Bain Attwood's 'The Truth': The Stolen Generations

Irene Kim

Professor Fred Myers / TA Tierney Brown

Cultures and Context: Indigenous Australia

30 November 2017

Essay Assignment 3: Topic 1 The Stolen Generations was a time period roughly between 1910 and 1970, in which countless Indigenous Australian children were forcibly removed from their families and homes under the implementation of government policies. Thus, many have been separated from their origins, and have sought to understand their identity, despite their estranged relationship with their Aboriginal history. The struggle to understand one’s Aboriginal identity has been one of the most prominent results of Australia’s colonial history, especially as the Australian government at the time, primarily deemed Aboriginality to be defined

In Bain Attwood’s ‘Learning about the truth’ The stolen generations narrative, he draws upon Peter Read’s hypotheses surrounding the stories of the Stolen Generations’ victims. While some children were unable to share their story of Aboriginality because of their unawareness of their heritage, Read depicts the shame that many others felt, as they worried that they, along with their families, would receive negative attention as a result of it; for many of these individuals “their descent or background was scarcely relevant to how they understood and/or represented themselves--in fact many wanted to deny their origins--and so their memory of separation was marginalised in the life stories they told” (Attwood

Australian Aboriginals believe their identity to be defined by the relationships that they have with one another. Without recognition and acceptance into an Indigenous community, one can not identify themselves as Aboriginal. Even prior to understanding her Aboriginal heritage, Sally displays her values regarding kinship and strong relationships, as she describes her “meetings” with her siblings, and expresses her concern with her family being torn