4 - Australia’s Stolen Generations, 1914–2021

Summary

From the earliest period of British invasion of the lands now referred to as Australia, white authorities have removed Indigenous children from their communities. Sana Nakata even states that ‘the history of Australia is a history of interventions into the childhoods of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’. In this chapter, we describe how Indigenous child removal has been perpetrated in Australia since 1914. We consider the period from 1914 until the 1980s, during which the removal of Indigenous children was explicitly enabled under a growing range of laws and policies. While it is impossible to calculate the exact number of children removed during this period, the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families (henceforth ‘the National Inquiry’), headed by federal judge Sir Ronald Wilson, concluded in 1997 that ‘Most [Indigenous] families have been affected, in one or more generations, by the forcible removal of one or more children.’ In this chapter, we also consider the contemporary context, from the 1990s onwards, in which Australian governments have apologised for the historic Stolen Generations but continue to remove Indigenous children from their families in rising numbers.