The Sydney Morning Herald http://www.smh.com.au/news/9902/24/text/features1.html STOLEN GENERATION Genocide amid the wattle Date: 24/02/99 As the Federal and NSW Governments prepare to fight stolen children test cases, Professor Colin Tatz explains to DEBRA JOBSON why Australia's treatment of Aborigines adds up to an attempt at extermination. WHAT images does the word "genocide" conjure for you? Do you see Hutus in Rwanda wielding their pangas to slash Tutsi to death? Do you imagine Jews with their ribs sticking out in Nazi camps? Do you recoil at remembered images of the Pol Pot regime's rows of skulls? The killing fields have been the fixation and fascination of Macquarie University's Professor Colin Tatz who, amid the peaceful suburbia of North Ryde, heads one of just three academic centres in the world devoted to studying genocide. Tatz, long-time explorer of the dark side of the earth, has just released a monograph in which he urges Australians to rethink genocide. He wants us to not only consider black blood spilt on the wattle in our frontier wars, but also how there was "premeditation" in attempts to erase the group known as Aborigines through assimilation policies and, especially, removing children from their families. "Certainly the quantum leap from images of Auschwitz to sad and ragged children clustered in old sepia photographs is beyond most Australians," he writes in Genocide in Australia. As allegations that the Federal Government has been guilty of genocide in its treatment of Aborigines are about to be raised again in a Federal Court case in Darwin starting next Monday, his paper is bound to stir up the "black armband" debate about history all over again. Matching the international Genocide Convention against our entire history, he found Australia culpable in three, or possibly four areas, using the definition "that genocide is the systematic attempt to destroy, by various means, a defined group's essential foundations". The murders of Aborigines last century, and the child removal and forced assimilation policies of this century all amount to genocide, he argues. The curiously named "protection" policies, in which Aborigines were locked away in the local equivalents of concentration camps, could fit the definition of genocide, too, he says. Tatz's new paper for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies is not likely to find much favour with Prime Minister John Howard, who has said most Australians would not accept that child removal policies were genocide. Nor is he likely to find a fan in the Federal Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Senator John Herron, who has said he saw genocide in Rwanda and it has not happened here. However, for those who believe these things are all in our past, Tatz has warned in his paper Genocide in Australia: "It will haunt." Tatz will assist with the haunting. As an expert witness in the Federal Court case beginning next week, Tatz will give evidence on the international legal meaning of the word "genocide". In two test cases bound to refloat calls for the Federal Government to apologise and make reparations to the "stolen generations", two Northern Territory Aborigines removed as children, Lorna Cubillo and Peter Gunner, are claiming damages from the Federal Government. About 750 other Aborigines are waiting with similar allegations that the Federal Government unlawfully removed them from their families under the Aborigines Ordinance and also allegedly breached its duty of care to them, says Koulla Roussos, senior solicitor with the stolen generation litigation unit at the North Australian Aboriginal Legal Aid Service. "We are hoping the precedent may affect over 2,000 other claimants," says Roussos. For those who can only envisage Auschwitz-style tactics when they think of genocide, Tatz has a story to show that people can still be complicit in attempts to obliterate a group, even with goodwill. As a Jew, born white in South Africa, Tatz derives from the victim and the conqueror sides of the power equation and in his adopted country of Australia, he says, he nearly become an accomplice of genocide 37 years ago. "For years I have thought about how close I came to a stupid decision," says Tatz. It involved a beautiful black baby his wife Sandra was asked to hold for half an hour. A student of and activist in Aboriginal affairs, Tatz visited the Retta Dixon home in Darwin with Sandra as part of his research into the Northern Territory wardship system. This is the home in which Lorna Cubillo will allege she was beaten and mistreated. A staff member handed Sandra the baby when she took Tatz on a tour of the home. "Would you like him?" she asked, tour over. The couple had two young children, but liberal ideas of helping a child out of an institution into a good loving home tantalised them. As they pondered, Tatz says, they realised that it would be wrong. "We thought: this kid is going to grow up black, but to grow up black and Jewish is too much to impose on any child." They said no. With each new revelation about the destructiveness of child removal policies, Tatz has become proportionately more grateful. Apart from the appalling injustices and suffering a Human Rights Commission inquiry has revealed, a study of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide which this country ratified on July 12, 1951, has made it clear to Tatz that such removal was a crime. According to the convention, which has effect in international law, genocide of a group includes forced assimilation and "forcibly transferring children of the group to another group". Tatz says that in NSW the reason most often stated in official records was the standard: "For being Aboriginal." While the Federal Government fights off damages claims in Darwin, the NSW Government is also about to embark on a legal battle against paying compensation in the State's first stolen children test case, starting in the Supreme Court on April 19. Joy Williams, who was taken from her mother when she was 10 hours old, is seeking compensation from the State Government, alleging false imprisonment, negligence and breach of fiduciary duty. Karen McMahon, the solicitor with the Kingsford Legal Centre handling Williams's case, says common law does not provide for any claim to be made on the basis of genocide. "What is not likely to be in dispute is that the Aborigines Welfare Board owed a duty of care to the children removed, but the dispute will be over whether their actions amounted to negligence," she says. The Public Interest Advocacy Centre has urged the NSW Government not to go the route of litigation, but to set up a Reparations Tribunal to deal with stolen generations claims. While the Government has not ruled it out, the Herald understands that in its draft official response to the Human Rights Commission's swag of recommendations urging State Government action to redress past child removal, there is no such tribunal. Meanwhile, it is fighting stolen children's court damages claims. WHAT of the other types of genocide of which Tatz has found us guilty? That dirty word still avoided by nearly all historians describes the killings, from the murders of Aborigines in Tasmania beginning in 1806 to the West Australian Forrest River massacre of 1926, contends Tatz. As he has predicted, that past is still reaching into our present. Last weekend, the immediate past head of the reconciliation process for the Uniting Church, the Rev John Brown, met some of the descendants of the Myall Creek massacre of 23 Aborigines on June 10, 1838, about 50 kilometres west of Inverell. They are planning a permanent monument. Brown has no trouble calling the massacres genocide. The third act of genocide where Tatz has found Australia culpable is "the 20th century attempts to achieve the biological disappearance of those deemed 'half-caste' Aborigines" through its assimilation policies. The fourth, the one which he believes other scholars should take up, is an argument that protection policies may have fallen within the international definition of genocide by "causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group". Tatz gives as an example the imprisonment which might have been be meted to Queensland Aborigines under the guise of "protection" on settlements and missions. Following a Human Rights Commission order, one small piece of accounting with the nation's past treatment of Aborigines was recently settled. In a hard-won victory, following a court battle, the Queensland Government four months ago apologised and paid $7,000 apiece to seven Aborigines who had alleged they were severely underpaid for work on the notorious punitive "mission" Palm Island from 1975-84. Tatz still believes his strongest case of genocide having occurred here is in the matter of the stolen children. A Northern Territory man, Alec Kruger, who lost a High Court test case fought largely on whether the Aborigines Ordinance under which he was taken was constitutional, lost a formal complaint to the Human Rights Commission, but has appealed. Whatever technical arguments there may be about genocide, solicitor Roussos appeals to all involved to think of the thousands of Aboriginal people who are still waiting for tangible recognition of their suffering. Lorna Cubillo's grandmother used to coat her light-skinned body in ash to stop her from being taken from the Banka Banka station just outside Tennant Creek where they lived because she knew of the official policy of "removing" such children. However, in the 1940s, when Cubillo was about six, she was taken to Philip Creek mission run by the Aboriginal Inland Mission, 40 kilometres north-east of Tennant Creek. Her grandmother joined her, but she was segregated from her because "full-bloods" were not supposed to mingle with others. One day, a truck turned up and 17 Aboriginal children were put on it, told they were going on a picnic. The mothers knew differently. Cubillo remembers them falling to the ground, crying. She remembers looking back and seeing smoke and dust and hearing screaming and wailing. In the open truck, Cubillo was given a baby to hold. The baby was suffering from diarrhoea and Cubillo transferred water from her own mouth to stop her from dehydrating - all the way to the Retta Dixon home in Darwin. At this home, she will allege in court, she suffered regular beatings. Peter Gunner, 52, was also hauled away at the age of seven in the back of a truck from Utopia outside Alice Springs. He was taken to St Mary's Home. He will allege that promises to his mother, Topsy Angala, that he would visit on school holidays, were never kept and that he suffered regular beatings, food shortages and a lack of basics such as clothing and blankets. Both Cubillo and Gunner will allege unlawful removal "with wanton, cruel and reckless indifference" to their welfare and rights. They will allege injury through post-traumatic stress disorder, emotional distress and psychological trauma. They will also allege injury through isolation from their people's social, cultural and spiritual life and denial of equal opportunity in social, educational and cultural prospects compared with non- Aboriginal Australians. They will allege that they were not allowed to speak Aboriginal languages. They will also claim compensation for loss of their entitlement to land and other advantages they could have enjoyed under the Northern Territory Aboriginal Land Rights Act. The Federal Government, which has engaged a Melbourne QC, Doug Meagher, will seek to have both cases struck out on technical legal grounds. Its arguments will include that it is too long after the alleged events for the Commonwealth to be able to defend the claims adequately. The plaintiffs' team, headed by another Melbourne QC, Jack Rush, is keen to get to the substance of the claims. Although no dollar figure has been put on compensation, the Federal Government is no doubt mindful that these are test cases and a win for the plaintiffs may potentially lead to large payouts. Yet, Roussos and others representing the stolen ones fear many will die before they see an outcome. Barbara Cummings, a spokeswoman for the Northern Territory Stolen Generation Aboriginal Corporation, who was also an inmate of the Retta Dixon home, says: "We are all tired and saddened waiting for justice. We want the Government to feel our loss. We are the children of stolen dreams and stolen hopes." Before the Human Rights Commission inquiry, says Cummings, she never used the word genocide. She had another, perhaps more Australian, term for it. "The Government tried to wipe us out." 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