The new volume in Keith Windschuttle’s series The Fabrication of Aboriginal History is based on an exhaustive examination of the archival records of child removals and of government policies and laws. It also scrutinizes the work of the historians on whom the Human Rights Commission relied when it declared genocide had been committed against the Aboriginal people. The book finds Aboriginal children were never removed from their families in order to put an end to Aboriginality or, indeed, for any improper government policy or program. The small numbers of Aboriginal child removals in the twentieth century were mostly based on traditional grounds of child welfare. Most children affected had been orphaned, abandoned, destitute, neglected, malnourished or subject to various forms of domestic violence, sexual exploitation and sexual abuse. The camps from which they were removed were the then equivalent of today’s notorious remote communities in outback Australia. Other children were sent by their Aboriginal parents to hostels to go to school or into the workforce as apprentices. The notion that this amounted to genocide came from creative interpretations of selected evidence taken out of context by politically motivated historians. There were no Stolen Generations.Wart would disagree.
Update: QuadrantOnline, which Windschuttle edits, is definitely worth a look.
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