THIS BOOK HITS YOU with great moral force. Its moral clarity comes in large measure from the fact that the author can see the moral ambiguity of the history he is describing. Read deals with the long term implications of the forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families and communities, mainly in New South Wales, from the end of the 19th century into the 1960s. He is sympathetic to many of those who facilitated the policies of removal:
If I had been twenty years older, I probably would have joined the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and supported its policies. I too in 1960 would have considered adopting a 'poor helpless little Aboriginal child'. That was what decent white people did.
Read believes that the policies which enabled the removal of Aboriginal children were designed to diminish Aboriginal culture and identity to the point where Aboriginality was to become identified only with a miniscule number of 'full-blood' Aborigines living far away from the main centres of population. It was a passive aggressive form of genocide, rooted in white guilt over the cost of their invasion of the continent: 'Their extinction, it seemed, would not occur naturally at all. It would have to be arranged.'
From such hurt, anger and indignation, Read has created an exceptionally hopeful book. Much of this hope comes from talking about his own experience with the group 'Link-up', of which, in the early 1980s, he was one of the founding members. 'Link-up' came into existence to put scattered Aborigines back in contact with relatives and communities from which they were severed. In 1980, Read was writing a thesis about the Wiradjuri people of NSW and was permitted to inspect the archives of the Aborigines Protection Board. These archives contained hundreds of personal stories. What he discovered was so disturbing that Read had to leave the archives occasionally to sit on the grass at Sydney's Circular Quay to regain some composure. Not long afterwards, he met Coral Edwards, a former state ward, and from their collaboration 'Link-up' was born.
This book reflects on the stories of well-known members of 'The Stolen Generation', Lowitja O'Donoghue and Charles Perkins, of whom Read has written a biography, among them. Read's analysis of the estrangement of Perkins from Alice Springs and the education he received as a result, as well as his exposure to benign white paternal figures, is subtle and appropriately tentative in drawing conclusions.