Bringing them home

The Bringing Them Home report, first presented at the Melbourne Reconciliation Conference ten years ago, documented the forced removal of Indigenous children from their families through much of the 20th century with the aim of bringing about the demise of their race. The wounds have still not healed.

The film Rabbit-Proof Fence told the story of Molly Craig, a 14-year-old Aboriginal girl kidnapped with her younger sister and cousin by a state policeman in 1931. This was not because the children had committed crimes or were neglected but because it was the policy of A.O. Neville, Western Australia’s “Chief Protector” of Aborigines (1915-1940): to enforce the Aborigines Act by transporting them 1,500 miles to a government settlement and telling them to forget family, language and home.

The monumental cruelty is to some extent masked by Molly’s refusal to submit to incarceration, escaping to find and follow the rabbit fence she’d observed during their long train journey with the slender hope it could lead them home. It becomes an adventure story of great courage and perseverance as the three youngsters embark on a very long walk to freedom. A story of tragedy but also triumph.

Bringing Them Home explains why this happened, how Neville and other state “protectors” hoped to create racially purer British colonies by eradicating those with Indigenous heritage.

One girl recalled, “Every morning our people would crush charcoal, mix it with animal fat and smother that all over us, so that when the police came they could only see black children”. Children with darker skins were safer because they were left at home, while those with lighter skins, like Molly, were removed to ensure their relationships would be with fairer-skinned people. Through the normal mating process each generation would become increasingly light-skinned and eventually indistinguishable from non-Indigenous people. That was the theory.

In May 1937 a newspaper reported Neville saying “the pure black will be extinct” after being segregated, while “half-castes”, although increasing in number, would be absorbed into the white population. “Perhaps it will take 100 years, perhaps longer, but the race is dying”, he said.

It was estimated between one in three and one in ten Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families and communities around Australia in the period 1910-1970. Young children were placed in dormitories away from their parents in early years and then sent off to missions as teenagers to work.

Meanwhile, in Berlin on March 31, 1933, Sebastian Haffner, a young lawyer is at work in the government library. The room is “full of extreme silence”. Then the mood changes, a tremor of agitation. The door bursts open and a posse of brown-shirted Nazi storm-troopers floods in. Their leader booms “Non-Aryans must leave the premises immediately”. He means Jews. A brown-shirt stands in front of Haffner’s desk. “Are you Aryan?”

“Yes”.

Haffner later wrote, in Defying Hitler, “A moment too late I felt the shame, the defeat … I had not lied, I had allowed something much worse to happen … to have answered the unjustified question as to whether I was Aryan so easily, even if the fact was of no importance to me”. Haffner’s girl friend was Jewish, every day he feared she and her family would simply disappear.

Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl described the fate of Jews. In 1942, when she was 13, her family hid themselves in the secret part of a Dutch warehouse for two years until they were discovered. She was sent to the notorious Belsen concentration camp where she died of typhus just one month before the camp was liberated.

The architect of this eradication policy was German Chancellor Adolf Hitler who in his book Mein Kampf (My Struggle) had explained he aimed to create a purer world by ridding it of Jews and gypsies, later adding the disabled. His National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nazis), dissolved in 1923, was resurrected in 1926. “The correctness of its ideas, the purity of its will, its supporters' spirit of self-sacrifice, have caused it to issue from all repressions stronger than ever”, Hitler wrote. “A state which in this age of racial poisoning dedicates itself to the care of its best racial elements must some day become lord of the earth.”

In 2005 former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder made a speech on the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II lamenting that German people had not tried harder to oppose the racial extremes of the Hitler administration. He was saying Sorry.

Neville and other Australian State administrators differed as to the best age for forced removal of a child from the family, at birth or two years. This was in stark contrast to the work of Sigmund Freud since the late 19th century, then more specifically John Bowlby in 1950s London, who emphasised the importance for a person’s lifetime development of close and reliable relationship with parents and family from their earliest years throughout childhood and beyond. Not that this came as a surprise. If the Australian “Chief Protectors” saw this detailed research they chose to ignore it.

Peggy was six-months-old when her extended family could no longer stay together and were moved to Cherbourg Settlement at Murgon, Queensland, in the 1930s. For four years Peggy slept in the same bed as her mother in a dormitory while the males went to the boys’ home and were not seen again. When Peggy was four, matron decided she should start school, so she was permanently separated from her mother and told she would never return to her. At age four. “Absolutely no interaction”, Peggy recalled. “We had removed from grandparents, family, then I was removed from her … I didn’t get to know her. You got into trouble for crying.”

It was all about control, reform. “The bald head was part of the dormitory system for punishment. If you had lice you had your head shaved ... Your hair was also cut off for being naughty, speaking back, not doing your chores. You also got the strap and you got put in jail … you could even be left without any food.

“The kids who slept on the verandah were the ‘pee-the-beds’. They were called nothing else. Maybe you’d pee the bed one night because you had an upset tummy or were scared. I could see them on a winter’s morning - ‘All you pee-the-beds gotta get up’ - and they would get up in their wet clothing and you’d see steam coming off them. It was absolutely dreadful. We were cruelly treated.”

Australia has been recalling the high-spots of the1967 Referendum and the community Sorry marches, meetings, festivals and local reconciliation study groups following the 1997 Reconciliation Conference.

The Australian Rugby League held its Inaugural Reconciliation Cup on May 25 with North Queensland Cowboys playing Canterbury Bulldogs at Lang Park stadium in Brisbane. Leah Purcell sang the national anthem, two Aboriginal Aunties acknowledged the traditional owners of the land and made a reconciliation speech, Kev Carmody sang, there were Indigenous musicians and traditional dancers, and there was a large mob of children from Hopevale, north Queensland, cheering their team to victory.

Although only 2.5 per cent of Australia’s population is Indigenous their proportion in the Australian Rugby League is 11 per cent, similarly in the Australian Football League. Indigenous folk have also been very successful in academia, the professions, the media, arts, sport, politics.

But we have had to acknowledge there has been little actual change on the ground for many Indigenous communities, and government cannot make even the symbolic gesture of saying Sorry, for personal disasters like those described above, or to “disappear” the race. Prime ministerial hopeful Kevin Rudd says he will say Sorry if elected. Why not say it now?

The continuing poor living conditions of many Indigenous people as reflected in the health statistics reflects the ambivalence in political circles.

Then there’s The Stolen Wages.

Perhaps we should all send a message to the PM with the one word: 'SORRY'.