Book Review
"The Fabrication of
Aboriginal History"
Volume Three, The Stolen Generations 1881–2008
In 1997, the Human Rights Commission made the most notorious
accusation ever directed against Australia. It accused this country
of committing genocide against the Aborigines by stealing their
children. The purported intention of governments and welfare
officials was to institutionalize and assimilate the children into
white society and thus rid Australia of its Aboriginal people. In
2008, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologized to Aboriginal people for
these policies.
This book is based on an exhaustive examination of the archival
records of child removals and of government policies and laws. It
also scrutinizes the work of the historians on whom the Human Rights
Commission relied. It finds the historical research that created
this interpretation was shoddy and untrustworthy. Aboriginal
children were never removed from their families in order to put an
end to Aboriginality or, indeed, for any improper government policy
or program. The small numbers of Aboriginal child removals in the
twentieth century were almost all based on traditional grounds of
child welfare. Most children affected had been orphaned, abandoned,
destitute, neglected, malnourished or subject to various forms of
domestic violence, sexual exploitation and sexual abuse. The notion
that this amounted to genocide came from creative interpretations of
selected evidence taken out of context by politically motivated
historians. There were no Stolen Generations.
Copies of this title are available from Macleay Press:
www.macleaypress.com