Stolen Generation in Australia

Frank Byrne says, "I've been hurt. I've been hurt very deeply. Since they took me away from my mother I have lived only in sorry and anger," he said. "Sorry is a word. It's just a hollow word."

Traumatised by having her son essentially kidnapped by the government, Franks's mother suffered a nervous breakdown, and was committed to a mental asylum in Perth. She died when he was 12.

Stolen Generations - A policy stretching from the late-19th Century to the end of 1960s, under which Australia's Aboriginal children were taken from their parents and placed in institutions, orphanages, missions or white foster families.

Most commonly, it was children of mixed race - "half-castes" in the word description of the day - that the government agencies chose to snatch.

They would descend on Aboriginal communities, separate the light-skinned children from those with a darker complexion, and then take them away.

Histories of the period recall how wire cages were sometimes used with spring doors. Children would be tempted in by a trail of sweets.

Under the twisted logic of the time, the idea was to "civilize" these young Aboriginal children, to indoctrinate them with European values. Another early aim, which stemmed from the doctrine of eugenics, was to "breed out their color".

This period in time in countries history has been labelled by the historian Robert Manne as "the most shameful act of 20th Century Australia".

An inquiry in the late 1990's called "Bringing Them Home" published the details of the policy towards the Aboriginal's, many white Australians claimed they were oblivious to what had been going on all those years. According to the "Bringing Them Home" report, at least 100,000 children were removed from their parents.

After the release of the report, formal apologies came from all of Australia's state parliaments. Prime Minister John Howard gave his motion of "deep and sincere regret", but refused to issue a formal apology. He argued that a formal apology would reinforce a sense of victimhood in Aboriginal communities, and that modern-day Australians were not the authors of the policy, so therefore had nothing for which to apologize.

However Howard's successor, the new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, plans to make his campaign promise good of delivering an apology.

Source: BBC - UK
Anguish of the Stolen Generations


Related Articles
Australia Apologizes to Aborigines

Bringing Them Home

Australia's stolen generation