Stolen 1a background

Reading & Responding - Unit 1

By Jane Harrison

BACKGROUND - 1 About the author Jane Harrison is a contemporary Victorian playwright. She is a descendent of the Muruwari people of NSW, and her plays reflect her strong interest in issues affecting Indigenous people. Her second play, Rainbow’s End, was first performed in 2005, and focuses on the lives of three Aboriginal women living on the banks of the Goulbourn River in the 1950s. Both Stolen and Rainbow’s End depict experiences of Aboriginal people, but they are engaging and moving for both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal audiences.

Overview The Ilbijerri Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Theatre Cooperative commissioned Jane Harrison to write a play about the stolen generations in 1992. Ilbijerri and the Playbox Theatre jointly produced Stolen in 1998 as part of the Melbourne festival, when it gained widespread acclaim. The return season in 1999 also toured regional Victoria. In July 2000 the Ilbijerri–Playbox production increased the profile of Stolen still further when it travelled to London as part of the HeadsUp: Australian Arts 100 festival.

Stolen has played a significant role in making the experiences of the stolen generations more widely known, both in Australia and overseas. The removal of Aboriginal children from their families, and their placement in institutions and white homes throughout much of the 20th century, led to suffering, loss and trauma for hundreds of Aboriginal people. The issue of the stolen generations is one of the most confronting, and for a long time suppressed, issues in Australia’s history.

The Stolen Generations: an historical outline The removal of Aboriginal children from their families began in the 1800s, and was carried out most systematically between 1910 and 1970. It occurred in tandem with the assimilation policy1, which was officially adopted from 1937, and it often combined the resources and ideologies of governments and churches. The intention was for Aboriginal people, and identity to die out and was part of a broader government policy to keep the Australian population basically ‘white’ and Anglo-Celtic in ethnicity. The ‘White Australia Policy’ – which restricted immigration to

VCE ENGLISH UNIT 1&2

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Reading & Responding - Unit 1

people of European descent from 1901 (the year of Federation) to 1973, reflected the attitudes that justified the removal of Aboriginal children, especially children of mixed-race parentage, from their families.

The problems faced by the Stolen Generations have proved to be profound, widespread and long lasting. Children placed in institutions were deprived of a supportive, nurturing home environment. Many of them experienced forms of physical, sexual and emotion abuse, both within institutions and within the homes of white families they visited or were adopted by. Although they received some form of ‘white’ education, Aboriginal children raised in institutions were never expected or given the opportunity to take on careers other than relatively unskilled work such as domestic service, cleaning, road work, etc.

The experiences of trauma, loss and dislocation of these children and their families have resulted in ongoing problems for Indigenous people. In the last thirty or so years, many have attempted to locate family members with whom they lost contact in childhood due to the policies of separation and assimilation. Some have tried to contact their own children who were removed; and, of course, many have found that after years of searching, their family member(s) has died before they were able to track them down. Sometimes too, re- establishing contact with families has been concurrent with identifying as an Aboriginal person for the first time.

The term ‘Stolen Generations’ came into use in the early 1980s. In 1981 the historian, Peter Read, was commissioned to write a pamphlet about the history of separation for the Family and Children’s Service Agency in Sydney. This NSW government agency aimed to reduce the separation of Aboriginal children from their families.

When Read realised the extent of the policies and practices of separation, he at first thought of them as the ‘lost generations’; but his partner suggested to him that those generations were not so much lost as stolen.

VCE ENGLISH UNIT 1&2

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