Stolen Generations

The Stolen Generations (also known as Stolen Children) were the children of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent who were removed from their families by the Australian Federal and State government agencies and church missions, under acts of their respective parliaments. The removals of those referred to as "half-caste" children were conducted in the period between approximately 1905 and 1969, although in some places mixed-race children were still being taken into the 1970s. Documentary evidence, such as newspaper articles and reports to parliamentary committees, suggest a range of rationales. Apparent motivations included the belief that the Aboriginal people would die out, given their catastrophic population decline after white contact, and the belief that full-blooded Aboriginal people resented miscegenation and the mixed-race children fathered and abandoned by white men.

A minority of historians dispute that substantial numbers of mixed-blood Aboriginal children were forcibly taken from their families. They contend that some children were removed mainly to protect them from neglect and abuse.

Numerous 19th- and early 20th-century contemporaneous documents indicate that the policy of removing mixed-race Aboriginal children from their mothers related to an assumption that the Aborigines were dying off. Given their catastrophic population decline after white contact, whites assumed that the full-blood tribal Aboriginal population would be unable to sustain itself, and was doomed to extinction. The idea expressed by A. O. Neville, the Chief Protector of Aborigines for Western Australia, and others as late as 1930 was that mixed-race children could be trained to work in white society, and over generations would marry white and be assimilated into the society.

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