It's a story that has been repeated for generations of Aboriginal families in Australia, and it's still happening today. In 2019/20, 952 Aboriginal children across NSW were removed from their families, a 2.6% increase on the year prior.
Why were Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children taken from their families? The forcible removal of First Nations children from their families was based on assimilation policies, which claimed that the lives of First Nations people would be improved if they became part of white society.
1969. By 1969, all states had repealed the legislation allowing for the removal of Aboriginal children under the policy of 'protection'.
The children were denied all access to their culture, they were not allowed to speak their language and they were punished if they did. The impacts of this are still being felt today. There are currently more than 17,000 Stolen Generations survivors in Australia.
It's estimated that as many as 1 in 3 Indigenous children were taken between 1910 and the 1970s, affecting most Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in Australia.
In NSW, more than 6,600 Aboriginal children are in statutory out-of-home care as of 30 June 2020.
In 2021, female Indigenous students had higher apparent retention rates than male Indigenous students across all school year groups and in all jurisdictions. Nationally, the apparent retention rate for female Indigenous students was 63% from Year 7/8 to Year 12, compared with 55% of male Indigenous students.
Compensation for Stolen Generation Survivors
All members would receive a $200,000 ex gratia payment per survivor plus a separate $7,000 payment per survivor for funeral expenses. The proposal would commence from 1 July 2023.
Most (81%) lived in non-remote locations, which was similar to the distribution of the broader Indigenous population. In 2018–19, approximately 142,200 Indigenous people aged 18 and over were the descendants of members of the Stolen Generations.
Saying sorry
Between 1997 and 1999 all state and territory parliaments officially apologised to the Stolen Generations, their families and communities for the laws, policies and practices which had governed forcible removal.
Closing the Gap is a national strategy that aims to reduce Indigenous disadvantage with respect to life expectancy, child mortality, access to early childhood education, educational achievement and employment outcomes.
The Stolen Generations refers to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children who were removed from their families between 1910 and 1970. This was done by Australian federal and state government agencies and church missions, through a policy of assimilation.
These children were forcibly removed from their families and communities through race-based policies set up by both State and Federal Governments. They were either put in to homes, adopted or fostered out to non-Indigenous families.
In Aboriginal communities, the responsibility of raising children is often seen as the responsibility of the entire family rather than the biological parents alone, and so adoption was not necessary and an unknown practice in traditional Aboriginal culture.
The islands were settled by different seafaring Melanesian cultures such as the Torres Strait Islanders over 2500 years ago, and cultural interactions continued via this route with the Aboriginal people of northeast Australia.
In 2018, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children made up 5.9% (an estimated 278,000) of the total child population in Australia. The gender distribution of Indigenous children was the same as for all Australian children (51% boys and 49% girls) (ABS 2018c).
between one in three and one in ten Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families and communities in the period from approximately 1910 until 1970. '
Between 11,000 and 14,000 Aboriginal people died, compared with only 399 to 440 colonisers. The tallies of the dead are not the only measure of what took place, according to Dr Bill Pascoe, a digital humanities specialist and key researcher on the project.
The Bringing Them Home report (produced by the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families in 1987), says that "at least 100,000" children were removed from their parents.
The New South Wales Stolen Generations Reparations Scheme provides ex-gratia payments of $75,000 to living Stolen Generations survivors who were removed from their families and committed to the care of the New South Wales Aborigines Protection or Welfare Boards.
Chair of the Prime Minister's Indigenous Advisory Council, Warren Mundine, told Q&A that $30 billion is spent every year on 500,000 Indigenous people in Australia.
This period of Government sanctioned slave labour is known as Stolen Wages. For thousands of Indigenous people during the late 1800s – 1970s, their work was unpaid and controlled by the State. There was forced servitude and state-controlled and organised child slave labour.
Poor attainment has been attributed to lower I.Q. and ability, inadequate home environments, and poor parenting and not to the inadequacies of the education provided, to prejudices Aboriginal children face or to the active resistance by Aboriginal people to the cultural destruction implicit in many educational programs ...
Attendance rates for Indigenous students remain lower than for non‑Indigenous students (around 82 per cent compared to 92 per cent in 2019). Gaps in attendance are evident for Indigenous children as a group from the first year of schooling. The attendance gap widens during secondary school.
Another review prepared for the Australian federal police in 2021 found that at least 25.6% of children under 12 and 18% of those aged between 13 and 17 who go missing while in care are Indigenous, despite First Nations children making up just 5.9% of the total population under 18.