In the official denominational magazine of the Presbyterian Church of Australia, AP, Mark Powell Cornerstone Presbyterian Church, Hobart writes “Ten things Justin Welby should know about the ‘stolen generations.’”
This journal might seem an odd place to interact with the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby who has been visiting Australia. But Powell is dealing with a serious topic for all Australian Christians to reflect on. Powell is entitled to set out his views. In this article, The Other Cheek will respond to his ten points and suggest why the Archbishop was right to say of the stolen generations ” there’s very little or nothing to be proud of and quite a lot to be ashamed of.”
Powell accuses Justin Welby of “pontificating on the historic wrongs we have committed against indigenous peoples.”
It’s not a protest about an Englishman talking about Australia, Powell disputes the historical record of genocide and destruction of Indigenous culture while focusing on questioning the “stolen generations” of his headline.
Powell frames his comments about the stolen generations, by saying that “Australia has never had an official government policy targeted at eliminating Aboriginal people but has rather sought to produce a harmonious society where everyone is afforded the same rights and opportunities.”
Secondly, he comments “Rather than being the government lackey for perpetuating systemic racism, the Anglican Church of Australia—alongside every other Christian denomination—was at the forefront of defending the rights and protections of Aboriginals. For example, as far back as 1920 the Church Missionary Society had asked the Australian government to set aside the whole of Groote Eylandt as an Aboriginal reserve.”
Powell’s perspective, that claims of harm to Aboriginal people are exaggerated, follows the lead of Keith Windschuttle, a leader of one faction in the history wars that Powell repeatedly cites.
Windschuttle takes the general view that official government accounts and reports are key to defining the truth about Australia’s past. Documents that give a much lesser death toll or deny that massacres took place are to be preferred according to Windschuttle, over accounts, both oral or written, that paint a grimmer picture.
The fate of the Tasmanian Aboriginal peoples was at the heart of the history wars, set off by Windschuttle’s book “The Fabrication of Aboriginal History.”
Windschuttle’s book, Christian historian John Harris writes was “a major revisionist attack on almost every modern Australian historian who writes about Aboriginal history. His major claim is that 19th century missionaries and modern Australian historians have greatly exaggerated the number of Aboriginals killed during the white settlement of Australia. Windschuttle’s purpose in exposing what he considers fraudulent claims about Aboriginal deaths goes something like this: current policies of Aboriginal self-determination are not working as they are based on the false notion that separate development is best for Aboriginal communities; early missionaries lied about the extent of Aboriginal deaths to promote their own ambitions for the control of protected Aboriginal mission stations; these false views influenced subsequent government protectionist policies, keeping Aboriginal people isolated from mainstream Australia and preventing their assimilation right up to today; historians continue to fabricate massacre stories to underpin a system of Aboriginal policy-making based on the rights of supposedly mistreated people to autonomy when in fact they would prefer to be assimilated into the wider Australian society; policies therefore need to be changed and we must begin by demolishing the ‘massacre myths’ which have misled us for the past two centuries.”
A good case study by one of the effective responders to Windschuttle, Professoe Emeritus Lyndal Ryan, distils the issues in her short paper “Massacre in Tasmania? How Can We Know?”
Ryan compares Windshuttles’ “Forensic Method” against other historical approaches that have accepted that these events often involve cover-ups, meaning that a range of sources needs to be investigated. “Windschuttle accepts statements of denial that immediately follow the incident as objective fact, while Semelin [a historian who advocates the alternative approach] is more likely to accept the evidence of those who speak out long afterwards.” In her paper, Ryan takes an incident near Campbell Town in Tasmania in the late 1820s – dismissed by Windschuttle -as a case study. Her paper is an example of how the Windschuttle thesis is overcome by the weight of evidence.
John Harris’ writing forms an effective response to Powell’s argument that “the Christian church in Australia has always been at the forefront in protecting the rights of indigenous peoples.” Harris’ One Blood book recounts a tragically divided history, with hero missionaries often at odds with the church hierarchy, times and places where Christians protected indigenous people, and times and places when Christians became the tool of cruel Government policies. It’s a complex history. The idea that the church was always at the forefront of protecting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples is sadly untrue. Powell cites the Church Missionary Society advocating for the “whole of Groote Eylandt as an Aboriginal reserve”, as evidence of good intent. But the evidence Harris provides is a complicated history of sometimes helping, and sometimes hindering the advancement of First Nations people.
Here are responses to ten points listed by Powell.
- What the Archbishop said about the stolen generations. In The Australian article cited by Powell, the Archbishop says “I think the Lost Generations’ history shows very clearly that whoever was responsible it was groups of people, not just one institution, and there’s very little or nothing to be proud of and quite a lot to be ashamed of.” Powell thinks the first thing that the Archbishop needs to be told is that “there was no genocide, citing a couple of high court judgements. There is a debate over whether the stolen generations met the technical definition of genocide. Bringing Them Home, the 1997 Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families said it was genocide. Some legal authorities disagree. To make a case that there was massive injustice and that repentance is required, which is what the archbishop was talking about, does not hinge on using the word “genocide.”
- “The majority of children were half-castes.” Powell’s comment is supported by Bringing Them Home. But he also gives the impression that these children were “often” rejected by Aboriginal communities is of abandoned children. But we also need to take into account that the eyewitness accounts in Bringing Them Home tell a very different story. “I was at the post office with my Mum and Auntie [and cousin]. They put us in the police ute and said they were taking us to Broome. They put the mums in there as well. But when we’d gone [about ten miles] they stopped, and threw the mothers out of the car. We jumped on our mothers’ backs, crying, trying not to be left behind. But the policemen pulled us off and threw us back in the car. They pushed the mothers away and drove off, while our mothers were chasing the car, running and crying after us. We were screaming in the back of that car. When we got to Broome they put me and my cousin in the Broome lock-up. We were only ten years old. We were in the lock-up for two days waiting for the boat to Perth.”
Confidential evidence 821, Western Australia: these removals occurred in 1935, shortly after Sister Kate’s Orphanage, Perth, was opened to receive `lighter skinned’ children; the girls were placed in Sister Kate’s. Powell’s account is skewed towards criticism of Aboriginal Families.
With regard to another of Powell’s suggestions that single-parent families were the target of child removal, there are accounts of mothers and fathers having their children removed. “The police came one day from Halls Creek when they were going on patrol to L. [pastoral station] and found me, a half-caste kid. They told the manager to take me to Fitzroy Crossing to wait for the mail truck from Derby to take me to Moola Bulla [government station]. When the manager’s wife told my Mum and [step] Dad that they were taking me to Fitzroy Crossing for a trip, they told her, `You make sure you bring her back’. But little did they know that I would never see them again.” - Confidential evidence 821, Western Australia: child brought up traditionally by her Aboriginal parents but captured at 12 years in the 1930s.
H S Taylor, proprietor and editor of South Australia’s Renmark Pioneer, wrote to the Protector of Aborigines, around 1910,
“[I] call to your attention what I believe to be a grave miscarriage of the intentions of the provision made for the protection of the [A]borigines of this State … I cannot conceive that it was ever the intention of the legislature that native lads should be torn from their parents without their consent, especially when in the present case, it could be easily shown that the lads were not, in the ordinary sense of the term `neglected children’. Both of them, in point of fact, were working for kind and considerate masters; the father is in good and regular work … I am unable to regard it as anything short of an outrage that they should have been so sent in defiance of the parents’ wish, more particularly when sending them involved their detention for a period of years … the affair has so worked on the mother’s mind that she has had several seizures of fits since the abduction of their children.
“… the lads were got from their employers, brought into court and committed without either parent knowing of it or having any opportunity to be present, to intimate their mind in the matter … [the father] is strongly opposed to their detention in the industrial school, being of the opinion that they will probably fret themselves ill there.”
3. “Older children were removed more than younger ones.” I am not sure what point Powell is making. Is the removal of a thirteen-year-old from their family, less of a problem for a child than removal as a baby?
4. “Children were not removed permanently but returned to their families.” Powell’s description is refuted by the testimonies in Bringing Them Home. WA’s chief Protector is cited in Bringing Them Home. regarding a high rate of teenage pregnancy of aboriginal girls sent out to work “The child is taken away from the mother and sometimes never sees her again. Thus these children grow up as whites, knowing nothing of their own environment. At the expiration of the period of two years the mother goes back into service so that it doesn’t really matter if she has half a dozen children (quoted by Choo 1989 on pages 49-50).”
“Unlike white children who came into the state’s control, far greater care was taken to ensure that [Aboriginal children] never saw their parents or families again. They were often given new names, and the greater distances involved in rural areas made it easier to prevent parents and children on separate missions from tracing each other,” historian Robert van Krieken, cited in Bringing them Home. (van Krieken 1991 page 108 Krieken, Robert. (1992). Children & The State: Social Control and the Formation of Australian Child Welfare. ).
5. The majority of children were victims of child sexual abuse. Powell is correct about a high rate of sexual abuse. He is quick to blame the families of the children involved, and suggests more children should have been removed, but fails to note that the national redress scheme is dealing with survivors placed by Government in mission stations where sexual predation was rife.
Bringing Them Home reported One in ten boys and three in ten girls allege they were sexually abused in a foster placement or placements. “I ran away because my foster father used to tamper with me and I’d just had enough. I went to the police but they didn’t believe me. So she [foster mother] just thought I was a wild child and she put me in one of those hostels and none of them believed me – I was the liar. So I’ve never talked about it to anyone. I don’t go about telling lies, especially big lies like that.”
Confidential evidence 214, Victoria: woman removed at 7 years in the 1960s.
6. The total number of Indigenous children removed was not “large scale” says Powell quoting Windshuttles figure of 8250, for 1800 to 1970. Bringing them Home says the number is difficult to assess, suggesting a range between one in ten and one in three aboriginal children were removed. The higher figure gives a number of roughly 100,000. Historian Robert Manne supports the lower figure.
“In certain regions and in certain periods the figure was undoubtedly much greater than one in ten. In that time not one Indigenous family has escaped the effects of forcible removal (confirmed by representatives of the Queensland and WA [Western Australia] Governments in evidence to the Inquiry). Most families have been affected, in one or more generations, by the forcible removal of one or more children.”
7. Growth in Aboriginal population. Powell points to a significant population increase in the twentieth century. If as both Bringing Them Home and Windschuttle agree, a minority of children were removed, a population increase and mass child removal are not contradictory
8. Investment. Possibly the most outrageous statement in Powell’s list is his use of this quote from Windschuttle. “The best Aboriginal stations had superior buildings and more amenities than many white working-class people in the outer suburbs and country towns at the same time. Some institutions for Aboriginal children had swimming pools, gymnasiums, tennis courts, film projectors, radios, record players, pianos and telephones decades before many white people.” If any Aboriginal children, most likely a few, had access to these facilities does not reflect what the majority of the stolen generation endured. A Christian analysis should contain an analysis of the effects of being separated from family – rather than simply emphasising that there were some instances of relatively high investment in facilities.
9. Removal for safety. Powell brings up a history wars debate about the reason Aboriginal Protection Boards removed children, citing child safety rather than reducing the aboriginal population as the reason. Reasons for removal varied as Government policies moved on from protection of a race social Darwinists suggested was doomed to policies of assimilation. The devastating effect on the stolen generation are evident, despite the various explanations Governmnets gave for their policies.
10. Aboriginal people themselves were involved in fostering. One again, as with point 8, the question scale of what Powell/Windschuttle describes is obscured. As is still true, the scale of aboriginal foster parenting or kinship care is far below what is required. Ask any foster care agency. The existence of some examples of brilliant aboriginal foster parents does not negate the effect of the destruction of aboriginal family relationships in removing children to white-run homes and missions.
John Harris points out the central problem in Windschuttle, and by implication Powell’s, treatment of Indigenous issues: “The awful but surely undeniable fact of Aboriginal history, the one fact which transcends all other facts and all other estimates, reconstructions, analyses, guesses, misrepresentations, truths, half-truths and lies, is the fact of the immense and appalling reduction in the Aboriginal population during the first century and a half of European settlement. This must be the starting point of any morally responsible discussion of the past treatment of Aboriginal people and therefore must precede any discussion of death by violence.”
Image from the cover of Bringing Them Home
Thank you John for this well-balanced article.