1969. By 1969, all states had repealed the legislation allowing for the removal of Aboriginal children under the policy of 'protection'.
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.
The removal of Indigenous children was a deliberate effort by the Australian Government as part of its assimilation policy. The 1997 Bringing Them Home report found that government officials took children away from caring and able parents.
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. '
The assimilation policy was formally abolished by the Commonwealth Government in 1973, in favour of self-management by Indigenous people. In 1979, an independent community-controlled child-care agency was established.
From 1949, Aboriginal people could vote if they were or had been servicemen. In 1962, the Menzies government amended the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 to enable all Indigenous Australians to enrol to vote in Australian federal elections.
Based on the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) projections, the number of Indigenous Australians in 2021 was estimated to be 881,600.
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.
It is estimated that massacres by white settlers resulted in the death of approximately 11% of the Aboriginal population between 1836 and 1851.
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.
In the 1860s, Victoria became the first state to pass laws authorising Aboriginal children to be removed from their parents. Similar policies were later adopted by other states and territories – and by the federal government when it was established in the 1900s.
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.
Thousands of children were forcibly removed by governments, churches and welfare bodies to be raised in institutions, fostered out or adopted by non-Indigenous families, nationally and internationally. They are known as the Stolen Generations.
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.
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.
Primary schools were to be 'free and fair', open to all children of school age within 2km of a school – though in practice access was often not equal. Aboriginal families in many areas enrolled their children in public schools.
The total number of deaths following British settlement in 1788 has long been debated, but many historians estimate it numbered tens of thousands.
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.
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.
In Victoria, the term 'Forgotten Australians' refers to people who spent time as children in institutions, orphanages and other forms of out-of-home 'care', prior to 1990, many of whom had physical, emotional and/or sexual abuse perpetrated against them.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders: Australia's First Peoples.
Families say they feel powerless in their fight against the Department of Territory Families, which is removing Aboriginal children at a rate almost 10 times higher than non-Indigenous children. It's a crisis being dubbed a "second stolen generation".
In 1803, British colonisation began and in 1876, Truganini died. She was the last full-blood and tribal Tasmanian Aboriginal. Within her one lifetime, a whole society and culture were removed from the face of the earth.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples' rights and interests in land are formally recognised over around 50 per cent of Australia's land mass. Connection to land is of central importance to First Nations Australians.