Stolen Generation Analysis

An analysis of the extent in which the Western Australian Indigenous ‘Stolen Generation’ between the period 1900-1940 can be classed as an ‘act of genocide’.

In recent Australian history, there has been a contentious public debate about identity, responsibility, and nationhood with regards to the practice of the forcible removal and assimilation of Australian Indigenous children between 1905 and 1970, which has come to be known as the Stolen Generation. This has been largely brought to the forefront of public attention by the ‘Bring Them Home’ report which declared that the ‘general public 's ignorance of the history of forcible removal was hindering the recognition of the needs of its victims and their families and the provision of services’

15). This has opened up a wide debate on whether the actions committed during this period constituted an act of genocide with this being extensively debated. The report (HREOC, 1997, p. 231) stated that the practice of child removal involved 'both systematic racial discrimination and genocide as defined by international law '; however, the UN and the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination (1999) has stated that the child removal policies did not amount to genocide as they did not have specific intent to destroy. Clearly, acknowledgement of responsibility is a subject of great importance, particularly to the Australian Indigenous people in order for the necessary provisions to be made available, but also to the wider Australian nation, to be able to gain a full understanding of their country’s history. Therefore, the need for a definitive answer to the inquiry of genocide is imperative, although the need for this to be assessed in a scholarly manner is vital. Power (1999) notes that the term genocide is often branded into holocaustization and that whilst this ganders public attention, it is irrespective of true events. Milanovic (2006) has also stated that the moral and social stigma attached to the word genocide is one of the primary reasons why states and other political actors use it in international

Following the atrocities committed in World War II, the term genocide was coined by Lemkin in 1944, who set the definition as ‘a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves’ (Lemkin, 1944, p. 79). However, the official definition, as classified by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), is ‘an act committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, such as: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another