Australia's 'stolen generation' and the extinction of Aboriginality
Peter Read at the British Library, London, 6 November 2002

Josie Appleton

Peter Read, an Australian historian who has spent the past 20 years researching and campaigning on behalf of the 'stolen generation', spoke to an audience at London's British Library on the week of the UK opening of Rabbit Proof Fence - the Australian film about the subject.

The 'stolen generation' were some 100,000 aboriginal children who were taken from their families on the territories, and raised in homes or adopted by white families. This was Australian state policy between about 1880 and 1960, but was concentrated around the 1930s. At the time, the policy was seen as benevolent - rescuing aboriginal children from the 'aimless and immoral' life on the territories, and giving them a better start in life. The project was part of the Australian attempt to forge a nation, to bring aborigines into mainstream society - it was assumed that the Aboriginal way of life would die out in a matter of years.

The benevolent interpretation of this policy began to be challenged in the 1980s, said Read. He and other historians began to tell the stories of the stolen generation - the beatings they had suffered in state homes; the rapes, identity crises, their mothers' grief. Read says that these oral historians began to establish the 'big truth' about Australia's past: that the conquest and attempts to assimilate Aborigines were immoral, barbarous and regretful. Read is soon to publish a book containing the extended accounts of one family, to show how the policy of wrenching an Aboriginal child from her family had wrecked the lives of the next three generations.

A man from the audience challenged Read's account, saying that when he was in Australia he met an Aboriginal man who said that he had been 'saved' by being placed in a white foster home. He had grown up with privileges and lived a full and challenging life - rather than wasting away in the poverty and degeneration of an Aboriginal community. The current Australian prime minister, John Howard, has also got involved in the debate. When a leading campaigner for the stolen generations admitted that her father had given her away - she had not been taken - Howard seized upon her case to discredit the movement for reparations.

It is strange that state policy in the 1930s is being discussed by interrogating the lives of those affected. Was it their parents' fault or the state's fault? Was it good for them or bad for them? The stolen generations and their descendants seem to be caught in a political tug-of-war, which actually has very little to do with them at all.

The discussion about the stolen generations is really a discussion about the shape of contemporary Australia. Should Australians be trying to forge an integrated nation, or should Australia be a multicultural association of peoples? Will Aborigines always be separate from mainstream society, or will they become part of the mainstream? What does it mean to be Australian now that the colonising myths are cast into doubt?

It is one thing to displace these discussions on to the events of the past. It is quite another to have them out through the stolen generations themselves, which must place incredible pressure on these individuals. One of Read's subjects dropped out from his oral history book, because she said that she wanted to 'break the chain' - she wanted to stop being part of the stolen generation. To place the story of her life in the line of four generations of suffering would consign her to playing this role.

Rather than say what he thinks about Australian government policy, Read has become a propagator of the 'stories' of stolen individuals. There is a gutlessness to this approach. It would be better, perhaps, to have the argument out in terms of the politics of the here-and-now, rather than pick apart the lives of those affected by a state policy that ended 40 years ago.

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