Yes.

Deborah Melville.

Foster child Deborah died in the dirt in a suburban Darwin backyard, propped against a trailer. She was suffering from a leg infection which had spread into the bone, and was visited by FACS case workers the day before she died. A FACS worker assured the child, “I am not here to take you away.”

A manslaughter trial and coronial inquiry was told that Deorah probably died in excruciating pain, and that she had been unable to control her bowel and bladder in the days before her death. Because of this, her carers, Denise Reynolds and Tony Melville, put her outside and left in the dirt.

Though Deborah was living in filthy circumstances, FACS reported that she was “happy and healthy.”

Peter.

Seven week old Peter starved to death in the back of a hot car on the Stuart Highway in 2005. Peter was born to a drug using mother who’s six other children were known to FACS. In 2002, one of the children, a daughter, was taken (stolen?) and taken to Alice Springs Hospital at three months old, “haunted and looking like a bony skeleton.”

Peter at death weighed 1kg less than his birth weight, and during his brief life, FACS officers were repeatedly contacted with reports that the baby was extremely skinny. There were various attempts to remove Peter from his mother’s care, but she was unco-operative, and FACS did not ask the police to forcibly remove (steal) the child.

Joy.

Joy was assessed by health workers as being ‘at risk of severe harm”, and she was one of eight teenage girls in a remote mining town who were being sexually abused by a government official. The teenager, who was born with fetal alcohol syndrome, had a long history of neglect in her aboriginal family. As early as two, she was deposited at a local health clinic because nobody was looking after her. But repeated attempts by the police to get FACS to intervene to protect Joy came to nothing.

LEGO,

I'm certainly not saying that Aboriginal kids have not ever been taken into care, of course they have, just like white kids - my mother's mother and my father, for instance (my English grandmother never knew that she was actually 100% Scottish but born just over the border in Durham, and I still don't know my father's real name).

Take the local orphanage here in Adelaide, at Goodwood, a huge place: I haven't come across any Aboriginal friends who were ever put in there. Other homes, yes, but not that one.

Of course kids, Black and White, were put into care, and for much the same reasons:

* mother died, usually in childbirth, or had chronic post-natal depression;

* single mother, couldn't afford to keep the child (i.e. up until about 1971);

* father died, mother re-married, 12-year-old daughters put in girls' home;

* family destitute, father out of work (this was especially the case in cattle country), mother couldn't take the kids back to her home country, so they put the kids up for care 'for a while, until they get back on their feet', which never happens;

* father injured at work (i.e. for Aboriginal men, rural labour), clearly not able to supporta family, wife either leaves him, or puts kids into care 'for a while';

* one parent or both hit the grog and couldn't really look after their kids, and the grandmothers were just buggered from doing it for fifty years;

And so on. Do such situations arise these days ? What is probably scandalous - as you allude to - is how often Aboriginal kids were in a destitute situation, and the State WOULDN'T take them into care, as it had the duty to do.

[TBC]

[cont.]

Lego,

The cases that you cite are examples of situations where obviously some government agency should have intervened: they should have taken the children 'away': children are not simply possessions or property that parents can do what they like with, as if they were bloody dogs. Not that people should do what they like with their dogs, either.

To get back to this thread, it is neither here nor there that Aboriginal people may or may not be pale or dark or anything in between: this site, and maybe others too, may contain artifacts going back tens of thouands of years, and should be preserved and excavated properly for the simple reason that they are part of the heritage of all of us.

A cornerstone of racist ideology a hundred years ago was that humans were of different species - this was one reason why inter-marriage was banned (not that people took much notice - people still fell in love across the boundaries). Surely such racist ideas are not still around.

Go back ten or fifteen thousand years and all of our ancestors, in Africa (where we/they all ultimately came from), or in Europe or Asia or Australia, were living in much the same way: what people were doing thousands of years ago is thus part of everybody's history. In that sense, we are all part of one family, with similar DNA. All of us, Black and White. These sites could be immensely significant for all of us.

Joe

this is not another Hindmarsh bridge con is it? Why some people want roads to be stopped being built defies belief. Why is it every time someone wants to improve this country or mine suddenly the place becomes of great cultural importance? The place where I was born has now been demolished and made into a aboriginal propaganda musuem at great cost to the taxpayer. No wonder Hanson gets a million votes. Meanwhile woman are beaten, children are abused and remain uneducated while money is wasted on this nonsense.

Loudmouth, the "Stolen Generations myth was the most successful con job since the publication of "The Eternal Jew'.

The charge was, that successive state and federal governments had "stolen" "GenerationS"(plural) of aboriginal children from their parents in an attempt to "breed out the black" and therefore commit "genocide" on the aboriginal race.

Thousands of compensation claims were lodged in state and federal courts seeking compensation, and the matter was so important it reached the High Court of Australia. The High Court ruled that the removal of aboriginal children by the Federal Government was not 'Genocide" but a "humanitarian obligation". Don't believe me. Look it up yourself. The entire "stolen generations fiasco is now legally as dead as a dodo.

Every "stolen generations" court case has now failed bar one. This case came from South Australia where a well meaning social worker broke the State Law by refusing to allow a mother to access her baby, who had been removed by the social worker because the staff at the local hospital attested that the baby was malnourished.

The most famous court case was "Gunner and Cubillo", which the activists claimed "was the very best example available". The case failed, not because (as the activists claimed) the records were destroyed, but because all the records exist, and they recounted facts which the western hating activists did not want to hear.

Thousands of compernsation cases were withdrawn, because if Gunner/Cubbillo" was the "best", then God help the worst.

This monstrous and totally fabricated charge was created by white activists who never tire of always finding some way to attack and slander their own people. The unintended consequece of this lie, is that government organisations such as FACS are extremely unwilling to remove any more aboriginal children from atrocious circumstances today because they are terrified of being accused of "stealing" aboriginal children.