still not the ‘stolen’ generation

Justice Janine Pritchard in WA’s Supreme Court last week dismissed a potential landmark case for compensation by nine “stolen generation” claimants. They are Donald Collard, 80, and his wife Sylvia, 81, of the wheatbelt town of Kondinin, and seven of their children. They claimed that nine of their 14 children had been wrongly taken away by the authorities between 1958 and 1961, and split among foster carers and Sister Kate’s Home.

The couple sought damages, exemplary damages, aggravated damages, compensation and costs for themselves and the children. The media have reported it as a ‘multi-million’ claim. The state Government defended the case, described as the first “stolen generations” damages lawsuit in WA, arguing that “it was the right thing to remove the children.” A win by the Collards could have set a precedent for thousands more “stolen” claims.

The 1997 Bringing Them Home report claimed there were 100,000 “stolen generation” cases. Ex-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, in his formal 2008 apology, dropped the number without explanation to a maximum of 50,000. Bringing Them Home accepted all Aboriginal “stolen” complaints at face value, and published without comment such improbable accounts as this from ‘Jennifer’:

Cootamundra [Home, NSW] in those days was very strict and cruel…Mum remembered once a girl who did not move too quick. She was tied to the old bell post and belted continuously. She died that night, still tied to the post, no girl ever knew what happened to the body or where she was buried.”

The Crown defence, as put by Rob Mitchell, Senior Counsel for the State, was partly based on archived official documents about the Collard family. He said removal of the children, who were living in squalor and neglect, was justified on welfare grounds. It was not racism, as claimed by the Collards.

The only successful “stolen generations” claimant has been Bruce Trevorrow in the SA Supreme Court. He was “stolen” in early 1958, when 13 months old, by a well-meaning but misguided Aboriginal Welfare Officer called Marjory Angas, who secretly put him out to a white couple for adoption in the incorrect belief the baby’s health would suffer if returned to its parents. Trevorrow won $775,000 damages in 2007-08. Far from validating the “stolen generation” thesis, the Trevorrow case proved the opposite, that there was no policy to remove half-caste children. In SA welfare cases, Aboriginal parents had the right to refuse removal, unless over-ruled by a court. After removals, there was no policy to cut children off from their Aboriginal heritage. “Stealing” Aboriginal children had been legally impossible since an Act of 1911.

More here

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/bennelong-papers/2013/12/one-blow-stolen-generation/