Stolen Generation

'Grandmothers Against Removals' (GMAR) is leading a conference at Matagarup, the Perth Tent Embassy from May 24 - May 30, to strategise for the future and to march on May 26. The gathering will hold a National Protest on 'Sorry Day', May 26th, as this date marks 18 years since the release, of the 'Bringing Them Home' report. This report detailed the horrors of the Stolen Generations in the 20th Century, and called for urgent action to stop the continued removal of Aboriginal children from their families by 'child protection' agencies. [node:read-more:link]

This story paints is a damning picture with some people believed to be calling for the age of when young people leave foster, kinship/family and residential care to be raised from 18 to 21. However, this must be thought through very carefully, with input from all parties, including the wider First Nations communities. We don't want yet another patch-up job decided by bureaucrats and governments who always look for a quick fix to try and hide the gaping faults already built into their system. [node:read-more:link]

An Aboriginal peak body has concerns about a new 'permanent care order' that transfers parental rights to carers. The government says the new 'permanent care orders' would be in effect until the child was 18 and are designed to provide a more stable upbringing for children unable to live at home. It is virtually the same as adoption without changing the child's surname, birth certificate, birthrights or entitlements. SNAICC CEO Frank Hytten said the new laws could mean that children become lost in the system. [node:read-more:link]

On the 13th February, 2014, Grandmothers Against Removals protested in front of Parliament house, Canberra. "Today we march in protest against the unprecedented theft of Aboriginal children from their families by so-called "Child Protection" agencies across Australia. We are in urgent need of protection from the criminal actions of these Departments, who persecute Aboriginal families and mobilise police to terrorise children with forced removals. More Aboriginal children are forcibly separated from their families at this moment than at any time in history. - Diet Simon writes [node:read-more:link]

The Freedom Movement held a Sit-In at Parliament House on 27 January, 2015. - There is no greater rights struggle than the Aboriginal rights struggle. It is a human rights struggle where not only the First Peoples of this continent were violently and murderously dispossessed of their lands but since the advent of British colonialism onto their shores they were subjected to segregation, apartheid and the systematic destruction of their cultures and languages – more than 350 First Peoples' nations and languages have been impacted. [node:read-more:link]

Children were "chained like dogs" and sexually assaulted at a government-run home for Aboriginal children in Darwin, a child sex abuse inquiry has heard.
A former resident of the Retta Dixon home in Darwin told the Royal Commission Into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. First Nations girls were chained to their beds, starved and flogged with leather belts until they bled, as punishment at the Retta Dixon Home in Darwin. [node:read-more:link]

Lois Olney was always told her mother had put her up for adoption, but a note scrawled on a pie wrapper and passed to her while singing on stage gave the first inkling she was stolen as a baby. Lois discovered her extended family in Roebourne Western Australia.

Lois had been adopted by the Olney family, with her adoptive father being Howard Olney who went on to become a state Labor politician, and then a Justice of the Supreme Court. [node:read-more:link]

It was 1943, I was two years old and my mother - an Aborigine - was married to a white Australian when he went and gave his life for our country.

My father was a soldier and was killed on the Kokoda Track and instead of giving his wife a war widow's pension, the bloody government came and took his children away. Because of my mother's Aboriginality. There were four children at that point in time and I was the third. We were split up, the four of us, we were split. [node:read-more:link]