aboriginal studies
HEARTBREAKINGHISTORY
Anna Haebich
Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families 1800-2000
FACP, $35.00pb, 724pp
1 863683 05 4
IN A SPEECH DELIVERED on 11 October Bill Hayden, ex Cabinet Minister, Leader of the Opposition and equestrian squire of Yarralumla, declared that most of the evidence given by members of the stolen children generations to the Human Rights Commission Inquiry was based on what he called 'Faulty Memory Syndrome'. He quoted with approval the views of D. R. Meagher, QC, in the Cubillo-Gunner judgement that there was never a policy of widespread removal of Aboriginal children in the Northern Territory.
Anna Haebich's book could not be more timely. It will be an essential tool of reference for what has become a fundamentally important national debate. While explaining her title Haebich writes:
Overlapping circles of extended family lie at the heart of the lives of most Aboriginal Australians. Networks of family relationships determine day-to-day activities and shape the course of destinies. From an early age Aboriginal Australians learn who belongs to whom, where they come from and how they should behave across a wide variety of kin.
These familiar systems, she argues with power and conviction, have been subject to repeated attacks by successive waves of Australian governments -- federal, state and colonial, tearing at the heart of Aboriginal family life.
Broken Circles is a big book and an ambitious one. It has a short account of nineteenth century policies with particular reference to Van Diemen's Land but the bulk of the material is about policy in the twentieth century and deals in detail with the activities of the state and federal governments. Haebich is the first person to attempt to synthesise the vast amount of material produced by the seven bureaucracies which dealt with Aboriginal affairs. Her touch is most assured when dealing with Western Australia where her research rests on years of scholarship, a PhD thesis and a major book. But her footnotes and bibliography attest to the labour that was required to bring this story before the public. There are twenty tightly packed pages of references and over two thousand endnotes. There is an informative chronology of legislation, opening and closing of institutions and departmental re-arrangements and a most useful table of nineteenth century legislation and institutions. One can only hope, whether her readers agree with her standpoint or not, that Haebich's detailed research will provide greater substance to a debate characterised by passion rather than precision.
A major problem with popular understanding and misunderstanding about the removal of children is the inability to appreciate the profound intellectual changes that have taken place during the twentieth century on the question of race. Get that perspective wrong and the whole picture falls out of focus.
What has to be understood is the intellectual and moral revolution that took place in the 1940s precipitated by the Holocaust. The whole complex structure of racial thought collapsed and was speedily cleared away in campaigns launched by the new United Nations Organization and its scientific and cultural offshoot, UNESCO. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights crystallised the new dominant paradigm.
Both sides of the debate about the stolen generation tend to ignore the dramatic changes which re-shaped thinking about race in Australia as much as anywhere. One side draws appropriate attention to the avowedly racist, eugenicist policies pursued by governments in the 1930s and then assumes they continued to inform policy in the 1950s and 1960s. This is understandable because there was continuity of policy even while the objectives underwent change which often occurred unremarked.
The other side of the debate is mistaken in the opposite way. They observe the practices and personnel of governments since the Second World War, much of which is within living memory, and project them back into the past assuming you can draw a straight line from the 1950s to the 1930s. In doing so they totally mis-read the intellectual climate, misunderstand the eugenicist agenda, underestimate the profound racism at the heart of pre-war Australia.
Incomplete:
Henry Reynolds is Research Professor at the University of Tasmania
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