Dear O Sung Wu and runner,

Before you can discuss the "Stolen Gnerations," you
both need to read the government report, "Bringing
Them Home." You need to read why Aboriginal
children were forcibly remove from
their families, where they were taken, and what happened
to them. Perhaps then you will begin to understand the
horrific abuse they suffered in institutions and foster
families that left thousands traumatised for life.

Hi Foxy,

Seriously, you need to take such works with a huge grain of salt. How many cases of 'stolen generation' have been brought to court and proven ? One: Bruce Trevorrow, from Meningie here in SA. And that case, in 1958, was very dodgy. I knew his mother slightly, nice lady, and her boyfriend Cyril, and some of his family fairly well. Some of the kids were my wife's cousins.

I had a long and fascinating talk in about 1982 - eight hours straight without a break, if I remember - with the social worker, Marj Angus, the one who had advised that he should be fostered by a Victorian family rather than sent back to his family. I think she certainly was acting with the best of intentions, and I probably would have done the same thing as she had done. The poor little bugger - he was only a year old at the time, Christmas 1958 - was close to death and had to be flown to Adelaide for emergency treatment. Surely that says something.

You have such a good heart, Foxy, but you need to be a bit circumspect about claims. No, I don't believe there was ever such a policy as a 'stolen generation'. Even 'removals' in Queensland were usually of whole families. And neglect happened then, as it does now, and in far more difficult circumstances.

At the beginning of the Second World War, all white and half-caste kids in the NT were evacuated south, to Adelaide and Sydney. Some didn't want to go back. Some didn't get back until around 1954. Of course, some of those kids would have been too young to understand why they had been evacuated, and could later honestly claim to have been - for no reason ! - taken away.

Reality is far more fascinating and variable than fiction, isn't it ?

Love,

Joe

The leftist 'Progressives' are not interested in the much larger number of State Wards though. Why not?

<As many as half a million Australian children were placed in institutions and foster care throughout the 20th century. Many were wards of the state, under the direct guardianship of state welfare departments, which often failed to protect them from physical, emotional and sexual abuse, despite annual inspections of institutions and legislation that often precluded the use of corporal punishment.

Most were not orphans. They were removed from their families when poverty, parental separation or neglect resulted in family breakdown, or because their parents were not married, or because they were deemed by social workers and police to be in ''moral danger''. Until the late 1980s, this was defined by Victorian law as including truancy, having a criminal parent, associating with criminals or, in the case of young women, suspected under-age sexual activity.

Institutions were seen as an easy solution to complex social problems and children bore the brunt of society's inability to deal with social disadvantage.

Those questioning the need for an apology should consider whether they would wish to swap places with a ''Forgotten Australian'' or wish to relinquish their children to the types of institutions or foster care that the Forgotten Australians endured.

More nuanced criticism points to the fact that removals were carried out under state legislation. It questions why the Commonwealth should apologise for state policies and practices.

The apology to the stolen generations has been regarded as appropriate because the Commonwealth had responsibility for indigenous policy. However, indigenous children were also taken from their families under state legislation and, in Victoria at least, indigenous and non-indigenous children were placed in the same institutions.>

http://tinyurl.com/q25mc4n

Any shabby treatment of State Wards or indigenous does NOT reflect on the general population who would have been horrified to know of the deficiencies, notwithstanding the usual neglect that resulted in placement in institutions.

Dear Joe (Loudmouth),

Reality is definitely more fascinating.

And the reality faced by any member of the Stolen
Generation - in trying to
get justice in the courts - would be having to
face the

"uncomfortable truth ...that the parliaments
of the nation, individually and collectively enacted
statutes and delegated authority under those statutes that
made the forced removal of children on racial grounds fully
lawful."
(Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. Apology to Australian Indigenous
People. House of Representative. 13 February. 2008).

No FOXY I do NOT need to read anything. Until some of these erstwhile critics get of their backsides and see exactly what's going on in these small outback settlements, I'm completely done with this topic, as I've no hope of ever convincing anybody, least of all you FOXY !

Dearest Foxy,

Statutes !? There were never any. It was never lawful, in any State (although I'm not sure about Queensland), to remove Indigenous children for no reason, and it is likely (judging by the number of successful court cases) that there were few if any children ever take UNlawfully. Sorry, dear :)

OTB posted an interesting quote:

"The apology to the stolen generations has been regarded as appropriate because the Commonwealth had responsibility for indigenous policy."

The Commonwealth didn't have responsibility for Indigenous matters until well after the 1967 Referendum. Once the single parent's benefit came into force, around 1971, the number of children being taken into care dropped dramatically - for white as well as Black.

Why do people these days imagine that Aboriginal kids were the only ones ever taken into care ? There must have been huge numbers of white kids taken into care. My mum's mother was raised in the Hull workhouse, and then by the Barnardo's, in England. My mum's father was on the road working at nine, up in central Queensland. My own father was supposedly raised by the Salvos in Redfern. It seems that none of those knew their mothers.

So why did Rudd go all apologetic ? From a sense of power: the power of the deeply concerned white intellectual class. I suspect that, amongst many whites, there is such a powerful feeling of, well, power, of being all-powerful, almost God-like in their supreme power, that they get quite a buzz out of 'apologising' for using it. But no, I don't think it was anywhere near so cut and dried as that in 1967. And it never was.

BTT: so what would YOU agree to, if anything, in a change to the Constitution ?

Joe