Indigenous Child Removals in Australia: The Stolen Generations and Debates about Genocide

In 1997, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission in Australia released a landmark report “Bringing Them Home: National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families.” The report resulted from several years of hearings conducted around Australia with (now) adult-age victims of this policy, namely indigenous children who were removed from their parents because of their “mixed-race” origins (European fathers and Aboriginal mothers). The report’s release forever altered the state of Australian-indigenous relations and initiated a local “Historikerstreit” about whether or not the forced removal of Aboriginal children from the 1930s to the 1970s could be discussed as “genocide”, as asserted in the report. The allegation of genocide was a term of empowerment for the victims, referred to as the “Stolen Generations”, but it was also problematic for historians and other scholars who equated genocide with the Holocaust. The inferred comparability of child removals and the Holocaust confused the discussion about the extent, silences and potential reparations of this history, and further obscured the links between the policy and ongoing socio-economic and mental health impacts on children, affected families and Aboriginal communities. The use of the term genocide also undermined any serious examination of how the policy of forced removals was transnational (as occurring in Nazi Germany’s assault on Jews): legalised segregation through eugenics principles with the motivation of eventual biological “absorption” of the group of “mixed-race” Aboriginal children into white European communities. This paper examines the brief history of removals of Aboriginal children in Australia, the local “Historikerstreit” it generated, and the significance of this history to discussions of children as victims of cultural and biological genocide.