Four years ago, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission released Bringing Them Home, the report of its inquiry into the distressing history of Aboriginal child removals. It changed the way that many Australians think about our past.
The inquiry concluded that from around 1910 until 1970, "between one in three and one in ten indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families", and presented harrowing extracts from the testimony of people who appeared before it. It also found that the practices contravened the United Nations 1948 Genocide Convention, because they were supposedly designed to bring about the disappearance of the "cultural values and ethnic identities" of indigenous children.
Many intellectuals realised that Bringing Them Home was badly flawed methodologically and historically. But they kept silent, unwilling to jeopardise public confidence in the report's truthfulness. Many were angered by my 1998 paper Betraying The Victims, which marshalled considerable evidence to demonstrate the shoddiness of Bringing Them Home. In The Age, for instance, Robert Manne wrote that I was deliberately polarising opinion and playing to popular ignorance.
But while the forensic examination of a terrible injustice can readily be misrepresented as being "mean-spirited", there is no defensible alternative to a rigorous quest for truth. Intellectuals who believe they help Aborigines by reducing the past to a simple moral tale that resonates with contemporary sensibilities are betraying those they claim to defend. Redemption or reconciliation cannot come from embellishing accounts of the dispossession and humiliation that Aborigines suffered for nearly two centuries, or by omitting embarrassing and complicating details. Unfortunately, the authors of Bringing Them Home and their supporters seem to think otherwise.
It is undeniable that at various times and places over the past century, an unknown but significant number of part-Aboriginal children were wrongly taken from loving families. I have no sympathy with commentators who want to replace "stolen generations" with "rescued generations", for both phrases distort a complex and painful reality for political purposes. And although some non-Aboriginal youngsters were also unjustly separated from their families, legislation and administrative practices as well as prejudice usually made it easier to remove Aboriginal children. Furthermore, even when Aboriginal children were taken for legitimate reasons, some suffered serious abuses in institutions or in foster care.
Unfortunately, Bringing Them Home lumped everything together as "forcible removal" -- from cases where the word "stolen" is entirely appropriate, to those where Aboriginal parents in remote locations willingly sent their children to boarding schools. Its findings of "genocide" ultimately hinged on a single document whose contents it grossly misrepresented. Its account of past assimilation policies is a travesty, omitting crucial information such as the initial strong support from prominent Aborigines and international organisations for assimilation. On page after page, Bringing Them Home deceptively stacks the deck against Australia.
In recent months, perhaps in response to growing public realisation of the failings of Bringing Them Home, supporters of the "Aboriginal movement" have begun to end their previous silence. Last year the historian Bain Attwood wrote that HREOC's secretariat and the inquiry proceedings "played a major role in shaping the stories presented to it". Attwood noted that major historical sources had been discounted and that the inquiry's estimates of the number of children removed could not be supported by any available research.
But the most interesting turnaround has come from Robert Manne, long one of the most vocal supporters of the Aboriginal leadership. This week sees the launch of his book, In Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right, which finally acknowledges many of the flaws in Bringing Them Home. Manne concedes the "thinness of the historical grasp" of the report, even though tracing the history of the removal practices was the inquiry's first term of reference. It "greatly exaggerated" the numbers of children involved, and did not properly explain that removals only affected Aborigines of mixed descent. While he argues that some pre-War administrators adopted the "genocidal thought" of wanting to "breed out the colour", he admits that it is wrong to call policies of cultural assimilation "genocide".
Manne criticises the inquiry's unwillingness to give proper consideration to cases where children were genuinely at risk, or where they were relinquished voluntarily by their parents. He thinks it should have been more active in soliciting the evidence of the public servants, missionaries and others who implemented the child removals. And much subsequent dispute might have been avoided had Bringing Them Home explicitly acknowledged what is "obvious to commonsense", that the memories of some individuals who appeared before the inquiry, could be "distorted with the passage of time".
While I condemn eugenic programs, I still do not accept that "breeding out the colour" was genocidal, at least as expressed in actual policies. But on the other matters above, Manne and I are in accord, although we may disagree on emphases. His estimate of 20,000 to 25,000 separations seems reasonable, provided it is acknowledged that this covers the whole range of cases, from genuinely stolen to voluntarily relinquished children.
Our approach to resolving the consequences of removal remains different, although even here, we are not so far apart as it may seem. For instance, I would like to see a Commonwealth apology to Aborigines, though unlike Manne, I think it should emphasise that most wrongs ultimately stemmed from the belief that Aborigines were a different kind of human being, requiring special laws and policies -- a belief that still persists.
Nevertheless, having to concede that virtually the only benefit of the HREOC inquiry was giving "victims of child removal a public voice" seems to have been too much for Manne. He feverishly conjures up an organised plot by "the right" to deny the reality of forcible removals, with P.P. McGuinness, who succeeded him as editor of Quadrant magazine, as "the general". Manne seems terrified of being re-identified with "the right", from which he has only recently managed to extricate himself.
So Manne follows the intellectual standards established by Bringing Them Home. The number of errors in his essay is quite remarkable. He caricatures the positions of people like myself, using tactics such as the creative use of quotation marks to make it appear as though we have made statements that are very different from what was actually said. From my perspective, his most egregious assertion is claiming I have argued that "almost all" of "the thousands of Aborigines believing themselves to have been taken from their parents unjustly" were "in the grip of collective hysteria and suffering from 'false memory syndrome' ". To apply one of Manne's favourite sayings, "slander is a hummable tune".
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