hi people,
Once again, Sorry Day/Journey of Healing/Reconcilliation Week is looming
closer.
In light of the Howard governments latest stunt, I feel the promotion of
reconcilliation is as important as ever.
Please take a look at the following site, feel free to stick your e-mail
addy in the form to be contacted when the site is updated (hint. nudge.)
www.journeyofhealing.com
The site has information on what you can do, contact info, fundraising info,
general background information on the stolen generation and sorry day.
peace
Liam
[internet coordinator, journey of healing.]
p.s. I'd appreciate it if you passed this on to any concerned Aussies out
there.
_______________
Dr Peter Read wrote the following article, I believe that it was printed in
the Herald Sun the day after Herron and Howard started playing their word
games.
The Stolen Generations?
Generations? Yes, 'Generations' because the first Aboriginal children
were brought to the Native Institution at Parramatta in 1814. They did
not come voluntarily: The numbers at the school were so low that in 1816
Governor sent out an expedition to capture 12 more children (they only
caught two). Nearly two hundred years later, in the 1980s, children of
failed mixed marriages were still being placed with the white parent by
magistrates who believed that Aboriginal parents was somehow inferior to
any other Australian. That's no one generation, that's eight.
'One Aboriginal child removed in ten' is just playing with statistics.
During the great Depression, hardly any children were removed at all. But
in NSW in the 1950s the figure was about in three. In the 'problem' rural
towns it was one in five. Along the Stuart Highway from 1920 to 1960 the
removal rate was close to ten out of ten.
And the years in between! In 1909 the man who became the chief architect
of the removal of Aborigines in NSW stated that taking the children away
from their families, and driving the adults off the reserves into the
community, would 'solve the Aboriginal problem forever'. In 1933 it was
official policy in the Northern Territory that 'Every endeavour is being
made to breed out colour by elevating female half-castes to the white
standard with a view to their absorption by mating into the white
population'.
'Stolen generations'?, Yes, 'stolen' because of the more than 1000
separated children whom I have been privileged to know and work with since
the early 1980s, not one mother could be said to have given up her child
voluntarily. Yes, many signed some kind of consent form - but they signed
under duress. To be told by the hospital matron, 'You're a wicked,
selfish girl, now sign this paper to give your baby to a nice white couple
who will care for your baby much better than you can' - that's not a free
choice! To be told, 'If you sign this paper we'll only take your eldest
child, otherwise we'll take the lot' - that's not a free choice either. To
be told, 'If you don't sign this form you'll be committed as a delinquent
minor and the father of your baby will be charged with carnal knowledge' -
that's not a free choice. The children were taken, signed paper or not.
Many of the parents asked to have their children back. I don't know one
who had their child returned to them.
Was it in the children's best interest? It's strange that it was always
where the children were most visible, and where their parents were seen to
be a problem, and where the townsfolk complained about the Aborigines the
loudest, that the greatest number of removals took place. I think of a
reserve in the central west where there was a school, rations, a church,
running water, proper houses - and a manager! How many were removed from
here? Twenty one children in twenty years. Now I think of another
Aboriginal camp, an unofficial, illegal reserve in the south west. No
running water, no rations, jerry-built humpies, no school for kilometres,
not much work - and no manager!. How many children were removed from this
out of sight ramshackle little place where none of the adults were cheeky
to the authorities of the Aborigines Welfare Board. Not one. That gives an
indication of how the policy was used punitively to discipline both the
children and their parents as they began to resent and question the
authority of the administration in the years after 1945.
How many children? I've calculated that at least 8000 Aboriginal children
have been removed in New South Wales alone. Up to the time the Link-Up
organisations started, only about twenty percent of them had come home to
find their families. Today the figure is about sixty per cent of removed
children still living, and able to find their families. It's an almost
incalculable loss to the Aboriginal people, those mothers who cried their
way to their graves, those children too brainwashed ever to want to
identify as a proud Aboriginal citizen of Australia. And every one of
those children had aunts and uncles, mothers, fathers, cousins and siblings
who grieved for them, cried over them, and sometimes did not even recognise
them when they eventually did return. We'll never have reconciliation until
we admit the dreadful nature of these policies, what it did to them, and in
a different way, what it did to us
Peter Read is an Australian Research Council Senior Research Fellow. He
was one of the founders of Link Up in 1980. He is the author of 'The
Stolen Generations and A Rape of the Soul So Profound.
______________________
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