Sorry

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IT'S pretty easy to be cynical about sorry and the stolen people.
Doubts about the authenticity of their claims, and questions as to how
the uttering of one word could really change anything, remain ever-
present (writes Paul Toohey).

Stolen people can be pretty cynical about each other, too. They are
quick to raise questions about each other's genetic or historical
provenance. Get in a room full of stolen people and it doesn't take
long for the sniping to begin.

It usually relates to whether a person was in fact forcibly removed or
willingly placed in the care of the state by a mother who couldn't
cope, and was therefore given rather than stolen.

Stolen people believe there's a stolen bandwagon with non-stolen
people aboard.

Anyone who witnessed the internal savagery of the Larrakia people's
native title claim over Darwin, with claimants laying waste to each
others' reputations, bickering about who was true Larrakia, has some
idea of how poisonous internecine Aboriginal politics can be. There
are often no straight answers. The reason is that there are almost
never any worthwhile government documents even as basic as a birth
certificate that might offer clear parental (and therefore tribal)
substantiation.

And there are the white people who went to school with these part-
Aboriginal or coloured children, who might later turn up as angrily
proclaimed second or third-generation descendants of the stolen
people. The white people who knew them as children will often remark:
How come these people never identified as Aborigines when they were
kids? Why are the doing it now? Is it for the money?

As Nicky Kilgour, the light-skinned daughter of a first-generation
stolen mother, told me the other day: "When me and my sister went to
school, we were the black gins. That's what they called us."

Kilgour identifies as an Aborigine. If a person grew up being called a
gin or a boong or a coon, I have no trouble understanding why they
would identify as straight Aboriginal ahead of the non-Aboriginal
parts of their make-up. Kilgour says she wants no money for herself.
But she wants it for her mother.

Kevin Rudd probably knows by now that sorry won't be enough. It never
will be. Reparation is outstanding. The Government might not take this
view. But anyone who has sat with a group of true first-generation
stolen people would find it hard not to be moved. Their stories of
being grabbed from their mothers' arms in bush camps and taken to
mission settlements, of being flogged for speaking their birth
language, being told to forget their mothers, sleeping in a dorm with
a shit-can in the room for all to use, of (some) being offered
assimilation in boarding schools in far-away states, of emerging from
this life in their teens and finding themselves scorned not just by
whites but by people of their own tribe: none of it is fantasy.

It doesn't take much for the hurt to surface in the form of tears. The
failed 2000 Cubillo-Gunner case frightened many stolen people away
from the courts. But the case of Adelaide stolen man Bruce Trevorrow,
who won $775,000 in compensation, suggests the states and the
commonwealth remain deeply exposed to claims.

Most of the Stolen Generations people would, it seems, prefer to
negotiate rather than litigate. But if there was any deal struck,
compensation ought not to reach down to the sons and daughters of
members of the Stolen Generations, who might have their backs up for
growing up in mad dysfunctional households and be angry on behalf of,
and sometimes because of, their parents.

First-generation stolen child Lorna Cubillo admitted in her failed
2000 Federal Court action that she simply didn't know how to be a
proper mother, and her kids suffered.

Across the nation it is estimated about 13,000 people identify
themselves as part of the Stolen Generations, or affected by the
Stolen Generations. The number of first-generation stolen people is
considerably less, perhaps only as few as 400. Seen in those terms, a
compensation package directed straight to them does not look so
frightening.

The 1997 Bringing Them Home report did not see it this way and urged
compensation (it gave no figure) be paid to those it loosely described
as descendants, who could be as far removed as great-grandchildren.

The chances of the descendants of first-generation people accepting
that the buck has to stop somewhere are remote. The situation now
arises whereby children of first-generation stolen people who have
died argue they should be compensated on behalf of their stolen
parents. It is a great shame this issue was not dealt with 10 years
ago.

Rudd's sorry will not be the end of this matter, but the start.

Paul Toohey is a senior writer at The Australian.

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Keith Windschuttle | February 09, 2008

IF the Rudd Government apologises to the Stolen Generations it should
not stop at mere words.
It should pay a substantial sum in compensation. This was the central
recommendation of the Human Rights Commission's Bringing Them Home
report in 1997.

The charge that justified this, the report said, was genocide. This
allegedly took place from the 1910s until the late '60s right across
Australia. In some parts of the commonwealth it was still going on in
the '80s.

None of the politicians who plan to apologise next Wednesday can avoid
the term genocide. It is embedded in the very meaning of the phrase
"Stolen Generations".

Bringing Them Home found indigenous children were forcibly removed
from their homes so they could be raised separately from and ignorant
of their culture and people.

The ultimate purpose, it claimed, was to endthe existence of the
Aborigines as a distinct people.

Bringing Them Home claimed "not one indigenous family has escaped the
effects of forcible removal". Hence it recommended that virtually
every person in Australia who claimed to be an Aborigine was entitled
to a substantial cash handout. The Bruce Trevorrow case in South
Australia provided a benchmark for what that sum should be, a minimum
of $500,000.

The Aboriginal population today numbers almost 500,000, living in
about 100,000 families. Those who are serious about an apology should
back it with a lump sum payment of $500,000 to each family, a total of
$50 billion. Only an amount on this scale can legitimately compensate
for such a crime and satisfy the grievances of activists such as
Lowitja O'Donohue and Michael Mansell.

The parliament cannot take those bits of Bringing Them Home it finds
congenial and ignore the rest. The report's logic is impeccable. If
children really were systematically removed to end the existence of
Aborigines asa distinct people, then the crime was definitely
genocide. As Raymond Gaita has argued, quite accurately, if Bringing
Them Home is a true account, the crime of genocide is "over-
determined".

There is no doubt that the majority of Aboriginal people today believe
the Stolen Generations story is true. If parliament agrees with them,
but fails to offer compensation, it will reduce next week's apology to
a politically expedient piece of insincerity that yet again humiliates
Aborigines by showing we do not take their most deeply-felt grievances
seriously. It is also worth observing that by apologising, the Rudd
Government will go a long way towards demolishing one of the Labor
Party's strongest calls on loyalty: its sense that it alone offers a
historical progression towards "the light on the hill". One thing the
university historians who first established this story kept largely to
themselves was that the major pieces of relevant legislation were all
passed by Labor governments.

In NSW, the 1915 Aborigines Protection Amending Act, which allowed the
Aborigines Protection Board to remove children without recourse to a
hearing before a magistrate, was the work of the first Labor
government in the state headed by James McGowen and W.A.Holman. The
Act's 1943 amendment, which allowed Aboriginal children to be fostered
out to non-indigenous families, was introduced by the Labor government
of William McKell, one of his party's favourite sons who later served
as governor-general.

In Western Australia, the 1936 Act that historians claim allowed
A.O.Neville to implement his policy of "breeding out the colour" was
the product of the Labor governments of Phillip Collier and John
C.Willcock. By apologising, Kevin Rudd and his colleagues will be
effectively trashing the reputations of their party's predecessors.

The problem with the Bringing Them Home report is not its logic, but
its facts. As regards NSW, the story of the Stolen Generations was
largely formed in 1981 by the historian Peter Read, then of the
Australian National University (now at the University of Sydney).
Read's work had an enormous influence on Aboriginal communities by
saying institutionalised children had not been failed by alcoholic
parents who neglected to provide them with food and shelter.

It was all the work of the white man, of faceless white bureaucrats
who wanted to eliminate the Aborigines.

Bringing Them Home did no original research of its own in NSW.
Instead, it relied upon Read's writings. It quoted verbatim his claim
that the files on individual children removed by the Aborigines
Protection Board confirmed his case: "Some managers cut a long story
short when they came to that part of the committal notice 'Reason for
board taking control of the child'. They simply wrote 'for being
Aboriginal'."

If it's pretended this was commonplace, however, it is a serious
misrepresentation. In a debate with Read last year at the History
Teachers Association's annual conference, I asked him how many files
bore those words. He confessed to the audience there were only two.
When I investigated the same batch of 800 files in the NSW archives, I
found there was only one. Its words were "Being an Aboriginal". There
were two others with the single word "Aboriginal".

I also found that, although popular songs and the Bringing Them Home
report gave the distinct impression that most children were removed
when they were babies or toddlers, there were hardly any in this
category. The archive files on which Read relied show that between
1907 and 1932, the NSW authorities removed only seven babies aged less
than 12 months, and another 18 aged less than two years. Fewer than
one-third of the children removed in this period were aged less than
12 years. Almost all were welfare cases, orphans, neglected children
(some severely malnourished), and children who were abandoned,
deserted and homeless.

The other two-thirds were teenagers, 13 to 17 years old. The reason
they were removed was to send them off to be employed as apprentices.
In reality, the NSW Labor governments were not stealing children but
offering youths the opportunity to get on-the-job training, just like
their white peers in the same age groups.

Read knew these Aboriginal youths were being apprenticed, though he
never admitted they constituted the great majority of those removed.
He claimed the authorities regarded them as stupid and consigned them
to degrading jobs: the boys to agricultural work and the girls to
domestic service. But at the time, this is where most white
Australians were also employed. These were the two biggest single
employment categories for men and women. The government was not asking
Aborigines to take occupations any more onerous or demeaning than
those of hundreds of thousands of their white countrymen.

Moreover, these teenagers were not removed permanently, as the charge
of genocide infers. The majority of them returned home to their
families when they turned 18 and their apprenticeship was complete.
The archival records show this clearly, and Read found the same when
in the '80s he recorded a little-publicised oral history of the
Wiradjuri people.

Yet in 2002 he could still claim publicly: "Welfare officers, removing
children solely because they were Aboriginal, intended and arranged
that they should lose their Aboriginality and that they never return
home."

There is another very good reason why it was not the policy of the
government to remove Aboriginal children from their parents: it wanted
them to go to school. It pursued this objective with both action and
money.

The NSW Department of Public Instruction constructed schoolhouses and
employed schoolteachers on all the 21 Aboriginal stations set up
between 1893 and 1917. It also provided schools and teachers on any of
the 115 Aboriginal reserves that had enough children of school-going
age to justify it.

On those reserves where there were not enough children to warrant a
dedicated school, the Aborigines Protection Board insisted they must
go to the local public school. In the early years, it tried to coerce
Aboriginal parents into sending their children to school by
withholding rations if they failed to do this. In its later years, it
organised for all Aboriginal children to have a hot midday meal at
school.

In contrast, in the '20s and '30s, there were only three welfare
institutions in NSW designated for Aboriginal children. One at
Bomaderry housed 25 infants to 10-year-olds, the second at Cootamundra
accommodated 50 girls aged up to 13 years, and the third at Kinchela
housed 50 boys aged up to 13 years.

At about the same time, about 2800 Aboriginal children in NSW lived at
home with their parents and attended public schools.

The 125 places at the welfare institutions represented a mere 4.5 per
cent of all the places provided for Aborigines at public schools. On
these grounds alone, no one can argue that the government was
conducting a systematic program to destroy Aboriginality by stealing
children from their families. A similar ratio of schools to welfare
institutions operated in most other states, where the same conclusion
deserves to be drawn.

In Western Australia and the Northern Territory, the two greatest
villains in this story were A.O.Neville and Cecil 'Mick' Cook. Both
publicly endorsed a program to "breed out the colour" with the
ultimate aim of biologically absorbing the Aboriginal people into the
white population.

This was an obnoxious policy that well deserved Kenneth Branagh's
portrayal of Neville as a fastidious, obsessive bureaucrat in the film
Rabbit-Proof Fence.

However, it was also a policy that had only a minor focus on children.
It was primarily concerned with controlling Aboriginal marriage and
cohabitation patterns in order to foster the rapid assimilation of
part-Aborigines. To define the policy as part of the Stolen
Generations thesis is a mistake. In any case, it was almost a complete
failure.

In the '30s, marriages arranged by these administrators totalled less
than 10 a year. Neville proved as inept at rounding up children as he
did at match-making. The Moseley royal commission recorded in 1935
that over three years, the one government settlement in the state's
south at Moore River took in only 64 unattended children. This was out
of a total Aboriginal population in the state of 19,000. It was less
than 1 per cent of all Aboriginal children in the state. Neville dealt
with handfuls of children, not generations.

The only successful program from this era was the NSW Aboriginal
apprenticeship system, which operated from the 1880s to the 1940s. It
provided real jobs and skills and gave young Aborigines a way out of
the alcohol-soaked, handout-dominated camps and reserves of their
parents. Indeed, it is a policy that could well be revived today to
rescue children from the sexual assault and substance abuse prevalent
in the remote communities.

If Rudd led a real Labor Government, he would be more concerned about
emulating the down-to-earth policies devised by his party's
predecessors among the old cream of the working class than pandering
to the misinterpretations of the recent academic historians who
created this issue.

Keith Windschuttle's The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume Two
will be published later this year.


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