Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing

Chapter 2
In many parts of Australia, the government practiced the forceful removal of children from their families;
a genocidal practice intended to destroy Aboriginal social and cultural identity and was exercised well
into the 1980s. A common practice was simply to remove the child forcibly, often in the absence of the
parent, but sometimes directly taking the child from its mother’s arms. The children were then sent to
non-Aboriginal institutions where they were kept until the age of 14. Then, in the case of girls, sent to
domestic services where they experienced sexual, psychological and physical abuses of unprecedented
proportions. They were constantly monitored by their non-Aboriginal “protectors” and forced into
social submission. On the other hand, Aboriginal men and boys often ended up in isolated detention
centres as a result of their “delinquent behaviour.” Stripped of their Aboriginal status and identity, they
were left to their troubled selves. Rose also talks about the bitterness experienced by Aboriginal men
who were not paid wages and could not support themselves or their families:
In order to obtain the food and other necessities that they needed, they had to rely on
women who would get the goods from Europeans and share the goods with them. As
fathers and brothers they were unable to protect their daughters and sisters, as their own
Law requires them to do; and as husbands they were unable to protect their wives.
They were forced to accept that European men could have unlimited sexual access to
the women they were meant to protect. Both men and women were also forced to
accept that the government would take their mixed ancestry children, and that they
themselves could be left with no descendants. Men and women all knew that their own
survival, both in the short and long term, depended on acquiescing to these painful and
perverted practices (1991:187-188).
Australia is a unique country in which colonialism had retained its primeval, brutal force for a much
longer period than in other dominated lands.
In the Northern Territory, from 1911 to 1957 and again from 1957 to 1964, when all
“full-blood” Aborigines were declared “wards,” protection included the need for permits
to leave reserves and the Territory, prohibition on alcohol, prohibition on inter-racial
sex, prohibition on inter-racial marriage unless with official permission, inability to
vote or to receive social service benefits and employment at specified, statutory Aboriginal
rates of pay (Tatz, 1999:21).
Prior to June 3, 1992, Australia was the only former British colony that had failed to acknowledge, in
law, the prior land ownership of its Aboriginal inhabitants (Hocking, 1993). In 1992, in Eddie Mabo
and others vs. the State of Queensland, the High Court of Australia handed down an historic judgment
that signaled a significant legal, as well as symbolic, transformation in relations between the Indigenous
people and non-Aboriginal of Australia. For the first time, the Court accepted the argument that,
under common law, the native title of the Indigenous inhabitants of Australia could be recognized. In
so doing, the Court abandoned a 200-year-old legal fiction held at the time of the first British settlement
that the continent was terra nullius - “a land without owners” (Tonkinson, 1998:289).
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