Last week, some newspapers published a draft document setting out ten principles of reconciliation, prepared by the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation. Two of these principles stressed the importance of learning and acknowledging the truth about the shared history of Aborigines and other Australians.
The release of the document was well timed. Events surrounding the "stolen generations" issue over the last fortnight have shown how strongly many Australians resist facing up to the full, tangled reality of our past.
It is beyond question that officials forcibly removed some Aboriginal children from caring families, and that many of these children had dreadful experiences in the institutions that were supposed to look after them. Indeed, today few Australians would deny that terrible things were done to Aborigines in the course of our history.
But what is denied, at least by intellectuals and many in the media, is that there were circumstances which led well-meaning authorities to believe that the welfare of some Aboriginal children might require their removal. Many people simply refuse to accept that part-Aborigines were ever rejected by their "full-blood" relatives in the past, or that some Aboriginal mothers might have relinquished their children voluntarily.
When counsel for the Commonwealth in the current "stolen children" compensation case told the Federal Court that one of the two Aborigines suing the government had previously said that his mother had tried to kill him, people were stunned. After all, Bringing Them Home, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's report on the "stolen generations", had carefully avoided mentioning such embarrassing matters.
The government had adopted a "no-holds-barred approach" protested one commentator, who evidently felt that even if the statement from the Commonwealth was true, it would be best if the public did not know about it. An anthropologist writing to the Courier-Mail this week said that tales of Aboriginal infanticide had become an "urban myth".
The anthropologist has obviously not come across the work of Annette Hamilton, Professor of Anthropology at Macquarie University. Hamilton, who carried out research in the Aboriginal community of Maningrida in Arnhem Land during the 1960s, wrote that prior to this time part-European babies had not been allowed to live, and that "mixed-unions are frowned on by men and women alike as a matter of principle". It was not just whites who thought that racial purity was desirable.
There is also indisputable evidence from Aborigines themselves. Last year Marjorie Harris, a "stolen child" now in her late sixties who had an Arunta mother and an Irish father, published her autobiography. She recounts how her elder brother, who was also of mixed race, had been killed at birth.
When Marjorie was born, her mother attempted to kill her, but she was saved by her grandmother. Until she was removed by a Northern Territory policeman in 1943, Marjorie lived with the Arunta, who always told her that she was not one of them, and that she should go to live with her own people, the whites. Of course, the tragedy was that in those days, most whites would not accept part-Aborigines as equals either.
People who advocate the cause of the "stolen generations" are also silent about the passion with which their predecessors, yesterday's equivalents of the Australian Democrats and Amnesty International, argued for separating mixed-race Aborigines from "full bloods". In 1946, for example, the National Council for Civil Liberties of Great Britain warned that unless the Australian government clearly distinguished between the two categories of people, it would be responsible for the "final extinction" of the remaining Aboriginal tribes. In other words, genocide.
It is also becoming increasingly obvious that a significant number of supposedly "stolen" children were not stolen at all. Early this week southern newspapers published a story about the tussle over the body of Dayne Childs, born in Brisbane in 1972 to Aboriginal activists Cheryl Buchanan and Denis Walker, and adopted by a couple who took him to England.
Buchanan claims that Childs was given away without her permission and wants his body returned to Australia for burial. ATSIC has provided $80,000 to cover her legal battle with Childs' adoptive mother, de facto wife and child, who wish to have him buried in England.
The story revealed that Dayne Childs' birth grandmother, Oodgeroo Noonuccal (formerly Kath Walker), told people that her son and Buchanan had "too much on their plate" and that they weren't interested in keeping Dayne. It pointed out that had the child of two outspoken Aboriginal activists really been "stolen", it is beyond belief that they would have kept quiet about it at the time.
An honest acceptance of the complexities involved in the past removal of Aboriginal children is not just a matter of getting our history right. Many people have become so obsessed with seeing the issue solely through a racial filter that they seem to have lost their moral bearings.
In a recent interview to coincide with the release of his book Genocide in Australia, Professor Colin Tatz confessed that 37 years ago he had nearly become "an accomplice of genocide". On a visit to a Northern Territory institution for mixed-race children, his wife nursed a beautiful baby boy for a while. At the end of the visit Tatz and his wife were asked if they would like to adopt the baby.
They were very tempted, but Tatz claims they "realised it would be wrong", and finally said no. Over the years he "has become proportionately more grateful" for this decision.
But consider what he is actually saying. The good professor believes that he was being virtuous by leaving the baby boy in an institution where -- by Tatz's own lights -- he would be beaten and mistreated, rather than bringing him up in a caring home.
On the other hand, Professor Tatz is suggesting -- without any demurral from his interviewer -- that a couple who took the boy from the institution to give him a loving home would be "accomplices in genocide". Are there no bounds to the moral confusion of our times?
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