ilies again. They were often given new names, and the greater distances involved in rural areas made it easier to prevent parents and children on separate missions from tracing each other. "
Many of the officials who oversaw and implemented the removal of the children tried to justify their actions with the racist claim that family bonds among Indigenous people were not as strong or as important as among whites.
"I would not hesitate for one moment to separate any half-caste from its Aboriginal mother, no matter how frantic her momentary grief might be at the time. They soon forget their offspring. "p> Yet if this was the case, why did government departments go to such extraordinary lengths to make it difficult for parents to find out where their children were?
"They changed our names, they changed our religion, they changed our date of birth ... That's why today, a lot of them don't know who they are, where they're from. We've got to watch today that brothers aren't marrying sisters; because of the Government. Children were taken from interstate and they were just put everywhere. "
"When I finally met [my mother] through an interpreter she said that because my name had been changed she had heard about the other children but she'd never heard about me. And ... every morning as the sun came up the whole family would wail. They did that for 32 years until they saw me again. "p> Parents and other relatives tried desperately to find or maintain contact with the children, meeting with obstacles and threats at every turn. p> Murray's mother was initially allowed to visit her children (under supervision) at the Townsville State Children's Orphanage. But the visits were stopped because they had "destabilising effects":
"That didn't deter my mother. She used to come to the school ground to visit us over the fence. The authorities found out ... They had to send us to a place where she couldn't get to us. To send us anywhere on mainland Queensland she would have just followed - so they sent us to ... Palm Island Aboriginal Settlement ... I wasn't to see my mother again for ten nightmare years. "p> Paul's mother never gave up looking for her son.
"She wrote many letters to the State Welfare Authorities, pleading with them to give her son back ... All these letters were shelved. The State Welfare Department treated my mother like dirt, as if she never existed. The department rejected and scoffed at all my Mother's cries and pleas for help. "
Records were destroyed, often deliberately. For example, in the Northern Territory, personal files were "culled back to only 200 records in the 1970s due to concerns their contents would embarrass the government ". And even today, it remains extraordinarily difficult to gain access to the remaining records.
The first Annual Report of the newly-established Ministry for Aboriginal Affairs in 1968 expressed concern about the illegal removal of children in Victoria, citing "unauthorised fostering arrangements" and informal separations where children were taken and their names changed to prevent their parents finding them. Government reports by this time recognised that Indigenous children were best left in their own communities, yet despite all this, the number of Aboriginal children who were forcibly removed continued to rise, from 220 in 1973 to 350 in 1976. p> Economic rationalists like Howard and Herron, of course, see "Benefits" only in material terms. They seem incapable of understanding the trauma of separation and the deprivation of things most Australians take for granted.
"I've often thought, as old as I am, that it would have been nice to have known a father and mother, to know parents even for a little while, just to have had the opportunity of having a mother tuck you into bed and give you a good-night kiss - but it was never to be. "
Another stolen child, Penny, reports that three of her siblings are under psychiatric care, and one of them, Trevor, has been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and sometimes gets suicidal. Yet because he has had a job for most of his life and owns a house and car,
"People ... look at [Trevor] and say, 'He's achieved the great Australian dream '. And they don't look behind that ... They look at us and say, 'Well, assimilation worked with those buggers'. They see our lives as a success. "p> Some submissions to the inquiry acknowledged the "love and care provided by non-Indigenous adoptive families (and foster families to a much lesser extent) "or recorded" appreciation for a high standard of education.
Access to education is the most frequently-cited "benefit" that stolen children are supposed to have enjoyed. Yet more often than not, their educational aspirations were denigrated and opportunities denied.
"I wanted to be a nurse, o...
