By Shantelle Common
2020 was the year of unprecedented events. The fires that tore through whole communities and brought the nation together in solidarity, supporting one another through generosity and comradery. The world stood still for the emergence of a pandemic that spread globally, stopping contemporary civilisation in it’s tracks and reminding us of our own fragility in the grand scheme of life. Capitalism was no longer in charge as the economy took a back seat to the public health emergency that unfolded. It was in this space that the Black Lives Matters movement made it’s mark as thousands of people took to the streets in defiance of a system ripe with injustice.
It is now 2021. We are no longer in drought, with an El Nina that saturated the predictions of an even more horrific fire season. Countries have started administering the first COVID-19 vaccines, with high rates of reported success. Economies have once again been prioritised over public health risk, with focused efforts made to label money-making machines with COVID Safe stickers, inducing a sense of security in business as usual practice. The Black Lives Matter movement has, however, slipped further into the background once more, with many of these events having been policed out of its potential political impact for real change.
Australia Day 2021. The date is still a contentious issue, dividing the nation with racial remarks running rampant on social media and mainstream media platforms. Many comments reflect a lack of historical understanding of actual events that occurred in Australia’s history. For many whose comments reflect an ignorant view, it is not their fault. Our Indigenous history in Australia was washed over by the colonial achievement of discovering Australia. God Save the Queen was sung by many of the older generations during their school years. Australia Day marked the day that the British flag was first raised on Australian soil. Many non-Indigenous Australians who have generations of history embedded in this country, are quick to state that what happened to Indigenous peoples was an act of the past, further stating that ‘we already said sorry’. But what does sorry mean, when the impact is still being felt strongly, and the mistake is still being made?
Briefly stated, colonisation resulted in the rapid decline of the Indigenous population of Australia, it’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, through countless untold Frontier Wars and diseases that resulted in deaths due to a lack of inherent immunity. They were further dispossessed from their lands, unable to access food through main hunting and foraging grounds, eventually forced to rely on British rations. Assimilation policies were supported by unethical child protection services, further displacing families through forced child removals on the basis of alleged neglect. The 1915 Amendment to the Aborigines Protections Act meant that these children could be removed without due process through a court to substantiate these claims, resulting in multiple generations of children missing entirely from their families and communities, with any remnants of cultural and personal identity stripped from their being, often through physical reinforcement. Children were raised in training homes for menial positions to further support colonial development. Fairer skinned children were selected for adoption into white families, with cases heard from the children and the foster families where they had no prior knowledge of these children being forcibly and wrongfully taken. The concept of adoption was used to imply that these children had been abandoned or unwanted. The events around this time became known as the era of the Stolen Generations.
Aboriginal culture, while revered by many on the surface through celebration of art and community events, has been associated with alcohol and drug abuse, higher rates of incarerations and domestic violence, and lower levels of education and poverty, to name a few. I wish to strongly state at this point, that in no shape or form is this actually a cultural attribute, however, these associated factors are heavily intertwined in our communities. They are an unsurprising result of intergenerational trauma and harm caused by a child protection system that has stolen children from innocent families that were thriving, and placed them into institutions and homes where the majority were abused in every sense of the word. My grandfather and his brothers never spoke of their lost childhood in these homes, and it was only after his death that I discovered the truth in a very unlikely way – by the accidental drop of the name of the home that was supposedly his father’s last name. Through my studies I had learned that the Matron or Manager of these homes were the mother or father to the children, with many beaten out of their names and given numbers in its place. The initial era of the Stolen Generations allegedly ended in the late 1970’s, however, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are increasingly over-represented in children in out-of-home care. These institutions and so-called ‘homes’ inflicted so much pain that they continued to suffer for the rest of their lives, learning to cope through unhealthy dependencies on alcohol and drugs to numb the pain, and applying the only parenting skills that they remembered onto their children. Family violence is prevalant and only exacerberates the cycle of trauma from one generation to the next. Our child protection system is responsible for the increasing over-representation of our children being removed into out-of-home care, out of family, and out of community. The Stolen Generations have never been restored and we are standing at the potential pivotal point in our history to exchange one future for a better one. This story cannot be silenced or ignored. Sorry needs to finally take shape through action and truth to allow our next generation to tell a better story.