Keith Windschuttle - The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume Three, The Stolen Generations 1881-2008

The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume Three, The Stolen Generations 1881-2008

Published in 2009, the argument of this book is that the Stolen Generations is a myth.

Key elements of the story of the Stolen Generations are that children of Aboriginal descent were allegedly forcibly removed from their families and their culture. It is alleged that the children were removed as young as possible so that they could be raised to be ignorant of their culture and people and that the ultimate intent was to end the existence of the Aborigines as a distinct people. It was also alleged that, as a part of this policy, parents were deliberately prevented from maintaining contact with their children. Windschuttle cites the words of the principal historian of the Stolen Generations, Peter Read: "Welfare officers, removing children solely because they were Aboriginal, intended and arranged that they should lose their Aboriginality, and that they never return home".

Windschuttle's argues that his analysis of the records shows that Aboriginal children "were never removed from their families in order to put an end to Aboriginality or, indeed, to serve any improper government policy or program". He found a similar level of misrepresentation and fabrication in the history of the alleged Stolen Generations as he had in his previous study on Van Diemen's Land. He argues that "until the term stolen generations first appeared in 1981, there had been no popular tradition among Aboriginal people that employed either the term or the concept". Indeed, one of the organisations now accused of participation in the removals had Aboriginal rights activists working as members of the board and yet apparently they didn't notice that they were "stealing" children. In 1981, a "then unknown white postgraduate history student, Peter Read" wrote, "in the course of just one day", a twenty-page pamphlet to make the case. "He alone was granted the vision denied to all who came before him".

Two years later, Coral Edwards, a colleague of Peter Read at the Link-Up social work organization, made a speech to a meeting of the National Aboriginal Consultative Council to seek funds for Link-Up and referred to the claims made in Read's pamphlet. "Edwards's speech came as a bombshell. Mothers had not voluntarily given their children away, she said. Rather, "the governments never intended that the children should ever return". Windschuttle argues that Read's "version of events was deeply comforting". "Mothers had not given their children away, fathers had not left their children destitute or deserted their families or been so consumed by alcohol they left them vulnerable to sexual predators"... "Aborigines could suddenly identify as morally innocent victims of a terrible injustice. Their problems could all be blamed on faceless white bureaucrats driven by racism. Since Read created this interpretation, it has come to be believed by most Aboriginal people in Australia".

With regard to the Human Rights Commission investigation into the Stolen Generations and their 1997 report entitled Bringing Them Home, he writes: "The empirical underpinnings of Bringing Them Home derived largely from the work of white academic historians. The Human Rights Commission did no serious research of its own into the primary historical sources. Co-authors Ronald Wilson and Mick Dodson also declined to hear any evidence that might have contradicted their preferred interpretation. They did not call witnesses from many of the still-living public officials responsible for child removal to hear or test their reasons for their policies and practices. The commission's only original contribution was to solicit the testimony of 535 Aboriginal people who had been removed from their parents and who spoke about their own experiences. While many of these stories were completely believable in what they said about what happened and how they felt, it is nonetheless true that when these witnesses were children they were not in a position to comprehend the question at the centre of the accusation of genocide, the motives of government policy makers".

He argues that only a small number of children were actually removed (approximately 8,250 in the period 1880 to 1971), far less than the tens of thousands claimed, and that most of the removed children had been orphaned or were abandoned, destitute, neglected or subjected to various forms of exploitation and abuse. These removals were based on traditional grounds of child welfare. He argues that his analysis of welfare policy shows that none of the policies that allowed the removal of Aboriginal children were unique to Aborigines and that the evidence shows they were removed for the same child welfare reasons as white children who were in similar circumstances. "A significant number of other children were vol­untarily placed in institutions by Aboriginal parents to give them an education and a better chance in life".

In Western Australia, the majority of the children who are claimed to have been removed and placed in state Aboriginal settlements, in fact went to those settlements with their destitute parents.

In New South Wales, Aboriginal children were placed in apprenticeships to enable them to acquire the skills to earn a living and be independent of welfare in a program that "was a replica of measures that had already been applied to white children in welfare institutions in New South Wales for several decades, and to poor English children for several centuries before that".

Windschuttle's argues that the evidence shows that the claims that parents were deliberately prevented from maintaining contact with their children and that the children were prevented from returning home are falsehoods. In New South Wales, for example, the relevant government board not only allowed parents to visit their children in the Aborigines Protection Board Children's Homes, it provided them with train fare and a daily living allowance to enable them to do so. When children of Aboriginal descent were apprenticed to employers, they often returned home for the holidays and when necessary, were accompanied by officers of the responsible government board to ensure they reached home safely. When they finished their apprenticeships, in common with apprentices of other races, they were free to go wherever they pleased including back to their original homes, permanently or for social visits.

With respect to the testing of the claims in court, Windschuttle writes: ".... when they tested specific policies before the Federal Court, and when they argued the general intentions of the parliaments and legislators before the High Court, the historians and political activists who invented the notion of the Stolen Generations proved incapable of substantiating their case. As far as Australia's highest courts are concerned, the central hypothesis of the Stolen Generations is legally extinct"... "The only legal cases with any potential credibility would be those made by individuals such as Bruce Trevorrow, who was unlawfully removed from his family and suffered badly as a result". However in the Trevorrow case, Windschuttle argues that the decision shows "that the actions of the Aborigines Protection Board in placing Bruce in foster care without his parents' agreement was actually illegal at the time" and not the result of a policy of removal but rather the illegal actions of welfare officials who believed, rightly or wrongly, that Bruce Trevorrow was neglected and that his health and life would be in danger if they returned him to his mother. The fact that Bruce Trevorrow's siblings were never removed is an indicator that there was no such policy and that welfare officials were not empowered to remove Aboriginal children on racial grounds.