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The Stolen Generation

Riona Judge McCormack
Skerries CC

After visiting Australia Riona Judge McCormack (Skerries CC) writes about the abduction of aboriginal children. Below she gives a personal account of her visit.

Imagine your child is taken away from you within the first five years of their life. Imagine being told you are an unsuitable mother or father simply because of your skin colour. Imagine never seeing that child again for the rest of your life, not knowing if they are alive or dead. Imagine being that child, and never knowing any of your family, where you were born, or who you belong to.

In the continent of Australia, this is reality.

Indigenous, or Aboriginal, children have been taken away from their families and communities since the very first days of the European occupation of Australia, over 200 years ago, in 1788.

In that time not one indigenous family has escaped the effects. Most families have had to cope with the removal of one or more children, usually at the age of 3 or 4. Roughly one in every three indigenous children were taken from their families without consent between 1910 and 1970. These children were known as the Stolen Generation.

This is the account of one woman: "We were told that our mother was an alcoholic and that she was a prostitute and she didn't care about us. They used to warn us that when we got older we'd have to watch it because we'd turn into sluts and alcoholics, so we had to be very careful. If you were white you didn't have that dirtiness inside you… It was in our breed, in us to be like that."

The conditions in the foster homes were usually terrible. Past residents of these homes from all over Australia talk of eating scraps for years, huddling together at night for warmth because of the scarcity of blankets or even beds, and being beaten and abused by those supposedly "caring" for them. "The porridge, cooked the day before, was already sour and roped from the mould in it, and when doused with the thin milk, gave up the corpses of weevils by the score. The bread was even worse, stringy grey wrapped about congealed glue, the whole cased in charcoal."

No formal records were kept, letters sent from the families were hidden or burned, parents were told their children had died. There remains a whole generation of adults who do not know their history.

Nowadays, situations are thankfully improving. There are mixed race schools, organisations have been formed to trace parentage, and Australia is slowly awakening to the damage inflicted in the past. However, this practise has not truly ended - Aboriginal children are still 6 times more likely to be taken into care by the State. There are other examples of blatant discrimination - Nuclear tests have been carried out in areas populated by Aborigines, burial sites have been turned into golf courses, land owned by tribes for generations has been taken away. It was only in 1992 that Aboriginal people were officially recognised as citizens of Australia. These people are the oldest living culture in the world, and have inhabited Australia for over 40,000 years, but have only existed "officially" for nine years!

There was no attempt at compensation for the trauma inflicted on the Aboriginal peoples of Australia. As yet no formal apology has been made by the Australian government despite the fact that over 6 million Australians marched over the Sydney Harbour Bridge on National Sorry Day, in a show of sympathy. It seems, for some people, that "sorry" is still the hardest word to say.

Change

The following article is an excerpt of a longer piece:

In October of 2000, I was given the opportunity to travel to Australia with a small group of students from Ireland and Britain, the aim being to learn as much as we could about the Aboriginal peoples and their culture. Although it meant taking two vital weeks out of my 6th Year, I discovered that there are much more valuable lessons to be learned in life than those found in textbooks.

We travelled to the Murrabay Language Centre where we received a hugely warm welcome, and witnessed a complete lack of self-consciousness as introductions were made. Our time with the "students" of this school, who ranged in age from thirty to sixty, was spent out on their wooden veranda, trying not to be too distracted by the panoramic view of the surrounding forestland. It was strange to listen to the accounts the elders gave of their people's oppression, their forced denial of their culture and their language, and the newly awakened revival of their native tongue. Strange because it held such powerful echoes of Irish oppression under British rule, and the subsequent attempt of a revival of a crushed culture. Something that had before just been dates in a history class, finally took on real meaning.

This was also the first time we had heard a detailed account of the Stolen Generation, and it became almost painful to listen to - the lost families, the forgotten ties, the absence of identity. Marge, the very genuine and sweet Aboriginal woman who had organised our visit to Nambucca land, had herself been taken away from her family as a young child and been placed in an institution. It was only now that she had finally found her tribe and her relations, in this very area, and at times we could see how hard it was for her to take everything in. After thirty years, she had come home. And found her parents dead, her siblings scattered. While we were in the Language Centre, one of her cousins, a student there, had told her how the language was being relearned. They had made an archive of tapes of an elder who had still retained the language, many years ago, and she had since died. He collected an armload of the tapes and handed them to Marge: "Here. Go home and listen to them. This is your grandmother."

After a night of songs and jokes around the camp table, we scrambled out of our bunk beds the next morning to visit a nearby primary school. What had been initially an unexciting prospect became one of the high points of the trip. There were so many shining moments to that day that it becomes impossible to recount any significant number of them. My happiest was my introduction to mulberries.

I was sitting at a green plastic garden table in the school's small canteen. A little boy in a baseball cap and a yellow raincoat was sitting to my left, battling with his knife and fork as he ate the sausages that had been served for lunch, his chin only just level with his plate. The faded writing on his water bottle identified him as Ricky.
I glanced around nervously at the other members of my group, noticing with a sinking feeling that they were all effortlessly engaging their lunch neighbours in smiling conversation. In the space of a week, we had braved downtown Sydney fearlessly, spoken in front of five hundred of our peers, prepared and presented workshops, among many other things that would have terrified me a few months ago… and yet I couldn't face fifty-odd primary school pupils. I was sure they could read "Child Phobic" written in scarlet letters across my forehead. Swallowing slowly, I turned to face Ricky and forced a cheerful smile.
"Hello."
His brown eyes regarded mine suspiciously, then lowered to concentrate once more on his food.
"Um… that looks really tasty."
He kept eating steadily, sandaled brown feet swinging, unable to touch the concrete floor. A local artist had painted it some years before, brightly coloured animals and symbols cavorting happily beneath the tables and chairs. The children who had helped had their names printed carefully there too. I looked hopelessly at "Dean" and "Karine", wondering where they were now. Then I picked up my red plastic knife and fork and continued to eat the delicious lunch that some of the workers in the school had barbecued in the fresh air just a few minutes previously. Eimear, a friend from home who was sitting across from me, caught my eye and grinned.
"Best meal we've had since arriving in Oz!"
My mouth full of steak, I laughed back my agreement. It really was. There was something wonderful about the atmosphere surrounding the simple but tasty lunch, the warmth we had been shown from the moment we had come to Nambucca.
"Do you like mulberries?"
The voice came from beside me. Ricky, finished eating, was staring at the shiny tabletop. I did a quick double take, glancing around the table, unsure.
"Me?"
He nodded.
"I don't know. I've never tasted them before."
"Well…" he addressed his empty plate in a soft drawl, "we've got a mulberry bush out the back. I could show you."

His eyes met mine finally, and there was a sudden flash of white as he smiled sunnily. I couldn't help but smile back as he twisted in his seat to clamber down, and scampered through the canteen door. He stopped, framed there in the sunlight, to hurry me on. Other children had already followed suit, peaked hats bobbing as they raced each other on the grass. Ricky disappeared into the leaves, little brown arms visible as they stretched upwards to grab branches laden with fruit. He emerged a few seconds later, mouth smeared red, grinning delightedly. One sticky hand was outstretched to offer a taste of his prize, nestled in his tiny palm.

As we stood under the mulberry tree, juice running down our chins - one freckled white, the other deep brown - I realised two things. One was that I didn't hate children any more. The other was that I was never really going to leave these enchanting people behind. We left a few hours later feeling uplifted by their open smiles, and unselfconscious ability to share themselves with us for even a short time. We found ourselves glancing at each other's faces, and reading our own happiness reflected there.

After a few minutes on the road, our minibus pulled over and our attention was directed towards a discreet sign and a low, undecorated building set far back in the grounds behind. One or two generations before, children like those we had seen had been taken away from their families and brought here, to be resettled in the white community. Although many within the programme felt, albeit misguidedly, that they were giving Aboriginal children a better chance at life, the main impetus behind the program was to eliminate a way of life, to absorb every trace of their culture into a more "civilised" one.

Forty years later, these children, now grown up and very, very lost in this vast country, without any sense of identity or family ties, had returned to the same place. Its function had changed to an alcoholic's rehabilitation centre, but to the inmates it must have triggered a horrible sense of dread, as they found themselves back where their own personal horror had begun. Our guide, an elder in the local tribe, had brought his son with us on the trip. I had sat with him on the minibus, and now he stood beside me, dark-skinned and beautiful and tiny, in the shadow of the plain wooden sign. As he snapped a picture of it on my camera, and turned to flash a wide grin at me, I had the sudden urge to scoop him up in my arms and take him anywhere, as long as it was far away, well out of sight of the building that his father had difficulty just looking at. Every member of our group returned to the bus slowly, subdued, and a little sick.

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