Reconciliation and Social Justice Library
Reconciliation and Social Justice Library
11.7.2 The assumptions the welfare system makes about the correlation between poverty and an inability to care for the 'welfare' of children is also mirrored in welfare perceptions of what constitutes appropriate family responses. The submission from the Western Aboriginal Legal Service in New South Wales, for instance, examines the assumptions of the Aboriginal Welfare Board and Child Welfare officials in the cases of Malcolm Smith. These officials assumed that Malcolm's family was not in contact with Malcolm either because they were not interested in him or for some reason did not wish him to return. The submission proposes an alternative reason where 'constraints of poverty, distance, illiteracy, and reluctance to approach police or Child Welfare officials' for fear of further intervention in the family' was a more likely scenario given the history of Aboriginals experience with the welfare system. It is also apparent that, at a local level, contact between the family and the separated child was discouraged. 6
11.7.3 European perceptions of what constitutes a stable living environment underlie welfare assumptions. As Ian O'Connor writes, the perception that the 'shifting household' is indicative of parental neglect is a peculiarly western perception. For Aboriginal communities this modality can serve a positive function in communities which stress the significance of kin ties and the fundamental relationship of child raising. 7 The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Inquiry into Homeless Children described the Aboriginal home to be 'wherever a family member extends sustenance, whether emotional or physical'. 8
11.7.4 The overall picture is one in which Aboriginal ways of operating as a family unit and child rearing practices (for instance, the encouragement of self-direction and independent action) have been undermined by the assumptions of a European welfare model. The emerging situation for Aboriginal children in many communities is therefore an experience of loss of role, of place and of family in their community. As Commissioner Wootten wrote in his report on Malcolm Smith:
The horror of a regime that took young Aboriginal children, sought to cut them off suddenly from all contact with their families and communities, instil in them a repugnance of all things Aboriginal, and prepare them harshly for a life as the lowest level of worker in a prejudiced white community, is still a living legacy amongst many Aboriginals today 9
11.7.5 The removal of Aboriginal children from their parents was a practice which began almost with European invasion in 1788; it was first formally enacted in Victoria in 1886 and quickly became part of a wider policy of assimilation.
11.7.6 The Interim Report flagged 'The impact of earlier programs of separation of families, forced relocation and institutionalisation' as a significant underlying issue. 10 It is clear from the number of cases examined by the Royal Commission, in which child separation was a feature, that the legacy of child removal has had a distinct role to play in institutionalisation and consequent juvenile offending. Many of these cases provide examples of a generation of loss in which Australia's welfare polices were particularly punitive.
11.7.7 Many in the Aboriginal community consider that child separation has had a profound impact on their culture. The Secretariat for National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care (SNAICC) comments, in response to this issue, that:
There is no Aboriginal family that is untouched by this policy. Many Aboriginal organisations today attempt to help Aboriginal adults who were 'removed' children to patch up their lives. Yet even today no official recognition is given to what happened. One problem of this blinkered approach by officialdom is that much needed support services are not provided to many people who literally live 'on the edge' .11
11.7.8 The author of a joint study on Aboriginal Child Poverty for the SNAICC and the Brotherhood of St Laurence, Christine Choo, sums up clearly the experience of this loss.
The poverty of Aboriginal Children is seen to be inextricably linked with the loss of the children to the community through their removal from their families and communities. This has, over the last 200 years, resulted in an inestimable loss to the communities of their most valuable resource in economic as well as personal, cultural and social terms. 12
11.7.9 Aboriginal people themselves see childhood separation as a direct cause of major social problems in Aboriginal communities today.
Many generations of Aboriginal people have been denied normal childhood development, bonding to families, and any form of positive relationship (love). As a result parenting skills are lost for generations. 13
11.7.10 This is the experience of a generation in Australia 'caught in the fabric of Queensland policy towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children'. 14 The National Aboriginal and Islander Legal Services Secretariat (NAILSS) submission on juvenile justice in Western Australia describes this experience of generational loss in the life of Graham Walley.
Firstly, Vera Slater loses her children to institutions, and a generation later the situation is compounded, with the institutionalisation of Graham who also loses his children... Both generations faced the same kind of obstruction and lack of care, but in Graham' s case the situation was made more hopeless by his inability to overcome his institutionalisation. In the second generation, the problems become insurmountable. 15
11.7.11 The exact effect of the institutionalisation, as a result of childhood separation, on Aboriginal youth offending is hard to determine as very little specific research has taken place in this area until recently. In South Australia for instance, the extent of the removal of children has never been accurately documented even though, for many years, the State Government actively pursued a policy of removing children from their parents and placing them in non-Aboriginal institutions or with non-Aboriginal families. The Western Aboriginal Legal Service Submission states that the legacies of removals 'were massive'. 16 The work of Link-Up in New South Wales has brought the issue of Aboriginal child separation to particular prominence, but there are still many more answers to questions in this area to be unearthed; for instance the effect of institutionalisation on parenting practices and why Aboriginal girls' response to their institutionalisation appears to be different to that of Aboriginal boys. 17 The work of Coral Edwards and Peter Read in New South Wales and their establishment of Link-Up has begun to re-dress this imbalance. Dr Mary Edmunds makes the point that the consequences of institutionalisation are complex, and causal theories of explanation may be insufficient here. Dr Edmunds goes on to say that:
It is certainly arguable that it constituted a major disruption to the transmission of culture and that it also removed responsibility from parents and placed it with an external agency, the mission or the State. In either case, it would appear to have at least reshaped the processes of social control in the same way that it reshaped the relationships between persons and between generations and genders. 18
11.7.12 The cases heard by this Commission would seem to indicate that child separation had a profound impact on certain individuals lives, for instance Malcolm Smith, Glenn Clark and Vincent Ryan. In the case of Malcolm Smith, the submission on behalf of the Western Aboriginal Legal Service by Dr Heather Goodall contextualises how the welfare system created institutional dependence.
The differences which arose from Malcolm's Aboriginality in his treatment in the Child Welfare system (i.e. his stereotyping as mentally defective, the failure to facilitate family contact, the failure to see his responses to the Homes as historically and socially conditioned, and his labelling as 'unreliable') heightened his exposure to precisely those risks (length of confinement and degree of authoritarian control) which are known to exacerbate institutional dependence, and the breakdown of personal autonomy and self-esteem. 19
11.7.13 Dr Peter Read describes also how institutionalisation had more sinister undertones of assimilation.
The most profound effect of institutionalisation, which overrides other well-documented effects of institutionalisation generally, was the persistent attempt by authorities to force the boys to identify as European... One was a positive reinforcement of the European model, the other was a negative portrayal of Aboriginality combined with a with holding from the boys of any particular knowledge of their immediate family or of Aborigines generally. 20
11.7.14 Although Glenn Clark was not removed under the auspices of a specific Aboriginal welfare Act, his childhood separation from his mother at four years of age by authorities, who perceived poverty as sufficient for removal, constitutes a similar occurrence. Commissioner Wootten describes how this action indelibly shaped Clark's life.
From that point on, Glenn' s life follows the tragic and well worn path of many Aborigines brutally separated from their families and thrown into an alien environment, cut off from family warmth, maternal care and any sense of identity. Torn from his mother at the age of four, his behaviour became so disturbed that the staff of a receiving home threatened to resign if this small child was not removed. 21
11.7.15 I wrote about a similar case of welfare insensitivity in the case of Stanley Gollan.
One of the most important underlying issues in this case seems to me to relate to the institutionalisation of Stanley during his early adolescence. It seems to me that there was little, if any, valid reason for Stanley being made a ward of the State... There was no reason to suppose that, had Stanley been returned to Point McLeay, his misbehaviour would have continued... By being institutionalised, he was removed from his family and friends and away from this influence of his own people.22
11.7.16 Although the lives of Malcolm Smith, Glenn Clark and Michael Gollan exemplify individuals who particularly suffered in the welfare system, in a more general sense child separation can be seen to have had an impact on all Aboriginal people who were touched by the experience of child separation either personally or through family connections.
11.7.17 Dr Goodall describes the tactics of resistance to institutional assimilation. She writes, 'These were the tactics appropriate to powerless groups: passive resistance, non-cooperation, absconding'. 23 For leaving the Child Welfare Network there was the additional legacy of heightened Child Welfare and police surveillance. The NAILSS submission on juvenile justice asserts a definite link between 'recidivism and separating children from their family and culture' .24
11.7.18 A picture emerges of lives permanently institutionalised. The NAILS Secretariat views the legacy of Kinchela Boys Home and Cootamundra Girls Home in New South Wales for those Aboriginal people who grew up in this system as
struggling against the odds to live normal lives in a world that is permanently disordered from the inside out. An indeterminate number find themselves in a revolving door relationship with police, hospitals, prisons and various debilitating dependencies. Malcolm Smith was one of many. 25
11.7.19 The legacy of child separation is still a significant issue in the lives of many Aboriginal people. It is an issue that still needs investigation and there is still a 'lost generation' that needs support and reunion with their families. Hence, there is a need for more expanded services such as those provided by Link-Up which would deal with the emotional and psychological legacy of what are now recognised as misguided child placement policies. There is need for a process of reclamation by Aboriginal people of their own immediate history here. Commissioner Dodson in Western Australia has noted that access to government archival records concerning family histories is important, and its significance cannot be underestimated:
Access to knowledge can assist: to reinstate pride in family experiences; enhance a stronger sense of identity; re-establish contacts with family members; reaffirm interaction within broad family networks; revive and maintain Aboriginal traditions...; understand the historical background of contemporary personal issues...; re-claim ownership of material pertaining to family life; develop resources... and enhance research skills. 26
11.7.20 However, I must warn that caution is required in opening up files to Aboriginal people, as with other persons who have undergone institutionalisation or adoption. The effect of seeing information which has been kept confidential, because it is private information, or because it was the practice in some States to document every governmental action and ungenerous remark of an administrator, can be devastating. Sympathetic counselling, especially by other Aboriginal people who have themselves been adopted or institutionalised, such as the Link Up staff, ought to be available to Aboriginal people who gain access to records of their family. We should be mindful of the emotional hurt which can be caused, as explained by one Aboriginal person.
Every Aboriginal person was documented on file. I came across Dad's file in 1969 by accident whilst working in the Department of Aboriginal and Islander Affairs. Dad had applied for permission to be married to my mother three times. Twice he was knocked back and permission refuse, but on the third request the Director relented. He relented because the Manager at the time was sick and tired of Dad's begging. The manager had written to support Dad' s request by stating that Nellie (my mother) may in fact have a settling influence on Dad' s larrikin ways. I stood there in that filing system stunned, frozen to the floor in shock. This was unbelievable at the age of sixteen to find out the truth in this way. My mind screamed out--what about love and freedom of choice? We remained prisoners in an unjust system that treated us like merchandise. My thoughts raced back in time, to when I was a child of nine, crying and begging with the police not to be locked up for the weekend. I was a half hour over the stipulated time granted on my permit. It was then I again realised the differences of laws that existed for non-Aborigines and my heart and soul screamed to be set free.27
11.7.21 It is important that Aboriginal people who desire to do so should be assisted in re-establishing their community and family links to those from whom they were separated as a result of past government policies.
Recommendation 52:
That funding should be made available to organisations such as Link-Up which have the support of Aboriginal people for the purpose of re-establishing links to family and community which had been severed or attenuated by past government policies. Where this service is being provided to Aboriginal people by organisations or bodies which, not being primarily established to pursue this purpose, provide the service in conjunction with other functions which they perform, the role of such organisations in assisting Aboriginal people to reestablish their links to family and community should be recognised and funded, where appropriate.
Recommendation 53:
That Commonwealth, State and Territory Governments provide access to all government archival records pertaining to the family and community histories of Aboriginal people so as to assist the process of enabling Aboriginal people to reestablish community and family links with those people from whom they were separated as a result of past policies of government. The Commission recognises that questions of the rights to privacy and questions of confidentiality may arise and recommends that the principles and processes for access to such records should be negotiated between government and appropriate Aboriginal organisations, but such negotiations should proceed on the basis that as a general principle access to such documents should be permitted.