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John Moriarty:
"Years later, when I found my mother, I asked 'Why did you let me go?'
My mother told me, in a very soft voice, 'My son, you were going
to school. I took you to school every day... then I went to pick you up
this day and you were gone.'"
John was the mixed race child of an Aboriginal mother,
from the ... tribe and an Irish father. Living near the Gulf of
Carpentaria, his mother anticipated John might be taken from her and moved
with him to the Roper River. He was still taken, at the age of 4 or 5.
With a group of other children, he was taken to the outskirts of
Sydney where he lived in a number of children's homes, some supportive
others very unhappy. He excelled at soccer and played at a national level.
Later he moved to Adelaide, where he was the first Aboriginal to graduate from
Flinders University. Now he and his wife Ros run a successful
design business, which included the painting of the Qantas jet
Wunala Dreaming.
"Being half-caste, as we were classified then, meant that I would eventually be taken away, because I was paler in colour than my mum. It was a policy of government when I was young to take away half-caste children and send them to missions or settlements. The policy was intended to breed out the Aboriginal culture and identity.
"The identity and culture that I was born into ... was what the assimilation policy of the government set out to destroy. It was an insidious, arrogant policy that amounted to cultural genocide...
"People say, 'Yes, but it was a product of the times.'
"And I say in response, 'Would you like someone to come and take your child away from you today and tell you that they'll give them a better life because you can't gice them a "proper" life?'
"People say, "Yes, but you probably learnt a lot more.'
"Who knows where I'd be if I'd been brought up in my own culture, according to my Aboriginal side? I think I would have fought for my identity in the context of my personality and my strengths....I still feel angry and I suppose that anger has carried me through, too, in lots of situations. I've learnt a trade, I've played soccer at the highest level in my country, I've gone to university, I've fought for Aboriginal rights for years, I've started my own company and raised a family. And all along I've tried to regain the pieces of the life that I should have had, the one that was shattered when I was just a kid."
Source: Moriarty, J. (2000). Saltwater Fella: An inspiring true story of success against all odds. With thanks to Penguin Books Australia Ltd.
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Archie Roach, a leading Aboriginal musician, is a Stolen Generation child who has searched all his life for his identity.
"I don't remember much because I was only three, but I do remember running with my cousin down to the river and hiding in the bracken and under sticks," Roach said.
As a child, Roach was sent to several white foster homes – one family forced him to eat raw potatoes and sleep in the grain shed. He only discovered he was Aboriginal at 11, and at 14 his lost sister wrote him a letter saying his mother had died.
"I don't know what my mother looks like," Roach said.
For years Roach lived on the streets searching for his family.
Source: A Stolen Generation Cries Out by Michael Perry, Reuter. 20/5/97
Archie Roach was born in 1956 in Mooroopna,
north Victoria, lived at Framlingham in south western Victoria and was
taken from his family at an early age. He moved from foster home to foster
home, before settling with a family who had emigrated from Scotland to
Melbourne. His love of music blossomed in their home, with their daughter
teaching him the basic rudiments of piano. In his teens, a letter from
a sister he didn't know he had sparked an angry search for his real identity.
Leaving home, he spent over a decade as an alcoholic living on the streets.
During this period, Archie met Ruby Hunter, a Ngarrindjeri woman
from South Australia, who had also been forcibly removed from her family.
The pair fell in love and started their own family. It is Ruby that Archie
credits for the couple's decision to give up drinking and make a life
for themselves. They went on to raise a family which included two children
of their own and three foster children, plus a revolving door of children
in need of shelter and refuge. |
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Neila was one of the later stolen children, taken from her mother in the late 1960s. She was adopted by a couple who emigrated from Australia to Britain in the late 1960s. Neila has spent most of her life living in Folkestone, Kent, England.
Recently, she returned to Australia for an emotional reunion with her family. Her birth parents are dead, but she was greeted at the airport by four sisters and two brothers, along with aunts, uncles, cousins and nieces, all from the Nyoongar tribe.
Neila was contacted in 1997 by her cousin, Fred Penny, who had promised her father shortly before his death that he would find her. They corresponded regularly and his visit to Kent persuaded her to make the two week visit, during which time she visited her parents' graves.
"I have waited a long time for this. I am overwhelmed, ecstatic, happy, emotional" said Miss Penny, who considers herself neither British nor Australian but Aboriginal.
Asked if she believed she had been stolen, she replied light-heartedly "Yes, I do, because I have been taken from my homeland and I have had to live in rainy, cold, freezing England".
Neila is the first person to benefit from a state government initiative to reunite members of the "stolen generations" with blood relatives.
Source: The Guardian, p. 23
After two years the Federal Government-funded campaign to help Aboriginal victims of past family separation policies has helped reunite 370 families, a fraction of the estimated 50,000 children removed from their parents....The Aboriginal Affairs Minister, Senator Herron.. said that about 9,500 Aboriginal people affected by child removal policies had been assisted and this had involved about 370 family reunions.
Source: Sydney Morning Herald, 30/11/00, page 3
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'Consider this: if you and your entire extended family lost all your property, means of earning a living and all democratic rights, if you were separated and scattered, imprisoned, refused medical treatment, mistreated and brutalized, how would your descendants be affected?'
Source: Council For Aboriginal Reconciliation, Walking Together – Building Better Relationships Between All Australians. P 16.
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'My time at the mission however, had opened my eyes to other things. I realized I had some ability and I wanted to do something with my life. The positive side of being in the home was that children like us had learnt discipline and skills which enabled us to fight our way through the white system later in our lives. Along with many other Aboriginal girls at that time, I was expected to go on to domestic service. I had higher aspirations and wanted to become a nurse.' I did my initial nursing training at the South Coast District hospital at Victor Harbour in South Australia.'
Source: Council For Aboriginal Reconciliation, Walking Together – Building Better Relationships Between All Australians. P 6.
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' "I want to provoke people's minds – not to guilt – but to an understanding of what I went through... so they'll understand a drunken Aborigine in the street the next time they see one. They'll at least be able to ask the question 'What kind of life did they have?" ... Then there's her Dad's Mum – who had a white partner, and lost her son as a result to the infamous Moore River Mission, "to have the blackness beaten out of him", in Lawford's words. "It gave Dad an education, as well, though, and he knew that we needed an education to survive. He wanted us to become lawyers and the like – the only way not to lose out" '.
Josie Ningali-Lawford, a performer who wants her audience to understand how Aborigines really tick.
Source: Sunday Star Times, 18/02/96
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'During the first 160 years of colonisation, 20,000 Aboriginals and 2000 Europeans and their allies were killed in frontier conflicts over land and property rights'
Source: Council For Aboriginal Reconciliation, Walking Together – Building Better Relationships Between All Australians. P 12.
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1967 – Aboriginals finally got citizenship rights. They were now able to purchase land, have passports, be counted in the censuses, vote in elections and travel overseas.
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'Indigenous life expectancy in 1995-1997 was only 54.1 for males and 61.2 for females at birth – lower than for all children born 100 years ago'. (Australian Bureau of Statistics)
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Aborigine death rates 'highest': 'Death rates for adult Aboriginal Australians were the highest in the world, a Queensland epidemiologist said yesterday... "I have been unable to find any other population in the world (for whom figures are available) that has rates as high with estimates ranging from six to twelve times that of the total population in various parts of Australia for those in their forties and late thirties. Not only are the adult rates high, but there has been no real progress in reducing adult mortality in the last twenty years. Indigenous populations in the United States and Canada had at least ten years greater life expectancy than Aborigines and Torres Strait Islander", Dr Ring said.'
Source: The Press, 01/07/95
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'Their removal as children and the abuse they experienced at the hands of the authorities or their delegates have permanently scarred their lives. The harm continues in later generations, affecting their children and grandchildren.' (Human Rights & Equal Opportunity Commission)
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In the case of In the Marriage of B and R, the Full Court of the Family Court of Australia recognised the devastating effects of placing Aboriginal children in non-Aboriginal environments. Their Honours, Fogarty, Kay and O'Ryan, JJ, stated that it is now beyond controversy that there is a:
"... devastating long term effect on thousands of Aboriginal children arising from their removal from their Aboriginal families and their subsequent upbringing within a white environment."
Further, their Honours remarked that the systematic removal policy:
"...of removing Aboriginal children and especially part Aboriginal children, usually of tender years, from their parents and placing them in institutions or in other white care...left many Aboriginals in childhood, adolescence and adulthood adrift in a white society which society treated as inferior and in which they lost fundamental connections with family and culture."
(Unfinished Business: The Australian Stolen Generations)
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Effects on Children's Lives
Section 11, Bringing Them Home - The Report
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This material has been produced by UNITEC Institute of Technology
under contract to the Ministry of Education.
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