John Roughan: Stolen generations story a distortion of history
[John Roughan is a columnist.]
When you see history being written you realise how much of it is mere legend.
Australia hasn't got a particularly exciting history. Once you've read past the convicts it becomes quiet and constitutional.
The closest they came to a civil convulsion was a goldfields rebellion by drunken Irish miners, much celebrated today at the "Eureka Stockade", that lasted all of a Sunday morning in 1853.
They have nothing like the colonial wars in this country.
The displacement of Australia's ancient pre-colonial population was a largely private, casual and dimly recorded atrocity. It haunts the country's story rather than leaving a catalogue of battles that could be mythologised today.
So they have invented a legend from living memory. By "they" I do not mean only Aboriginal revivalists. The "stolen generations" story, now carrying the official imprimatur of this week's Federal Government apology, is as much a creation of white authors, journalists, film-makers, scholars and even jurists freed from the need of forensic proof.
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Just about everybody now believes that as recently as the 1950s Aboriginal children were being dragged from the arms of clutching parents by cold-hearted agents of the state for purposes that could not be good.
I would believe it too if I hadn't read a paper delivered by a Melbourne lawyer, Douglas Meagher, QC, to a seminar in 2000.
His suspicions of the stolen generation story had been aroused when reading the 1997 report of an inquiry by a fellow jurist, Sir Ronald Wilson.
Meagher, whose father was in the state government, was surprised by a reference to someone he had known quite well. He found it impossible to believe this person, a highly respected Aborigine who ran a holiday project in Melbourne for children from northern mission stations, would have been associated with a scheme the Wilson Report said was designed never to return the children.
His curiosity kindled, he studied the report for the evidence. The accusation turned out to be based on a woman, identified by a number, who said that when in Melbourne on the holiday scheme she was billeted with people who applied to adopt her. Which they did, the report said, without reference to her parents.
But 56 pages later, the same witness mentions that while she was in Melbourne her mother had died and, a few sentences later, that her father had died too. The report glosses over the fact that she had become an orphan, noting heavily, "She never saw her parents again."...
Read entire article at http://www.nzherald.co.nz
When you see history being written you realise how much of it is mere legend.
Australia hasn't got a particularly exciting history. Once you've read past the convicts it becomes quiet and constitutional.
The closest they came to a civil convulsion was a goldfields rebellion by drunken Irish miners, much celebrated today at the "Eureka Stockade", that lasted all of a Sunday morning in 1853.
They have nothing like the colonial wars in this country.
The displacement of Australia's ancient pre-colonial population was a largely private, casual and dimly recorded atrocity. It haunts the country's story rather than leaving a catalogue of battles that could be mythologised today.
So they have invented a legend from living memory. By "they" I do not mean only Aboriginal revivalists. The "stolen generations" story, now carrying the official imprimatur of this week's Federal Government apology, is as much a creation of white authors, journalists, film-makers, scholars and even jurists freed from the need of forensic proof.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Just about everybody now believes that as recently as the 1950s Aboriginal children were being dragged from the arms of clutching parents by cold-hearted agents of the state for purposes that could not be good.
I would believe it too if I hadn't read a paper delivered by a Melbourne lawyer, Douglas Meagher, QC, to a seminar in 2000.
His suspicions of the stolen generation story had been aroused when reading the 1997 report of an inquiry by a fellow jurist, Sir Ronald Wilson.
Meagher, whose father was in the state government, was surprised by a reference to someone he had known quite well. He found it impossible to believe this person, a highly respected Aborigine who ran a holiday project in Melbourne for children from northern mission stations, would have been associated with a scheme the Wilson Report said was designed never to return the children.
His curiosity kindled, he studied the report for the evidence. The accusation turned out to be based on a woman, identified by a number, who said that when in Melbourne on the holiday scheme she was billeted with people who applied to adopt her. Which they did, the report said, without reference to her parents.
But 56 pages later, the same witness mentions that while she was in Melbourne her mother had died and, a few sentences later, that her father had died too. The report glosses over the fact that she had become an orphan, noting heavily, "She never saw her parents again."...