The struggles of people like the ex-Roelands inmates show that the vision of the assimilationists was largely realised. These people have lost much of their Aboriginal heritage but few have been able to compete equally with whites for jobs and lifestyle. In significant ways they have been disempowered.
As soon as they take you from your family the indoctrination begins. Those in control of you, white foster parents, schools, the welfare all set out to crush and demoralise you, they try to change you, to whitewash you and force you to fit into a world that is alien to you. It’s interesting because they don’t try to make you fit into relationships, they always let you know that you don’t belong, you remain on the fringes of the ‘family’ pretty much all your life. This total disregard for your humanity and your identity is part of the ‘assimilation’ process. They dehumanise you by denying you the right to be who you really are.
This instils in you a deep level of resentment in regard to your Aboriginality and towards those who ‘failed’ to protect you. People often say to me: ‘You might not have been where you are today if you had been left with your parents’. What they are saying is that I would be nothing without my ‘white’ upbringing, that I’m worthless and doomed to failure as an Aborigine. This is such an insult to me.
What people fail to recognise is that this is the kind of thinking that formed the racial stereotyping that created the policies that took us from our families in the first place. They still say it was ‘for our own good’. How can anyone justify taking small children away from families who love them? The best intentions in the world can never compensate me for the pain and loss that I have experienced and continue to experience. We all have a right to our Identity, it’s something that most white people take for granted. For more than thirty years I didn’t have this basic right and that will always continue to cause me great anguish.
Acknowledging the damage and the hurt inflicted on the stolen generations has only recently begun in Australia. Unresolved grief and psychological dysfunction still plague the Aboriginal community. Many have died early and untimely deaths resulting from the underlying problems associated with their forced removal from their families. Others have undertaken journeys of personal healing and have managed to move their lives on. Yet, a great many have never recovered. An altogether separate group claim to have mostly fond memories of their time in missions and claim not to have been adversely affected by the experience. Generalising is therefore difficult. However, all the evidence suggests that a great many—perhaps most—of the stolen generations have experienced a range of emotional, social and psychiatric problems.
The various dysfunctions associated with the aftereffects of forced separation have been summed up in a Canadian Report into the removal of its native children as ‘the inner despair of individuals’.257 In fact, the Aboriginal Legal Service in Western Australia argues that the great hurt suffered by the stolen children is a significant factor in the over representation of Aboriginal people in the justice system; physical, mental and emotional health problems; domestic violence; welfare dependency; substance and alcohol abuse; the breakdown of traditional family structures; a loss of cultural and spiritual identity; and the loss of individual self-esteem, security and happiness.258 In other words, an almost limitless toll of human misery, most of which is ongoing, and untreated. Much of the mental distress is ‘acted out’ in antisocial ways but the underlying grief has not generally been recognised.259
While there are difficulties associated with disentangling the effects of removal and institutionalisation from the wider causes of mental illness among Aboriginal people, research has highlighted the central role played by separation and institutionalisation.260 The 1991 New South Wales Aboriginal Mental Health Report gathered information on 1501 consecutive adult patients visiting the Redfern and Taree Aboriginal Medical Services; 25 percent of these patients were diagnosed as having a mental health problem. There was ‘a very strong association between a history of childhood disruption, employment difficulties in adult life, and having a mental health problem.’261 Similar conclusions were reached in a 1992 Victorian study of psychological distress among urban Aboriginal people visiting the Melbourne branch of the Aboriginal Medical Service. Of the 112 individuals selected at random, over fifty percent were found to have the likelihood of a psychiatric disorder. Childhood experiences were assessed. It was found that many respondents had been separated from their families for significant periods before the age of fourteen years, with forty-nine percent being separated from both parents and nineteen percent from one. Twenty percent had been brought up in children’s homes and ten percent adopted or fostered by non-Aboriginal parents. Conversely, ‘a significantly lower proportion of respondents who grew up with their Aboriginal families, who learned their Aboriginal identity early in life, and who regularly visited their traditional country, were psychologically distressed’.262
The Aboriginal Legal Service in Western Australia has attempted to document the ongoing impact of separation and institutionalisation in a recent questionnaire given to 483 individuals who suffered separation from their families. While the results of the study are revealing, caution is needed in interpreting them in light of the high non-response rate (up to one-third) to many of the sensitive questions, indicating the possibility that many did not want to present as someone who had experienced ongoing problems in their lives. However, almost a quarter stated they had physical problems and fourteen percent stated mental problems. About one-fifth reported they had abused substances while sixty-two percent were currently unemployed.263
Surviving this traumatic ordeal in childhood has very often involved years of painful struggle. The experience of Trish Hill-Keddie is illustrative: ‘There was a time when I wanted to go and neck myself, because it was all too hard. I got to rock bottom, a feeling of absolute hopelessness.’
How are such crisis points reached? The simplest and clearest explanation for the social and emotional pain among the stolen generations is the concept of trauma. There needs to be recognition that these are a traumatised people. Trauma is an overwhelming experience of terror and helplessness. It is an ‘affliction of the powerless’.264 It can seep into the personality, affecting personal development. Severe or repeated trauma is not easily dislodged. As Trish Hill-Keddie explained: ‘The experience of removal never leaves you. No matter how hard you try or how many times you talk about it, you always remember something different, something triggers up your memory.’ For some, the intensity of their emotional pain remained with them throughout adulthood. Frank Gare still remembers a forty year old Geraldton woman who had been taken away as a child. In the 1960s, she was a happily married, educated woman approaching mid-life. However, from time to time she ‘got drunk and would wander around weeping and wailing, crying for her mother.’265
According to one prominent psychiatrist, the symptoms and behaviour of stolen children are similar to those of holocaust victims.266 This comparison is unpalatable to some Australians. The scale and horror of the Nazi crimes against the Jews and the Gypsies—and the central fact of physical extermination—should not diminish the similarities with Australia’s policy to assimilate Aboriginal children. These were all races victimised by the belief in racial superiority. The Jews, the Gypsies and the Aborigines all had many family members forcibly torn from their communities and isolated from the outside world. Among each group are survivors left to pick up the pieces when social and political circumstances changed.
The children caught up in the Holocaust form the most direct parallel with Aboriginal children living under assimilation. They, too, suffered abrupt, and often permanent separation from parents and families. Important insights into the impact of their sudden loss of family can be found in recent studies among the adult survivors. These show that the moment of separation is one of the ‘most powerful, and in many instances still psychologically unresolved’ events in their lives.267 Moreover, it exists at a very deep lev
el, ‘perhaps the most difficult trauma to cure.’268 Common knowledge about childhood tells us that children who have the opportunity to make strong bonds with their parents have the best chance to grow into well-adjusted adults while those who do not are more likely to experience mental health problems. As Haas explains in relation to the children caught up in the Holocaust: ‘When we lose a loved one, we lose a part of ourselves. When so much of the self is removed at once, a disorientation ensues, an emotional paralysis follows.’269
The moment of separation was the first, and possibly deepest, trauma many of the stolen generations suffered. As Phillip Prosser reflects on his own experience of removal: ‘It was traumatic as far as I was concerned because I was being torn away from my loving strong family environment.’ He was being raised by his grandparents; his mother having died and his father working in the North-West. They lived in a three-bedroom house with a well-kept garden and picket fence at the front and vegetable garden and fruit trees at the back. A request by his grandmother to adopt him was turned down by Native Affairs. Consequently, ‘I was torn from an environment that was the equivalent or better than the environment I was transported into.’270
Trauma was an inevitable accompaniment to removal because, as the Human Rights inquiry extensively documented, ‘invariably they were traumatically carried out with force, lies, regimentation and an absence of comfort and affection.’271 For many, the trauma of their separation generated ongoing feelings of insecurity. Why had parents allowed this to happen? Would they visit? One woman explained to the Aboriginal Legal Service: ‘During my whole time at the mission [Forrest River] I used to wonder about my mother and family. I missed them terribly and used to cry a lot for them. I thought they had forgotten me.’272
While the trauma of removal embedded itself in many of its childhood victims, their subsequent experiences in institutions and foster homes added new layers of emotional distress. ‘Trauma compounded trauma’, the Human Rights inquiry confirmed. Studies on the importance of attachment theory, in the wake of John Bowlby’s pioneering work in the early 1950s, show institutionalised children were typically not provided with a replacement caregiver with whom they could form a loving relationship. As one woman reflected to the Human Rights inquiry about her time in Sister Kate’s in the late 1940s: ‘we were brought up in various stages by various house mothers—who were usually English ladies who were not really interested in us.’273
The ongoing symptoms of trauma suffered by the stolen generations should come as no surprise in light of longstanding studies which show that childhood is a particularly vulnerable time in which to be exposed to emotional distress. Wolff believes that, on their own, children cannot master their anxieties.274 Fears about personal safety or impending danger cannot be dispelled because of the child’s limited capacity to reason what is going on in any situation. In the presence of a mother and/or father, the child naturally leaves this function to them: ‘he trusts them to put things right.’ Of course, Aboriginal children stolen from their parents had no such comforts.
In very many cases repeated trauma was compounded by the isolation of many of the institutions and by the lax supervision exercised by the Departments of Native and Child Welfare. So cut off were many of these children that they existed in a state of virtual captivity. From a psychological perspective, a state of captivity exists where there are barriers to ‘escape’ and where there is ‘despotic control over every aspect of the victim’s life’.275 A state of captivity is also associated with fear, coercive control, capricious attempts to enforce rules, the need for absolute compliance and attempts to reshape an individual. Many of the personal testimonies provided to the Aboriginal Legal Service in their survey of the stolen generations bear witness to children’s realisation that they were being confined against their will. Memories of missions ‘being like a prison’, of being confined without the freedoms of normal children; of not being able even to go down to the local shop, are commonplace.276 Confining children in such a manner increases the chance of trauma. One ex-inmate, for example, remembers the practice at the United Mission of locking children in at night so they couldn’t leave: ‘Even now I find it distressing to be in a closed environment.’277
Institutional life provided the conditions for repeated trauma. Many children were both witnesses to, and victims of, unconscionable acts of abuse and cruelty. The following testimony given to the Aboriginal Legal Service of life in Roelands Mission is illustrative:
there was a lot of cruelty by the missionaries. I used to hate seeing other children belted by the missionaries. I hated any form of cruelty. I felt so frustrated that there was nothing I could do to stop it. We mission kids had to hold in our feelings, if we didn’t we would suffer from physical abuse … When I was about six years of age I experienced sexual abuse at Gnowangerup Mission. One missionary tried to penetrate me but he was unsuccessful. However he did play around with my genitals. This still affects me very much today. I am trying as much as possible to block it out.278
The struggle to repress, to ‘block out’ the intrusive memories of a traumatic experience is widely associated with people who have suffered deep emotional distress. It is a key finding in studies of Holocaust survivors. Interviews with these survivors showed that ‘memories involuntarily intrude with even great frequency in recent years’.279
The uncertainty and unpredictability of parents’ visits was another cause of emotional distress. The very purpose of the institutional experience was to cut children off from their Aboriginal families. However, some institutions allowed infrequent contact between children and their parents, contact which was often made very difficult by the distances frequently separating parents from the missions. For children, not used to seeing their parents, visits could be traumatic. One woman told the Aboriginal Legal Service:
The most enduring memory that still causes so much pain for me is the time I saw my mum once while I was in the orphanage and I wanted to go out and see her but one of the nuns was holding me back. I wanted to go with my mother … My mother was crying and I was being held back by the nun. The image on my mother’s face sticks vividly in my mind and it is very upsetting—it still causes me much grief and sorrow. When I think about it I still cry a lot.280
The deepest scars were on those subjected to abuse. As we have seen in previous chapters, the scale and extent of physical abuse was often extreme. In such cases, it has left lasting psychological damage.
In about 1990, when I was about twenty-one years old, I began having occasional memory flashbacks of the incidents from my life at the Smiths [the foster family], in particular, some of the beatings I used to receive. Some of the memories of events in the past were like looking at myself being hit. These experiences were very frightening.281
A woman told how in 1960 when she was five years old she was taken away with six brothers and sisters from their parents who lived in Narrogin. Carol was placed in Sister Kate’s Children’s Home which she described as ‘a horrible nightmare’. Not only was she frequently hit for crying about her mother and father, for three years she was subject to regular sexual abuse by the sons of cottage parents running the home. She told the Aboriginal Legal Service she ‘is still deeply traumatised’ by the experience of being forced to ‘sit on the laps’ of cottage boys from where they would ‘finger’ her ‘private parts’ and also ‘penetrate her with their penis’. The long-term impact of this experience has been severe. Carol feels ‘confused’, and ‘used’ and suffers from low self-esteem and a hatred of life; every day she ‘cries about the pain and suffering of her childhood.’282
Sexual abuse of mission children also occurred when they were sent to work or live with foster families. One account given to the Human Rights inquiry is revealing about the social attitudes to children who made complaints about such ill-treatment:
While I was in first year high school I was sent out to work on a farm as a domestic. I thought it would be great
to get away from the home [Sister Kate’s] for a while. At first it was. I was made welcome and treated with kindness. The four shillings I was paid went to the home. I wasn’t allowed to keep it, I didn’t care … The first time I was sent to the farm for only a few weeks and then back to school. In the next holidays I had to go back. This time it was a terrifying experience, the man of the house used to come into my room at night and force me to have sex. I tried to fight him off but he was too strong. When I returned home I was feeling so used and unwanted. I went to the matron and told her what had happened. She washed my mouth out with soap and boxed my ears and told me that awful things would happen to me if I told any of the other kids. I was so scared and wanted to die. When the next school holidays came I begged not to be sent to that farm again. But they would not listen and said I had to.283
It is impossible to tell how widespread such terrible experiences were for Aboriginal children in missions or foster homes. From the testimonies collected for this book, and from those given to the Aboriginal Legal Service and the Human Rights inquiry, it is clear sexual abuse was a disturbingly common experience. There is extensive literature now available explaining the legacy of such abuse, especially the sense of personal struggle victims often face:
Many abused children cling to the hope that growing up will bring escape and freedom. But the personality formed in an environment of coercive control is not well adapted to adult life. The survivor is left with fundamental problems in basic trust, autonomy, and initiative. She approaches the task of early adulthood—establishing independence and intimacy—burdened by major impairments in self-care, in cognition and memory, in identity, and in the capacity to form stable relationships. She is still a prisoner of her childhood; attempting to create a new life, she re-encounters the trauma.284
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