Stolen Generations

The Stolen Generations are the Noongar and other Aboriginal children who, over one and a half centuries, were taken away from their families and placed in institutions and missions. Most often it was the lighter skinned children who were taken to be assimilated into white society. Sometimes children were on their way home from school or visiting their siblings when they were taken.

 History of the Stolen Generations
The first recorded removal of a Noongar child in the Swan River Colony was in 1833. Lt. Governor Irwin wrote to his superiors in London after the execution of Noongar Elder, Midgegooroo. Irwin writes in relation to Midgegooroo’s eight-year-old son, Billy. ‘The Child has been kept in ignorance of his father’s fate and it is my present intention to retain him in confinement and by kind treatment I am in hopes from his tender age, he may be [accustomed] to civilised habits, as to make it improbable he would revert to a barbarous life when grown up.’[i] The systematic removal of Aboriginal children was set in place with the increase of missions and the introduction of the 1905 Act. Many children were also removed from their families before this period.

Children at Moore River Native Settlement, 1930s. Courtesy State Library of Western Australia, The Battye Library 226017PD

Four months later, after repeated requests, he was returned to his mother. Billy’s removal was not legal, but like other cases in the early years of colonialism, little was done to stop it. The impact of colonisation on Noongar children began early on with the violent conflict between Noongar and Europeans over land, laws, and vast differences in culture and perspective. Over the next one and a half centuries, successive generations of European settlers sought to impose European values and behaviour on the Aboriginal population. They did so with the deliberate and calculated removal of Noongar and other Indigenous children from their families. The children were confined in government and church-sponsored institutions, where they were to be re-educated and Christianised.

 

Missions

With the arrival of the Christian missions came the first systemic removal of Noongar children.[ii] From the point of view of the missionaries, their work was to ‘save the souls’ of the Aboriginal race. For Noongar it meant fear of police and cars carrying officers from the Welfare Department.

 Doolan Leisha Eatts recalls her time at the Badjaling Mission:

[A]t the Badjaling Mission, you know everyone was camped along. We were camped right up at the sand plain, up the top there. And when the car comes in down the bottom, come in like that, well the bottom camp they all had a young fella who was trained to whistle long and sharp for danger if there was a car coming in. And so young fella would give this long sharp whistle and it be carried on with every young fella in the family too, and it would get up to the camp where we were. And of course all the kids used to run and ‘ide.
Doolan Leisha Eatts, oral history, SWALSC, 2008

 Legal removal of Indigenous Children

The first law in Western Australia to officially sanction the removal of children was the Industrial Schools Act of 1874. It stated that, ‘any Indigenous child “surrendered” to an institution could be detained there without parental consent, or contracted to employment after the age of 12 until the child reached 21 years’.[iii]

Aborigines Act, 1905

The Aborigines Act, 1905 gave the government even further control over Noongar lives. For the first time, provisions of the Act incorporated an assessment of ‘behaviour’ to determine whether an individual should be defined as Aboriginal or not. It recognized the Chief Protector of Aborigines as the legal guardian of every Aboriginal child. More consequential was his power to remove any child born of ‘half-caste’ or Aboriginal mother to a home or mission.
The number of missions and settlements in Western Australia exploded from six in 1905, to 24 in 1915, when A.O. Neville became the Chief Protector of Aborigines.[iv] Neville was a strong advocate of assimilation and thought children of mixed descent should be absorbed, racially and culturally, into the general population. His tenure was characterised by a sharp increase in the number of our Noongar children being taken from their families.