It is hoped that prime minister Kevin Rudd's recent apology to the Aborigines will mean a sea change in attitudes towards Australia's indigenous people - but for some of those who were forcibly removed from their families as children, the trauma goes on, writes Brian O'Connell
ON FEBRUARY 13TH, Aborigines from all over Australia gathered to hear a brief televised statement for which some of them had spent decades campaigning. The new Australian prime minister, Kevin Rudd, apologised on behalf of the government for the policy of forcibly removing children from Aborigine families, a practice which continued until the 1970s.
The apology came more than 10 years after the Bringing Them Homehuman rights report recommended that the government say sorry for the policy of removing indigenous children from their parents. Children were often removed on the pretext of dubious "child welfare" concerns, and almost always placed with families in the non-Aborigine community, sometimes hundreds of miles away. The 1996 inquiry estimated that between 1910 and 1970, at least one in every 10 indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families and placed in church missions, institutions, adopted or fostered.
The intent was clear: the wholesale destruction of a community, a process that mirrored the emergence of a modern Australian state. Since the report in 1997, every individual state in Australia has taken the initiative and issued its own apology, but while former prime minister John Howard expressed a "deep and sincere regret" for past injustices, he consistently stopped short of issuing a full apology while in power.
In contrast, prime minister Rudd made the apology the first item of business for the new parliament, describing it, as "building a bridge of respect which I think has been in some state of disrepair in recent decades". The apology asserted that the time had now come for the nation to "turn a new page in Australia's history by righting the wrongs of the past and moving forward with confidence to the future". The government also acknowledged the "laws and policies of successive parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians".
Proving that the apology was not an isolated act, last week Rudd again made a statement on Aborigine affairs. This time he pledged action to increase life expectancy among the Aborigine community. His statement followed a report that white Australians outlive Aborigines by an average of 17 years, and that the death rate of Aborigine infants before their first birthday is double that of non-indigenous children. Rudd said the government was "100 per cent committed to working in partnership with [the Aborigine community] over the weeks, months and years ahead".
IN GENERAL, ABORIGINE communities have welcomed Rudd's gestures as a step in the right direction, many seeing it as the beginning of the end of a policy of systematic discrimination against their people. Others are more cautious though.
"There are three times when white Australia has stood up against the treatment of our community," aborigine leader Alf Bambeltt says. "One was a referendum in 1967 where 93 per cent supported the need to try and address the issue. The other was in 1988 when people marched all over the country in support of our people. And this recent apology is seen as the third instance. That's three events in Australia's 205-year history - it's a little bit of an imbalance, don't you think?"
Despite the historical reticence, Bambeltt sees the recent apology as a much-needed marker on the road to reconciliation. The Aborigine movement has been calling for such a public gesture for a long time, and when it came it made for an emotional day. Yet significant issues remain for the indigenous community, including access to counselling services and other financial concerns. The struggle to change embedded societal attitudes also continues.
"If you just look at the issue of citizenship, for example," says Bambeltt, "today many Australians have dual citizenship, such as Greek Australian, or Lebanese or English, and so on. When it comes to Aborigines, though, we are either Australian or Aborigine. We don't have the option for dual citizenship. So what that is saying is that we are a separate entity, and that permeates the whole of our experience in society, including accessing goods and services. The attitude is, we shouldn't be here. So, along with the apology, we need to see the proper recognition of all people in this country. Kids are taught in schools that Captain Cook found Australia. But when were we ever lost?"
Of paramount importance, says Bambeltt, is the need for schools to be able to cater for Aborigine children, teaching them who they are and where they came from. He believes education has a key role to play in eroding stereotypes.
"It's more accurate to describe us an urban entity today, but society is happy to cling to outdated aspects of our identity, which has us living in the bush and eating bugs," says Bambeltt. "That needs to change."
On the day of the apology, Bambeltt gathered with others from his community in a room where the government message was screened.
"It was a very emotional time," he says. "Before it began, I reflected on my own family and the removal of some of our kids. I was fortunate enough to be able to find them later and bring them home. There is one we didn't get, and it's taken us quite a few years to develop a relationship with him. But we have tried to raise our kids to be proud of where they came from and know who they belong to. There was a great feeling of hope in the hall that day, but there are many out there who have stories to tell."
AT THE OFFICES of the Stolen Generations organisation, on the outskirts of Melbourne, Donna Charles wipes a tear from her eye as she recalls the events that led to her separation from her mother. She still finds it incredibly difficult to come to terms with her forced removal (along with her sister, Lisa) from her family home three decades ago.
Life in the intervening years has been something of a struggle for Charles, a 38-year-old mother of four. For most of her upbringing, local media hounded her and Lisa as their case became something of a proxy battle between white Australia and the native community.
On the one side were their mother and local Aborigine advocates, who fought through the courts to reverse the decision to remove the children and foster them with a local German business family. Against them was a predominantly white community, with political clout and financial muscle, which felt it had a duty to assimilate Aborigine children into mainstream society. Caught in the middle were two kids, who couldn't understand why they had to leave their mother.
"For four years my mum fought through the courts to keep me and my sister," says Charles. "I remember being very young and police cars calling to our home and suddenly taking us from our mother to a foster home in Melbourne. The family fighting my mum for custody were wealthy and had a lot of influence, and everywhere we went the media followed us."
She remembers heartbreaking visits by her mother to a dormitory where both girls were placed while the case progressed through the courts. "We wanted our mum, and it was really terrible to be taken from home and placed in those dormitories. I was three years old when I was first removed, and I remember those institutions as miserable, rotten places. I remember a whole line of beds on one side and a whole line on the other side. When mum came to visit, we would run to her and not want to let go, because she was the only person we knew. It was a really deep feeling of being very alone and then running to her and being comforted and then she had to let go again."
The stress of the public court battle took its toil on Charles's mother, and she took a fatal overdose just as the case was nearing its end. As Charles recalls the incident, her eyes fill with tears and she is unable to continue the interview. This is the first time she has recounted her story publicly, and her pain and sense of loss are tangible.
I suggest taking a break or arranging to meet another day. She asks for a few minutes, takes a cigarette break, and returns to the room. She wants her story to be heard. She needs to tell it, she says.
"After Mum passed, the media kept following our case and we moved from town to town to try get some privacy," she says. "They were fascinated with us, because I guess so many other cases like ours were happening at the time. I remember one newspaper staged a photo showing the position on the ground of our mum when she died. It was incredibly hurtful. Once Mum was buried, we were handed over to the Bausch family - I was about seven years old."
Charles's sister, Lisa, was, "scared of everybody and everyone" and depended on her sister for safety. The Bausch family educated the girls and raised them as their own, but two years after they adopted the girls, the parents split up. As adolescence approached, Charles wanted to know about her birth mum and visited her paternal grandmother.
"I was 15 or 16 and really wanted to know more, so I arranged to visit my nana. She told me more about my mother. I had always felt her presence and I used to wonder why certain things moved in the house. My nana told me that all people come back after they pass, and I felt reassured by that. Mum had been watching over us all along."
To mark the televised government apology a few weeks back, Charles met up with other victims in her local town. During a minute's silence, she closed her eyes and spoke to her mother. For the first time, she felt some aspect of closure on her past.
"The apology can't change the past or bring back what has been taken from my life, but I now have four children and I need to move on and learn as a parent. I want my girls to be proud of themselves, and have good self-esteem and know who they are. I just try and take every day as it comes and be the best mum to them I can be."
" We wanted our mum, and it was terrible to be taken from home and placed in those dormitories
