by Susan Allott
Australians of my generation tell me they were taught a narrative of Australian history in which the white settlers were brave pioneers, taming the wilderness and building a land of opportunity. The anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner, in his 1968 lecture “The Great Australian Silence,” talked about a partial view of history in which the experiences of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people had been disremembered: “It is a structural matter, a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape. What may well have begun as a simple forgetting of other possible views turned into a habit and over time into something like a cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale.”
The silence in Australia appears to have lifted since Stanner’s day. The narrative of white settlement has widened to include the massacres that occurred in the aftermath of colonization in 1788, and the often brutal treatment of the First Nations people who survived. But in Britain, I’m not sure this is the case. It seems I’m not alone among my British friends in this knowledge gap around Australian history and our part in it. A look at the current history syllabus options for British schools suggests not much has changed. One secondary school department head I spoke to confirmed that Australian history is not covered at all at his state school in the English Midlands, other than a brief mention of the First Fleet.
The forced removals of Aboriginal children depicted in this book took place after Australia became an independent nation in 1901. Nothing to do with the British, then? Except that the policy is underpinned by the ideology of the motherland. As Geoffrey Robertson QC wrote in 2008:
Historical wrongs can not be put right by belated apologies unless there has been a genuine attempt to understand—then remember and condemn—the thinking behind the policies that have had such appalling results. . . . For this reason, the UK Government should find a way to endorse the apology to Australian Aborigines, for whose suffering Britain has been in part responsible.1
For anyone wanting to know more about Australia’s Stolen Generations, I would recommend the National Library of Australia’s Bringing Them Home Oral History Project, where the voices of hundreds of Australians have been recorded. The majority of those voices are people who were themselves removed as children, or whose family members were removed. Another moving account can be found in the film Rabbit-Proof Fence, based on the novel by Doris Pilkington Garimara. The following information, derived mainly from the 1997 Bringing Them Home report, may also be helpful.
The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people of Australia who were forcibly removed from their families during the period from 1910 until 1970 are known as the Stolen Generations. Nobody knows exactly how many Aboriginal children were removed from their families in this time. Many records have not survived, and many of those removed in childhood are now deceased. It is thought that there are people who were removed in childhood whose Aboriginality is not known, even to themselves.
The Australian Human Rights Commission has estimated that between one in three and one in ten Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their families and communities. The Commission states that most Aboriginal families have been affected, in one or more generations, by the forced removal of one or more children. Children removed in this way were placed in institutions where they were at heightened risk of physical and sexual abuse.
Prior to 1940, Aboriginal children were removed on overtly racial grounds, with lighter-skinned children being targeted for removal in the hope they might lose their Aboriginal identity and “merge” with white society.2 From 1940 onward, the removal of Aboriginal children was governed by child welfare legislation. To justify removal, children had to be “neglected,” “uncontrollable,” or “destitute.” These terms were applied more readily to Aboriginal children than non-Aboriginal children, and poverty was often conflated with neglect.3
In May 1967, Australians voted in a referendum that proposed two amendments to the Australian Constitution relating to Aboriginal people. The amendments were overwhelmingly endorsed and became law in August 1967. Consequently, it became possible to count Aboriginal people in a census for the first time. A federal Office of Aboriginal Affairs was established and grants were given out to the states for Aboriginal welfare programs.
In 1969, the New South Wales Aborigines Welfare Board was abolished. The Aboriginal Homes at Kinchela and Cootamundra were closed soon afterward, but the Aboriginal Home at Bomaderry in New South Wales was operational until 1980.
The Bringing Them Home report was the outcome of a national inquiry into the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families. The report was put before Federal Parliament in May 1997. Over 600 Aboriginal people who had been removed as children, or who were the children of people who had been removed, were interviewed for the report. The report recommended that official apologies be made, acknowledging responsibility for the laws, policies, and practices of forced removals.
In 2008, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd issued a national apology to Australia’s Stolen Generations. As yet, no apology has been made to Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people by the British government.
Notes
1. Geoffrey Robertson, “We Should Say Sorry, Too,” Guardian, February 13, 2008.
2. Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families, Australian Human Rights Commission, April 1997, p. 25.
3. Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families, Australian Human Rights Commission, April 1997, p. 28.
A Note About Language
The language used throughout this novel reflects the language of the period in which the novel is set and the views of some characters for whom racist attitudes were ingrained. Some of this language is not considered appropriate today but is given in its historical context.
Acknowledgments
I sometimes look back and wonder how I managed to write this book. For most of the years it took me to write it, I was juggling a day job with bringing up young children. I was also learning how to write, which any author knows is a dispiriting experience, the words on the page never matching the brilliant thing we hold in our head. The answer is, I drew on the support around me, and there was a lot of it. I couldn’t have kept going without the people who helped and encouraged me, and I’m enormously grateful to them all.
In particular, I want to thank the friends, family, and colleagues who read the early drafts and gave kind and helpful feedback, even when those drafts were slightly dreadful. Thanks to Sheila Pallier, Charlotte Spencer, Catherine Rose, Nicki Bowman, Ed Elias, Emily Elias, Sam Dodd, Tilly Wright, Kit Hui, and the Faber Academy gang, and, of course, my most steadfast writing buddy, Francesca Jakobi. My thanks go out also to the talented teachers I was lucky to work with: Marian Husband, Edward Docx, Debi Alper, Emma Darwin, Esther Freud, and Stephen Carver.
Huge thanks to my multitalented agent, Nicola Barr, who helped me to hone my story into the book I was trying to write all along and who took it out into the world with such energy. Many thanks also to Amelia Hodgson and the rest of the team at The Bent Agency for their ongoing support.
Thank you to my brilliant editors, Suzie Dooré in the UK and Kate Nintzel in the US, for their belief in The Silence and their considerable skill in bringing out its potential. Thanks to Ore Agbaje-Williams, Rachel Quinn, Simeon Greenaway, Vedika Khanna, Ploy Siripant, Liate Stehlik, Jennifer Hart, Gena Lanzi, Molly Waxman, Jeanie Lee, and the rest of the team at HarperCollins for their part in designing, producing, and raising the profile of the book. Many thanks also to Caroline Ast of Belfond and to Ilaria Marzi of HarperCollins Italia, for the wonderful French and Italian editions.
I’m grateful to Nadia Hanafi and Philippe Kerampran for their kind support with my author website, to Jon Bent for his input to the Author’s Note, to Barb Taylor a
nd Alecia Bof for their help during the final edits, to Charlie at Urban Writers’ Retreat for her faultless hospitality, and to Alistair at Rye Books for sourcing me so many inspirational novels over the years. Thanks to the other three corners of the Book Square for knowing when to ask how the book was going and when to change the subject. Thanks to Writerful Books for the sensitivity read, and also to Stephen Buckley for his generous insight on the more sensitive sections of the book.
Thanks to Dad and Gillie for reading the early drafts and being so positive and encouraging. Thanks to Mum for reading and for helping in so many other ways, and for always believing I could do it. Thanks to my sister, Sarah, for being fabulous and for her ground-level marketing efforts. And thanks, of course, to my amazing children who can’t remember a time when I wasn’t writing this book, and who have been my proud champions at each step of the way.
Finally, thanks beyond measure to my husband, David, who has always understood and encouraged my need to write. The Silence has benefited from his “very Australian” perspective, not to mention his eagle eye for continuity errors. I doubt it would have been written at all without his love and support, or his willingness to give me the space and time I needed.
I should finish by saying that among the many resources I used to research this book, the National Library of Australia’s excellent website was the most useful and exhaustive. I returned again and again to their oral history section, which is keeping alive the experiences of people whose voices might not otherwise have been heard. I’ve tried to do justice to those experiences within the limits of this work of fiction. Any errors or inconsistencies are entirely my own.
About the Author
SUSAN ALLOTT is a British author who lived and worked in Sydney in the late nineties. She now lives in London with her children and her very Australian husband.
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
the silence. Copyright © 2020 by Susan Allott. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Originally published in the United Kingdom in 2020 by the Borough Press, an imprint of HarperCollins UK.
first u.s. edition
Cover design by Ploy Siripant
Cover photographs © Miguel Sobreira/Trevillion Images; © Sichon/Shutterstock (fence)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
Digital Edition MAY 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-298357-2
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-298355-8
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