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Aboriginal Legal Service of Western Australia (Inc), May 1996
Aboriginal Legal Service of Western Australia (Inc), July 1995
Reviewed by Roderic Pitty
After the Removal is a deeply disturbing, massively moving and positively powerful plea for a bit of belated humanity to be demonstrated by governments who have destroyed and are destroying many thousands of Aboriginal lives by robbing Indigenous children of their culture and the essence of family love. This submission from the Aboriginal Legal Service in Western Australia to the current inquiry by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission exposes the destructive intent and awful human costs of assimilation policies, and shows how to help fix up the resulting mess. The purpose of After the Removal is to explain the pain felt, and the demands for urgent change expressed, by 710 survivors of assimilation who told their stories to the Aboriginal Legal Service. Telling Our Story may be read with it as a kind of companion volume.
Telling Our Story was produced by the ALS in 1995, before the national inquiry began. The horrors revealed in Telling Our Story cannot be summarised, only read in the form of many individual and a few family case studies. A common cry of all the survivors is: why was such hurt inflicted on children, siblings and parents?
The reason was stated without apology by a barbarian named AO Neville, who abused the title 'Chief Protector of Aborigines in Western Australia' from 1915 to 1940. At a conference in Canberra in 1937, he remarked '... the native population is increasing. What is to be the limit? Are we going to have a population of I million blacks in the Commonwealth, or are we going to merge them into our white community and eventually forget that there were ever any Aborigines in Australia?'. Neville's cruelly racist manifesto of genocide, as expressed in this speech, is the first appendix to Telling Our Story; his legacy is outlined in the second appendix in several dozen profiles of Aboriginal survivors, who remain caught between Aboriginal culture and white society.
The terrible prolonged effects of forced separation on Indigenous people are clearly analysed in Telling Our Story, including comparisons with North America. A survey reported in After the Removal shows physical abuse in the form of cruel punishment and torture was very common in missions, where 85% of stolen children were held. Two out of every three in missions suffered such abuse, compared to one out of three held in government institutions and foster care. While most sexual abuse was perpetrated in missions, a greater proportion of children forced into foster care reported sexual abuse (15% in foster care compared to 11% in missions). At least one in every four stolen children (and perhaps one in three or two) later spent time in gaol.
Possible remedies are outlined in Telling Our Story and explored at length in After the Removal. Aboriginal survivors demand: governments and churches apologise; help getting families together; secure housing; appropriate health services and elderly care; better education, especially for youth self-esteem; self-government and compensation; and urgent action to end the separation, through high imprisonment, of Aboriginal families.
Compensation is defined in After the Removal as one form of reparation, along with restitution and rehabilitation, for losses suffered. Causes of legal action for victims could include breach of fiduciary and statutory duties by governments to protect Aboriginal children from abuse; negligence; wrongful imprisonment; and breach of Constitutional rights. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, ratified by Australia in 1949, is extensively assessed. Common law damages and relevant international human rights standards are also examined.
The first two of 166 recommendations in After the Removal, that governments accept civilised principles for compensating victims, have been rejected by the current Commonwealth Government. The Commonwealth in its submission to the national inquiry, when giving reasons for denying compensation, contrasted 'actions which may later be considered to be unacceptable by the standards of their own time and actions which are later considered to be unacceptable in the light of changes in standards and values'. Yet genocide was not acceptable internationally soon after 1937 at the latest: why else did Aboriginal soldiers join so many others fighting Nazism? More importantly, it is stressed in After the Removal that '[p]eople continue to suffer as a result of the assimilation policies and removal practices which are now prohibited by international instruments to which Australia is a party.'
After the Removal includes substantial analysis of how extreme forms of institutionalised racism still today separate Aboriginal children from their families. Extremely high levels of juvenile and adult Aboriginal imprisonment in Western Australia are in large part an awful legacy of the failure of governments to start to redress the disastrous social and psychological effects of disrupting Aboriginal families across generations.
The tone of the writing in After the Removal is restrained, creating a contrast with the personal stories of trauma that introduce each chapter. These pleas for a hearing, for compassion to make amends a little for policies bearing 'the hallmark of totalitarianism and the antithesis of representative government' (to quote the International Commission of Jurists' opinion included as an appendix) which were and are the result of populist racism, are supported by much coherent research. After the Removal is dedicated to Rob Riley, 'who worked tirelessly to have the story told', like so many: without compensation.
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URL: http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/AboriginalLawB/1996/85.html