We acknowledge the traditional land on which we stand and pay our respects to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, their elders, past, present, and future.
From the early 1900s to the 1970s, ‘white Australia’ assimilation policies were founded on an assumption that Indigenous people were inferior, and that they should be allowed to 'die out' through a 'natural' elimination processes or at a minimum be assimilated into the white community by abandoning their heritage (Australians Together, 2014). It was believed that Indigenous children were disadvantaged by staying in their own communities and that they would receive a better education and a more 'civilised' upbringing if they were adopted into white families or placed into government care institutions (National Sorry Day Committee, 1998). During this period, Australian Federal, State and Territory government agencies, church missions and welfare bodies forcibly removed Indigenous children from their families and their traditional countries. Today, these children are known as ‘The Stolen Generations’. (National Sorry Day Committee, 1998; Healey, 2009).
Those children taken from their families and homelands were either placed in institutions or adopted. They were given a lower standard of education compared to that available to non-Indigenous children, taught to reject their Indigenous heritage, forbidden to speak their traditional languages; and had their names changed. Some who were fortunate enough to have been placed with caring foster parents have flourished. But, those children who were placed in unsatisfactory conditions, either with foster parents or in institutions, have struggled in their adult lives to overcome their experiences of trauma, loss, isolation and abuse (National Sorry Day Committee website, 1998).
Many people from the Stolen Generations have written accounts in a variety of literary forms of their experiences of survival and the impact such policies had and still have on Aboriginal people. Writing has been a means of healing the scars of removal (Heiss 2015). This BlackWords trail presents autobiographies, biographies, novels, children's stories, anthologies, short stories, poems and songs, oral histories, plays, and films written by many Stolen Generations survivors, and/or by their family members. They depict the emotional, psychological and physical traumas of their experiences, and the disruption of their oral and cultural knowledge.
Please be aware that some of these works and agent records may contain images, artwork, perspectives and stories from people who are now deceased. It also contains words, terms or descriptions which may be culturally sensitive and are considered inappropriate today, but which reflect the period in which it was written.
Published on 11 Jun 2014
This documentary DVD was produced in 1997 and forms part of the Bringing them home education resource for use in Australian classrooms.
Access more on the report here..
This resource is based on 'Bringing them home' , the report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families, and on the history of forcible separation and other policies which have impacted on the lives of Indigenous Australians. This documentary complements a collection of curriculum-linked activities and teaching resources, plus a range of photographs, maps and diagrams, timelines, legal texts and glossaries.
The Australian Human Rights Commission invites teachers and students to use this resource to explore, understand and reflect on one of the most difficult chapters of our national history and to engage with some of the key concepts involved in the reconciliation debate in Australia. See the education resource here. https://www.humanrights.gov.au/educat...
Warning: This video may contain images / voices of deceased Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander persons.
Video produced by Oziris. © Australian Human Rights Commission
Many one-time Aboriginal authors are those who write their autobiographies or memoirs or have their story told through biography. These personal accounts often unravel the painful experience of being removed under Acts of Protection nationally.’ (Heiss, Anita, BlackWords: Our truths - Aboriginal writers and the Stolen Generations, 2015)
'The film Rabbit-Proof Fence is based on this true account of Doris Nugi Garimara Pilkington's mother Molly, who as a young girl led her two sisters on an extraordinary 1,600 kilometre walk home. Under Western Australia's invidious removal policy of the 1930s, the girls were taken from their Aboriginal family at Jigalong on the edge of the Little Sandy Desert, and transported halfway across the state to the Native Settlement at Moore River, north of Perth.
(...more)This work was also adapted into an award-winning feature film in 2002. see Rabbit-Proof Fence.
"Most people call me Auntie Rita, whites as well as Aboriginal people. Auntie is a term of respect of our older women folk. You don't have to be blood-related or anything. Everyone is kin. That's a beautiful thing because in this way no one is ever truly alone, they always have someone they can turn to."
Rita Huggins told her memories to her daughter Jackie, and some of their conversation is in this book. We witness their intimacy, their similarities and their differences, the '"fighting with their tongues".
(...more)This biography was written by Rita Huggins with the help of her daughter Jackie Huggins. Rita was young child when she was taken from her family in the land of the Bidjara-Pitjara people.
This biography is the story of Jessie Argyle who was taken at the age of five from her family in the remote East Kimberley.
Grace Roberts was a 'stolen' child. This short book tells the story of her life. Grace 'was regarded as a "special woman" , she lived and worked mainly within her own language area, but her presence was felt in far wider circles; the bureacracy of the time both state and federal were very aware of her work and aspirations'. (Source: Grace Roberts: Her Life, Her Mystery, Her Dreaming 198?:4)
(...more)Author's note: 'To tell Grace's story, memory has been relied upon, so if some find query with what has been written, it has been told as it has been remembered. Wherever possible factual evidence from records has been sought, but unfortunately in the past, the bureaucracy of the time, found it...convenient to lose their records, particularly those of the children taken by the officers of the... Protection Board.' (page 4)
'Joy Williams - Janaka Wiradjuri - was a difficult personality, and she made herself so. This book explains how and why she, and so many other people like her never had a chance.
Moving from Joy's untimely death in a Primbee flat, to the ten years she spent pursuing a negligence claim against the NSW Government, through two lost appeals and on to the beginning of her life, Read takes us on a mesmerising and evocative journey that offers a rare historical insight into institutions, street life and indigenous and urban culture between 1942 and 2006.
(...more)Epigraph: It's not fair. If I start crying I'll never stop. I never will. Sometimes I'm so frightened of dropping a cup. Or tripping on a feather. Because if I trip I can't [get up], I can't do it. And they're not going to take me out of the world like that. Joy Janaka Wiradjuri Williams, 2003
'Set amongst the low scrub of the Mogumber sand plain north of Perth, the Moore River Native Settlement was, for thirty years, "sort of a place like home" for thousands of Aboriginal people. Sanctuary, work camp, orphanage, prison and rural idyll, the settlement was part of a bold social experiment by the Chief Protector of Aborigines, A. O. Neville, the aim of which was nothing less than the total eradication of a race and a culture.
Making extensive and imaginative use of oral resources and hitherto unseen documents, the book paints a vivid and intimate picture of the life experience of Moore River inmates, while documenting the appalling bureaucratic incompetence, official indifference and occasional outright brutality that made Moore River notorious.
(...more)'The stories in this book are part of a wide canvas of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people affected by past practices of removal and separation from families, including by adoption, foster care and out of home care.' (Source: Trove)
(...more)Chapters include:
1. Aboriginal children's homes in NSW
2. Cootamundra Aboriginal Girls' Home
3. Barbara Hart (1936-1947)
4. Isabel Hampton (1938-1947)
5. Tibby Briar ((1939-1946)
6. Jean Bell (1943- 1958)
7. Betty Ellis (1943-1958)
8. Lesley Whitton (1944-1962)
9. Daphne and Bertha Bell (1952-1964)
10. Penny Packer (1952-1955)
11. Mavis Lang (1955-1958)
12. Fay Clayton (1956-1961)
13. Yvonne Clayton (1958-1964)
14. Matron (1945-1967)
15. Caretaker (1955-1975)
16. Aftermath.
'This is a true story about lots of little secrets and one big one. It's the spare and painful tale of the author's family and the hidden strands she found underweaving its history - a story embedded in the ancestry of many white Australians. What was it that Lynette's grandmother could not tell her? Why did she cover her face in pale make-up? Who was her own mother, Emily, the "Polynesian princess"? And what happened when Emily "was taken away from us for some time"? In "A Little Bird Told Me", Lynette Russell finds out the answers to these questions, unearthing secrets kept by her family for generations.
(...more)Dedication:
This book is dedicated to the treasured memories of my parents Albert and Rosie Holt. My father, Albert, was an inspirational leader and a determined Aboriginal warrior. He was dedicated to family life, and worked hard and long to provide for his family. My mother, Rosie Guilema Holt, was a very powerful, loyal wife, and to her children an inspirational matriach. Mum and Dad deserve all the credit for this book. Albert Holt.
'Lorraine McGee-Sippel was just a small girl when she asked her parents what a half-caste was. It was the 1950s and the first step on a journey that would span decades and lead her to search for her birth family.
'In the historic climate of the Rudd Government's Apology, McGee-Sippel aligns herself with the Stolen Generations as she reveals the far-reaching effects of a government policy that saw her adoptive parents being told their daughter was of Afro-American descent.
'This is not just a story of displacement, but an honest telling that explores the fragility of reconnection, cultural identity, and the triumphs of acceptance.
(...more)Epigraph: My story is not just my story. There is family to consider and I have changed some names for privacy. This is an account of my life as I remember it. People familiar with my story may have a different version. This is mine.
'Hilda Muir was born on the very frontier of modern Australia, near the outback town of Borroloola in the Northern Territory in about 1920.
'Her early life was spent roaming the Gulf Country on foot, hunting and gathering with her family. Her mother was a Yanyuwa person, and so was Hilda. Known to the clan as 'Jarman', it mattered little that her father was an unknown white man. This small girl had a name, a loving family, and a secure Aboriginal identity.
'Very Big Journey tells of Hilda's bush childhood, and her forced removal from a loving family to the rigours of life in the Kahlin Home.
(...more)Glenyse Ward was taken from her mother and put into Wandering Mission to grow up in a regimented and enclosed world of German nuns. At sixteen, again without choice, she was sent to a wealthy farm to be little better than a slave. Soon, she was wishing shoe was back at the mission...' (Source: Back cover)
(...more)'Stolen, beaten, deprived of his liberty and used as child labour, Bill Simon was locked up in the notorious Kinchela Boys Home for 8 years where he was told his mother didn't want him, and that he was 'the scum of the earth'. His experiences there would shape his life forever...
Bill Simon got angry, something which poisoned his life for the next 2 decades. A life of self-abuse and crime which finally saw him imprisoned.. From The Block in Sydney's Redfern, one of the most contentious and misunderstood places in Australia, Bill Simon tells the truth about life in one of Australia's most terrible juvenile institutions, where thousands of boys were warehoused and abused.
(...more)Also see Andrena Jamieson's review, Surviving Institutional Abuse.
Dedication: For all members of the Stolen Generations who have passed away.
'Alec Kruger was stolen as a child from his family and his country. From this early time he knew the cold and harsh reality of institutions and not the caressing love of his mother or the warmth of other close relations. Still young, he was taken again - to the cattle stations of Central Australia where, even as a boy, he was expected to display all the independence and ingenuity of someone much older. In isolation. Alec faced possible death, till the arrival of Old People from country who saved him, taught him and made him culturally strong.
(...more)'When I went home to find how my people are still living makes my blood boil, see they are still suffering, to have leaned that my great Auntie had helped to do how language, Ngiyambaa, and never was paid for it was a shock to me...' (Source: One of the Lost generation, 1998:5)
(...more)Novelisation of the four part television series; book comprises a brief prologue, 'Towradgi' (short story), followed by a 'quartet' of thematically related stories: 'Alinta, the Flame'; 'Maydina, the Shadow'; 'Nerida, the Waterlily'; 'Lo-Arna, the Beautiful~'.
'A secret spans five generations from Cornwall to Australia.
'Who was Zenna Dare?
'When Jennefer moves to the old family home in country Kapunda, she uncovers a secret from the past. What sort of life did Gweniver, her great-great-great-grandmother, lead? And what connection did she have to the glamorous young singer, Zenna Dare?
'Could a nineteenth-century mother of nine have led a double life, and, if so, why?
In a story crossing five generations, from the old world to the new, Zenna Dare brings reconciliation in more ways than Jenefer could ever have imagined.
(...more)'The novel has been written as a dual narrative telling the story from the point of view of both fifteen year Will today and Ruby, an Indigenous servant girl, in the 1940's. Events play themselves out as past and present collide. Explored themes are family and belonging, secrets, identity and the 'Stolen Generation'.'
Source: http://au.wiley.com (Cited 24/05/2012)
(...more)A novel for young adult readers,
'First published in 1923, The Incredible Journey tells the story of Iliapa, an Aboriginal woman, who embarks on a long, arduous journey through the Australian outback in search of her son after he is abducted by a white man. Catherine Martin said that she wrote this novel 'in order to put on record, as faithfully as possible, the heroic love and devotion of a black woman when robbed of her child'.'
'The novel presents a vivid picture of the Aboriginal people (viewed through the eyes of a white novelist), their culture, their dispossession and, in particular, this abhorrent white practice of taking Aboriginal children away from their parents.
(...more)According to Richard Pascal, prior to W.E. Harney's 1947 book entitled Brimming Billabongs, 'very few narratives fictional or otherwise, had focussed primarily on a single Aboriginal subject', nor attempted to recount events from an Indigenous viewpoint (Pascal, 2009). One significant, and possibly one of the first fictional accounts of a Stolen Generation event, was Catherine Martin's 1923 novel The Incredible Journey, features an Aboriginal protagonist, but the Indigenous characters are viewed predominantly from an external perspective ...' (Pascal, Richard. The telling of Marmel's story [online]. Australian Literary Studies, Vol. 24, No. 2, 2009: 54-68)
An insight into the treatment and interactions of black, Aboriginal and other women with white society. The narrator highlights her and her fathers life as an Aboriginal sheep shearer. It also highlights the hardships they faced as a single parent family and Claire's experience of being taken away as an Aboriginal child by the policies of the day. The novel also describes her involvement in politics and working towards a better life for all Aboriginal people. (Published posthumously)
(...more)Pulisher's Note: The word "Karobran", the title of this book, is highly appropriate, being a northern New South Wales Aboriginal word meaning together, or togetherness. It was what Monica Clare believed in, and hoped for, and it was the way the Aborigines lived, and the way white people did not live and did not understand. but increasingly people all over the world, particularly young people, are coming to recognise that it is the only way human beings will be able to live at all in the world of tomorrow. the final victory may yet be to the Aborigines.
'A story of homecoming, this absorbing novel opens with a young, city-based lawyer setting out on her first visit to ancestral country. Candice arrives at "the place where the rivers meet", the camp of the Eualeyai where in 1918 her grandmother Garibooli was abducted. As Garibooli takes up the story of Candice's Aboriginal family, the twentieth century falls away.
Garibooli, renamed Elizabeth, is sent to work as a housemaid, but marriage soon offers escape from the terror of the master's night-time visits.
(...more)In 2002, Kamilaroi writer Larissa Behrendt’s novel Home won the David Unaipon Award. This work was first published by University of Queensland Press (UQP) in 2004.
'A fictional account of one woman's journey to find her family and heritage, Caprice won the 1990 David Unaipon Award for unpublished Indigenous writers. Its publication marked the beginning of Doris Pilkington Garimara's illustrious writing career.
Set in the towns, pastoral stations and orphanage-styled institutions of Western Australia, this story brings together the lives of three generations of Mardu women. The narrator Kate begins her journey with the story of her grandmother Lucy, a domestic servant, then traces the short and tragic life of her mother Peggy.
(...more)In 1990, Mardu writer Doris Pilkington Garimara’s book Caprice: A Stockman’s Daughter won the David Unaipon Award. This work was published by University of Queensland Press (UQP) in 1991.
'A young Aboriginal girl is taken from the north of Australia and sent to an institution in the distant south. There, she slowly makes a new life for herself and, in the face of tragedy, finds strength in new friendships. Poignantly told from the child’s perspective, Sister Heart affirms the power of family and kinship.' (Publication summary)
(...more)'Written for upper primary students this book tells the story of Eddie Albert who joined the Army in 1940, enlisting in North Queensland. Eddie gives an account of a battle he was in, was captured by the Germans and taken to a number of prison camps in Italy. He returned home safely in 1945, married and had children and was reunited with his brother. Eddie’s story is contextualised in the social history of the time, both before and after the war, including the story of his removal from his mother.
(...more)'An action packed novel set in North Queensland, based on a true story. A boy and girl are on the run, chased by the police who want to take them from their mother. Their father, escaped from prison, is rallying local tribes for full scale warfare. An excellent account of the interactions between Indigenous people and white settlers.' (Source: TROVE)
(...more)'In the 1940s Dolly was a girl in the dormitory on Mornington Island. Then as a teenager she was sent to the mainland to work as a domestic on several stations. She tells of some of the things that happened - some funny, some shocking, some sad.' (Source: Online)
(...more)'The story of the nameless fictional character in Stolen Girl, carefully and cautiously points out through text and images, the differences between life in the home she removed to (dorm life, routines, no family) to the family life she misses and dreams about (storytelling around the campfire, mornings with her mother on their verandah, fishing and swimming in the river).' Source: Heiss, Anita. Anita Heiss Blog, 14 March 2011. Sighted 16/3/2011)
(...more)A novel in diary form.
There are many poems written about Stolen Generations, these poems express the consequences and experiences of removed children, and the painful experiences of the parents who children had been taken. Some poems capture the pain of people, who were taken as children, the pain of never being reunited with their families or communities, where other poems reflect their rejections of the government, police and the church organisations that imposed the Policy of Protection acts.
'When Doris Kartinyeri was a month old, her mother died. The family gathered to mourn their loss and welcome the new baby home. But Doris never arrived to live with her family - she was stolen from the hospital and placed in Colebrook Home, where she stayed for the next fourteen years.
The legacy of being a member of the Stolen Generations continued for Doris as she was placed in white homes as a virtual slave, struggled through relationships and suffered with anxiety and mental illness.
(...more)This work is an autobiography in poetry form.
'In her memoir Too Afraid to Cry, published in 2013, Indigenous poet Ali Cobby Eckermann related how she had been tricked away from her mother as a baby, repeating the trauma her mother had suffered when she was taken from her grandmother many years before. Eckermann in turn had to give her own child up for adoption. In her new poetry collection, Inside my Mother, she explores the distance between the generations created by such experiences, felt as an interminable void in its darkest aspects, marked by sadness, withdrawal, yearning and mistrust, but in other ways a magical place ‘beyond the imagination’, lit by dreams and visions of startling intensity, populated by symbolic presences and scenes of ritual and commemoration, chief amongst them the separation and reunion of mother and child.
(...more)First line of poem: "I not see you long time now"
See Also Eva Johnson's poem Protection. First line of poem: "In the days when our land and our people were free"
First line of poem: "As a child I left this place"
First line of poem: "You don't take that land,' they cried, they yelled, they wailed"
First line of poem: "No Mother"
First line of poem: "My Grandmother was born Molly Lennon at Eringa,"
First line of poem: "When whitemen bin cummon alonga this way,"
First line of poem: "To know you is all I want to find you is my destination in life"
Graeme Dixon spent several years in Sister Kate's Children Home in Perth, but at the age of 16 he was sent to Fremantle Prison, Western Australia were he spent nine years. Prison was where Dixon had began writing poetry, and in 1989, his first collection of poetry Holocaust Island, won the David Unaipon Award. Dixon was the first winner of this inaugural award.
First line of poem: "Please mista do'n take me chilen, please mista do'n"
First line of poem: "Black people crying dispossession of their land"
'A well-known anthem for many Stolen Children, their families and communities, is singer /songwriter Bobbie Randall’s 'Brown Skin Baby'. Randall himself was removed by police as a young child and taken to the notorious Bungalow in Alice Springs, before being sent to Darwin, Goulburn and Croker Islands. His lyrics capture the pain of never being reunited with his parents or siblings ever again.' (Heiss, BlackWords : Our Truths Aboriginal Writers and The Stolen Generations, 2015). Singer and song-writer Archie Roach wrote 'Took the Children Away', is a moving indictment of the treatment of indigenous children from the 'Stolen Generation' and a song which 'struck a chord' not only among the wider Aboriginal community, but also national. Inspired by a search for his mother's mother, singer/song-writer Dan Sultan wrote his song 'Kimberley Calling', it tells the story of Sultan finding the grave of his maternal grandmother in Western Australia's Kimberley region, a woman he never knew after his mother was taken from her parents as a child.
'Although not the first song about the enforced separation of Indigenous children from their families, Archie Roach’s song, based on his own life and experience, was released at a time when there was increasing public focus on the Stolen Generations. The significance of the song also resonated outside the Indigenous community with Roach winning ARIA Awards for Best Indigenous Release and Best New Talent in 1991. Took the Children Away received an international Human Rights Achievement Award, the first time that the award had been bestowed on a songwriter.
(...more)Kimberley Calling tells the story of Dan Sultan finding the grave of his maternal grandmother in Western Australia's Kimberley region, a woman he never knew after his mother was taken from her parents as a child.
(...more)'...[Granny Lottie] had much to be bitter about for the events that took place and changed her life. Taken from her parents while still a child, she was placed on a church mission many miles from home. As a result, the sudden switch from a nomadic subsistence existence to a very controlled, disciplined Christian lifestyle was understandably traumatic...'
(...more)'I knocked on her door when I was about seventeen or so and that day my whole life changed. I met family: uncles, aunties, cousins and my brothers and sisters. A new journey had begun.'
(...more)'In the Aboriginal missions of far northern Australia, it was a battle between saving souls and saving traditional culture.
'Every Secret Thing is a rough, tough, hilarious portrayal of the Bush Mob and the Mission Mob, and the hapless clergy trying to convert them. In these tales, everyone is fair game.
'At once playful and sharp, Marie Munkara's wonderfully original stories cast a taunting new light on the mission era in Australia.' (From the publisher's website.)
(...more)In 2008, Rembarrnga writer Marie Munkara’s selected work of short stories Every Secret Thing, won the David Unaipon Award. This work was first published by University of Queensland Press (UQP) in 2009.
Poet and writer, Ali Cobby Eckermann was born in 1963 at Brighton, Adelaide, on Kaurna Country, and grew up on Ngadjuri country between Blyth and Brinkworth in mid-north South Australia. She had travelled extensively and lived most of her adult life on Arrernte country, Jawoyn country and Larrakia country in the Northern Territory. When she was 34,Eckermann had met her birth mother Audrey, and learnt that her mob was Yankunytjatjara from north-west South Australia. Her mother was born near Ooldea, south of Maralinga on Kokatha country. Eckermann relates herself to the Kokatha mob too. (Ali Cobby Eckermann 2013).
'Indigenous singer, performer and songwriter Ruby Hunter was born by a billabong in the Riverland region of South Australia. At the age of eight she was forcibly removed at night from her extended family and told that she was being taken to the circus. For years afterward Hunter was placed in various foster homes and institutions and suffered the many traumas associated with being separated from her Aboriginal family.
'“When I was taken away,” the singer-songwriter says, “all I saw in front of me was white people. Or they wouldn’t be people. They’d be ghosts. White ghosts. Because we had no name for you fellas. I’m a person who’s not speaking English right at the age of eight. To me, you’re ghosts. You’re not people. Shut them out. That’s how you was with me.”' (Source: Larry Schwartz Consulting website)
(...more)This biography is in short story form.
'Lisa Bellear is one of the Stolen Children a generation of Aborigines who have emerged to remind White Australians that past injustices are with us still. Bellear is about to make sure that nobody forgets them...' (Source: from Demsey, Dianne. The warrior poet. Vol. 28, No. 3, Summer 1996:21)
(...more)'...The Incredible Journey, published in 1923, presented a positive view of Indigenous motherhood and raised the issue of stolen children at a time when white public opinion had little interest in or sympathy for these issues... (Source: Allen, Margaret. 'To Put on Record, as Faithfully as Possible': Catherine Martin. New ed. In: Cole, Anna (Editor); Haskins, Victoria (Editor); Paisley, Fiona (Editor). Uncommon Ground: White Women in Aboriginal History. New ed. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2005:241)
(...more)This biographical short story appeared in Us Taken-Away Kids : Commemorating the Tenth Anniversary of the Bringing Them Home Report, 2007.
Betty Lockyer, author of War Baby, was born in 1942 in Beagle Bay, the cultural and traditional land of her grandmother, and her story touches on the Stolen Generations. She writes: 'The kids I grew up with at the mission, and later on at the orphanage in Broome, were like lost souls, plucked out from loved ones' arms, herded like cattle into holding yards and then dumped with strangers in a frightening environment'.
'...I was about five years old when I left the mission, but I can still remember events which must have occurred much earlier than my five-year-old memory...'
(...more)Betty Lockyer is also the author of Last Truck Out, an emotional account of Betty Lockyer's life that describes her early school years, as she witnessed children being forcibly removed from their families.
Traditional oral communication is about The Dreaming and passed on from one generation to the next. They help us to understand about the past, present and future. Oral traditions include the use of story telling, song, dance, art and craft making giving instructions and directions, they help to pass on specific cultural practises and values, languages and laws, histories and family relationships. Today, oral histories are expressed in many ways, through visual arts and drama productions, in contemporary songs, poetry, radio or film, mass media, and electronics sources.
Below is a list of oral histories from 'Stolen Generation Survivors' in forms of short stories, and electronic sources.
'The ‘Stolen Generations’ Testimonies’ project is an initiative to record on film the personal testimonies of Australia’s Stolen Generations Survivors and share them online.'
'The Stolen Generations' Testimonies Foundation hopes the online museum will become a national treasure and a unique and sacred keeping place for Stolen Generations’ Survivors’ Testimonies. By allowing Australians to listen to the Survivors’ stories with open hearts and without judgement, the foundation hopes more people will be engaged in the healing process.
(...more)Warning: Please be aware that this work may contain images of people who are now deceased.
The Colour of my Skin is a children's book that tells stories from Stolen Generations members in the Albury Wodonga and Woomera area, a group known as the 'True Australian Aboriginal Survivors'.
(...more)This is a collection of oral histories about the displacement of Aboriginal adults and children from their traditional lands to the Kahlin Compound and the Retta Dixon Children's Home in the Northern Territiory. The children's home was run by the United Inland Mission and was established within the Government compound in 1947 and both areas are referred to today as the Bagot Reserve. The author Barbara Cummings highlights the forced living of Aboriginal people at the compound to the removal of their children to the Retta Dixon home.
(...more)'The first time I went into Sister Kate's I was about three years old, the second time I was six years old. I hardly ever saw my brothers and sisters except for things like bonfire night, outings to the zoo and church. I was put in Magpie Cottage which was full of fair kids...' (Source: Graeme Dixon, Graeme Dixon in Echoes of the Past : Sister Kate's Home Revisted, 2002:55)
(...more)'The intention of this publication has been to highlight the forced removal of Aboriginal children from their Aboriginal families to be placed in government settlements, missions and children's homes. In this publication Aboriginal people who were removed as children recount personal oral histories of separation from their mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters and extended families. Recounted as well, is the trauma experienced by the parents, who were physically and legally disempowered by the laws and policies which governed all aspects of Aboriginal peoples' lives'.
(...more)Editor's note: What is clear from the Home's history and the personal stories in this collection is that no Home can ever replace the care and love of a close, supportive family.
'This book is a collection of oral histories compiled by Diwurruwurru-jaru at the request of the Katherine Region Stolen Generations Committee...[it] tells the stories from the perspectives of people who were forcibly removed and siblings and children of people who were taken.' (Source: Introduction page 9)
(...more)In this short story Mick Dalgetty talks about when he was taken from Mt Dalgety Station and taken to the Moore River Native Settlement.
(...more)Appears in Yammatji : Aboriginal Memories of the Gascoyne
Warning: Please be aware that this work may contain images of people who are now deceased.
'Oral histories of the history and culture of the Aboriginal peoples in the Gascoyne region of Western Australia; relationships with pastoralists and the law; treatment of Aboriginal people; alcohol; violent conflict; domestic service; health; Baijungu; Inggarda; Jinigudira; Maia; Mandi, Carnarvon.' (Source: TROVE)
(...more)Warning: Please be aware that this work may contain images of people who are now deceased.
A documentary that uses historical footage and interviews with people who were part of the generation of Indigenous Australians forced into unpaid servitude by the Australian government. The title refers to the amount of pocket money the indentured workers were supposed to be given, but never received, while their wages were managed by their 'employers' on behalf of the Aborigines Protection Board.
(...more)Warning: Please be aware that this work may contain images of people who are now deceased.
'Archie Roach was about three years old when he was taken from his family. He talks about the value of 'joining the circle' - his metaphor for the recovery that can be achieved by those who have been separated from their families, as they link up again. We meet Jean in Cootamundra who was taken with her four siblings from La Perouse while her mother begged for more time with her children. When Sam Murray was taken as a young boy he was too young to remember his name.
(...more)Warning: Please be aware that this work may contain images of people who are now deceased.
Stolen Generations, directed and narrated by Aboriginal filmm-maker Darlene Johnson, continues the examination of the impact of the removal of Aboriginal children from their families during the 1950s and 1960s. Using the particular stories of Bobby Randall, Cleonie Quayle and Daisy Howard, the fi lm expands upon the themes of Lousy Little Sixpence, showing the wide range of ways in which Aboriginal children were removed and the variety of destinations for the children.
(...more)Warning: Please be aware that this work may contain images of people who are now deceased.
'A short drama written and performed by Indigenous children about the Stolen Generations. Snake Dreaming is part of the Nganampa Anwernekenhe series produced by Central Australian Aboriginal Media Associaation (CAAMA) Productions. Nganampa Anwernekenhe means 'ours' in the Pitjantjatjara and Arrente languages, and the series aims to contribute to the preservation of Indigenous languages and cultures.' (Film synopsis)
(...more)'Frank Byrne began his search for his mother 60 years ago. The journey is nearly over, as he has found Maudie in a pauper's grave, and must have the remains exhumed and returned back to her country. But Frank faces a new journey, as putting his mother to rest opens new discoveries about his own identity. ' (Source: Screen Australia)
(...more)After the death of her sister, an Indigenous Australian woman travels to her hometown to pay her last respects.
(...more)Stolen is based upon the lives of five Indigenous people, who go by the names of Sandy, Ruby, Jimmy, Anne and Shirley, who dealt with the issues for forceful removal by the Australian government.
(...more)'Ruby's Story is a passionate and emotionally moving concert about stolen children and stolen water, sung and recounted by Ngarrindjeri woman Ruby Hunter and her partner in music and life, Archie Roach (Yorta Yorta).
The much loved and respected Ruby and Archie, both members of the Stolen Generation, are accompanied by Paul Grabowsky and the Australian Art Orchestra in this truly unique performance. The concert recounts Ruby's birth by the side of a billabong near the banks of the Murray River in SA.
(...more)A celebration of life, love and family set in the remote Aboriginal community of Flat Creek, where life is pretty uncomplicated—until a Canberra bureaucrat returns home. (Source: Australian Plays website)
(...more)'An acclaimed play that strikes at the very heart of the Stolen Generations, exploring the impact on an individual and a culture when relationships are brutally broken.' 'Based on the life story of Geoffrey Narkle, King Hit mirrors the lives of many Aboriginal people of his generation. Forcibly removed from his family, Geoffrey was raised on Wandering Mission before leaving to join Stewart's Boxing Troupe, where he travelled the South West as a tent boxer.'
'Ultimately it would be Geoffrey's fighting spirit that gave him the strength to turn away from a downward spiral of despair and find peace within and reconcile broken family bonds.
(...more)'The Fence' was devised by a team of artists working in consultation with Indigenous and non-Indigenous community members with related experiences.
'Bertolt Brecht's epic morality tale about the ravages of war is given a unique twist by Queensland Theatre Company Artistic Director Wesley Enoch and Paula Nazarski in a dazzling new translation.
Instead of the 'Thirty Years' War of 1600s Europe, this near-future incarnation of the age-old story is set against the bleak backdrop of a post-apocalyptic desert where Mad Max might be at home - an Australia ravaged by devastating conflict, where life is cheap but business is still business.
(...more)'Every hill got a story is the first comprehensive history of Central Australia’s Aboriginal people, as told in their own words and many languages.
'Nyinanyi ngurangka – being on country – is not a ‘lifestyle choice’ but a hard-won right, a spiritual and cultural duty, a constant battle, a source of happiness and opportunity and the meaning of life all at the same time.
'In this heartbreaking, funny and poignant collection, 127 eminent men and women remember surviving first contact, massacres and forced removals and resisting more than a century of top-down government policies.
(...more)''I'm your half-brother and I'm here to stay. This is my home.' With these words Wilmot Abraham sought refuge with his white relations. Wilmot was the best-known Aboriginal in the Warrnambool district of Victoria, a man who maintained the old way of life long after his people were dispossessed. Local farmers spoke of him as 'the last of his tribe'. Few were aware that his father had been a white lad working as a boundary rider on the Western District frontier; and only the Aboriginal community knew that Wilmot had barely escaped with his life from the violent seizure of his mother's people's country.
(...more)'Survival In Our Own Land presents history in 'South Australia' for the first time from the point of view of Nungas, as many 'Aborigines' call themselves, showing Goonyas, as Europeans are called, as the invaders.
Almost 150 Nungas have told how the Goonya invasion and implementation of Goonya law and policy have affected us. Fifty years ago for 'South Australia's' centenary we were a chapter in a Goonya book. Now we are our own books.
The stories, in prose and poetry, speak volumes of much that has been previously omitted from history and textbooks.
(...more)'These stories rise out of the pain of separation and displacement. Showing hope and forgiveness, the writers give an insight into the strength of the human spirit. The Stolen Children - Their Stories is an acknowledgement of the human tragedy created during a misunderstood and shameful part of Australia's history. The Stolen Children - Their Stories includes a collection of documents and personal stories of Indigenous people that appear in the Report from the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Bringing Them Home.
(...more)The following stories are written just as they were told to the Inquiry. The names of the authors are the false names used in Bringing Them Home for the purpose of preserving anonymity and protecting the privacy of the authors and their families.' (The Stories, Carmel Bird)
'Separating Aboriginal children from family and community began as soon as Europeans set foot on our land. The belief that it is in the best interest of Aboriginal children to be removed from Aboriginal culture and assimilated into White culture has justified the systematic disruption of Aboriginal families. This book traces the history of removing Aboriginal children in New South Wales and contains testimonies of Aboriginals whose lives have been profoundly and painfully altered by separation.
(...more)Dedication: We dedicate this work to all our Elders who never saw their children again and to all our children who never came home.
We also dedicate this to our parents, who have suffered terribly in having their children systematically taken away from them, and who continue to blame themselves for losing us.
A brief collection of autobiographical works, including stories about being taken away, about mission life, and about being reconnected with family.
(...more)Introduction states: 'To commemorate the 10th anniversary of the publication of the Bringing Them Home report (1997), it is fitting that we should look to those whose stories of removal formed the basis of the report and its recommendations. With this in mind, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission invited Indigenous peoples across Australia to tell us their experiences of removal, their thoughts ten years on from the Inquiry and their hopes for the future.
(...more)Available on-line here
'Read why Aboriginal children were stolen from their families, where they were taken and what happened to them. The horrific abuse they suffered in institutions and foster families left thousands traumatised for life.' (Creative Spirits website)
See Creative Spirits website for their Guide to the Stolen Generations.
Australians Together is a fresh approach to building relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians that seeks to plant a seed in peoples’ hearts and minds; the idea that Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians can live in respectful, peer relationships with each other.
See this website's Discover stories : The Stolen Generations page.
In this essay Heiss demonstrates that stories, poetry, songs, plays and memoirs are 'living' evidence of truths otherwise untold or appropriated (Source: Introduction)
(...more)This essay is on-line, see also BlackWords Essays Trails
See the National Library of Australia's website for this collection of online Bringing Them Home interviews.
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