also published as "Genocide: Truth Stolen" in The Age, 5 March 1998
For much of Australia's history, the treatment of Aborigines has clashed with cherished moral principles, and some of the most serious breaches involved forcibly removing innocent children from caring families. Last May's release of Bringing Them Home, the report of the "stolen generations" Inquiry, was hailed as a major advance in acknowledging these wrongs.
But the praise was unjustified. Recently, I released my booklet, Betraying the Victims, which critically examines issues covered by Bringing Them Home, such as its comparison between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal child removals, and its claim that the removal of Aboriginal children constituted "genocide". Amongst its many defects, Bringing Them Home omits crucial evidence, misrepresents major sources, makes false assertions, and confuses "forced" separations with voluntary separations in order to establish the worst possible case against Australia.
In his opinion column (2 March), Robert Manne claims my criticisms of the report involve a perceived conflict of interest, receiving funds from mining companies who "have a great deal to lose or gain regarding the thrust of Aboriginal policy". Apart from the fact that I structure my funding so that I am not dependent on any one company or sector, my strongest personal interest is maintaining my own intellectual credibility. I would be most foolish to risk this by making an unsustainable attack on a report that has been treated so reverentially.
Furthermore, Manne is naïve to think that allowing a shoddy report to remain unchallenged actually furthers Aboriginal interests. The only proper response to injustice is a passionate commitment to presenting an account that cannot be dismissed. The truth is bad enough, and exaggerating it, or suppressing details which might embarrass today's activists, or making outrageous charges about "genocide", feeds public distrust and encourages indifference or worse.
Manne says the structure of my argument is "peculiar", because I have supposedly discovered terrible truths from the very report I described as "intellectually and morally irresponsible". Manne's statement reveals a strange narcissism, because it implies that because he first learnt about the child separations from Bringing Them Home, the same is true of nearly everyone else. I learned about the separations over a long period from many sources, including the writings of historians and affected Aborigines, conversations with Aboriginal friends, and cases examined by the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.
As my booklet explains, the Royal Commission's findings suggest a much more complex picture of Aboriginal child removals than the one presented by Bringing Them Home. This is one of four grounds I give for suggesting the report may not have faithfully represented the testimony before it. Manne falsely states my suspicions were "based entirely on a single piece of evidence".
Another basis of my suspicions was the failure of Bringing Them Home to present essential summary data about the witnesses who appeared before the inquiry, such as the official reason for removal, or the extent to which family contacts were maintained after separation. The extracts from testimony included in the report came from less than 40 per cent of the witnesses, and it is therefore fair to say the experiences of over 60 per cent were very largely ignored.
The bias of Bringing Them Home is also obvious from its complete failure to record that when the assimilation policy was first formulated in the 1930s, the common strand in the views of all Aboriginal spokespersons in the south was the desire for incorporation into white society. The point is crucial, because the "genocide" charge hinges on the assimilation objective of the child removals.
Manne claims that my case against the bias of Bringing Them Home "collapses" because the most significant and passionate Aboriginal advocacy of absorption, the pamphlet written to publicise the 1938 "Day of Mourning", was really written by a white fascist, "Inky" Stephenson. In the true spirit of Bringing Them Home he has misrepresented his source -- Craig Munro's biography of Stephenson -- and ignored all the other evidence of initial Aboriginal support for assimilation. Worse, he seems to have joined the ranks of those who believe Aborigines cannot think for themselves, and that there is always a white man behind their protests.
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