An article in the last issue of People and Place by Grazyna S. Majchrzak-Hamilton and Neil T. M. Hamilton¹ claims that Aborigines (or part-Aborigines) who were forcibly removed from their parents’ care as children by government action have suffered worse socio-economic outcomes than those who were not so removed. The people who were removed were the subject of a report published by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) in 1997, Bringing Them Home,² and the article seeks to add to our understanding of its findings by examining socio-economic outcomes for the two categories.

The HREOC report has sparked a major national debate and the article’s use of the term ‘stolen generation’ is provocative. The term is not used by the report itself and is strongly resented by some of the major protagonists in the debate, not least the Federal and most State Governments, as well as a host of ordinary citizens. But apart from this question of nomenclature, the authors have fallen into manifest error.

First, they have failed to appreciate the very finely defined category of children which is alone the subject of the report, namely those Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (ATSI) children separated from their families by ‘compulsion, duress or undue influence’. HREOC shortens this phrase to ‘forcible removal’³ and I will hence refer to these children as ‘FRC’ — Forcibly Removed Children.

Majchrzak-Hamilton and Hamilton tell us in their introduction that they will use data from the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Survey (NATSIS) conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) in 1994 to examine two ATSI groups, the one comprising children separated from their families and the other not. But this strategy cannot add to any knowledge discovered by the report because the people identified as separated were not all ‘forcibly removed’ and the survey would have missed many of those who were.

Because they lack a clear focus on the FRC, the authors are blinded to the fatal inadequacy of the NATSIS data for their purposes. Its key question: ‘Were you taken away from your natural family by a mission, the Government, or welfare?’, does not identify FRC out of those ATSI people actually interviewed.⁴ The report, Bringing Them Home, observed that there were actually three categories of separated children, of which only one, the FRC, was its proper subject matter.⁵ The excluded categories comprise those children orphaned or abandoned and taken into care in the absence of indigenous carers, and those children whose separation was voluntary. That is, it took place with the consent or acquiescence of the family. The report did not estimate the total numbers in each category, or even their relative proportions. This task would probably be impossible. Nonetheless, it is the FRC who were the focus of its investigations. It is necessary to be scrupulous in recognising the distinctions between these three categories for the purpose of attributing guilt and securing damages and compensation.

The authors of the article also seem to be unaware that the category of FRC contains an anomaly for their strictly socio-economic focus. The FRC are divided (though this is not made clear in Bringing Them Home) by a temporal zigzag line drawn from 1935 in Tasmania through to 1965 in Queensland and the Australia Capital Territory, the intermediate points being 1940 in New South Wales, 1954 in Western Australia, 1957 in Victoria, 1962 in South Australia, and 1964 in the Northern Territory. These dates are the respective dates when the old arbitrary powers of the State and Territory governments to order indigenous children about were repealed and replaced by the various child welfare and juvenile justice legislations.⁶ That is, all the FRC separated since the relevant dates have been separated under non-discriminatory laws applicable to all Australian children (and if that makes them ‘stolen’, then so too must be all the non-indigenous children who suffered the same fate). They were, or are, in care or in juvenile correctional institutions because a Court has, on evidence and according to the law, found them either to be neglected or in moral or physical danger or guilty of a criminal offence.

All those children of indigenous ancestry removed prior to the relevant date are the children whom the public would think of as ‘stolen children’. I will refer to them as the ‘pre-ZZ FRC’. It may have been logical for the report to treat both the pre-ZZ and the post-ZZ children as FRC since their formal mode of removal was in both cases ‘forcible’, but the profile of each category is quite different and this difference is significant.

The post-ZZ FRC are an entirely different cohort from the pre-ZZ group. They are younger (typically under 35 but varying from State to State — under 58 in New South Wales) and more likely to be in trouble with welfare authorities or the police. This is necessarily so because their separation is a result of being taken into care or detention pursuant to welfare or juvenile justice laws. As at 1993 there were 220 of them in corrective institutions, and 2,419 in care.⁷

The pre- and post-ZZ groups present a problem for the HREOC which it has not been able to resolve. On the one hand, the report treats all children forcibly removed from year dot down to last Friday’s line-up in the Children’s Court as the uniform victims of a genocidal destruction that continues unabated even as we read. (Mick Dodson, then ATSI social justice commissioner for HREOC and a co-author of the report, told the World Congress on the Rights of Children in San Francisco in 1997 that, while the policy of ‘genocide’ was no longer official practice, ‘they are now effectively doing the same thing under a different guise’.)⁸

The report probably fails to maintain a distinction between the two groups because its authors believe that the removal of a child from the family for any reason at all is an evil which ineluctably initiates a downward trajectory in the life and happiness of the child, a life which up till then had been, and would otherwise have continued to be, full, healthy and blessed. This rationale could maybe apply to the pre-ZZ FRC arbitrarily plucked to another life elsewhere, but to the post-ZZ FRC?

The report’s answer to the dilemma posed by the two categories is a bland dismissal; nothing changed after the ZZ date. This will not hold water morally or factually. It may be true that the minds of all concerned did not change overnight with the new legislation, but the change in practices and procedures was dramatic and unmistakable; evidence had to be got for a start, magistrates had to be convinced, law and order had to be observed, all of which has continued to the present day. The experience of the post-ZZ FRC is thus the reverse of their predecessors. The act of removal follows upon a prior life of neglect or the commission of a criminal offence, and the judge who ordered it cannot be tainted with the moral odium reserved for the old, arbitrary takings.

But while the report does not treat the temporal distinction seriously, the ‘stolen generation’ article ignores it, just as it ignores the distinction between the different types of separation pre and post ZZ.

The pre-ZZ FRC were virtually all of mixed ancestry. Indeed most were removed for the very reason they had non-indigenous ancestry. They were purposefully taken for assimilation, as far as practicably possible, into the white community. A sizeable proportion were fostered or adopted by white families. Many of them would not identify as ATSI today, just as many non-removed people of mixed ancestry would not identify. For example, in parts of Australia mixed-blood communities formed outside the full-blood indigenous communities with every ambition of becoming part of the broader society. One motivation for this was that, in a number of places, the full bloods sometimes rejected the mixed bloods, neglected them or even killed them, practices which continued into the life times of people alive today.⁹

Situations of this kind provide one reason for people of mixed ancestry to seek a future outside the indigenous fold. Whatever the precise practices in different times and places, and irrespective of the exact numbers involved, many people of mixed ancestry, including many pre-ZZ FRC, have sought and found acceptance within the broader community and now find no need or wish to identify as indigenous. Intermarriage has accelerated the integration of this mixed-ancestry group and their loss of manifest Aboriginality. For example, 64 per cent of all unions involving at least one indigenous partner are now between a non-indigenous partner and an indigene¹⁰ (a figure which, of course, does not include those who do not choose to announce their Aboriginality). And 72.6 per cent of self-identifying indigenes now live in urban areas.¹¹

Neither the report nor the article pay consistent attention to the way in which different tendencies to identify as an indigenous Australian might influence their findings. This failing is clearly exposed in the article’s use of the NATSIS data. This was a national household survey designed to select ATSI respondents. Herein lies the first problem. How could this survey select respondents who, though they had at least some ATSI ancestry, did not wish to identify as ATSI or did not know of their ATSI origins?¹² Majchrzak-Hamilton and Hamilton quote Peter Read’s estimate that ‘half of [all separated children] ... may be still unaware of their origins or choose not to self-identify as Aboriginal people’.¹³ It is not possible to check or quantify this estimate but if it is to be accepted as valid — and the authors do accept it — then they can draw no conclusions at all about the relative outcomes for separated and non-separated children from the NATSIS data.

At the most, as far as the separated children are concerned, NATSIS tells us something about persons who have two statistical characteristics: they willingly identify themselves as having ATSI origins and they believe that they have either been, or have not been, separated from their families when they were children. As far as the FRC are concerned, this sample pool undoubtedly excludes all those FRC who in 1994, though they had at least some ATSI ancestry, either did not know this fact or did not choose to reveal it. It is more than likely that the group who did not identify as ATSI would have included people who had reached higher levels of socio-economic achievement than those who did identify. And the key question on separation fails to distinguish the FRC from those separated in other circumstances. When respondents were asked: ‘Were you taken away from your natural family by a mission, the Government or welfare?’ all three groups of separated children would probably have answered: ‘Yes’. Even people handed over for upbringing by other kith or kin may well have felt that welfare had a hand in it and answered: ‘Yes’.

The article creates the impression that it is describing the social and economic outcomes experienced by a key group of people of indigenous ancestry, those who were forcibly separated from their families for the purpose of assimilation. It then seeks to compare these outcomes with those for indigenous people who did not have this history. It does not achieve its goal because it does not have representative data on the key group.

Despite this, the authors conclude that child-removal polices have been a ‘total failure’.¹⁴ But there may be many FRC who are alive today only because of these policies. Consider the testimony of Mrs Marj Harris, FRC, and born in 1930 to an Arunta mother and an Irish father. She was interviewed for Channel 9 in August 1997.

Marj Harris: My mother was mistreated because she had my brother. He was half caste. He was done away at birth. My mother did it — hit him on the head. My grandmother told me. Then I came along. Mum, she tried the same thing, hit me on the head. She missed the main part, hit me here. [Lifts hair and reveals depressed temple.]

Channel 9: How come she didn’t succeed?

Marj Harris: My grandmother came along and held me against her breast, and kept me.

Channel 9: Did this go on a lot?

Marj Harris: Oh yes. A lot of others did away with their children, and the reason was the clan didn’t accept them having white children.

Channel 9: If you hadn’t been taken away?

Marj Harris: I’d be sitting in Todd River drinking myself silly and I’d be taxpayers’ problem, that’s how I look at it.¹⁵