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

There’s the ten-year-old Aurukun girl given to a loving white foster family after she’d been pack-raped — until new case workers diagnosed a case of ‘stolen generations’ and ordered her return to her hellish community, where she was pack-raped again.

There’s five-month-old Mundine Orcher, given to the ‘care’ of a violent Aboriginal family and soon killed, because, as the NSW Ombudsman found, the Department of Community Services had been so keen to keep him Aboriginal, citing the need for ‘constant sensitivity to the historical impact of … the stolen generations’, that it overlooked the need to keep him safe.

There’s the Western Australian coroner who, after investigating the failure to remove a three-year-old boy who later died of malnutrition, sighed that while taking children from Aboriginal communities was now seen as ‘not an effective solution socially’, the problem was ‘we have a dead child’.

There’s the NSW Child Death Review Team, which checked why the children of Aboriginal drug addicts were 10 times more likely to die under the noses of welfare officials than those of white addicts, and blamed the ‘stolen generations’, saying it should not now lead to ‘an equally inappropriate lack of intervention for Aboriginal children at serious risk’. But it has. These children, and a dozen more I could name, are paying for the ‘stolen generations’ myth. Those who created it have blood on their hands.

Andrew Bolt is a columnist at the Herald Sun in Melbourne and now the Daily Telegraph in Sydney.