Introduction by Croakey: This coming Sunday, 26 May, is National Sorry Day, which remembers and acknowledges the mistreatment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who have been forcibly removed from their families and communities over many generations.
It is also a day for reminding governments and the wider Australian community of the pressing need to do much more and better in providing redress and healing, 27 years after the landmark Bringing Them Home report was released, a national policy forum was told yesterday.
Marie McInerney writes:
Not only have key recommendations of the 1997 Bringing Them Home report not been fully implemented nearly a generation after they were handed down, causing ongoing hurt and distress for Stolen Generations survivors, but some have been introduced in ways that actively cause harm.
That was one of the verdicts at a national policy forum, ‘The Unfinished Business of Bringing Them Home’, hosted this week by The Healing Foundation and ANU’s First Nations Portfolio in Canberra on the lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples.
Panel members told the forum about their diverse connections to the Bringing Them Home report, including powerful and painful stories of loss and trauma, and concerns that a “shellshocked” Federal Government in the wake of the Voice referendum will find it “politically easy” not to act on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander rights.
Priorities for action
The forum was moderated by Healing Foundation CEO Shannan Dodson, who can still recall the toll on her father Professor Mick Dodson, then the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, who was co-chair of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families, which led to the Bringing Them Home report.
Unable to be at the forum, he featured in a video, remembering the landmark two-year inquiry as “the toughest thing that he’s ever done in his life”.
It was, she said, about day in and day out, “witnessing the grief, loss and cruelty”.
“So as you can see, there’s an important unfinished business for me and my family, and of course for the wider Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community,” Shannan Dodson said. “I feel like it’s my responsibility now to continue this work and ensure the voices of survivors are never forgotten.”
Dodson highlighted three key priority areas for action:
- Nationally consistent, fair, and equitable redress for Stolen Generations survivors, their families, and descendants.
- Nationally consistent access to historical and contemporary records (including births, deaths, marriages) for Stolen Generations survivors and their families.
- Tailored and targeted trauma-aware and healing-informed services to meet the unique aged care, health, mental health, disability, and housing needs of ageing Stolen Generations survivors.
Crisis of trust
Professor Peter Yu, ANU’s inaugural Vice-President (First Nations) and Yawuru man, told the forum he came from three generations of removal, including that of his grandmother, a Bunuba woman from Fitzroy Crossing. She was forcibly taken as a ten-year-old in 1910 to Beagle Bay on the Dampier Peninsula – followed throughout the 800-kilometre journey by her mother on horse and buggy.
Yu’s mother was later also removed from her family, and he was sent away from Broome to Perth as a 12-year-old to attend a Catholic school in Perth.
Yu said he did not believe there was a single Aboriginal family in Australia who is not either directly or indirectly connected to the Stolen Generations, and that the passing of the years should not diminish the level of human suffering that resulted from very deliberate and pervasive policies, designed to “eliminate us from the face of the earth”.
The intergenerational trauma inflicted by these policies, still manifesting in many ways today, including dysfunction among young people in Alice Springs and elsewhere in Australia, “will never disappear” until there is some just, fair and formal settlement between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia, he said.
Setting the scene for forum discussions, Yu outlined some of the 54 recommendations in the report: apologies from governments, police and faith and community groups, restitution of land, culture and language, reparation, access to records, and support and services for mental health and wellbeing.
The report also urged a focus to address contemporary removal of children, including the juvenile justice system. Yet in 2023, 43.7 percent of children aged 0-17 in out of home care were Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, who represent just six percent of total population of children, he said.
Twenty-seven years on from the Bringing Them Home report, “federal and state governments have failed, there has never been a collaborative or systematic attempt to address the recommendations, and most have not been implemented”, contributing to a “real crisis of trust”.
Yu said the only way that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people had made any significant advances was through litigation, such as with the Mabo High Court ruling. “We’ve never achieved much from negotiations,” he said, asking why there had never been a successful Stolen Generations compensation claim.
He proposed philanthropic funding into research for a class action for Stolen Generations justice, “because the only way to get justice for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people is by forcing the government’s hand,” he said.
Ongoing harm
Dr Jenni Caruso, an East Arrente woman, Stolen Generations survivor, Adelaide University academic and the first Indigenous woman to complete a PhD on Stolen Generations policies that saw tens of thousands of children removed, told the forum she was still in the process of “being taught how to be non-Aboriginal” when the inquiry got underway.
However, when the Bringing Them Home report was published, she went to a signing event featuring the late Dr Lowitja O’Donoghue, and the signed copy became her guidebook. Her foster mother went with her and “it was the first time ever that she cognitively engaged with the notion that maybe this kid who they’d taken into their family was a member of the Stolen Generations”, Caruso said.
Chair of the South Australian Stolen Generations Aboriginal Corporation (SASGAC), Caruso told the forum that while South Australia has a reparations scheme, it was highly flawed, with mechanisms and practices that are actually “harmful”. It significantly underestimated and under-budgeted for the number of people likely to be eligible (300 vs 2,100 identified Stolen Generations people in the state), was done in haste, and without meaningful co-creation and co-delivery.
She said determinations of the scheme “were often made on a whim and the whims were informed by the colonial lens”, creating an ‘us versus them’ approach.
“We’re not just telling stories, we’re delivering unto you the experiences of our life,” she told the forum. “If you were to do that to me, I would say ‘what is it that we can do together to ameliorate some of the impacts of that?’”
Caruso highlighted the challenges in getting access to records in SA, where many state records have been “closed off”, damaged by everything from fire to rats and cyclones, or “very, very heavily redacted”. But they are crucial, she said. Through her work, she was able to demonstrate 20 people as being eligible for reparations.
Caruso also talked about the hurt and harm of last year’s Voice referendum result.
“Am I salty about the referendum? You bet your sweet arse I am,” she told the forum. “It was not going to hurt a non-Aboriginal person in any shape or form. It was not going to affect a non-Aboriginal person’s life one iota. And yet 60 percent of the nation came out and said ‘we don’t really want to know about it, we don’t really want to see it’.”
“So do I forgive 60 percent of Australians for voting No? No, I don’t. Do I ask people to reflect why? Yes, I do. Because …..this is unfinished business. But it’s not unfinished business because of lack of effort on our part. We are doing the heavy lifting.”
Governments in retreat
Also on the panel was Michael Lavarch, Emeritus Professor of Law at the Queensland University of Technology, a member of the Queensland Treaty and Truth Interim Body, and former Labor Attorney General who in 1995 commissioned the inquiry that led to the Bringing Them Home report.
It was an exciting time then, he said, with the Mabo decision recently handed down and native title legislation underway, and a sense that the country was set to reckon with its true history.
But the report was handed to the Howard Government, the promise of the 90s was never realised, and the results of last year’s Voice referendum confirmed “there’s still a very large proportion of the broader Australian population which has not come to grips with the history of this country”, Lavarch said.
Nonetheless, he said the report “remains a very big part of my life” and he is focused on the ongoing forced removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and young people that sees Australia “confronting very much a new Stolen Generation”, with rates of removal exponentially higher now than they were in 1997 when the report handed down.
Lavarch said progress required a true understanding and embrace of self-determination and a true commitment to co-design, which no Australian government has delivered to date.
Stolen Generations survivors should not be given ‘permission’ to access birth and other records and then face a range of barriers. The starting assumption should be that these systems are working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, survivors and families, so that the records are made available as a right, rather than people having “to go through hoops”.
The biggest move to address ongoing harm would be shifting the power for child removal and juvenile justice at the local community level and, to some extent, dismantling state structures that continue to see rising numbers of children removed and increasing numbers of people in prison, he said.
But Lavarch acknowledged that change is not simple and even harder now following the referendum, which saw a “very strident re-emergence of the policy of assimilation”, this time just in a different language – of being ‘opposed to separatism’. This makes it “politically easy” to not act on Indigenous priorities.
“As the referendum tells us, there are not too many votes to be won to be morally strong, to actually do what is right when it is hard to do so,” he said.
Unfortunately, he said, Australia is now seeing “a retreat” post-referendum, with a “shell shocked” Federal Government and loss of bipartisan support for Treaty and Truth processes in Queensland and Victoria.
Don’t forget about us
Ngambri, Wallabalooa and Wiradyuri Elder Aunty Dr Matilda House brought home the pain and distress of the Stolen Generations at the forum, telling her harrowing story of being taken from family as a child, brought up on the Erambie mission in Cowra, and later moved into indentured service.
“Don’t forget about us, the boys and girls who were taken off Aboriginal missions and were treated like colonial slaves,” she said.
She too warned that ongoing policies were perpetuating the harm: building more jails and more children’s homes, babies still being taken from Aboriginal families.
“That is the continuation of colonialism. That is still taking our kids, still traumatising families,” she said.
What can allies do?
“Continue to be an ally,” said Caruso. “Don’t make assumptions and, where you can, ensure that you are engaging with Aboriginal people. We don’t want you to speak for us. We do want you to stand alongside of us and have those conversations.”
Sometimes being an ally means having an uncomfortable conversation, when racism is sitting there in front of you, being prepared to pay a personal cost, to lose a friendship if someone is blatantly putting forward racist positions. “You’ve got to counter it,” she said.
Dodson also suggested that allies could make donations to Stolen Generations organisations.
Sovereign citizens
Healing Foundation chair Professor Steve Larkin closed the forum, talking about the importance of truth to challenge the colonial narrative that wrongly told people they were taken from families for their own good.
“I agree with the panel that the colonial lens is insidious, pervasive, it structures and mediates us…not as sovereign citizens of sovereign states, where you might exercise diplomatic relations, but rather an administrative problem,” he said.
Larkin called on politicians and policy makers to do what they can to deliver the three major priorities, and urged education providers to engage their students in Sorry Day activities and events, support them to develop a deeper understanding and respect for Australia’s true history, and to incorporate the Healing Foundation’s Stolen Generations resource kit for teachers and students into their work.
At the individual level, he urged people to learn more and listen to the voices of survivors.
“We cannot forget their experiences and we must honour them,” he said.
Declaration: Marie McInerney provides occasional communications services for The Healing Foundation and was involved in preparations for the forum. She live-tweeted from the forum and wrote this article as a probono service for Croakey readers.
See Croakey’s archive of articles on the Voice referendum
