The trauma of forcible separation affected the parents and other relatives left behind as well as the children taken. Few of the parents have survived to tell their own stories. Many of those who have feel such guilt and despair that they were unable to come forward. Link-Up (NSW) advised the Inquiry that,
In preparing this submission we found that Aboriginal women were unwilling and unable to speak about the immense pain, grief and anguish that losing their children had caused them. That pain was so strong that we were unable to find a mother who had healed enough to be able to speak, and to share her experience with us and with the Commission ...
We end up feeling helpless in front of our mother's pain. We see how hurt they have been. We see that they judge themselves harshly, never forgiving themselves for losing their children - no matter that they were part of ongoing systematic removal of Aboriginal children ...
Our mothers inevitably say that they didn't want to hurt us. But also we realise that here is where our mothers were hurt most deeply. Here is where they were shamed and humiliated - they were deprived of the opportunity to participate in growing up the next generation. They were made to feel failures; unworthy of loving and caring for their own children; they were denied participation in the future of their community (submission 186 part III pages 30-31).
The evidence clearly establishes that families and whole communities suffered grievously upon the forcible removal of their children.
The interesting thing was that he was such a great provider ... He was a great provider and had a great name and a great reputation. Now, when this intrusion occurred it had a devastating impact upon him and upon all those values that he believed in and that he put in place in his life which included us, and so therefore I think the effect upon Dad was so devastating. And when that destruction occurred, which was the destruction of his own personal private family which included us, it had a very strong devastating effect upon him, so much so that he never ever recovered from the trauma that had occurred ...
Progressively the shattering effect continued in my father's life to the point that he couldn't see the sense in reuniting the family again. He had lost all confidence as a parent and as an adult in having the ability to be able to reunite our family.
Confidential evidence 265, Victoria: woman removed with her sisters from their father and grandmother in the 1960s.
Mum was kidnapped. My grandfather was away working at the time, and he came home and found that his kids had been taken away, and he didn't know nothing about it. Four years later he died of a broken heart. He had a breakdown and was sent to Kew [Psychiatric] Hospital. He was buried in a pauper's grave and on his death certificate he died of malnutrition, ulcers and plus he had bedsores. He was 51.
Confidential evidence 143, Victoria.
I remember my Aunty, it was her daughter that got taken. She used to carry these letters around with her. They were reference letters from the white fellas in town ... Those letters said she was a good, respectable women ... She judged herself and she felt the community judged her for letting the welfare get her child ... She carried those letters with her, folded up, as proof, until the day she died.
Quoted by Link-Up submission 186 on page 21.
Professor Beverley Raphael told the Inquiry,
Part of the reaction to being traumatised, like suddenly having your child torn away from you, is what we call a high level of arousal ... that heightened arousal can stay on a heightened level with physiological responsiveness for the rest of one's life ... so that people are aroused, alert. And one reason they take alcohol and other substances is often to dampen this down and they don't know its cause (evidence 658).
My parents were continually trying to get us back. Eventually they gave up and started drinking. They separated. My father ended up in jail. He died before my mother. On her death bed she called his name and all us kids. She died with a broken heart.
Confidential submission 106, New South Wales: woman removed at 11 months in the late 1950s with her three siblings; children fostered in two separate non-Indigenous families.
The Inquiry is not aware of any research on the effects of forcible removal of a child or children on the parents and other family members. However there is research on the effects of the death of a child and some research on the effects of relinquishing a child for adoption. Speaking at the Third Australian Conference on Adoption in 1982 Margaret van Keppel and Robin Winkler summarised some of this research.
Sanders (1979-80) assessed the intensities of bereavement reactions of people who had experienced three different types of death (spouse, parent and child) and found that those who had experienced the death of a child revealed more intense grief reactions of somatic types and greater guilt with accompanying feelings of despair, than did those bereaved who had experienced the loss of a spouse or parent ... There is consistent evidence indicating that bereavement increases mortality and morbidity ...
There is no evidence contradicting the assumption that relinquishing a child for adoption is an undesirable life event, a life crisis, for the relinquishing mother. [Research evidence shows]: 1 That people respond to crises in specific predictable ways, e.g., shock, anger, depression. 2 That people go through a series of stages over time, attempting to come to terms with an aversive life-event. 3 That people eventually accept or resolve their crises [although there is] extreme variability in peoples' responses to life crises [and ] the difficulty following a crisis may be experienced indefinitely.
[Factors affecting recovery are]: 1 Perceived social support facilitates adjustment ... 2 The opportunity for free expression of feelings facilitates adjustment ... 3 The presence of other life-stressors impedes adjustment ... 4 The ability to find meaning in the outcome facilitates adjustment ... (pages 176-9).
These findings about bereaved and relinquishing parents can be extended approximately to the experience of Indigenous parents whose children were forcibly removed. They have the lowest likelihood of recovering from the trauma of that event. While social supports would usually have been available within the Indigenous community, beyond that there were none. Indigenous families continued to experience profound disadvantages (`other life-stressors ') including exclusion and control, racism and poverty which would have acted as severe stresses compounding their grief and trauma. They could generally find no meaning in the forcible removal.
A Western Australian mother of two boys was working as a nurse and well able to fit her sons out for school. Yet they were made wards of the State in the late 1950s.
It has left me sick, also my son sick too, never to be the same people again that we were before, being separated from one another, it has made our lives to be nothing on this earth. My sons and myself went through a lot of pain and heartbreak. It's a thing that I'll never forget until I die, it will always be in my mind that the Welfare has ruined my thinking and my life. I felt so miserable and sad and very unhappy, that I took to drinking after they took my sons. I thought there was nothing left for me.
Confidential submission 338, Victoria.
I'm not under the influence of alcohol anymore, you know. Because then you used to sort of deal with it more or less in drink and I thought I could solve my problems in a bottle, you know. That's the only way I could deal with my feelings for my kids not living here ... My kids are with me today, but I've lost a lot. I've lost that motherhood with my kids, you know.
Confidential evidence 208, Victoria.
Because `mixed race' children were particularly targeted for forcible removal, non-Indigenous parents and families also lost children.
In some circumstances the non-Aboriginal parent actually believed that they could have done something to stop what happened. In some experiences that I'm aware of, that has led to long-term ill health of that non-Aboriginal parent. In some circumstances it has led to breakdown in those relationships [between the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal parent] ... But how do you tell your father that it's okay; that it wasn't their fault; and that his whiteness and maleness in a patriarchal society that should have been enough to protect any person's family did no good because of the nature of the relationship with his partner? (Joanne Selfe, NSW Aboriginal Women's Legal Resource Centre, evidence 739).
Parenting roles, nurturing and socialising responsibilities are widely shared in Indigenous societies: `relatives beyond that of the immediate family have nurturing responsibilities and emotional ties with children as they grow up' (Dr Ian Anderson evidence 263). When the children were taken, many people in addition to the biological parents were bereft of their role and purpose in connection with those children.
Aboriginal life was based on the sharing of all resources for the good of the group. The family unit was not the restricted modern nuclear family but an extended family of sharing and caring. Everybody was related and all relations were important, individual interests were subordinate to the lore. Aboriginal society was an all-inclusive network of reciprocal obligations of giving and receiving, which reinforced the bonds of kinship (Elvie Kelly, Victorian Koori Kids Mental Health Network, submission 758).
When you look at a family tree, every person that is within that family tree is born into a spiritual inheritance. And when that person isn't there, there's a void. There's something missing on that tree. And that person has to be slotted back into his rightful position within the extended family. While that person is missing from the extended family, then that family will continue to grieve and continue to have dysfunctions within it. Until the rightful person comes and takes their spiritual inheritance within that family (Kevin Booter, NSW Aboriginal Mental Health Worker, evidence 527).
The loss of so many of their children has affected the efficacy and morale of many Indigenous communities. Evidence to the Inquiry referred particularly to the way in which the child-rearing function of whole communities was undermined and denied, particularly where all children were required to live in mission dormitories. Psychiatrist Professor Ernest Hunter documented how removal on missions in the Kimberley region of Western Australia undermined the confidence of families and diluted their ability to rear their children.
Parental roles and adult authority were compromised as the responsibility for education and discipline was claimed by Europeans (Hunter 1995 page 379). ... you can say parenting can be undermined absolutely in those instances where a child is physically removed. It can be undermined to a degree in settings where there's sequestration such as dormitorisation, but you could say that parenting is undermined universally in a society where parental roles - particularly Aboriginal paternal roles, male roles - are undervalued generally. [The] mission agenda [was] intrusion into family structure and intrusion into the kind of dynamic relationship between sacred and family roles because you can't undermine one without undermining the other ... I think there's a problem blaming the problems with alcohol and social distress on the removal of kids ... However, it certainly is tied in with the broader process of undermining parenting roles and undermining family structure ... (evidence 61).
Hunter documented how Kimberley Aboriginal parents responded when the government station managers and missionaries relinquished their control over the children with the growth of self-management progressively from the mid-1970s.
It was anticipated that Aboriginal adults would reassert their role in the discipline and control of children ... Aborigines [in Jigalong, for example] ... had relinquished a significant dimension of that function to European mission control, defining it as `whitefellow business'. When it became redefined as `blackfellow business' a conflict arose (1993 page 229).
The anticipated reassertion of parental control did not occur. The adults had experienced discipline as children but not nurturing. It had been a model of discipline reliant on physical chastisement, something unacceptable in traditional child-rearing. With their own methods denigrated and largely lost to them and European methods unacceptable, there seems to have been a discipline vacuum.
That's also impacted on my own life with my kids. I have three children. And it's not as though I don't love my kids. It's just that I expected them to be as strong and independent and to fight for their own self like I had to do. And people misinterpret that as though I don't care about my kids. But that's not true. I do love my kids. But it's not as though the Church provided good role models, either, for a proper family relationship.
Confidential evidence 548, Northern Territory: Western Australian woman removed at 4 years in the 1950s and placed at a north-west Catholic orphanage and then at Beagle Bay Mission.
Hunter and other researchers noted how Europeans devalued the paternal role in particular, in common with most other aspects of the traditional male role. Indigenous men generally lost their purpose in relation to their families and communities. Often their individual responses to that loss took them away from their families: on drinking binges, in hospital following accidents or assaults, in the gaol or lock-up, or prematurely dead.
[This has] a significant impact on child development. For Aboriginal boys, the compromise of traditional and contemporary role models resulting from the father's absence or functional unavailability has a damaging impact on the development of male identity (Hunter 1993 page 231).
Forcible removal affected community life in another way, too. To escape `the welfare' and avoid their children being taken some families exiled themselves from their communities and sometimes hid their Aboriginal identity.
Because forcible and seemingly arbitrary separation was so widespread and because the government used the threat of separation to coerce Aboriginal adults, most Aboriginal people lived with the fear of separation structuring their lives. Some tried to protect their families from separation by continually moving; others called themselves Maori or Indian; others cut off all ties with other Aboriginal people, including family members (Link-Up (NSW) submission 186 part III on page 3).
This almost as effectively removed children from community ties and culture; `social removal and nil contact with Aboriginal people was also achieved by the very real fear of removal and the severance of family ties' (quoted by Link-Up (NSW) submission 186 part III on page 67).
I didn't know anything about my Aboriginality until I was 46 years of age - 12 years after my father died. I felt very offended and hurt that this knowledge was denied me, for whatever reason. For without this knowledge I was not able to put the pathway of my own life into its correct place. When I did find out, for the first time in my life I understood why I had always felt different when I was a young man.
Man whose Aboriginal father lived as a white, quoted by Link-Up (NSW) submission 186 part III on page 65.
My grandfather wanted us to deny our Aboriginality so that we wouldn't be taken away. He used to say that none of his kids would live on a mission. We weren't allowed to say that we were Aboriginal, and we weren't allowed to mix with the Aboriginal people in the country town where we lived ... I didn't find out until Mum passed on that I was related to nearly everyone on the south coast. I even found out that the woman who lived across the street when were growing up was my Aunty. But all those years growing up I hadn't known.
Quoted by Link-Up (NSW) submission 186 part III on page 64.
When a child was forcibly removed that child's entire community lost, often permanently, its chance to perpetuate itself in that child. The Inquiry has concluded that this was a primary objective of forcible removals and is the reason they amount to genocide.
[Children are] core elements of the present and future of the community. The removal of these children creates a sense of death and loss in the community, and the community dies too ... there's a sense of hopelessness that becomes part of the experience for that family, that community... (Lynne Datnow, Victorian Koori Kids Mental Health Network, evidence 135).
There have been similar conclusions in the comparable context of forcible removal to educational institutions of Native American children.
Because the family is the most fundamental economic, education, health-care unit in society and the centre of an individual's emotional life, assaults on Indian families help cause the conditions that characterise those cultures of poverty where large numbers of people feel hopeless, powerless and unworthy (Byler 1977 page 8).
A Congressional Inquiry in 1978 found that the removal of Indian children had a severe effect on Indian tribes, threatening their existence as identifiable cultural entities (US Congress 1978).
`Culture' has been defined as `a set of values and ideas which contains the distinctive way of life of a group of people and which tends to persist through time and is transmitted from generation to generation' (Telling Our Story 1995 page 52).
Culture is the whole complex of relationships, knowledge, languages, social institutions, beliefs, values and ethical rules that bind a people together and give the collective and its individual members a sense of who they are and where they belong. It is usually rooted in a particular place - a past or present homeland. It is introduced to the newly born within the family and subsequently reinforced and developed in the community. In a society that enjoys normal continuity of culture from one generation to another, its children absorb their culture with every breath they take. They learn what is expected of them and they develop a confidence that their words and actions will have meaning and predictable effects in the world around them (Canadian Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples 1995 page 25 quoted by Telling Our Story 1995 on page 52).
Every culture is continually changing and adapting to new conditions. Cultural stress such as the massive disruption caused by massacres, introduced diseases, dispossession and forcible removal of children robbed Indigenous societies of almost every opportunity to control the nature of their adaptations.
The impacts of forcible removal are renewed when societies must deal with the desire of removed children to return and reclaim their inheritance. The Jawoyn Association in the Northern Territory explained to the Inquiry,
... the impact of the former policy of assimilation on traditional Aboriginal Law - in particular the Law applying to inheritance and inclusion within traditional clan and kinship systems ... is creating continuing social tensions and division and has the potential to disrupt and damage - well into the future - traditional land ownership and management structures. ... the establishment of a genealogical affiliation does not necessarily determine `who speaks for country' under Jawoyn traditional law - and it is this aspect of trying to cope with the colonialist history of assimilationism that has created difficulties for the Jawoyn nation ... ... To be able to `speak for country' crucially involves knowledge: knowledge about the law; knowledge about country; knowledge about `the system'; and a social connectedness to all things Jawoyn. Without such knowledge and connectedness, appropriate to one's age group and experience, one is not entitled to `speak for country' (submission 841 pages 2, 4 and 6).
The Jawoyn Association has found a way to resolve two competing interests.
The ability of Jawoyn people living on or near Jawoyn traditional lands, and whose lives are completely integrated in Jawoyn society, to determine what happens on those Jawoyn traditional lands. There has been a strongly expressed fear - perhaps unfounded - of Jawoyn people in this situation being potentially `outvoted' on decisions by people living well away from their traditional lands and having little if any strong connectedness to those lands or its people.
Recognition and an acknowledgment of and respect for the Jawoyn heritage of those people stolen from their kin and country, and their descendants. Significantly, very few people in this situation have said they want to receive a share in rentals or royalties (except perhaps as a symbol of recognition), however a number of people from a Stolen Generation background have stated they wished to `come back' to Jawoyn land; some have stated they wished to establish commercial ventures and/or living areas on Jawoyn land (submission 841 page 7).
The resolution chosen by the Jawoyn will not necessarily appeal to other communities and associations dealing with this issue. The Central Land Council advised the Inquiry,
In some cases, the reunification of some `Stolen Generations' people with their families and culture has led to Land Councils including those people in land ownership and native title holder records, as determined and as directed by Traditional Owners. In other cases, while reunited family members are often involved in land and native title claims, their loss of language and culture often `disables' them from taking part. There are also cases where `Stolen Generations' people claim genealogical relationships which may not be acknowledged and cases where there is not recognition of a genealogical link between people in a land or native title claim, situations which are painful for all concerned (submission 495 page 3).
What is clear from the Jawoyn experience is the imperative that each community exercising its right of self-determination must be empowered to resolve the matter for itself.
It has not been through choice that the Jawoyn had their children kidnapped from their country; likewise those children suffered a cruel fate. It was a policy that drove at the heart of Jawoyn society, and tore our families apart. The resolution of this colonialist legacy will only in part be achieved through the mechanisms of this Inquiry and the response of government to its recommendations. It will not be an easy process, it will not be quick. But it cannot succeed unless Aboriginal law - which has been damaged as part of the same process of assimilationism that led to kids being taken away - is respected as having a place in the restitution process (submission 841 page 11).
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If you grow up with no love ... I thought sex was love. That's why I probably had all those kids, `cause I was trying to get all this love, y'know. `Cause I never got it when I was in the Home.
Confidential evidence 383, South Australia: woman removed at about 4 years in the 1940s and raised largely at Koonibba Lutheran Children's Home.
We wasn't told anything about the facts of life. When we left the Home they didn't tell us anything about sex and that. All us girls, when we all come out the Home, we were all just, bang, pregnant straight away.
Confidential evidence 170, South Australia.