A killer myth

Wednesday, 3rd March 2010

The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume Three, the Stolen Generations 1881-2008
by Keith Windschuttle
Macleay Press, $59.95,
pp. 656, ISBN 9781876492199

It would be a mistake to dismiss such people as merely fabulists attracted by the prospect of money and an escape from responsibility. The tears O’Donoghue cried in speaking of her abandonment were of a daughter thrown away by someone who should have been the most loving man in her life. And it struck me: would you rather believe you’d been discarded, unloved, or that you’d been stolen? Yet the pain should not stop us from noticing how preposterous are the examples of ‘victims’ now trotted out.

Last month Windschuttle found himself on ABC Radio National debating ‘victim’ Helen Moran, another co-chair of the National Sorry Day Committee. Yet Moran’s mother was white, and was charged in a Victorian court with child neglect. Moran even admitted two years ago — on the very same ABC — that her parents abandoned her. Even when such facts are shouted in the ears of journalists, which dares hear?

Equally deaf have been the academics. Take Manne, who has been unable for years to meet my challenge to name just ten of the 100,000 children allegedly stolen for being Aboriginal. The few names he’s suggested include a 12-year-old with syphilis, a 13-year-old girl found pregnant out bush, and even children evacuated from war zones in the second world war.

So if facts mattered, Windschuttle’s book would kill the ‘stolen generations’ myth stone dead, yet we know the myth will be taught as gospel for years. He’s wasted his time, then. Unless we add one more chapter to excuse the truth, and here is what it might say. Manne cannot name ten children who were stolen, but we can name ten who were not.