Australia says SORRY to the Aborigenes

[Truth Bearer]

Or how about this one....

This is what the white man came across back in 1770..Their living conditions.

[Truth Bearer]

That's right these are luxury homes for them.......The Red Indian,Inuit and even the black African had much better living conditions.

[Truth Bearer]

Stolen generations: My Melbourne Writers’ Festival speech

Andrew Bolt
Tuesday, September 05, 2006 at 10:59am


Tonight we debate the stolen generations - the claim that between 1910 and 1970 as many as 100,000 aboriginal children were stolen from caring parents for racist reasons.

Robert says the figure is actually lower. He suggests one in 10 Aboriginal children were stolen from 1910, and estimates the total number at up to 25,000.

But what do we mean by “stolen”. Let me tell how Robert has defined it.

Says he: “It was not from harm that the mixed-descent children were rescued but from their Aboriginality.” (1)

And, he said in one essay, this was overseen by authorities who “wished, in part through the child removal policy, to help keep White Australia pure”.

So, he adds: The “stolen generations is for Aboriginal Australians what the term Holocaust was for the Jews’’. (2)

Now I do not deny some children – and not just Aboriginal - were removed from their families for reasons that weren’t good enough, or sent to some homes that weren’t good enough, either. And I have heard many – Lowitja O’Donoghue, for one - tell of the pain of growing up without the love and attention of parents, for whatever reason, and I find them heartbreaking.

So what am I saying? I am saying that Robert, who for perhaps eight years has been the leading advocate of the “stolen generations” theory, has never given the proof that we had here a Holocaust or genocide.

He has never proved that anything like 25,000 children were stolen – and were stolen because they were Aboriginal, rather than because they simply needed help.

In fact the reason I am here is that I challenged Robert in a radio debate - and in writing – to name just some of these 25,000 children he claims were stolen from 1910 to save them from their Aboriginality. To name not, say, 2000 of them, or even just 200 or a mere 20.

No, I asked him to name just 10. Just 10 children truly stolen just to save them from being Aboriginal.

Only 10, Robert.

(Click on title for the full speech.)

It is not a pedantic request. If we could see the real children we could then check the real reasons for their separation to see if the reality matched Robert’s theory. We are entitled to ask for those names, and the evidence, and no one should be too proud or delicate to answer.

Yet Robert – and not only him – has found this job of producing names extremely hard. Over the years he has several times named several people, famous cases, who’d been stolen, only to find they had in fact not been stolen at all.

Then, after my radio challenge, he tried again – searching for those 10 names I wanted. But he had to go back to well before 1910, and when I checked his list I found it in fact comprised names such as that of Topsy, who turned out – the poor girl - to be http://histrsss.anu.edu.au/briscoe/7.html” title="a fatherless 12-year-old with syphilis">a fatherless 12-year-old with syphilis. Dolly, I discovered, was actually a 13-year-old who was seven months pregnant and working for no wages on a station when she was rescued and sent to missionaries for the care she needed.

These were http://histrsss.anu.edu.au/briscoe/7.html” title="children saved from sexual abuse and desperate need">children saved from sexual abuse and desperate need, Robert. Why did you tell me they were stolen – as in saved from their Aboriginality? Or do you think it’s more authentically Aboriginal to be sick and pregnant and poor and abused?

Robert has tried again and now given me another list of 10 names – actually 12 names, as it happens - which I have in my hand. (3)

But I am here tonight not because he at last could name 10 – or 12 - truly stolen children, but because he could not. He has failed again.

Robert may try again in a few minutes and try to surprise me with yet more names. Or some of you may even stand up and say “I’m stolen” and demand I take your story on trust.

But as of right now this list is Robert’s best attempt in eight years of research to name the most undeniable examples of children who were stolen.

Having checked it, I now ask you this:

When the leading advocate of the “stolen generations” still can not - after eight years of looking – name even 10 children stolen for racist reasons, is it because there isn’t actually a “stolen generation” to find? Where are the children?


But before I discuss Robert’s list, I must ask you: How important to you is the truth?

You see, I suspect that no matter what proofs I might present tonight, some of you will refuse to even consider them.

You may think it cruel to even ask for evidence of the “stolen generations”. Or you may just be too frightened for your good name to dare doubt.

I sure understand that, because when I’ve questioned the evidence of the “stolen generations”, I’ve been accused not of being wrong but of being bad.

Robert, for instance, has accused me directly, or implicitly, of playing the race card, of being part of a conspiracy, of being “simplistic, sensationalist, misleading and mischievous”, of being a “terrible simplifier”, of having “little capacity for empathy”, of wanting Aborigines to hold gratitude days for being conquered and so on.

It’s not true and it’s not pleasant. So I need to do one thing before I discuss the evidence – I need to give you permission to believe it.

Here, then, is why it’s right and good and decent and kind to believe that, no, the “stolen generations” are in fact, just as the evidence suggest, a myth. It’s moral not to believe this myth, this theory, because it is now causing such terrible harm.

It’s not just that the “stolen generations” theory has robbed children of pride in their country; that this myth has given newcomers less reason to embrace us, that it has made villains of heroes who once saved children abandoned by everyone else, and that it tells Aboriginal children that this is such a genocidal society that they should not even want to join it, even if they dared.

Worst that even all that is that Robert’s theory of the “stolen generations” is actually killing children.

Of course, I need to explain.

By now you must all know there has been an epidemic of child abuse in Aboriginal settlements.

Professor Bonnie Robertson, for instance, warned in a 1999 study of Queensland’s communities that the violence – including against children - was out of control and gave many horrific examples, such as the girl one witness saw being checked for sexual diseases after her arrest for shoplifting.

Just 14, she was, but the witness said: “I have never seen a girl so red raw inside...Turns out she had been sexually assaulted since the age of three. (She) was the first person I have seen that I have thought, ‘There is no hope for you.’”

It’s shocking. We’ve loved arguing about what was allegedly done to Aboriginal children half a century ago, yet we avoid discussing how Aboriginal children are being hurt right now.

In May, a Crown prosecutor in Alice Springs, Nanette Rogers, also tried to warn of the horrific crimes she saw being committed against children in Aboriginal camps.

There was the seven-month old who was raped so badly she needed surgery. There was the 10 year old who was tied to a tree for weeks by a tribal “husband” who raped her repeatedly. There was the six year old who drowned when a petrol sniffer raped her anally as he held her down in a lake.

So what has been our response those few times we’ve been forced to take notice?

Here is one example. Five years ago the Victorian government was told that child abuse involving Aboriginal children had soared, and the then Community Services Minister responded: “The solution is not to continue to take disproportionately high numbers of Koori children into care...” (4) That’s right: Don’t remove them so much.

As the then family services coordinator of the Mildura Aboriginal Co-operative angrily noted: “Things have to be a hundred times worse for Kooris before the department will become involved.” (5)

She is right. We consciously leave Aboriginal children in dangers we would never tolerate if these children were of any other race.

Just ask the New South Wales Child Death Review Team, which investigated why Aboriginal children of drug addicts were 10 times more likely to die under the noses of welfare officers than were children of white addicts.

It blamed a fear of the “stolen generations”, pleading: “A history of inappropriate intervention with Aboriginal families should not lead now to an equally inappropriate lack of intervention for Aboriginal children at serious risk.’’ (6)

In 2001, Western Australia’s deputy coroner tried again to warn us after investigating the death of a three-year-old Aboriginal boy from malnutrition and pneumonia.

She found the boy had been admitted to hospital three times before for pneumonia, and suffered many other infections as well as scabies, anaemia and impetigo. His mother wouldn’t give him prescribed medicines or feed him properly.

A doctor testified that she’d begged the Aboriginal case worker to at least remove the boy’s even more sickly twin sister, but had been told she didn’t understand Aboriginal ways of child-rearing.

The coroner concluded: “Experience has shown that in the long term taking Aboriginal children from their communities is not an effective solution socially, although in this case it may have been medically advisable. We have a dead child . . . ‘’ (7)

We have a dead child, she said. How many others must die in our homage to the “stolen generations’’?

Aboriginal leaders are now asking that very question, even those who believe , more or less, Robert’s theory.

Listen to Warren Mundine, Labor’s past president, who said: “I understand why some governments and also the white Australian community ... like to back off, because they don’t want to be accused of being racist or creating a stolen generation.”

But, said Mundine: “I’m saying to them, ‘No, you need to get your hands dirty if you’re going to fix this.’”

Or listen to the National Indigenous Council’s chairwoman, Sue Gordon, who tells us that Aboriginal leaders in Halls Creek, and elsewhere, are demanding we again build hostels to save children there.

But, she says: “The same old argument arises in so-called progressive circles: we will somehow be creating another stolen generation.’’

Listen to other Aboriginal leaders such as Wesley Aird, Mick Gooda and New South Wales MP Linda Burney (8), who all have said a fear of the “stolen generations” has made us too scared to save Aboriginal children right now.

And why? Because, I believe, we don’t want to admit that Aboriginal children were once rescued not from their Aboriginality, but from harm just like this.

We refuse to remove them from harm today, to avoid admitting this may be why we removed them yesterday.

I repeat: Robert, your “stolen generation” theory is killing Aboriginal children – and there is only one excuse for you to still push it. That it is true, and you can prove it. That you can produce the names and say - see, these children were stolen and this is why.

But here is Robert’s problem.

It’s often forgotten that anthropologists and historians from both the Left and the so-called Right – Bain Attwood (9) and Ken Maddock, for instance – noted that even in Aboriginal communities before, say, 1980, there was very little talk, or awareness, of children being stolen.

So I wasn’t surprised that Robert had enormous trouble once he tried to identify these stolen children he claimed were rescued just from their Aboriginality.

Look at the names of the children he once claimed were stolen, but which fail to make his latest list.

There was Lowitja O’Donoghue, a co-patron of the national Sorry Day Committtee, who in fact turned out to have been sent with four of her five siblings by her white father - with her mother’s consent, she says - to South Australia’s Colebrook Home because he no longer wanted to be saddled with his Aboriginal family. (11)

Colebrook, incidentally, also took in a sick young girl from the same station as O’Donoghue. That girl, Nancy Barnes, later became an admired educator and activist, and her autobiography starts: “We are referred to as the ‘Stolen Generation’. I consider myself saved.” (12)

Also named as stolen by Robert was Malcolm Smith, one of the only four cases – just four - he discusses in his book In Denial.

In fact, Malcolm in 1965 was an 11 year old son of a drunk widower who’d let his six sons run wild, wagging school, going hungry and stealing. His dad agreed in a court hearing that he’d could not look after Malcolm , and Malcolm was sent to a boys home. Are these really examples of what you mean by “stolen” for racist reasons, Robert?

Then there was Lorna Cubillo, another of those four cases in In Denial.

Cubillo - and Peter Gunner, another “stolen child”, said Robert – later had compensation claims heard by the Federal Court in the most famous test case of the “stolen generations”, one which investigated the history of child removals in the Northern Territory.

Robert - before the verdict – said this: “Nowhere was child removal conducted more systematically and tenaciously than in the Northern Territory” (13), and “we are never likely to have a more probing investigation”.

So what did this probing investigation into the worst area of child removals find? That, said the judge, the ”evidence does not support a finding that there was any policy of removal of part-Aboriginal children”. Or, to use Robert’s phrase, there was no policy of stealing children just to rescue them from their Aboriginality.

Nor were Gunner and Cubillo found to be stolen.

Lorna Cubillo, it turned out, had been taken from a remote mission and ration depot in 1947 when she was just eight, with her father gone, mother dead, grandmother dead and a debate over whether her auntie was around much to look after her. Would you have left a little girl out there?
As for Peter Gunner, he’d been sent to Alice Springs to get an education with the express agreement of his mother.

That’s not the first time a hunt for victims came up empty for Robert.

He’s also been on the board of Victoria’s Aboriginal-led Stolen Generations Taskforce, which even hired consultants to find stolen children in this state. It could find no Victorian Aboriginal who had been truly stolen, and concluded that in Victoria “there was no formal policy for removing children”.

Even Western Australia produces no real names for him, even though he’s accused the former Protector of Aborigines there, AO Neville, of having had “genocidal thoughts”. On ABC Radio National in 2002, Robert conceded: “I think that kind of thinking didn’t have much effect on the victims of the policy.”

So to his latest list, which I hope to talk about more fully in our discussion if I run out of time.

Robert includes Molly Craig, 14, and her cousins Daisy and Gracie, apparently because he saw the film Rabbit Proof Fence. But when Molly as an adult saw the film she declared “That’s not my story”, and if Robert had checked the book on which it is based he’d know why.

The girls were not stolen by racists, but were taken with the consent at least of the tribe’s head man, Molly’s so-called step-father, and only after warnings to AO Neville that the fatherless girls at that harsh Depression-era camp were running wild with whites (men, presumably) and were badly treated by full-bloods. What’s more, the eight-year-old Daisy was now promised in marriage to a tribal man.

Are you really saying, Robert, that these children should NOT have been sent to safety and school? Did you see what became of Molly after she ran back to the camp, and was allowed to stay?

Robert also lists as stolen the late Robert Riley, citing as his source the biography by Quentin Beresford.

Did you actually read that book, Robert? Beresford says he in fact doesn’t know why Riley went to Sister Kate’s home as a two year old, although a file letter to the Minister of Child Welfare at the time records he was simply “left at this home, by his mother”. A later report from a welfare officer notes that his mother “showed no interest at all in her son”. (14) And some of those who knew Riley later said his mother actually sent him to Sister Kate’s because her then boyfriend said he’d kill him if she didn’t. (15)

Is this really what you mean by stolen, Robert?

Then you list Rosalie Fraser, who writes that she was made a ward of the state at two in 1961 – but why, Robert? What’s your evidence she was in fact just saved from her Aboriginality? She was in fact removed by child welfare officers (16), not Aboriginal welfare, and sent with one of her sisters to live with her father’s relatives.

Margaret Tucker, now, was 13 in 1917, when she was sent to a girls’ home. If this was to save her from Aboriginality, why was it done so late? Could it be that the authorities were worried that Tucker’s father had in fact left, her mother had gone to Sydney and some auntie was looking after her - or kind of? (17)

Then Robert lists John Moriarty, a successful designer whose single mother one day brought him to Roper River, from where he was sent south to go to a boarding school with, he says, aunties and uncles. Stolen? Or sent away?

I could go on. Bob Randall, for instance, is another interesting case on your list.

But Robert, you don’t have here 10 names of truly stolen children. Not even close.

Yes, you have stories of great loss, stories of betrayal and pain, and also stories of lives saved – of children rescued from great need to become artists, businessmen and writers.

But what you don’t have are stories of children stolen by racists from caring families simply because they were Aboriginal.

And while you can’t put faces to your theory of this “stolen generations”, I think we’re entitled to doubt its truth.

In fact, given the devastation your theory is causing to real children right now, we have a moral obligation not to believe in your “stolen generations”. Not, at least, until you can show us those victims, and prove their stories.

Start with just 10.


1. The Age, 27 February, 1999

2. In Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right, by Robert Manne. Page 82.

3. Robert Manne’s latest list of 12 truly stolen children, as sent by him to the Melbourne Writers’ Festival as, he wrote, a “condition” of this debate, is:

(1) ‘Walter’ see Robert Manne In Denial and Anna Haebich Broken Circles

(2) Margaret Tucker see Margaret Tucker If Everyone Cared

(3) John Moriarty see John Moriarty Salwater Fella

(4)and (5) Trish Hill-Keddie and Sandra Hill see Quentin Beresford and Paul Omaji Our State of Mind

(6) Bob Randall see Songman: The story of an Aboriginal Elder

(7)(8) and (9) Molly Craig, Gracey [actually Gracie - and Manne meant also to include Daisy] Fields see Doris Pilkington Rabbit-Proof Fence

(10) Donna Meehan see Donna Meehan It’s no Secret

(11) Rosalie Fraser and her 4 brothers and sisters see Rosalie Fraser Shadow Child

(12) Rob Riley see Quentin Beresford Rob Riley

(4) The Age, 9 May, 2001

(5) Herald Sun, 14 May, 2001

(6) Sydney Morning Herald, 15 March, 2000

(7) Herald Sun, 14 May, 2001

(8) The Australian, 21 Semptember, 2005

(9) ‘Learning about the truth’, The stolen generations narrative, by Bain Attwood, included in In Telling Stories: Indigenous History and Memory in Australia and New Zealand. Edited by Bain Attwood & Fiona Magowan, Allen & Unwin, 2001

Except: In the telling of such stories over several decades some of the factual content has remained constant but the forms in which they have been told and their relative importance have varied enormously. Between the late 1930s and the late 1970s, the removal of children was, as far as we know, neither the subject of many stories told in Aboriginal communities nor central to their historical consciousness7 —for example, in an Aboriginal history of Cummeragunja published in the 1950s there was no reference to the removal of children8 —and it was certainly seldom a part of narratives heard by non-Aboriginal people

(10) Genocide and the Silence of the Anthropologists, by Kenneth Maddock, in Quadrant, November 2000

Excerpt: What I find fascinating, given the passions aroused, is that the contemporaneous anthropological record contains nothing about genocide and little about removals. Did anthropologists doing fieldwork in various parts of Australia between, say, 1925 and 1975 miss what went on, or did they take the practice so much for granted that it aroused neither curiosity nor condemnation, or did it occur mainly in their absence?

That anthropologists would have ignored genocide by child removal, assuming it was happening, seems unlikely, since it was commonly held during those years that the future of Aborigines posed a problem for well-meaning Australians, that contact with other races could cause harm to full-blood Aborigines, and that the offspring of mixed unions were unenviably placed. A number of anthropologists shared these views. Some, who worked in regions where fullbloods predominated, put forward policies which would have nipped the “half-caste problem” in the bud had they been successfully implemented. Others, who did their fieldwork in communities consisting mainly of people of mixed descent where such proposals could have had no application, took an interest in how these communities had come into being, what their characteristics were and what the future might hold for their members.

If removals took place on a genocidal scale, why did anthropologists say nothing?

(11) “I wasn’t stolen”, Herald Sun, 23 February, 2001

(12) Munyi’s Daughter: A spirited brumby, by Nancy Barnes. Seaview Press, Henley Beach, SA.

(13) The Age, 27 February, 1999

(14) , by Quentin Beresford. Aboriginal Studies Press. Pages 37-38

(15) Hansard, 2 June, 1997

(16) Fraser later told a Senate committee that child welfare officials were in fact responding to concerns that she and her siblings had been neglected. Her parents broke up and her father was jailed, not seeing his daughter again. See Hansard of Legal and Constitutional References committee, 9 August, 2000.

(17) As recounted by Tucker’s mother, Theresa Clements, in From Old Maloga: (The Memoirs of an Aboriginal Woman)

[Truth Bearer]

Here is the truth

September 06, 2006 12:00am


ANDREW Bolt writes: Over the years, Robert Manne has tried to name people as stolen, only to find that they had not been stolen at all.

Tonight we debate the "stolen generations" -- the claim that between 1910 and 1970 as many as 100,000 Aboriginal children were stolen from caring parents for racist reasons.
Robert says the figure is actually lower. He suggests one in 10 Aboriginal children was stolen from 1910, and estimates the total number at up to 25,000.

But what do we mean by "stolen"? Let me tell how Robert has defined it.

Says he: "It was not from harm that the mixed-descent children were rescued but from their Aboriginality."

And this was overseen by authorities who "wished, in part through the child removal policy, to help keep White Australia pure".

So, he adds, the "stolen generations is for Aboriginal Australians what the term Holocaust was for the Jews".

Now I do not deny some children -- and not just Aboriginal -- were removed from their families for reasons that weren't good enough.

But Robert, who for eight years has been the leading advocate of the "stolen generations" theory, has never given the proof that we had here a Holocaust. He has never proved anything like 25,000 children were stolen -- stolen because they were Aboriginal, rather than because they needed help.

In fact, the reason I am here is I challenged Robert in a debate to name just some of these 25,000 children he claims were stolen from 1910 just to save them from their Aboriginality. To name not, say, 2000 of them, or even 200.

No, just 10.

It is not a pedantic request. If we could see the real children we could then check the real reasons for their separation to see if the reality matched Robert's theory.

Yet Robert -- and not only he -- has found this job of producing names extremely hard. Over the years he has several times named people as stolen, only to find they had not been stolen at all.

After my challenge, he tried again -- searching for those 10 names. But he had to go back to before 1910, and when I checked his list I found it comprised names like Topsy, who turned out to be a fatherless 12-year-old with syphilis. Dolly, I discovered, was a 13-year-old who was seven months pregnant and working for no wages on a station when she was rescued (by Dr Walter Roth) and sent to missionaries.

These were children saved from sexual abuse and desperate need, Robert. Why did you tell me they were stolen?

Robert has now given me a new list of 10 names -- actually 12.

But I am here tonight not because he at last could name 10 truly stolen children, but because he has failed again.

When the leading advocate of the "stolen generations" still cannot -- after eight years of looking -- name even 10 children undeniably stolen for racist reasons, is it because there isn't actually a "stolen generation" to find?

But I must ask: how important to you is the truth?

You see, I suspect that no matter what proofs I present, some of you will refuse to even consider them.

You may think it cruel to even ask for evidence of the "stolen generations". Or you may be too frightened for your good name to dare doubt.

So I need to do one thing before I discuss the evidence -- I need to give you permission to believe it.

Here, then, is why it's good and decent and kind to believe that, no, the "stolen generations" are, just as the evidence suggests, a myth:

This myth is now causing such terrible harm that it is immoral to preach it any longer without proof it is actually true.

It's not just that the "stolen generations" theory has robbed children of pride in their country; made villains of heroes who once saved children abandoned by everyone else; and told Aboriginal children that this is such a genocidal society that they should not even want to join it, even if they dared.

Worse than even all that is that Robert's theory of the "stolen generations" is actually killing children.

By now you must know there has been an epidemic of child abuse in Aboriginal settlements. In May, a Crown prosecutor in Alice Springs, Nanette Rogers, tried to warn of the horrific crimes she saw committed.

There was the seven-month-old who was raped so badly she needed surgery. There was the 10-year-old who was tied to a tree for weeks by a tribal "husband" who raped her repeatedly. There was the six-year-old who drowned when a petrol sniffer raped her anally as he held her down in a lake.

So what has been our response those few times we've been forced to take notice?

Five years ago the Victorian Government was told child abuse involving Aboriginal children had soared.

The then Community Services Minister responded: "The solution is not to continue to take disproportionately high numbers of Koori children into care..."

That's right: Don't remove them so much.

As the Mildura Aboriginal Co-operative angrily noted: "Things have to be a hundred times worse for Kooris before the department will become involved."

True: We consciously leave Aboriginal children in dangers we would never tolerate if they were of any other race.

Ask the New South Wales Child Death Review Team, which investigated why Aboriginal children of drug addicts were 10 times more likely to die under the noses of welfare officers than were children of white addicts.

It blamed a fear of the "stolen generations": "A history of inappropriate intervention with Aboriginal families should not lead now to an equally inappropriate lack of intervention for Aboriginal children at serious risk."

In 2001, Western Australia's deputy coroner tried also to warn us after investigating the death of a three-year-old Aboriginal boy from malnutrition and pneumonia. She found he'd been hospitalised three times for pneumonia, and suffered many other infections as well as scabies, anaemia and impetigo. His mother wouldn't give him prescribed medicines or feed him properly.

A doctor had begged the Aboriginal case worker to at least remove the boy's even more sickly twin sister, but had been told she didn't understand Aboriginal ways of child-rearing.

The coroner concluded: "Experience has shown that in the long term taking Aboriginal children from their communities is not an effective solution socially, although in this case it may have been medically advisable. We have a dead child ..."

And how many others must die in our homage to the "stolen generations"? Aboriginal leaders are now asking that very question.

Listen to the National Indigenous Council's chairwoman, Sue Gordon, who tells us Aboriginal leaders in Halls Creek, and elsewhere, are demanding we again build hostels to save children.

But, she says: "The same old argument arises in so-called progressive circles: we will somehow be creating another stolen generation."

Listen to other Aboriginal leaders such as Warren Mundine, Wesley Aird, Mick Gooda and New South Wales MP Linda Burney, who all have said a fear of the "stolen generations" has made us too scared to save Aboriginal children right now.

And why? Because, I believe, we don't want to admit Aboriginal children were once rescued not from their Aboriginality, but from harm just like this.

We refuse to remove them from harm today, to avoid admitting this may be why we removed them yesterday.

I repeat: Robert, your "stolen generations" theory is killing children -- and there is only one excuse for you to still push it. That it is true, and you can prove it. That you can produce the names and say, "See, these children were stolen and this is why."

Start with just 10.

This is an edited extract of my speech at a debate with Professor Robert Manne at the Melbourne Writers' Festival last Sunday.

To see both speeches in full -- and my proof that Manne's list of 12 truly stolen children is false -- go to blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt

[Truth Bearer]

Truth is what was stolen

Andrew Bolt

February 08, 2008 12:00am

IT'S over, and all I can do now is offer a sincere sorry of my own. You see, no matter what, a sorry to the "stolen generations" will be read out in Parliament next week by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

Rudd will say that sorry to "stolen" children no one can actually find, but few commentators and politicians seem to mind. Or care to notice.

Most Liberals, cowed and cringing, will just back whatever Rudd says. Most journalists, teary over their own goodness, will praise it. And most Australians will sigh with relief, hoping a bit of well-meaning humbuggery will let us "move on".

So it's over. The only thing I can hope for now is that if Rudd must read out an apology, he reads out a compromise like mine.

What has divided us so far is that Rudd is a sentimentalist who wants to say sorry regardless of the facts about the "stolen generations". But I am a rationalist who can only say a sorry that respects the truth - and no apology I've read, including the ones on this page yesterday, comes close.

Mine does - not that I have much hope that even this last appeal to reason will work.

To Rudd and other Say-Sorries it simply doesn't matter that there's no evidence any Australian government had a policy to steal children just because they were Aboriginal.

See the evidence they've ignored.

In Victoria, for instance, the state Stolen Generations Taskforce concluded there had been "no formal policy for removing children". Ever.

In the Northern Territory, the Federal Court found no sign of "any policy of removal of part-Aboriginal children such as that alleged".

In Tasmania, the Stolen Generations Alliance admitted "there were no removal policies as such".

In South Australia, the Supreme Court last year found no government policy to steal Aboriginal children there, either. Rather, stealing black children had been "without legal authority, beyond power and contrary to authoritative legal advice".

But none of that evidence matters to Rudd.

Nor does it matter that no one has yet named even 10 of these 100,000 children we are told were stolen - stolen not because we wanted to save children in trouble, but because we wanted to "keep White Australia pure", as "stolen generations" author Prof Robert Manne put it.

Name just 10, I asked Manne in debates in print and on stage. He couldn't.

Name just 10, I asked Stolen Generations Alliance spokesman Brian Butler last week on Adelaide radio. He wouldn't.

Name just 10, I now ask the Prime Minister. He won't.

Even the Liberals, now desperate to seem more "compassionate", seem to know they will be saying sorry for a great crime that never happened.

Here is Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson, urging Rudd only to not say "stolen": "(I)t has pejorative connotations particularly for several generations of very good men and women from churches and other organisations who believed they were doing the right thing in removing these children."

But if these people really did steal Aboriginal children from good homes just to smash their culture and "keep White Australia pure", how on earth could they be "very good men and women"? That's like condemning slavery while praising slavers as "very good men" who only meant well.

But not even that matters. Rudd's apology is happening and all I can hope is that he can still hear a little voice telling him he has a duty to truth, and to the Aboriginal children today who will suffer if he lies.

Because suffer they will. Already we read almost monthly of Aboriginal children who are bashed, raped or killed because social workers and magistrates are too scared by the "stolen generations" to "steal" them.

So, what is my own apology?

No apology can do us good, dividing us by race and suffocating us with victimhood. But mine, I hope, can avoid most harm.

My sorry will acknowledge that many Aboriginal children were indeed betrayed by their walk-away parents, white and black, and even by some institutions pledged to help them.

But my sorry won't make our children ashamed for a society that still offers us all - Aborigines included - more freedom, health, justice and security than any before.

My sorry will also have one other great virtue you'll see in almost none of the dozens of others suggested.

Mine, at least, will tell no lies.

That is because I have done what few others will: I have checked the histories of scores of the "stolen" children asking for this sorry, to see what it is we should be sorry for.

I've asked, for instance, why I'd say sorry to Lowitja O'Donoghue, the Stolen Generations Alliance's co-patron.

O'Donoghue in fact was dumped at a children's home by her footloose Irish father, to be educated by missionaries.

For what should I say sorry to Peter Gunner, who sought compensation in the Federal Court for being "stolen"?

Gunner, in fact, was sent to a home in Alice Springs with the written permission of his mother, to get a schooling.

For what should I say sorry to Topsy, named by Manne as a "stolen" child?

Topsy, in fact, was just 12 when she was found, riddled with syphilis and far from hospitals, schools or police, with her parents unknown.

For what should I say sorry to Mary Hooker, another Stolen Generations Alliance spokeswoman?

Hooker, in fact, was removed with three of her 11 siblings because welfare officers thought she was neglected and "I was raped by my brother".

For what should I say sorry to Lorna Cubillo, who claimed compensation?

Cubillo, in fact, was just seven, with no parents or even known guardian when she was found at a missionary-run ration camp in the bush, and sent to a home and school in Darwin.

For what should I say sorry to Molly, portrayed in Rabbit Proof Fence as a girl stolen to "breed out the colour"?

Molly in fact was taken into care with the agreement of her tribal chief after warnings that she was in danger of sexual abuse and had been ostracised as a half-caste by her tribe.

For what should I say sorry to Archie Roach, famous for his song Took the Children Away?

Roach, in fact, said yesterday he was removed when he was three because "word got around" he was neglected -- his parents weren't there, and his sister was trying to care for him.

For what should I say sorry to all the "stolen children" like these - activist Robert Riley, whose mother dumped him at a home; author Mudrooroo Narogin, who turned out to be neither stolen nor Aboriginal; claimant Joy Williams, whose mother gave away her illegitimate girl; bureaucrat Charlie Perkins, whose mother asked a boarding school to help her gifted boy; and "stolen generations" leader Annette Peardon, whose mother was jailed for three months for neglecting her children.

And here's the sorry I say to them:

What makes us Australians helps make us human. As Australians, we believe in the dignity of each person, regardless of their race or place of birth, of their colour or creed.

We believe that no one is a stranger to us, beyond our sympathy and our help. And we believe it is in offering such sympathy and help that we best realise our humanity.

But we are sorry. We are sorry that at times we have not as a nation, or as individuals, lived up to those ideals. We are but human, and, as all humans do, have failed and fail still.

As a nation, we are sorry for those children that we harmed, when we meant to help. We are sorry that in helping many, we did not help all.

We have failed at other times as well. We are sorry for having taken, when we could have shared. We are sorry we have treated some as strangers, when in truth this is their sacred home.

But we are a people whose sins are small when set beside our virtues, which are great.

We have as a nation desired to do good, just as we desire it now.

We therefore commit ourselves anew to the purpose with which this nation was founded - to give every citizen the right and opportunity to live their life in peace, honour and freedom, under laws common to us all.

But more - we recommit ourselves, today especially, to our young, our lost, our helpless and our poor. They will not find us wanting as some have found us wanting before. This will be the measure of our repentance.

For our failings we are sorry. But for our ideals we are not. What has divided us can be overcome, and with the goodwill that compels us to say sorry today, overcome we surely will.

Join Andrew on blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt

[Truth Bearer]

So can you tell us Lakonian and Slayer why should Oustralia apologize for what??Again we fall victims to a left leaning media frenzy that we should apoilogize to these same children that were abused and ostracized or dumped by their own communities.....Lads we are Hellenes we are the upholders of the ancient principles of Hellenism to seek and explore for our questions and answers We are not sheep,simpletons (like some other goatherders) our ancestors never stood idle hoping for handouts or accepting just anyones theories.They investigated for themselves to seek the truth and the facts.I am not tryiong to demean the Aborigines or be perceived asa racist.I try and seek the truth just like Socrates or Plato would have I will never just accept someones opnion without researching the facts.We do not and should not apologize for ANYTHING that isn't warranted.

[Truth Bearer]

Baby 'stolen' from under PM's nose
Andrew Bolt

February 13, 2008 12:00am


KEVIN Rudd will this morning say his sorry just two days after the latest baby was "stolen" - from the Aboriginal tent embassy 300m away.

Nothing better symbolises the absurdity of the Prime Minister's apology to the "stolen generations".

The six-week-old baby was taken on Monday by two Department of Community Services officers who judged it was in danger in that squalid camp, now filled with Aborigines in Canberra to celebrate Rudd's sorry.


A Daily Telegraph reporter who saw the rescue said the baby's grandmother abused the officers as "criminals" who were "taking my family away". The child's father, who cannot be named for legal reasons, said his baby was now one of the "stolen generations" - one of the 100,000 children we're told were stolen just because they were black, not because they needed help.

But this latest baby was in fact "stolen" for the same kind of reasons that had us "steal" Aboriginal children before.

The child's mother is reportedly in jail, and the Daily Telegraph said the father had lived in the tent embassy for six months. If you've seen that "embassy", you'll know it is no fit place for such a terribly young child.

So why does Rudd today say sorry for "stealing" children when we still "steal" the same kind of children for the same reasons from his own doorstep, under his own eyes?

Do not think this child is much different to those of the "stolen generations" to whom Rudd apologises.

Take Mary Hooker, presented by the Sydney Morning Herald this week as a representative of the "stolen generations" - one of the black children stolen by white racists for no good reason.

Hooker, a spokesman for the Stolen Generations Alliance, told her story in a video clip on the Herald's website, during which the camera panned over documents relating to her case.

I froze the picture to read what I could. And here is the true story of this "stolen generations" child.

Hooker's mother was in fact taken to hospital unconscious from an overdose of pills, and Hooker says she didn't wake up for two weeks.

She left behind her 12 children in a house that welfare officers found had plenty of rubbish but little food: "The only food available was three sausages and a small piece of steak."

There is no mention of any man in the house, but the documents show the dad of seven of the children was a prisoner at the Mount Mitchell Afforestation Camp, a low-security jail.

There is also no mention of abuse in what documents I could read, but Hooker last week admitted on ABC radio "there was also abuse going on in the community", and that she had been "raped".

So guess on what grounds welfare officers "stole" Hooker from a filthy, abusive, overcrowded, foodless home, with her mother in a drug-caused coma and a father in jail?

Was it because they were white racists trying to destroy Aborigines, or because they were people just trying to save a little girl?

You guessed right. These documents confirm Hooker and three of her 11 siblings were removed not because they were Aboriginal, but because a magistrate found proven a complaint that "they were neglected" and without a guardian.

Welfare officers would have removed any white child found in such circumstances, I am sure. And most certainly should have.

Yet Hooker is one of the "stolen generations" children Rudd will say he's sorry we "stole", when she in fact was just another Aboriginal child we tried to save. Just like the baby we rescued just two days ago.

If Rudd is sorry we've saved such children, then let's stop. And heaven help those we must now leave behind.

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/sto...-25717,00.html

[Truth Bearer]

Rudd's great leap forward

ONE election, and we're already back to group-think. Baa baa is the chorus of Chairman Rudd's Australia.

Already commissars are rounding up our children for re-education, so they can chant like little Red Guards the authorised opinions of these new days.

Note, for instance, this email to all schools from Victoria's Education Minister, Bronwyn Pike, a former board member of Greenpeace:

Sorry Day, Wednesday 13 February 2008, will be an historic day and I would strongly encourage all Victorian Schools to recognise and celebrate this significant event in Australia's history.

It is a great opportunity for individual teachers to make sure that your students are aware of the significance of this important day by:

- Listening or watching the Apology live in your classrooms from 8.55am ...

- Reading stories which affirm Aboriginal culture and customs.

At a school level I strongly encourage you to consider the following suggestions:

- Hold a school assembly at 8.55am ... to acknowledge the Apology and listen or watch the Apology live.

- Hold a flag-raising ceremony with the Australian, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags as a sign of acknowledgment of the Apology ...

And so on.

You see it is not enough that students simply know of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's sorry to these "generations" of "stolen" children no one can actually find. To children we actually saved.

They must also "celebrate" it and "acknowledge" it. For extra measure, they must also "affirm" Aboriginal customs and fly the Aboriginal flag - a flag that divides us by race.

This is not teaching. This is indoctrinating. This is not passing on knowledge, but ramming home opinions of the must dubious kind.

Of course, Victoria is not alone in this extraordinary exercise, now that we enjoy the great efficiency of wall-to-wall Labor governments.

NSW's 2240 state schools have also been ordered to fly the Aboriginal flag - on the very flagpoles that former prime minister John Howard made them put up to fly the Australian one.

And, of course, the students were instructed not only to watch today's "sorry" on TV but yesterday's "welcome to country" at Parliament House - a ceremony by "traditional owners" welcoming our politicians to land that actually belongs to us all.

Were the children dutifully watching this made-up hocus-pocus, with its white feminist touches, told that even the local Aborigines couldn't agree who the rightful "traditional owner" truly was? Were they allowed to notice that the woman who finally did the welcoming, Matilda House-Williams, obviously had as much European ancestry as Aboriginal, making her as much invader as victim?

Don't notice, children! Don't question, or even ask. And especially don't laugh at this farce - or not in front of your teacher, at least.

But what next? Must children march around the school oval waving Labor manifestos and chanting other famous Rudd slogans, such as "New Leadership!", "The buck stops with me!", "Climate change is real!" and "In answer to your question, let me say this, that in terms of what we do from 2009 on, I've got an open mind"?

But as with the children, so with many of their parents, who today will be hauled in for their own celebrations of Rudd's sorry and told to cheer.

Take the staff of Victoria's Department of Human Services, who have already been given free screenings of An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's global warming call to faith, to ensure they hold the Left's approved opinion on global warming.

The department's secretary, Fran Thorn, now wants them to have the Left's approved opinion on this "sorry", too, and has emailed them all an "invitation" to a free screening - in work time - of Rudd's "significant" and "momentous" speech.

"This is an opportunity for Department of Human Services staff to come together and promote greater understanding between all Australians," burbled Thorn.

Victoria's Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission is even rewarding staff who come to its own screening with tea and biscuits.

No doubt some of HREOC's more censorious thought police, having already made criticism of the Koran all but illegal under our vilification laws, are now dreaming of ways to make questioning of the "stolen generations" a crime, too.

You may say I'm just twitching at Maoist shadows. But as the jubilant intelligentsia gathers for group hugs in this Rudd dawn, let ABC radio host Jon Faine make the censorious mood of the Left's new order clear.

Faine, who today hosts ABC radio's coverage of Rudd's "sorry", last week asked the Herald Sun's editor in chief - on air - why he and The Australian hadn't yet done a "cleansing" of their "notorious" conservative columnists, who mock such things as I mock now.

Writers like me were "out of step with the result of the election", Faine gloated, and the question now was "whether some of the staples of the media in the Howard era (had) worn out their usefulness" as we enter the Rudd era. In short: "You're not going through a cleansing process?"

"Cleansing?" As of dirt, Jon? Or did you mean "fumigating", perhaps?

Let me astonish you, dear reader. Not once in Howard's four terms of Coalition rule did Faine suggest the ABC have a similar "cleansing" of its own great drain-clog of Leftists like himself, given they were "out of step with the results of the election".

But more disturbing than Faine's hypocrisy is his apparent belief that the media should be "in step" with Labor, as so many of our cultural institutions are already, and that dissenters should be "cleansed".

There is a totalitarian glint in young Faine's glasses, I fear. And it's a glint I now see in the eye of so many of our Leftist intelligentsia.

Take, for instance, Professor Robert Manne, voted by his peers as our "most influential public intellectual". Under Howard, Manne and other writers of the Left - David Marr, Clive Hamilton, Guy Rundle - flayed Howard for allegedly crushing dissenters just like . . . er, them?

But the instant Rudd won, Manne called for all conservatives on the ABC board to resign, and said: "With the election of the Rudd Government . . . the culture war will come abruptly to an end." Is that an order, too?

Guy Rundle, an editor of the far-Left Arena magazine, similarly demanded The Australian "clean house" and sack all but one of its conservatives, and everywhere now we hear such cries from the Left for a cleansing.

Hear it from former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Fraser, now an agony aunt of The Age, who this week called for a cleansing of "a conservative group of ideologues" among the Victorian Liberals who'd taken the state party to the Right.

Pardon? The state Liberals still have conservatives?

In fact, this Opposition has apologised to the "stolen generations", fretted about climate change, voted to turn a dam reservation into a national park, backed vilification laws against free speech, praised multiculturalism and, in almost every ideological battle, chosen the side of the ABC.

Its leader, Ted Baillieu, is so fashionably Left that Fraser praises him as "one good piece of news" - despite his consequently terrible poll ratings.

Yet Fraser still wants any conservatives still loitering in the sad shadows of this limp, lame and listless lump of a me-too party to be hunted down and cleansed.

Oh dear. How intolerant is the new Left of what little debate and dissent remains.

What clean fiends they are, too. See them now getting out their hoses, disinfectant and scrubbing brushes. See them set to work, cleansing bad-thinking adults and washing the brains of our children. For hygiene's sake.

Want to save yourself? Then say after me the great new chorus: Baa baa. And tell your children this morning to watch in sacred silence the sorry on their teacher's TV, and then clap. Very loudly and long.

[Lakonian]

Tb, im kinda fucken drunk now from mt night out, but i got your tetx msg so i though id check it out. I seriously think you need to reflect on what you are saying here mate......this is not the Hellene way. How can you defend such utter trash.

Yes you owe a big sorry because the european man came here Tb not just the Anglo euro.

Do you forget Greeks who came here for the gold rush , you live in Melbourne you should know. Wealthy Greeks, not the war torn ones.

You should feel proud at such courage the PM took that day to actualy say sorry 3 times. Ist the hardest thing any man can do. Dont water it down mate because you feel as thought your saying sorry on behalf of the anglos, sure its a shame that the kologria the queen didnt do it, but at least we as Australians did, us as Greek Australians, thats the Hellenic way.

Its a fresh start and now no one has an excuse. Its now the governments duty to fix there ghettos, and the Aborigenes to change there bitterness to determination, and strength, and educate there kids.

I think its revolutionary.

[Lakonian]

Tb i have further checked your posts in here with the pics...you bring shame mate. Whats it to you re how they lived? Where did ancient Greeks live as the pelasgians ( neolithics) caves!

why dont you post some of the actions that where taken on the these people. They cut out there scrotums and used the scak for tobacco poutches etc.....the drepomaste re sis? Ti afta poulete re.