AustLit
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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 whose children had been taken. Some poems capture the pain of people who were taken as children and 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.
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'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)Doris Kartinyeri's autobiography is written in the form of poetry.
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'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.
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See Also Eva Johnson's poem 'Protection'.
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'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's '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 nationalyl. 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.
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'"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 nationally. The song was awarded two ARIA Awards, as well as an international Human Rights Achievement Award, the first time this had been awarded to a songwriter because of a song. The album it came from featured in Rolling Stone magazine's Top 100 Albums for 1992.
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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.
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