Foxy,

And why are you telling me this?

"Oh! Toni".

Foxy,

Jesus. Belief is not truth. Just because most people in the Middle Ages would have believed in witches, didn't mean that there were witches.

Why do you go on about going to Canberra ? State records stay within their states. The states had responsibilities for Indigenous matters until the late seventies, and all documentation up until then has stayed in their State Archives. Surely as a librarian, you know that ?

I've typed up as much of the records in the SA State Archives that I could find - obviously I'll never be able to see confidential and personal files, which is only proper. But the public stuff - it's all there on my website: www.firstsources.info. I've tried to type it up verbatim, sometimes (as you would be aware) much of the paper record had deteriorated, so had to be more or less deciphered, but I did my best.

Of course, if you doubt that, you are free to come over to Adelaide yourself and check it all out at the Archives. Anybody can.

Joe

//Yes, it's the truth that matters - and not merely assertions about the truth.//

If assertions about the truth are written down on a bit of official government paper, does that make them more truthful than assertions that aren't written on fancy paper? I'm not sure that it does.

//Find back-up. I don't mean yet more and more and more and more written works which all assert the same, but something which cites actual evidence, concrete evidence, something which can be checked by anybody.//

I suppose you don't count first-hand testimony as evidence. Fair enough, I suppose, eye-witness testimony is notoriously dodgy and people have been known to just tell outright lies.

But the thing I don't get is this: if you've Johnny Q. Blackfella saying 'I was taken from my safe and loving home environment for no damn reason I could see' but Humphrey H. Form-writer has said that 'Johnny was in mortal peril' before his removal, how is that not just a case of he-said, he-said? Do Humphrey's assertions somehow achieve the status of concrete evidence if he wrote them down? Did Humphrey have a magic pen? What metric can we apply to work out whose version of the truth is the truthful one - especially if Johnny's assertions have been detailed in a submission to a Royal Commission and are thus written on official government paper?

Leaving the value of different forms of evidence to one side for now: is it possible that there is another way to look at this? That maybe, just possibly, the people who removed members of the stolen generation did were not acting illegally when they did so. Which, if my understanding of the law is correct, would make it awfully difficult for anyone to sue for compensation. And maybe, just possibly, the people responsible for the removal of the stolen generation thought they were doing the right thing. A bit like the people who hunted 'witches' in the Stuart period thought they were doing God's work. Maybe they really believed they were doing those kids a favour and protecting them from the grave moral peril of being raised as heathen savages rather than God-fearing, forelock-tugging, 'civilised' members of the British Empire.

And maybe, just possibly, even though their behaviour was lawful and their intentions pure, taking kids from their family homes when no abuse was occurring and putting them into institutions where they were abused - emotionally, physically and sexually - wasn't really the right thing to do. Doesn't make the people who did it evil, doesn't make Australia an inherently racist country, but maybe it was still wrong. And maybe there is no shame in saying that it was wrong, and maybe admitting that it was wrong won't open the floodgates of compensation claims as you seem to fear will happen. Maybe it's not about the money for some of these people; maybe they just think it's important that the truth about these injustices be told. I don't see Jews suing the German government for compo, but they are never going to let us forget about the Holocaust - and nor should they. So let's call this hypothesis the 'Toni hypothesis'.

Now let's compare it with what seems to be your favoured hypothesis: it's all just a big conspiracy. The whole thing is made up: with the exception of one token unlawfully removed blackfella, the rest is all just a big fat lie and the victims of the stolen generation who have given their testimony are lying con-artists looking to squeeze some cash out of the government. Because that's what blackfellas are like, of course... all just a bunch of crooks and cheats and swindlers. So let's call this hypothesis the 'LEGO hypothesis'.

If you have any actual, concrete evidence to support the LEGO hypothesis that all the blackfellas are telling the same remarkably consistent lie, then by all means feel free to table it. Until then, I will be forced to take the same view of conspiracy theories that I always do.