In Denial

The Stolen Generations and the Right; Quarterly Essay 1

Robert Manne

• Publisher: Quarterly Essay
• Year: 2001
• Print ISBN: 9781863951074
• eBook ISBN: 9781921825002
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Australian & Oceanian History
• Index: History

In this national bestseller Robert Manne attacks the right-wing campaign against the Bringing them home report that revealed how thousands of Aboriginal children had been taken from their parents.

What was the role of Paddy McGuinness as editor of Quadrant? How reliable was the evidence that led newspaper columnists from Piers Akerman in the Sydney Daily Telegraph to Andrew Bolt in the Melbourne Herald Sun to deny the gravity of the injustice done?

In a powerful indictment of past government policies towards the indigenous Australians, Robert Manne has written a brilliant polemical essay which doubles as a succinct history of how indigenous Australians were mistreated and an exposure of the ignorance of those who want to deny that history.

'In complex intellectual conflicts, there will always be argument about whether the antagonists are committed to finding the truth or to winning the battle. This essay tells us that Robert Manne is intent on finding the truth.' – Morag Fraser, editor Eureka Street

'[In Denial] is a work of both the head and the heart. It is carefully researched and powerfully expressed. It needs to be widely read. – The Hon. P.J. Keating, former Prime Minister of Australia

IN DENIAL

The Stolen Generations and the Right

Robert Manne

On 23 February 2000 the Melbourne Herald-Sun published on its front page an “exclusive” report concerning what was described as a “shock admission” by one of Australia’s most respected Aboriginal leaders, Lowitja O’Donoghue. The essence of the supposed admission was captured by the huge headline—“I Wasn’t Stolen”.

It is well known to the Australian public that Lowitja O’Donoghue was separated from her Aboriginal mother at the age of two. According to the author of the article, Andrew Bolt, she agreed, in the course of an interview, that the word “removed” rather than “stolen” better suited the personal circumstances of her case. Her mother had borne five children while living with her father, an Irish station worker. Lowitja thought it likely that it was not the government but her father who had been responsible for having all five children sent to the South Australian “half-caste” children’s mission, the Colebrook Home at Quorn. Lowitja O’Donoghue told Bolt that if her mother had allowed her children to be taken from her this amounted to what she called “uninformed consent”. It was clear, even from Bolt’s article, that because of her father’s cruel action her mother had suffered an unbearable grief throughout her life. Lowitja O’Donoghue told Andrew Bolt that she had not been able to forgive her father for what he had done.

It ought to have been obvious to the editor of the Herald-Sun that Bolt’s article was a classic example of what is customarily called a journalistic “beat-up”. Invented by the historian Peter Read, “stolen generations” is the term that the Aboriginal people have embraced for their collective tragedy—the separation of thousands of children of mixed descent from their mothers and communities. The term covers a wide variety of circumstances— from forcible removal by agents of the state to the relinquishment of children following the application of moral and legal pressure on powerless young Aboriginal women by those who thought they knew what was best. In discussing the phenomenon of Aboriginal child removal in general, Lowitja O’Donoghue, like everyone else, had in the past used the common term, the stolen generations. When describing her own personal circumstances, however, she had been careful to speak, more simply, of her “removal” from her mother and her community. There was nothing either new or surprising in what she tried to explain to Andrew Bolt. Her only error was to have mistaken a journalist–campaigner for a reporter with a concern for discovering the facts.

It was unclear from Bolt’s article whether or not Lowitja O’Donoghue had explained to him how she had come to understand the depth of her mother’s suffering following the loss of all her children. It is a story Bolt’s readers ought to have been told. During the 1960s, some thirty years after Lowitja had been separated from her mother, she was approached by two old Aboriginal people who were sitting outside the supermarket at Coober Pedy. They told her that they could see in her face the face of her mother and that they knew who she was and from where she came. As it turned out, these old Aborigines were Lowitja’s uncle and aunty. They were able to tell her that her mother was still alive and where she lived.

It was several weeks before Lowitja was able to travel to Oodnadatta to find her mother. Her uncle and aunty had, however, told Lowitja’s mother about their chance encounter with one of her daughters.When Lowitja finally made it to Oodnadatta she discovered that on every day for the past three months her mother had sat by the roadside awaiting her daughter’s return. When they met, Lowitja and her mother could not speak to each other. Her mother knew almost no English. Lowitja, of course, had never learnt her native tongue. Nonetheless they were now together, for the last ten years of Lowitja’s mother’s life.

Lowitja O’Donoghue, who is a woman of scrupulous honesty and great beauty of soul, has devoted many years of her life to the cause of reconciliation. She has sought to help her fellow Australians understand the tragedies that overtook people like herself and her mother because of the racist belief, no doubt held even by her own father, that “part-white” children had to be “rescued” from the primitive, godless and degraded Aboriginal world. She was rewarded for this work by a nasty national debate over the circumstances of her removal, precipitated by what she rightly described as a “simplistic, sensationalist, misleading and mischievous” report.

On the morning Bolt’s beat-up appeared in the Herald-Sun, the Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard, seized his opportunity. He told a commercial radio audience in Melbourne that the revelation that Lowitja O’Donoghue was not stolen was a “highly significant” fact, one, he implied, which vindicated his government’s famous denial of the existence of the stolen generations and his even more famous refusal to apologise. Howard called on Australians to cease what he called their pointless “navel gazing” over questions of Aboriginal injustice and to move on.

John Howard, on the morning of February 23, was speaking under the shadow of the strange re-emergence of the racist One Nation Party and the anti-Coalition landslides in Western Australia and Queensland. By underlining his disagreement with Kim Beazley and his agreement with the Hanson voters on the question of a national apology to the stolen generations, John Howard had plainly announced his determination to try to cling to power by playing—as his last hand—what Australians call, crudely but not inaccurately, the race card.

Andrew Bolt’s article and John Howard’s response were not isolated incidents but the most recent moves of a long campaign to change the moral and political balance with regard to the issue of the stolen generations, and indeed with regard to the Aboriginal question as a whole. It is with this campaign that this essay is concerned.

THE LONG ROAD HOME

In October 1994 the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs in the Keating government, Robert Tickner, addressed the Going Home Conference in Darwin. Of the several hundred Aborigines who attended the conference, very many had been removed from their families and communities as children. Already such people thought of themselves as members of the “stolen generations”. At this conference Tickner said that as a minister no issue had so haunted him as this one. He announced he would shortly be writing to Michael Lavarch, the Attorney-General, with the suggestion that the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission conduct an investigation into why thousands of Aboriginal children had been separated from their mothers, families and communities during the course of the twentieth century.

Tickner’s letter led, in 1995, to an inquiry headed by Sir Ronald Wilson, former High Court judge and President of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, and Mick Dodson, its Social Justice Commissioner. Over two years the inquiry took written and oral evidence, across Australia, from 535 Aboriginal witnesses who had experienced separation at first or second hand. The inquiry had the support of all Australian State and Territory governments. The only government which failed to offer significant assistance was the Howard government, elected in March 1996. It declined to assist the Wilson–Dodson inquiry by producing a history of Commonwealth policy regarding Aboriginal child separation in the Northern Territory. It turned down the inquiry’s modest request for some additional funds.

The findings of the Wilson–Dodson inquiry were tabled in the Federal Parliament in May 1997. The inquiry reported that in the period from 1910 to 1970 between one in three and one in ten Aboriginal children had been separated—most by force or under duress or at least with undue pressure. It provided a history of the removal policies and practices in each State and the Northern Territory. It concluded that the physical and mental health of the separated children was probably worse and certainly no better than that of the Aboriginal children who had been spared this fate. A large part of the report consisted of extracts from the testimony of the Aboriginal witnesses who appeared before it. Story after story spoke of psychic and cultural dislocation; terrifying loneliness; physical, sexual and moral abuse; and of continuing pain, numbness and trauma experienced after an often bewildering and inexplicable removal from mother, family, community, world.

The inquiry recommended restitution for the separated children in many forms, including monetary compensation, and most importantly, solemn apologies from the churches and governments involved. According to the relevant United Nations Convention, one means by which genocide can be committed is by removal of children with the purpose of destroying, in whole or even in part, the racial or ethnic group to which they belong. The Wilson–Dodson inquiry concluded that before 1970, and arguably even after that date, the Aboriginal child removal policies and practices of the Commonwealth and State governments made them guilty of genocide, the most serious of all crimes.

No inquiry in recent Australian history has had a more overwhelming reception nor, at least in the short term, a more culturally transforming impact. On the day after Bringing them home was tabled, the Leader of the Opposition, Kim Beazley, wept openly in the House. Over the next few days Opposition members read stories contained in Bringing them home into Hansard during the adjournment debates. Overwhelmingly, the media in Australia accepted the general findings of the Wilson–Dodson inquiry and acknowledged the gravity of what the report had revealed.Very rapidly the question of Aboriginal child removal moved from the margin to the centre of Australian self-understanding and contemporary political debate.

Many stolen generations memoirs were now published; films produced; plays staged; songs sung. Hundreds of thousands of citizens signed what were called—in a language borrowed from the Aborigines—Sorry Books. A National Sorry Day was established. It soon seemed to many Australians that no historical question was of greater importance than the stolen generations, no moral matter of greater significance to the life of the nation than the apology to the stolen generations. By now the quest for what we have come to call reconciliation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians, and the nature of Australia’s response to the issue of the stolen generations, had become altogether intertwined.

Not all Australians shared in this mood. Gradually critics of Bringing them home emerged. Some of the criticism came from former administrators of Aboriginal affairs; some from former patrol officers; some from conservative journalists; some from right-wing think-tanks and magazines. It was the magazine Quadrant, however, under the editorship of Padraic McGuinness, that marshalled the troops and galvanised the disparate voices of opposition to Bringing them home into what amounted to a serious and effective political campaign.

FOUR STORIES

The assessment of the arguments of those involved in the anti-stolen generations campaign cannot take place in a vacuum. Without stories, the understanding of child removal in the first seven decades of the twentieth century is in danger of becoming far too abstract and remote. I have chosen four stories which span the decades and the States and which are, for one reason or another, unusually well documented.

i .Walter

The first story is set in 1903. At this time Dr Walter Roth, an eminent anthropologist and the son of naturalised Hungarian Jewish refugees who lived in England, was the Northern Protector of Aborigines in Queensland. Roth was a determined and effective opponent of the economic and sexual exploitation of Aborigines, especially of women and children. As such he made many bitter enemies in Queensland. In 1904 Roth was invited to conduct a Royal Commission into the treatment of Aborigines in the northern areas of Western Australia. He produced a humane and powerful report. Roth was also, as it happens, probably the pioneer in Australia of the policy and practice of Aboriginal child removal. In both his monthly and annual reports to the Queensland parliament, Roth routinely listed the names, ages, localities and, to some extent, the life circumstances of the “half-caste” children he arranged to be sent to the north Queensland Aboriginal missions at Mapoon and Yarrabah. In general it is difficult to discover a great deal from the contemporary records about how the Aboriginal children or their families responded to their removal. In one case, however, the human reality comes vividly alive.

On 17 February 1903 Roth sent a typical letter to the police at Townsville. Roth had recently passed through the township of Cardwell and his attention had been drawn to six “half-caste” children “roaming about the blacks’ camp”. “I would be grateful”, Roth wrote, “by your kindly causing inquiries to be made.”

One of the children of interest to Dr Roth was a boy called Walter, aged about fourteen, whose mother, Nellie Bliss, was a full-blood Aborigine. “It seems to me”, Roth wrote, “a great pity to see the lad Walter loafing around the camps instead of learning a trade at the Industrial School.” Inquiries were duly made. On 8 June Roth recommended that Walter be brought to court and charged, under the Industrial Schools Act of 1865, with being “a child born of an Aboriginal or half-caste mother”.Walter was charged with this offence at Cardwell on 18 August 1903. He was sentenced to two years at an industrial school.

On the afternoon following the sentence a telegram was sent by the shire clerk in Cardwell,William Craig, to the Queensland Home Secretary in Brisbane. It read: “Mother half-caste boy Walter weeping outside lockup says she will kill herself by inflicting blood-letting gashes and starving herself if son taken. May I acting on her behalf pray you to instruct police to return boy pending further inquiry.” Craig followed his telegram with a letter. “It is an unassailable and incontestable fact”, he wrote after listening carefully to what Nellie Bliss had explained to him, “that Aboriginals treat all children they come in contact with or nurse— half-caste or full-blooded or white—with universal kindness.” Nellie Bliss had reared Walter as her people had reared children for centuries. Was this to be regarded as neglect? Was she now to “suffer the mental agony of separation”?

The official in Brisbane who received Craig’s letter scrawled across it, “I am not impressed.” Nonetheless he asked for further information on the case. The information soon arrived. When Walter was imprisoned he had been sobbing in his cell, while his mother howled and lamented in the street outside. Walter had fallen ill. The wife of the police sergeant at Cardwell feared for his life. Nellie was allowed inside the cell. She nursed Walter back to health. Eventually both were released. Mother and son went to a tracker’s hut awaiting news of their fate.

In mid-November Dr Roth reached Cardwell. He took the case of Walter in hand. New warrants were issued. Roth induced William Craig to convince Walter to come on board a steamship, merely, he promised, as a matter of legal formality. Roth pledged to Craig that Walter would then be freed. Instead the boy was seized. Walter tried to jump ship. The native troopers held him down.Walter had not even been able to farewell his mother. He was despatched to the mission at Yarrabah.

Craig was very bitter that he had been persuaded by the police to use his influence to prevent Walter from escaping to the mountains with his Aboriginal stepfather.Walter’s stepfather had not for one minute trusted the word of the Queensland government. “The government too much tell im lie, he all day want to stealim blackfellow piccaninny.”As it turned out, Craig reflected ruefully, “the old blackfellow knew the character of government officials better than I did.”

One of the more insidious racial prejudices of the protectors and police involved in Aboriginal child removal was the conviction, as one put it, that Aboriginal mothers, despite “momentary grief, soon forget their offspring”. Nellie Bliss did not forget Walter. On the morning of 18 July 1904 she paid William Craig a visit. She begged his help: “Master you write im letter longa government and tell im me too much cross [sorrowful] me cry all day longa my boy, you tell him quick fellow send im, longa me, me too much poor fellow.”

William Craig wrote that evening to the Home Secretary: “The sight of this helpless old gin with tears in her eyes on one side, pleading for her child, and the powerful Queensland government or its officials acting as a kidnapper on the other, has induced me to take up my pen again.” Craig told the Home Secretary he had recently met an Aboriginal escapee from Yarrabah who was hiding in the scrub, trying to get back to his land. This man had told him that the blacks at Yarrabah lived in a state of permanent hunger and that Walter, for stealing a piece of bread, had been placed in solitary confinement. Craig pleaded for the Home Secretary’s mercy. Would he not allow Walter to go home?

The Home Secretary forwarded Craig’s letter to Roth. He responded formulaically. Craig was now beside himself with rage. “I am sorry that the Home Secretary should have thought fit to have forwarded the mother’s prayer for mercy to you; the lamb does not expect mercy from the wolf.”“Do you dare”, he continued, “assert that under English law you have a better right to this boy than the mother who reared and fed him?”William Craig’s letter was passed back to the Home Secretary. He advised that no reply need be sent.

In 1906 Walter Roth quit Queensland for British Guiana, worn out by the political opposition that had followed him through his time as Chief Protector of Aborigines. For his part Walter stayed on at Yarrabah. Removal to Yarrabah was for most of its inmates a sentence for life. There is a faded typed page in a file in the Queensland State Archives recording the marriage on 13 April 1910 of a young man now called Walter Cardwell to another “half-caste”, Rosie Murray, who had, as it happens, been removed by Dr Roth from the blacks’ camp in Maytown in 1902.

ii . Margaret Tucker

During the decade after Walter was despatched to Yarrabah, the Aboriginal Protection Board in New South Wales fought a long political battle to have similar powers to those available to Dr Roth—to remove Aboriginal children from their parents—transferred to itself.

By the second decade of the twentieth century an estimated 7,000 Aborigines lived in New South Wales. Fewer than 2,000 were “full bloods”; the remainder were so-called “half-castes”—Aborigines of mixed descent. While the number of “full bloods” was declining, the number of “half-castes” was on the rise. Many Aborigines in New South Wales lived on the stations and reserves. Members of the Board believed that unless something drastic was done—to separate the children from their...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• IN DENIAL: THE STOLEN GENERATIONS AND THE RIGHT