the twentieth century, Australian governments had removed many aboriginal children from their families. This practice did great damage to the Aboriginal people, culturally and emotionally, giving rise to the term stolen generation to describe these families. Since the publication in 1997 of a federal government report, "Bringing Them Home" all state governments have followed the recommendation of the report in issuing formal apologies for their past practices to the Aboriginal people, as have many local governments. The Howard government refused to make such an apology on behalf of the federal government, despite pleas from the Aboriginal people and from many sections of the wider community, saying that it implied intergenerational guilt on modern non-indigenous Australia. However, the new government under Kevin Rudd led a formal bi-partisan apology on 13 February 2008.
Ngalla Maya
"In Western Australia, the rate of imprisonment of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander children is 50 per cent higher than the imprisonment rate of black children in the US. Australia incarcerates Aboriginal juveniles at 37 per 10,000, whereas the United States is at 52 per 10,000, according to the US Justice Department. However, Western Australia incarcerates Aboriginal children at 78 per 10,000."
Child migration
The practice of sending poor or orphaned children to the English settler colonies, to help alleviate the shortage of labour, began in England in 1618, with the rounding-up and transportation of 100 vagrant children to the Virginia Colony. Prior to the second half of the twentieth century, the Home Children programme was seen as a way to move impoverished children to a "better life" in Australia, Canada and elsewhere, also providing good "white stock" to former colonies. The children and parents were not consulted, and often siblings were separated. In total 130,000 children were sent from the United Kingdom to Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and Australia. Often children were lied to about their parents being dead and many faced abuse in their new homes. In February 2010 British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown issued an official apology for the 'shameful' child resettlement programme and announced a £6 million fund designed to compensate the families affected by the "misguided" programme. The Child Migrants Trust has since set up the Family Restoration Fund in order to use this money to help reunite former child migrants with their families as part of the British government's package of support to former child migrants and their families.
Aboriginal history of Western Australia
The study of Aboriginal history in Western Australia has been enhanced in recent years by people like Lois Tilbrook who have started collecting information and records on key Aboriginal Families in WA. Due to the comprehensiveness of the records of the Department of Native Affairs, more is known about Aboriginal families than about most European families. Anna Haebich has written of the Moore River Native Settlement and the "Stolen Generations", which refers to the systemic removal of Aboriginal children from their families for almost a century ending in the late 1960s.
Stolen Generations
As a result of such legislation, states arranged widespread removal of (primarily) mixed-race children from their Aboriginal mothers. In addition, appointed Aboriginal protectors in each state exercised wide-ranging guardianship powers over Aborigines up to the age of 16 or 21, often determining where they could live or work. Policemen or other agents of the state (some designated as "Aboriginal Protection Officers") were given the power to locate and transfer babies and children of mixed descent from their mothers, families, and communities into institutions for care. In these Australian states and territories, institutions (both government and missionary) for half-caste children were established in the early decades of the 20th century to care and educate the mixed-race children taken from their families. Examples of such institutions include Moore River Native Settlement in Western Australia, Doomadgee Aboriginal Mission in Queensland, Ebenezer Mission in Victoria, and Wellington Valley Mission in New South Wales, as well as Catholic missions such as Beagle Bay and Garden Point.
Stolen Generations
In 1909, the Protector of Aborigines in South Australia, William Garnet South, reportedly "lobbied for the power to remove Aboriginal children without a court hearing because the courts sometimes refused to accept that the children were neglected or destitute." South argued that "all children of mixed descent should be treated as neglected." His lobbying reportedly played a part in the enactment of the "Aborigines Act 1911." This designated his position as the legal guardian of every Aboriginal child in South Australia, not only the so-called "half-castes".
Jaara baby
At one point, Gary Foley, who at the time was the curator of the Bunjilaka exhibition at the Melbourne Museum, was approached by a white man from Canberra who claimed that the Jaara baby was an ancestor of his. He claimed that the baby was actually a European child, who had been abducted by Aboriginal tribesmen during the period of frontier violence which decimated Aboriginal populations in Victoria's west during the mid-nineteenth century. Although tests on the Jaara remains were not conclusive, they did reveal that the child was no more than eighteen months old, whereas the abducted white child was three years old.
Kinchela Aboriginal Boys' Training Home
Historically Aboriginal children were separated from their families from the earliest days of the colony. Governor Macquarie established the first Native Institution in Parramatta as early as 1814 and in 1823 another Native Institution was started in Blacktown (Blacktown Native Institution Site). Both these institutions were considered failures, one reason being that once parents realised their children wouldn't be allowed to come home, they wouldn't give them up to the institutions. The Government of New South Wales also subsidised missionary activity among the Aboriginal people, including that of the London Missionary Society in the 1820s and 1830s. On the frontier of Wellington Valley the Reverend Watson gained a reputation for stealing Aboriginal children and as a consequence the Wiradjuri hid their children from the white men.
Australian native police
In late 1846 and early 1847, in a horrible example of British colonial values, a rumour began that a shipwrecked white woman had been abducted by a Gunai clan. Outraged Victorian sensibility demanded both the rescue of the supposed damsel and the wholesale punishment of the natives involved. A special Native Police mission was organised in September 1846 under HEP Dana that failed to produce the white woman. A private posse of 10 armed Aboriginals and 6 whites was then organised under de Villiers which also did not produce the woman. The rumour of the white woman was proved false, but the results for the Gunai were devastating. Tyers estimated that the two punitive groups killed at least 50 Aboriginals and wounded many more.
Aboriginal history of Western Australia
A new "Native Welfare Act" in 1954 did nothing to limit these removal powers under the 1936 Act, which continued unabated. However amendments to the "Native Welfare Act" in 1963 repealed all previous legislation and abolished the Chief Protector's powers to remove children of Aboriginal descent from their biological parents. Nevertheless the removal of Aboriginal children continued under the arbitrary implementation of the broad provisions of the Child Welfare Act of 1947.
Indigenous Australians
Indigenous Australians are the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people of Australia, descended from groups that existed in Australia and surrounding islands before British colonisation. The time of arrival of the first Indigenous Australians is a matter of debate among researchers. The earliest conclusively human remains found in Australia are those of Mungo Man LM3 and Mungo Lady, which have been dated to around 50,000 years BP. Recent archaeological evidence from the analysis of charcoal and artefacts revealing human use suggests a date as early as 65,000 BP. Luminescence dating has suggested habitation in Arnhem Land as far back as 60,000 years BP. Genetic research has inferred a date of habitation as early as 80,000 years BP.
Other estimates have ranged up to 100,000 years and 125,000 years ago.
Aboriginal Legal Service of Western Australia
Rob Riley was CEO of the organisation from 1990 to 1995. By the 21st century, Aboriginals make up 40% of the prison population in Western Australia, despite still only constituting 3.5% of the population, and 65% of juveniles detained within the legal system are Aboriginals.
In 2009 the ALSWA represented a 12-year-old Aboriginal boy who was charged with receiving stolen goods after he had been given a chocolate Freddo frog stolen from a shop in Northam near Perth; Colin Barnett, the Premier of Western Australia, subsequently said that the frog had "held the whole police system up to ridicule". After missing a court date in connection with the matter, the boy, who had no previous convictions, had been arrested and held for several hours in a police cell. Peter Collins, director of the ALSWA at the time, suggested that the charges were because the boy was Aboriginal, and that the same action would not have been taken against a "non-Aboriginal kid from an affluent Perth suburb with professional parents". Northam police denied this, and said the boy had come to their attention in the past.
Sixties Scoop
In Australia, a similar policy, which is sometimes referred to as the Stolen Generation, removed Aboriginal children from their families and placed them in orphanages, children's homes, or with non-Aboriginal foster parents.
Child migration
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many Aboriginal Australian children were removed from their families and placed in institutions and foster homes, in what became known as the Stolen Generations.
Apology to Australia's Indigenous peoples
On 13 February 2008, the Parliament of Australia issued a formal apology to Indigenous Australians for forced removals of Australian indigenous children (often referred to as the Stolen Generations) from their families by Australian federal and state government agencies. The apology was delivered by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
Kinchela, New South Wales
Kinchela Boys Home was established by the Aboriginal Protection Board in 1924 and absorbed the Aboriginal school. The home was intended for Aboriginal children who were removed from their families as part of the process of 'assimilating' them into white Australian society. The victims of this process eventually became known as the Stolen Generation. Kinchela Boys Home housed between 400 and 600 boys between 1924 and its closure in 1970. Bringing Them Home, the report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families, documents the brutal punishment and sexual abuse suffered by these boys.
Racism in Australia
Indigenous peoples of Australia, comprising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders peoples, have lived in Australia for at least 65,000+ years before the arrival of British settlers in 1788. At the time of first European contact, it has been estimated that the indigenous population was at least 315,000, while recent archaeological finds suggest that a population of 750,000 could have been sustained.
Racism in Australia
In response to the Little Children are Sacred Report the Howard Government launched the Northern Territory National Emergency Response in 2007, to reduce child molestation, domestic violence and substance abuse in remote indigenous communities. It was continued under the Rudd and Gillard Labor Governments. James Anaya, a United Nations Special Rapporteur, alleged in 2010 that the policy was "racially discriminating" because measures like banning alcohol and pornography and quarantining a percentage of welfare income for the purchase of essential goods represented a limitation on "individual autonomy". The Rudd Government, the Opposition and a number of prominent indigenous activists condemned Anaya's allegation. Central Australian Aboriginal leader Bess Price criticised the UN for not sending a female repporteur and said that Abaya had been led around by opponents of the intervention to meet with opponents of the intervention.
Disappearance of the Beaumont children
Although there is no proof that he had ever visited Adelaide, a witness recalled having a conversation with Brown in which he mentioned having seen the Adelaide Festival Centre nearing completion which places him in Adelaide in June 1973. The Oval abduction occurred on 25 August 1973. However, no evidence has ever been found to connect Brown with Adelaide in 1966 when the Beaumont children were abducted. Another witness, who reported seeing a man near the Oval carrying a young girl while another older girl in distress followed, later identified Brown as the man she had seen after seeing his picture on television in December 1998 in relation to the MacKay murders. The woman who identified the abductor as Brown first saw him for a single minute when aged 14, and then identified him as Brown 25 years later when she saw him as an 86-year-old on television. Brown's appearance, in fact, had barely changed, and he was still very much recognisable as the same person when compared to photographs of him taken 30 years earlier, which was a factor in identifying him as matching the sketch of the suspect in the Beaumont and Adelaide Oval abductions. Additionally, she had reported that the man was wearing a pair of horn rimmed glasses and Brown is known to have worn horn rimmed glasses, something considered by police to be another noteworthy point in the identification. Brown was 53 at the time of the Beaumont children's disappearance, which may or may not match the description of the suspect seen with the children, who was reported as being in his late thirties.
A. O. Neville
Neville became the state's second appointment, in 1915, to the role of the Chief Protector of Aborigines. During the next quarter-century, he presided over the controversial policy of removing Aboriginal children from their families, children who came to be called the Stolen Generations. More than 69% of Noongah were removed in this way and sent to "camps" at Mogumber at Moore River and Carrolup near Katanning. In 1936, Neville became the Commissioner for Native Affairs, a post he held until his retirement in 1940.
Bomaderry Aboriginal Children's Home
Under the 1909 Aborigines Protection Act children were removed from their families if they were found to be neglected. The Act was originally intended to enable the training of Aboriginal children and was therefore aimed at older children. The Act was amended in 1915 to allow younger children to be taken and to give the Board more power to act without parental consent. An article in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1921 reported in the words of an official from the Aborigines Protection Board "that the principal work of the Board was the rescuing from the Reserves of all children who had reached the age of 14 years, and the taking of children from parents whose neglect warranted the board's intervention." Children removed by the Board who were old enough for training were taken to the Board's own institutions such as Cootamundra Girl's Training Home or Kinchela Boy's Training Home. If the children were taken very young, or as babies, they were first taken to Bomaderry Children's Home. UAM supported the activities of the Aborigines Protection Board by providing a home for these young Aboriginal children.
In 1922 there were 45 children at the home with the two eldest being apprenticed by the mission. On the site were three buildings with a fourth under construction. The number of the children at the home must have fluctuated around the upper 30s as in 1924 there were 36 children. The children at the Bomaderry Aboriginal Children's Home were housed in dormitory cottages up until the 1960s. There was a separate cottage for kitchen and dining and for the sisters' accommodation.
Stolen generation testimonies
Indigenous children were taken from their families from the very early days of the colony. On the frontier there were many instances of children who were kidnapped by settlers who often became servants for the newcomers. On missions and reserves across the country children were often separated from their families. They slept in dormitories and had very limited contact with their parents. This system helped convert the children to Christianity by removing them from the cultural influence of their people. But the removal of Aboriginal children intensified at the end of the 19th century. There were a number of Aboriginal children being born of mixed race. Colonial authorities believed the children with training and education could be absorbed into the white population ridding them of the so-called ‘half caste’ problem.
Indigenous Australians
By 1900, the recorded Indigenous population of Australia had declined to approximately 93,000. However, this was only a partial count as both Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders were poorly covered, with desert Aboriginal peoples not counted at all until the 1930s. The last uncontacted tribe left the Gibson Desert in 1984. During the first half of the twentieth century, many Indigenous Australians worked as stockmen on sheep stations and cattle stations for extremely low wages. The Indigenous population continued to decline, reaching a low of 74,000 in 1933 before numbers began to recover. By 1995, population numbers had reached pre-colonisation levels, and in 2010 there were around 563,000 Indigenous Australians.
Indigenous health in Australia
The Australian government proceeded to deny the Indigenous people of their civil rights, including property rights; the ability to work and receive wages; and access to medical care and educational institutions. Legislation also allowed for the separation of Indigenous families, with guardianship being awarded to government officials called Protectors. Indigenous children forcibly removed from their families under Protection legislation in the first half of the 20 century are referred to as the Stolen Generations. Many of these children were neglected, abused, and denied of an education. The Australian government forced the Indigenous populations to assimilate into the colonisers’ culture through schools and programs, where Indigenous languages were banned and any resistance to these practices could result in imprisonment or death. This process of acculturation has led to trauma, including historical, inter-generational, and social trauma. Issues such as anxiety, stress, grief, and sadness are produced from this trauma, which have led to higher suicide rates, violence, substance abuse and incarceration of Indigenous peoples today.
History of eugenics
In the first half of the 20th century, this led to policies and legislation that resulted in the removal of children from their tribe.
The stated aim was to culturally assimilate mixed-descent people into contemporary Australian society. In all states and territories legislation was passed in the early years of the 20th century which gave Aboriginal protectors guardianship rights over Aborigines up to the age of sixteen or twenty-one. Policemen or other agents of the state (such as Aboriginal Protection Officers), were given the power to locate and transfer babies and children of mixed descent from their communities into institutions. In these Australian states and territories, half-caste institutions (both government or missionary) were established in the early decades of the 20th century for the reception of these separated children. The 2002 movie "Rabbit-Proof Fence" portrays a true story about this system and the harrowing consequences of attempting to overcome it.
Disappearance of the Beaumont children
The kidnapping is also viewed by many social commentators as a significant event in the evolution of Australian society, with a large number of people changing the way they supervised their children daily. At the time, it was never publicly suggested that the children should not have been allowed to travel unsupervised, or that their parents were in any way negligent, simply because contemporary Australian society took it for granted that this was safe and acceptable. However, this case alongside similar child-related crimes (such as the 1960 Graeme Thorne kidnapping, and the 1965 Wanda Beach murders) "marked an end of innocence in [post-war] Australian life".
Stolen Generations
Historian Inga Clendinnen suggests that the term genocide rests on the "question of intentionality", saying: "There's not much doubt, with great murderous performances that were typically called genocide, that they were deliberate and intentional. Beyond that, it always gets very murky."
During the same period from the 1930s to 1982, 250,000 Australian-born non-Indigenous children were also removed from parents who were deemed "unfit". At the time this was widely seen as a positive thing by society for both the mothers and the children. The term "white stolen generations" is now used to distinguish this group from the Indigenous stolen generations. The mothers were sometimes drugged, tied to beds, or told their babies had died. Many hospitals engaged in what is now known as institutionalised baby farming, these babies were often adopted into middle class families.
Rabbit-Proof Fence (film)
The film stirred controversy in Australia relating to the government's historical policy of removing part-Aboriginal children, who became known as the Stolen Generations, from Aboriginal communities and placing them in state institutions. Eric Abetz, a government official, announced the publishing of a leaflet criticising the film's portrayal of the treatment of indigenous Australians, and demanded an apology from the filmmakers. Director Phillip Noyce suggested instead that the government apologize to the indigenous people affected by the removal policy.
Home Children
In 2014–2015 the Northern Ireland Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry considered cases of children forcibly sent to Australia. They found that about 130 young children in the care of voluntary or state institutions were sent to Australia in what was described as the Child Migrant Programme in the period covered by the Inquiry, from 1922 to 1995, but mostly shortly after the Second World War.
Indigenous Australians
An inquiry into the Stolen Generations was launched in 1995 by the Keating government, and the final report delivered in 1997 – the "Bringing Them Home" report – estimated that around 10% to 33% of all Aboriginal children had been separated from their families for the duration of the policies. The then-Howard government largely ignored the recommendations provided by the report, one of which was a formal apology to Aboriginal Australians for the Stolen Generations. There was a formal apology issued on 13 February 2008 by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd on behalf of the federal government of Australia to the Aboriginal Australians over the Stolen Generations.
Baby Scoop Era
A similar period of forced adoption, also known as the "White Stolen Generations", also occurred in Australia. It is generally understood that a decline of adoption during the 1970s was linked to a 1973 law providing for financial assistance to single parents.
Racism in Australia
Indigenous peoples of Australia who had lived in Australia for at least 65,000+ years before the arrival of British settlers in 1788, were dispossessed from their land in 1788 by Britain, which claimed Eastern Australia as its own on the basis of the now discredited doctrine of "terra nullius". Initially, indigenous Australians were in most states deprived of the rights of full citizenship of the new nation on grounds of their race and restrictive immigration laws were introduced to preference white European immigrants to Australia. Discriminatory laws against indigenous people and multiethnic immigration were dismantled in the early decades of the Post War period. A 1967 Referendum regarding Aboriginal rights was carried with over 90% approval by the electorate. Legal reforms have re-established Aboriginal Land Rights under Australian law and in the early 21st century, indigenous Australians account for around 2.5% of the population, owning outright around 20% of all land. Intense focus on the impact of historical policies like the removal of mixed ethnicity Aboriginal children from their Aboriginal parent resulted in a bipartisan Parliamentary apology to Aborigines carried in 2008. Aboriginal health indicators remain lower than other ethnic groups within Australia and again are the subject of political debate.
Adoption in Australia
The earliest introduction of child removal to legislation is recorded in the Victorian "Aboriginal Protection Act 1869". The Central Board for the Protection of Aborigines had been advocating such powers since 1860, and the passage of the Act gave the colony of Victoria a wide suite of powers over Aboriginal and 'half-caste' persons, including the forcible removal of children, especially 'at risk' girls. By 1950, similar policies and legislation had been adopted by other states and territories. According to the "Bringing Them Home" inquiry into the forced separation of indigenous children from their families, less than 17% of the children were adopted. The majority of these adoptions occurred after 1950 when authorities began promoting the fostering and adoption of Aboriginal children by white parents.
Stolen Generations
This cannot be over-emphasized—the Australian government literally kidnapped these children from their parents as a matter of policy. White welfare officers, often supported by police, would descend on Aboriginal camps, round up all the children, separate the ones with light-coloured skin, bundle them into trucks and take them away. If their parents protested they were held at bay by police.
Cootamundra Domestic Training Home for Aboriginal Girls
The Aborigines Protection Board was finally abolished and replaced by the Aborigines Welfare Board in 1940. Aboriginal children were then subject to the Child Welfare Act 1939 which required a magistrate's hearing and the child had to be proven neglected or uncontrollable. Aboriginal children continued to be sent to Cootamundra, Bomaderry and Kinchela, some went to Mittagong or Boystown. There were no specific homes for uncontrollable Aboriginal children so these were sent to State corrective institutions such as Mt Penang or Parramatta Girls. The education of Aboriginal children had generally been one of segregation until, in 1940, the Department of Education officially took on the role.
History of Australia
In 1992, the High Court of Australia handed down its decision in the Mabo Case, holding that the legal doctrine of "terra nullius" did not apply when Australia was settled, and therefore Indigenous native title survived reception of English law. That same year, Prime Minister Paul Keating said in his Redfern Park Speech that European settlers were responsible for the difficulties Australian Aboriginal communities continued to face: 'We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice'. In 1999 Parliament passed a Motion of Reconciliation drafted by Prime Minister John Howard and Aboriginal Senator Aden Ridgeway naming mistreatment of Indigenous Australians as the most "blemished chapter in our national history". In 2008, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd issued a public apology to members of the Stolen Generations on behalf of the Australian Government.
Kruger v Commonwealth
Indigenous Australians have lived in the Northern Territory for at least 40,000 years. In 1863 the Territory came under the control of South Australia which in 1910 passed the "Northern Territory Aboriginals Act 1910". The Act claimed to be for the "Protection and Control" of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people of the Territory. Under the Act, the "Chief Protector of Aboriginals" was appointed as the legal guardian of every child whose mother was Aboriginal, and had the power to confine such children to a reserve or Aboriginal institution. That is, indigenous children could be removed by Administrative order, whereas non-Indigenous children at the time could only be removed by order of a Court. This policy of removing indigenous children from their family continued when control of the Northern Territory was transferred from South Australia to the federal government. The "Aboriginals Ordinance" 1918 extended these powers, putting Aboriginal females under the total control of the Chief Protector. Most of the Aboriginal institutions were operated by churches. From 1964 indigenous children could only be removed under the same circumstances as non-Indigenous children, however, the conditions of life for Indigenous people put them at greater risk of having their children removed on the ground of neglect or destitution. In 1971 97% of Territory children in foster care were Indigenous.
Australia
Australia was inhabited by indigenous Australians for about 60,000 years before the first British settlement in the late 18th century. It is documented that Aborigines spoke languages that can be classified into about 250 groups. After the European exploration of the continent by Dutch explorers in 1606, who named it New Holland, Australia's eastern half was claimed by Great Britain in 1770 and initially settled through penal transportation to the colony of New South Wales from 26 January 1788, a date which became Australia's national day. The population grew steadily in subsequent decades, and by the 1850s most of the continent had been explored and an additional five self-governing crown colonies established. On 1 January 1901, the six colonies federated, forming the Commonwealth of Australia. Australia has since maintained a stable liberal democratic political system that functions as a federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy, comprising six states and ten territories.
Forgotten Australians
The term "Forgotten Australians" is controversial. It sometimes refers to all Australian children, including Indigenous children and former child migrants to Australia who spent part or all of their childhoods in care during the 20th Century, particularly between 1920 and 1970.. Not all Australians accept the term "Forgotten Australians" because of its connotations of passivity and because the label was supplied by the Senate Committee without consultation. Certainly many Indigenous people and Child Migrants prefer other more descriptive terminology.
The Aboriginal Mother
Eliza Hamilton Dunlop moved to New South Wales, Australia in 1838, arriving on 25 February. The Myall Creek Massacre occurred on 10 June 1838, a few months after her arrival. During the incident, a total of 30 Aboriginal Australians were murdered by 11 people; several Aboriginal children were decapitated and a three-year-old boy was killed. On 5 December, seven men were found guilty for the crime after a trial; the other four men who were involved with the incident were accused of the massacre but found innocent. On 18 December, the seven men found guilty of the incident were sentenced to death, executed by hanging.
History of Indigenous Australians
In 1975, the Whitlam government drafted the Aboriginal Land Rights Act, which aimed to restore traditional lands to Indigenous people. After the dismissal of the Whitlam government by the Governor-General, a reduced-scope version of the Act (known as the Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1976) was introduced by the coalition government led by Malcolm Fraser. While its application was limited to the Northern Territory, it did grant "inalienable" freehold title to some traditional lands.
Half-caste
The term was immortalized in the Half-Caste Act in which the Australian government could seize such children and forcibly remove them from their parents, theoretically to provide them with better homes than those afforded by typical Aborigines, where they could grow up to work as domestic servants and for social engineering. The removed children are known as Stolen Generations. Other British commonwealth Acts on half-castes and Aborigines enacted between 1909 and 1943 were also, in theory, called Welfare Acts, in statutes passed deprived these people of basic civil, political, and economic rights and made it illegal to enter public places such as pubs and government institutions, marry, or meet relatives.
Indigenous Australians
It is generally believed that Aboriginal people are the descendants of a single migration into the continent, a people that split from the first modern human populations to leave Africa 64,000 to 75,000 years ago, although a minority proposed an earlier theory that there were three waves of migration, most likely island hopping by boat during periods of low sea levels (see Prehistory of Australia). Recent work with mitochondrial DNA suggests a founder population of between 1,000 and 3,000 women to produce the genetic diversity observed, which suggests "that initial colonization of the continent would have required deliberate organized sea travel, involving hundreds of people". Aboriginal people seem to have lived a long time in the same environment as the now extinct Australian megafauna.
Bob Randall (Aboriginal Australian elder)
At about the age of seven, Randall was taken away from his mother and family under government policy which forcibly removed thousands of half-caste (half-Aboriginal) children from their families. This policy came to be known as the "Stolen Generation." Randall was taken to The Bungalow, an institution for half-caste children in Alice Springs, Northern Territory, then later was moved to a reservation on Croker Island in Arnhem Land, thousands of kilometres away from his home and family. Randall was given a new identity and birth date.
Indigenous Australians and crime
The issue of child abuse in Indigenous communities was looked at by the Northern Territory government, who in 2007 produced a report referred to as "Little Children Are Sacred".
Bomaderry Aboriginal Children's Home
Historically Aboriginal children were separated from their families from the earliest days of the colony. Governor Macquarie established the first Native Institution in Parramatta as early as 1814 and in 1823 another Native Institution was started in Blacktown. Both these institutions were considered failures, one reason being that once parents realised their children wouldn't be allowed to come home, they wouldn't give them up to the institutions. The Government of New South Wales also subsidised missionary activity among the Aboriginal people, including that of the London Missionary Society in the 1820s and 1830s. On the frontier of Wellington Valley the Reverend Watson gained a reputation for stealing Aboriginal children and as a consequence the Wiradjuri hid their children from the white men.
Aboriginal child protection
Child protection for aboriginal peoples of Canada has tended from Confederation in 1867 to fall between the chairs.
Constitutional arrangements in Canada assigned "Indians" to federal and child protection to provincial authorities.
Several generations of family life for many aboriginal peoples were devastated by a policy designed to "kill the Indian in the child" effectuated through a compulsory residential school program. In the 1960s, many aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their families and adopted by non-aboriginal parents, in a process known as Sixties Scoop. In 1985, a Judge found that "Cultural genocide has been taking place in a systematic routine manner." During the 1980s, "First Nations peoples [took initiatives] in developing proposals of their own and in negotiating agreements with governments. ... First Nations peoples [developed] service models which reflect[ed] the experiences of their communities, cultures and histories." In 1982, aboriginal rights were protected in the Canadian Constitution. Developments in case law suggest that since 1982 aboriginal peoples' rights to cultural integrity have been constitutionally protected. Subsequently, some provinces enacted provisions and established policies for aboriginal child welfare agencies to provide services for aboriginal families on reserves under provincial law. They depend upon federal funding.
"Native agencies are bound by the same provincial child-welfare laws as their mainstream counterparts, but must survive on far tighter budgets under a strict federal funding formula that takes little account of provincial legislation." In 2007, the Assembly of First Nations announced that it was filing a complaint with the Canadian Human Rights Commission that discriminatory services violated human rights. In 2008, Canada's Auditor General found that "Current funding practices do not lead to equitable funding among Aboriginal and First Nations communities." Currently, "The First Nations are engaged in a struggle to gain control of child welfare in their own communities, and this issue has a significant place in the First Nations movement towards self-determination." Indigenous peoples exercising the right of self-determination have yet to make it fully effective in respect of aboriginal child protection.