Unfortunately this type of thing wasn't just happening in Australia. I believe that illegitimate children and orphans were being sent from British children's homes to Canada and Australia -- without meaningful consent from the children -- from the 1900's until the early 1960's. In theory it was supposed to give them a chance of a better life but in practice many of the children were very badly treated by strangers who took them in for a variety of reasons. -- Derek Ross
I know... it's amazing that these things could happen. Did you know that the Pope issued an official apology today for the involvement of the Catholic church in these forced removals?
Not relevant, but read this direct quote from the Stolen Generation report:
As Brisbane's Telegraph newspaper reported in May 1937, "Mr Neville (the then Chief Protector of Western Australia) holds the view that within one hundred years the pure black will be extinct. But the half-caste problem was increasing every year. Therefore their idea was to keep the pure blacks segregated and absorb the half-castes into the white population. Sixty years ago, he said, there were over 60,000 full-blooded natives in Western Australia. Today there are only 20,000. In time there would be none. Perhaps it would take one hundred years, perhaps longer, but the race was dying. The pure blooded Aboriginal was not a quick breeder. On the other hand the half-caste was. In Western Australia there were half-caste families of twenty and upwards. That showed the magnitude of the problem".
WHen I read that my blood went cold... - MMGB
I agree that it is quite appalling. As a non-Australian, I am curious as to how much that past racism is connected to the modern racism of the One Nation party. -- Egern.
What One Nation party? hehe - they don't exist anymore... the party fell apart about a year ago, and lost the only seat in government they had (in Queensland... our version of Alabama). The foreign media made such a big deal of the One Nation party, but they were always nothing more than a trivial and irrelevant movement. Certainly their views were racist, but then so are the views of the White Nazis or other such lunatic fringe organisations. The entrenched racist views would still exist in rural Australia, no doubt, but they are an incredible minority. All nations have racists, but it seems that the foreign media particularly like focusing on ours. - MMGB
Media particularly like focusing on other countries racists. Authorities were pretty fast and loose with children generally, shipping them about the world, sometimes even telling their parents the child had died... when you've done stolen generation, take a look at child migrants: http://www.childmigrants.com
Oh jeez... do I have to? I'm depressed enough as it is... :) I'm finding this article REALLY difficult to write well, by the way. -- MMGB
I think you're doing a great job, Manning. I've never heard of this before; it makes me angry to read about it. It's going to be very difficult to keep things NPOV, but I think you have the right idea with heavy quoting of government officials and documents. --STG
It seems to me there are two questions that need to be answered better, however. First, what happened to the children when they were taken from their homes? (The government taking children from their homes! Horrific! In fact I am surprised there hasn't been a major film made about it yet.) This is never made clear. At one point it sounds as if they were taken and then simply killed. The second paragraph, in particular, only contains hints, where clarity demands that the differing views about what happened to them, if there are any, be stated explicitly. Are some of the present-day aborigines descendants of the Stolen Generation?
Second, is there anything like a consensus about what percentage were taken from their homes? If this is a point of disagreement, or if many informed people believe we simply don't know (or that we know it's only within some range), it seems to me that should be said. Right now it sounds as though one faction believes it's 100% and one faction believes it's 10%, which is probably a huge simplification of the situation, I imagine. --Larry Sanger
The following are all quotes from the official report:
"inculcate European values and work habits in children, who would then be employed in service to the colonial settlers"
"By the middle of the nineteenth century... [Governments] typically viewed Indigenous people as a nuisance."
"Unlike white children who came into the state's control, far greater care was taken to ensure that [Aboriginal children] never saw their parents or families again. They were often given new names, and the greater distances involved in rural areas made it easier to prevent parents and children on separate missions from tracing each other"
"Government officials theorised that by forcibly removing Indigenous children (of mixed descent) from their families and sending them away from their communities to work for non-Indigenous people, this mixed descent population would, over time, `merge' with the non-Indigenous population. "
Thanks TK - it's certainly been the toughest article I've ever written. In case anyone is wondering why I have placed [sic] after every usage of "aboriginal" (instead of Aboriginal) - this is a specific issue of complaint by Aborigines in this country, one never writes "english people" or "american", and it is regarded as offensive to be denied the proper noun status. Pedantics might argue that "aborigine" also has a generic meaning (which it does) but it is not being used generically in these cases. Most government documents I have quoted use the lower case, so I have noted this with [sic] to indicate that the Wikipedia does not participate in this slightly derogatory behaviour. Interestingly, it is only around 1965 that government documents start capitalising the term. - MMGB
--- I reverted the changes to the previous version. The sentence "Though Governor Macquarie funded the first school for aboriginal children in 1814 and the British government had by the mid nineteenth century estabished a system of protectorate authorities with complete authority over Aboriginal welfare and rights, the term Stolen Generation generally refers to the family seperations after Australian federation in 1901." doesn't make any sense, raises an irrelevant school created by Macquarie (that was a failure and shut after three years anyway). Most importantly it detracts from the key notion that the actions were performed with the full knowledge and blessing of the federal authorities, as is cited in the HREOC report.
The next statement "However as the size of the Aboriginal population was unkown, many did not speak english and lived away from any town; Section 127 of the 1901 Australian constitution stated "In reckoning the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth, or of a State or other part of the Commonwealth, aboriginal {sic] natives shall not be counted." is not only grammtically incorrect and has bad spelling (correctable), it is also inaccurate in its implications. The Aboriginal community were not classified as "civilised", therefore they were not regarded as a part of the commonwealth, it was not simply a matter of difficulties in counting. Also, even if this were the case that their exclusion of Aboriginals were solely a matter of challenges with the census, it doesn't change the fact that the legal interpretation was that Aboriginals did not have equivalent human rights under Australian Law. Again refer the HREOC report for verification. It's not pretty, but it is a verifiable truth.
I don't know who changed it or why - perhaps it was because they wished to soften the damnation that this article offers. But although I'm as proud as the next Australian, this is a pretty fair and unbiased article. The truth really WAS that horrible. I have no problems with corrections and improvements (as SJK has already done) but only when they improve the article and do not introduce fallacies and ambiguities. - MMGB
Somebody's edited this page again, and I found the last version more informative. I'm for a reversion to the previous version. --Robert Merkel
Good work so far. Big questions from me include who and why. Who were the people that thought this up, and how did it become policy? What did the people implementing this think they were going to accomplish? Do they think they succeded? -- ansible
Ansible - these are really good points, I think the article could be tweaked to give greater attention to the actual reasoning behind the actions. I'll do it later (at work now) - MMGB
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