Just a comment on the issue of the "Stolen Generation" as applies to the Kimberley. My husband was part aboriginal, one of a huge family numbering in the thousands these days. All were part Aboriginal, only one was ever removed and that was the daughter of an alcoholic mother and absent father. From observation in the Kimberley, it seems that no part aboriginal children were ever removed from families that had fathers, only single mothers. This does raise the question that if this was an attempt to "breed out" the colour, why were far more part Aboriginal children left with their parents than were ever removed. It also gives weight to the policy of removal of children for welfare reasons. Single mothers, or women who were partnered by full blood men but with a half caste child, were probably deemed unable to care for the child properly. I would say the thought at the time was that as these children were part white it was the governments responsibility to ensure their well being.

Hi Big Nana,

Great to hear from you ! On the matter of half-caste children: very roughly, at least down here in SA, the boundary between patriarchal and bilineal Aboriginal groups, and between cattle and sheep country, more or less coincides: cattle country is much harsher, and so are patriarchal societies.

At the onset of our many droughts, Aboriginal women who had gone out to work on cattle stations, and who had liaisons, including long-term 'marriages', were, like all the blokes, suddenly out of work, and so had to return to their patriarchal group. Their half-caste children, however, had no identity in a patriarchal group, no father, no skin-group. They didn't exist in any traditional classification. They could be killed, as many, many early reports suggest. If they were female, they were fair game.

Neville in WA was constantly directing his attention towards the generation after generation of half- and quarter- and etc.-caste kids, especially the girls, growing up on cattle stations, some as white as he was, he reported, but condemned to stay and live and grow to womanhood in the camps around the cattle stations. He didn't care so much about 'full-blood' kids, they could stay in the camps. But he was concerned to get the paler girls away, down to Perth, where they could gat a fair education, employment, and then marry whoever they liked.

Here in SA, a church home on the edge of cattle country at Oodnadatta, Colebrook, tended to find itself loaded with half-caste kids at the beginning of every drought, certainly from the mid-twenties. Mothers would drop their kids off at the police station or church door, intending - of course - to come back later when the drought was over and work was available again. But - of course - droughts go on and on, 'husbands' move interstate for work and don't return, as they expected to.

[TBC]

[continued]

Most of the kids at Colebrook moved down to Quorn, a couple of miles out of town, in about 1931-32 (i.e. = 'assimilation'), according to Depot records (see web-site below). There, they could go to basic secondary school from the late thirties, and some, people we all later came to know and respect, went on to full secondary schooling in Adelaide in the forties - and from there to celebrated careers as nurses, teachers and advocates.

SA - the driest state on the driest continent - has had many long droughts since 1836. Nobody has to posit some devious - and unexplained - policy of deliberately removing kids from families. Any state should have a fiduciary responsibility towards abandoned kids, foundlings, orphans, or - in today's much more affluent society - kids suffering abuse and/or neglect.

Would Pilger have all of those kids die in the gutter rather than be put into care ? I don't know if Pilger is a half-wit, or merely a standard pseudo-Left opportunist, ready to grab any flimsy front-bar rumour or excuse to flog governments and boost his cred amongst naive British readers.

Thanks, Trish. Best wishes :)

Joe
www.firstsources.info

"At the onset of our many droughts, Aboriginal women who had gone out to work on cattle stations, and who had liaisons, including long-term 'marriages', were, like all the blokes, suddenly out of work, and so had to return to their patriarchal group. Their half-caste children, however, had no identity in a patriarchal group, no father, no skin-group. They didn't exist in any traditional classification. They could be killed, as many, many early reports suggest. If they were female, they were fair game."

Joe refers to South Australia here but this evoked memories of my late Grandfather and his dealings with indigenous people in coastal central Qld from the late 1800s through to Depression years. He wouldn't/couldn't employ them as they proved unreliable but generally enjoyed cordial relations with the tribe whose 'territory' his holdings were part of.

Grandfather wouldn't tolerate any of his workers attempting to consort with native women. Apart from stirring up trouble he didn't need, his concern was for children born out of any such couplings. "Neither one nor the other" as he described the mixed race offspring, he'd observed first hand the rejection of these individuals by tribal society, remarking boys would not be initiated, therefore never considered men, often forcibly driven from the tribe while girls might end up 5th or 6th 'wife' of some old man whose senior wives would frequently abuse.

Aboriginal tribes were widely separated and different - however there is considerable evidence that many "stolen" children were in fact not forcibly removed but surrendered by mothers who knew they would not be accepted by the tribe. Undoubtedly many more taken into care due to death of or inability of a parent to provide as well as cases of abuse or neglect.

Today any 'stolen' children are victims of abuse and neglect and victims of the highest order to get that level of protection.
Mr Pilger, it would seem, would rather aboriginal kids die, or suffer unspeakable abuse and neglect at the hands of their own kind than see them removed by the nasty racist white fella regime

Thanks, divine Ms N.,

Understandably, it's usually too painful for people to have to admit that their mother had to give them up, but [as one can see tonight on 'Love Child'] it was a terrible dilemma for single mothers - if you thought a bit about it, yes they might be supported financially by their family for a time, but especially working-class families before 1971, when the benefit came in, must have almost immediately felt the burden on their income. When you're barely getting by, that extra is often just too much.

What's the bet that many unmarried mothers, who had taken their babies home, had to give them up by the end of the first month ?

As well, it has to be admitted that many parents have been, or are, and others will be in the future, drunks, utterly useless as parents. I remember a mother when I worked up the Murray, who, as far as I can recall, was never sober. Usually, she was just on the edge of fall-down drunk. It didn't help to live across the road from a winery. Relations helped protect her kids as best they could, and fed and clothed them. Of course. she's gone now.

But who would admit to a mother like that ? It's far easier, especially if independent investigation is frowned on and barred, to claim to have been dramatically seized from a warm, loving, comfortable family by brutal white men in coats with a truck (the image is easy to conjure up and perpetuate). Frankly I've never known anybody, Black or white, who could honestly say that happened to them. In the sixties, I was good friends with one lovely lady, one of whose kids had died officially of starvation, about 1955. Lovely people are not necessarily good parents.

Cheers,

Joe

I recall an article by an English writer-Sophie Love, which was critical and I believe ill informed. Here is another one