Journal articles on the topic 'Stolen generations (Australia)'

Australian texts for the young run the gamut of representational approaches to the removal of Indigenous children. Early colonial texts treated child removals as benign acts designed to rescue Indigenous children from savagery, but from the 1960s Indigenous writers produced life writing and fiction that pursued strategies of decolonisation. This essay plots the history of Stolen Generation narratives in Australia, from the first Australian account for children in Charlotte Barton's A Mother's Offering to Her Children to Doris Pilkington Garimara's Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, Philip Noyce's film Rabbit-Proof Fence, and pedagogical materials that mediate the book and film to children. Garimara's book and Noyce's film expose the motivations of those responsible for child removal policies and practices: to eliminate Indigenous people and cultures and to replace them with white populations. Many pedagogical materials deploy euphemistic and self-serving narratives that seek to ‘protect’ non-Indigenous children from the truths of colonisation.

Indigenous Australian children are significantly over-represented in out of home care. Figures evidencing this over-representation continue to increase at a startling rate. Similar experiences have been identified among native peoples in Canada, the United States and New Zealand. Drawing on interviews with lawyers who work with Indigenous parents in child protection matters in Queensland, Australia, this article examines how historical factors, discriminatory approaches and legal structures and processes contribute to the high rates of removal and, we argue, to the perpetuation of the stolen generations.

<p>This article provides a comparative overview of issues pertaining to the stolen generation in Canada and Australia. It includes a historical overview of the removal and detaining of aboriginal children in Canada and Australia. As a consequence of the revelations of this past practice, litigation has been undertaken by members of the stolen generations in both Canada and Australia.<br />The article includes a summary of the key cases in Canada and Australia. Unlike in Australia, some Canadian aboriginal claimants have successfully brought actions for compensation against the federal Canadian government for the damages stemming from their experiences in the aboriginal residential schools. In the course of this discussion, the various causes of actions relied upon by the<br />plaintiffs are examined. While the plaintiffs in these leading Canadian cases were ultimately successful under at least one of their heads of claim, the approaches in these cases in regard to the Crown’s liability for breaching fiduciary duties, the duty of care, and non-delegable duties is inconsistent. Thus even in regard to the Canadian jurisprudence key legal issues pertaining to the Crown’s liability for the aboriginal residential school experience continues to<br />be unresolved.</p>

The complicity of state and church in the removal and placement of Aboriginal children in Australia has been well documented. Since the investigation by the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families, a number of churches have apologised for their participation in these practices. Alongside the apologies, churches have engaged in activities of reconciliation. This paper documents a research project, commissioned by the Minajalku Aboriginal Corporation, to explore the role of churches and church agencies in Victoria.

Masculindians, Conversations on Indigenous Manhood has travelled with me over the last few months—I guess together we would have flown, driven and walked over 25,000km. Travelling across the continent, here in Australia, often leaves you with lots of thinking space, and it was perplexing to reflect on our angles on manhood here, as Aboriginal men. As in other parts of the world, the continuing violence of invasion (stolen lands, murders, forced relocations, stolen generations, etc.) impacts on our way of life and those localised nuances of what it is to be a man.

Historical photographs of Australian Aboriginal people were amassed during the colonial period for a range of purposes, yet rarely to further an Indigenous agenda. Today, however, such images have been recontextualized, used to reconstruct family history, document culture, and express connections to place. They have become a significant heritage resource for relatives and descendants. Images stand in for relatives lost through processes of official assimilation—or as this sad history is now known in Australia, the Stolen Generations. This article explores the potential healing power of the photos in addressing loss and dislocation, and emerging tools for supporting this process through reviewing the Returning Photos project outcomes.

In 1998, the Canadian historian and politician Michael Ignatieff wrote: “All nations depend on forgetting: on forging myths of unity and identity that allow a society to forget its founding crimes, its hidden injuries and divisions, its unhealed wounds.” Ironically, Ignatieff's home country has belied his assertion. Canada has engaged in collective remembering of one of its hidden injuries—the Indian residential schools—through a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) from 2009 to 2015. Australia, too, has reckoned since the 1990s with its own unhealed wounds—the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, or, in common parlance, the “Stolen Generations.”

Indigenous people around the world have long healing traditions. Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander healing projects are designed to empower individuals, families and communities; strengthen connections to culture; and reduce the damaging effects of colonisation and government policies such as the forcible removal of children (the Stolen Generations). Evidence on the conditions necessary for healing to occur, and how healing works for different people and in different contexts, is limited. Evaluations that will help identify good practice and document the full range of outcomes are sorely needed. This paper is based largely on experiences and learnings from Stolen Generations projects around Australia funded by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Healing Foundation, and the reflections of experienced scholar-practitioners. It argues that evaluations that are responsive to, and ultimately owned and led by, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities need to be designed and implemented differently to mainstream evaluations. Timeframes, methods, relationships between evaluators and stakeholders, and the identification and measurement of outcomes all need to be carefully considered. Challenges include definitions of healing, diversity of landscapes and programs, and data collection. Qualitative methods that preference and support Indigenous cultural frameworks and ways of creating and sharing knowledge work well. In addition to ensuring culturally sensitive methodologies and tools, working ethically and effectively in the Indigenous healing space means emphasising and enabling safety for participants, workers and organisations.

Jonathan Lear, inRadical hope: Ethics in the face of cultural devastation,movingly writes: ‘We seem to be aware of a shared vulnerability that we cannot quite name … It is as though, without our insistence that our outlook is correct, the outlook itself might collapse’. It is this ‘vulnerability’ and ‘anxiety of collapse’ that has led to what has been called in Australia the ‘cult of forgetfulness’ and the ‘terror of history’ which refers to the silence that surrounded the Stolen Generations and still surrounds the psychic distress of our indigenous first peoples. This article explores Lear's statement in terms of the psychic pain of a culture founded upon waves of migration and traumatic dispossession to think about the question ‘What does it mean to live here?’ And what can that teach us about the formation of identity and cultural identity?

This article explores the role that genre plays in fictional depictions of the Stolen Generations (Australian Indigenous children removed from their homes) in three twenty-first-century Australian middle-grade novels: Who Am I?: The Diary of Mary Talence, Sydney 1937 by Anita Heiss (2001) ; The Poppy Stories: Four Books in One by Gabrielle Wang (2016) ; and Sister Heart by Sally Morgan (2016) . It argues that the genres of fictional diary, adventure story and verse novel invite different reading practices and approaches to history, and shape the ways in which the texts depict, for children, the suffering and resilience of the Stolen Generations.

This article examines the debate relating to reparations for ‘past’ human rights violations, with particular focus on the case of the indigenous ‘Stolen Generation’ in Australia. The ‘Stolen Generation’ is a term used to describe the government-sanctioned practice of forced removals of part-Aboriginal children from their indigenous parents and placement into non-indigenous institutions and homes, which occurred in Australia from approximately 1910–1970. The ‘Stolen Generation’ violations present a unique and difficult legal question for international human rights law because they straddle the divide between ‘historic’ violations and contemporary acts, that is, they were committed by Australia after Australia signed key agreements such as the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, the Declaration on the Rights of the Child and the Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, but prior to its ratification of international human rights treaties such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. This means that bringing a claim under international human rights law in relation to the violations raises a number of problems. The object of this article will be to explore whether Australia can be held responsible under international human rights law for the ‘Stolen Generation’ violations and possible avenues of redress. In this regard, the focus of the article will be on the possible claims victims could make to relevant treaty monitoring bodies and the types of obstacles they would face in doing so. These legal questions are also relevant to the wider debate that is taking place in relation to reparations, namely the extent to which a State can be held legally responsible to provide reparations for past violations.

The British controlled dominated and exploited the indigenous population in the process of colonizing Australia in the late Eighteenth Century. They appropriated the aborigines’ land, resources and wealth: they also left psychic scars of stealing their children from the indigenous families under the guise of civilization. Colonial Governments saw Aboriginals not as people who had been colonized but as heathens to be converted and institutionalized. The ‘Assimilation Policy’ as it was called advocated in all the states of Australia in order to remove the half caste aboriginal children. This paper will foreground on the psychic scars of the Stolen Generation writer Doris Pilkington’s novel Caprice - The Stockman’s Daughters. Further this paper will discuss and analyse the fear, persecution, angst desolation and the pain felt by the stolen children and their families in the novel Caprice - The Stockman’s Daughter.

That you could look down to your arm and hands and see brown skin, but it connote nothing but disgust or confusion, is one consequence of the assimilationist policies implemented on Aborigines throughout Australia in the 1900s. Some removed children had little exposure or experience of Aboriginal culture, family and no reinforcement to live “as an Aborigine”. Understanding the disconnect experienced by these removed children, between being visually perceived as Aboriginal and living an identity they have been forced to create is important. This article describes how this disconnect is understood as a dysphoria holding both body-focused aspects and cultural aspects. It is proposed here that these dysphoric constructions have resulted in a unique way within this population and influences how the individuals involved have come to understand their lived identity and, indeed, how they might continue to be understood as a legitimate part of the span of indigeneities.

Literature is said to be culture-specific production. Muted voices are gaining momentum in academia, and they blur the line between personal and political. Exile Testimonio, as a theoretical discourse, foregrounds the plight of the natives in their homeland. Academia is of the misconception that Exile and Testimonio are irreconcilable binaries, whereas this research article highlights that both are of the same spectres. Power Structures play a rampant discourse in the life of the natives. The supreme irony is that everything is being state-sponsored. Subversion and Containment play a vital role in the theoretical discourse of Exile Testimonio. This Research Article showcases the hidden agonies of the Australian Citizens in their homeland. Australia as a Nation underwent so many invasions, and movements like Jindyworabox and stolen generation are essential in the literary discourse of Australian history and the history of Australia. Kim Scott as a writer of Exile Testimonio, encounters the hidden histories and how their ancestral roots are being shaken owing to political monopolisation. The painful fact is that Kim Scott, who hails from Nyoongar Ancestry, underwent traumatic emancipation when his people's identity underwent a drastic change. The beauty of Exile Testimonio as a theoretical discourse is that the writers become a critic and visionary in foregrounding the unheard truths. The Researchers here will examine the two literary works of Kim Scott, namely Benang.In these works, the hidden facets of history and also in the name of cultural up-gradation, inevitable brutalities had happened. This evidence forms the crux of Exile Testimonio. Overall, this Research Article emphasises making the unknown known by having the element of Exile Testimonio as a justifiable tool.

This short story is about a public servant with the Australian Department of the Arts and Administrative Services, Ayres writes of generational change in the professional and persona} lives of a father and son working in the Service. They hold the last of their 1raditional chess games on the father's final day of his career. The prize for the winner is a family "heirloom" --a spoon stolen by the father's father from a U.S. Navy warship during World War II.

First Nations peoples in Australia, as in many other colonized countries, were forced to acquired English soon after the arrival of the colonists in their country during the second half of the 18th century. In response to their land dispossession, Indigenous Australian poets adopted and adapted the language and literary forms of colonists to write a politicized literature that tackles fundamental subjects such as land rights, civil, and human rights, to name but a few. Their literary response can be traced back to the early 1800s, and it had continued through the 20th century. One example is the poem “The Stolen Generation” (1985) by Justin Leiber, which has since been considered a motto for the struggle of Aboriginal peoples against obligatory removal of children from Aboriginal families.This paper aims at examining 21th century politicized literary response of Aboriginal poets. It sheds lights on the poetry of Evelyn Araluen as a telling paradigm of decolonial poetics, demonstrating her role in the political struggle of her peoples. Analysing representative poems by the poet, including “decolonial poetics (avant gubba)” and “Runner-up: Learning Bundjalung on Tharawal,” the paper examines the interdisciplinary nature of her poetry, and demonstrates how the poet transgresses the boundaries between poetry and politics, so as to be utilized as an effective tool of political resistance.

In her novel Sorry (2007), Australian novelist and essayist Gail Jones engages in a reflection on the ethics of reconciliation. Written in response to her wish to acknowledge the debt to the Stolen Generations, Sorry offers new possibilities of ethical mourning, allowing the dead to return and the voiceless to speak. This article explores the ways in which Jones not only fashions a narrative that bypasses the unsayable dimension of Australia’s history and the representational difficulties inherent in trauma but also fosters the empathetic imagination through a metadiscursive discussion of the act of reading. Self-referentiality and self-reflexivity are also examined, as they allow Jones to draw attention to her novel’s writerly elaborations and offer an alternative to standard reconciliation practices.

Although conceptually distinct, ‘time’ and ‘community’ are multiply intertwined within a myriad of key debates in both the social sciences and the humanities. Even so, the role of conceptions of time in social practices of inclusion and exclusion has yet to achieve the prominence of other key analytical categories such as identity and space. This article seeks to contribute to the development of this field by highlighting the importance of thinking time and community together through the lens of political apologies. Often ostensibly offered in order to re-articulate both the constitution of ‘the community’ and its future direction, official apologies are prime examples of deliberate attempts to intervene in shared understandings of political community and its temporality. Offering a detailed case study of one of these apologies, I will focus on Australian debates over the removal of indigenous children from their families, known as the Stolen Generations, and examine the temporal dimensions of the different responses offered by former prime ministers John Howard and Kevin Rudd.

• Summary: The Australian Prime Minister’s 2008 historic Apology to the Stolen Generations gives Australian social work an opportunity to confront its past complicity in Australian Indigenous disadvantage and embrace the development of Indigenous social work as central for practice. Critical Whiteness1 theory in social work curricula could assist the development of Indigenous social work as a core approach by challenging the ongoing and largely un-reflexive practices emanating from social work’s Euro-centric heritage with its often taken-for-granted knowledges and principles which negatively affect Indigenous peoples. • Findings: Recent professional and theoretical attention on critical Whiteness highlights race privilege, questions the invisibility and continuing invisibilization of race, critiques previously taken-for-granted Western knowledges and practices, and facilitates the development of countering practice approaches. Research studies reveal some practitioners to be aware of the need for different practices as well as some who practice differently without realizing they are using critical Whiteness principles. • Application: Critical Whiteness theory in the social work curriculum offers a strong conceptual and practical opportunity for students and practitioners to become more racially cognizant in their work with Indigenous people, allowing this work to be more effective in the profession’s social justice mission as well as decreasing some of the extant colonizing practices.

In Western Australia, the removal of mixed-descent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island children from parents into church-run institutions has caused ongoing damage to the social and emotional wellbeing of survivors and their descendants. Curtin University and Aboriginal organisations are attempting to utilise a number of defunct mission sites as Healing Centres for Stolen Generation survivors. But the rapid deterioration of missions and restricted access constrain use of the sites. Virtual reality offers a safe and accessible alternative to physical access. Layering this digital environment with knowledge and the lived experience of survivors and interweaving past and present experiences has the potential to provide a powerful platform for healing survivors and their families. A key aspect of this project was to ensure that a strength-based approach is used where Aboriginal people power share and collaborate in the projects ensuring that they have tangible control over their story and heritage.

Piknik pod Wiszącą Skałą, napisana w poł. lat sześćdziesiątych powieść Joan Lindsay, jest w Australii dziełem kultowym o wielu interpretacjach. Jedną z nich jest adaptacja filmowa Petera Weira, która – zwłaszcza dla odbiorcy europejskiego – stanowi punkt wyjścia do rozważań o sensach pierwowzoru, co powoduje rozliczne transgresje eksplikacyjne rozmijające się z przesłaniem autentyku. Dodatkowe komplikacje wprowadzają również pseudohistoryczność powieści oraz mistyfikacja: epilog wydany po śmierci Lindsay, którego ezoteryczna treść nie współgra z zasadniczo realistycznym Piknikiem. Rozpowszechnione propozycje psychoanalityczne czy genderowe nie ogarniają całokształtu dzieła, są zbyt jednostronne i nierzadko dotyczą jedynie filmu Weira. Pomijanie kontekstu postkolonialnego (kwestia Stolen Generations), jak również uwarunkowań mitologicznych (wierzeń Aborygenów a nie kręgu śródziemnomorskiego), sprawia, że powieść zostaje oderwana od jej macierzystego gruntu kulturowego i odbierana jest połowicznie lub błędnie. Aura metafizyczna filmu generuje zaś naddatki interpretacyjne. Artykuł ma charakter porządkująco-uzupełniający, przywołuje się w nim i dopełnia uzasadnione dziełem Lindsay kwestie dotyczące inicjacji, wskazuje konteksty m.in.: polityczne, obyczajowe, symboliczne, artystyczne, genologiczne. Takie ujęcie sprzyja przypomnieniu polskiemu czytelnikowi powieści, której Weirowska tessera odebrała prymarne znaczenia.

Almost all Shaun Tan's work explores notions of belonging, and related ideas about feeling at home (or not) in time and space. But these issues are most starkly explored in his first solo picture book, The Lost Thing (2000), where the narrator, Shaun, relates his discovery of a mysterious, large, red, hybrid being. This article undertakes a close reading of Tan's text, drawing on the work of theorists like Mary Douglas, Zygmunt Bauman, Giorgio Agamben and Judith Butler to show how societies, through their classificatory logic, manage to deal with any ‘matter out of place’. It also explores the particular poignancy of ‘misplaced’ things in the context of Australia, not only through the Howard Government's draconian treatment of refugees, but also in terms of the country's long-standing guilt about its treatment of the Aboriginal ‘stolen generation’, and of others, like the forcibly deported British children. In contrast to the more optimistic reading usually given to Tan's work, a darker, more menacing interpretation is suggested – though a note of hope is still detected in the narrator's need to record his story. In this way, The Lost Thing is not concerned solely with social issues, but engages with a more existential sense of longing that we can all experience.

Objective: A shortened version of a presentation to the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, this paper raises questions regarding policy and program directions in Indigenous affairs with consequences for Indigenous health. Method: The author notes the inadequate Indigenous mental health database, and describes contemporary conflicts in the arena of Indigenous mental health, drawing on personal experience in clinical service delivery, policy and programme development. Results: Medicalized responses to the Stolen Generations report and constructions of suicide that accompanied the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody are presented to demonstrate unforeseen health outcomes. Examples are also given of wellintentioned social interventions that, in the context of contemporary Indigenous society appear to be contributing to, rather than alleviating, harm. Problems of setting priorities that confront mental health service planners are considered in the light of past and continuing social disadvantage that informs the burden of mental disorder in Indigenous communities. Conclusions: The importance of acknowledging untoward outcomes of initiatives, even when motivated by concerns for social justice, is emphasized. The tension within mental health services of responding to the underpinning social issues versus providing equity in access to proven mental health services for Indigenous populations is considered.

In Australia, the trauma of the forced removal, institutionalization, and attempted assimilation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children under Stolen Generations policies is rarely publicly memorialized, especially at the children’s homes and missions where these things took place. Darug Nation reclamation of the former site of the Blacktown Native Institution in Western Sydney entails, however, a distinct memorialization of the land as a powerful identity through restoring ceremonial and land care cultural practices that predate invasion. The Darug activation of this place pivots on a powerful Aboriginal ethos of land as “Country”—a living being or spirit. We also contend that this relationship to land is better defined by the expansive term “zone” rather than the colonial, territorial notion of “site.” It is in this context that Darug Traditional Owners, other First Nations artists, and Stolen Generations survivors are generating remarkable artistic, communal, ephemeral, land-based, and performative approaches that empower and restore Darug bonds, with the land of the former institution as a living being.

The 1997 Bringing Them Home Inquiry (BTHI) sparked a significant shift in public understanding of the Stolen Generations. While substantial evidence incriminated the Australian government with acts of genocide, the allegations were subdued by the division around the circumstances in which Aboriginal children were removed. This essay analyses political discourse before and after the BTHI, while offering a contemporary understanding of genocide.

Integrating personal stories of maternal connection and separation with a detailed analysis of the 2018 crisis of migrant family separation in the United States, this autoethnographic essay examines the continuum between parental responsibility and collective engagement for the greater good. A comparison is made between the current crisis of family separation and the case of the Stolen Generations of Indigenous children in Australia, particularly the tendency toward collective forgetting. The essay calls for the protective and compassionate impulses felt in the midst of this crisis to be translated into democratic participation and empowered voices raised in resistance.

In early February 2001, the greater Ipswich region was dotted with advertising posters for New Idea featuring a full picture of Pauline Hanson, dressed in lily white. The determined look of a much put-upon woman ready to do battle for home and hearth is worn into her slightly smiling face. The heading reads "PAULINE’S BACK – ‘I’ll NEVER say sorry’". Central in the conceptualisation of this issue of M/C was consideration of what a change of Prime Minister might mean for prospects of an apology to the Stolen Generations, given that the current leader is never likely to give one. In New Idea, Hanson makes it clear that she will not apologise, and yet she is unclear in her own inimitable way: "I will never say sorry to the Aborigines. ¼ Why should I say sorry? I don’t think John Howard should say sorry either. Once he does, the Government will be liable to pay out huge compensation to the Aborigines. That’s what they’re after – money!" (Lloyd 14). Here Hanson is clearly missing the point of the whole ‘Bringing Them Home’ Inquiry and yet, in the midst of all her aggression, she suddenly makes a valid point: "[t]hey want an admission that we did wrong by them and continue to do so. ¼ We should accept and acknowledge what has happened and make sure it never happens again" (Lloyd 14). This is punctuated by the declaration that members of the Stolen Generations should somehow simply stop ‘dwelling on it’ – it is this different attitude that is needed to effect ‘change’, and by ‘change’ Hanson does not necessarily mean any improvements for Indigenous peoples. The article goes on to link the apology with ‘handouts’, which should cease, and the problem of ‘divisions’ within the country as a result of Native Title and land rights. Clearly New Idea has chosen to market this story by choosing a headline which uses the topical issue of an apology to the Stolen Generations, and created a new focus of anger for Hanson’s supporters in the process: an article intended to promote Hanson’s attempts at political survival becomes an onslaught against the acknowledgment of history’s mistakes. As the rise of Pauline Hanson has illustrated, such a message holds considerable weight in public sentiments, even among people who do not directly embrace such ideas. Hanson came close to expressing personal sorrow towards Indigenous people in the initial letter which brought her celebrity in 1996: "I would be the first to admit that, not that many years ago, the Aborigines were treated wrongly but in trying to correct this they have gone too far. I don’t feel responsible for the treatment of Aboriginal people in the past because I had no say, but my concern is for now and the future" (14). Howard has done better, offering a far less conditional personal apology on occasion and acknowledging, after a period of equivocation when he first became Prime Minister, the disadvantage faced by Indigenous people. However, he is still unwilling to offer an official apology as leader of the nation ("Transcript of the Prime Minister"). Apology may certainly involve fear of compensation, as Hanson argues, and we must acknowledge the difficulty of making an apology that is meaningful. The act of saying sorry does not absolve all blame and those supporting a genuine form of reconciliation must recognise, and continually combat, the enduring dynamics of racialisation and denial. The best example of a formal apology to the Stolen Generations would include profound sorrow for what my forebears and I, and those from whom I have so richly benefited, have done and are doing to Indigenous people. However, I am unwilling to accept that an apology could be as politically or practically significant in itself as current movements seems to suggest. At most, it is only an opening into a process that might lead to a better way for Indigenous and non-Indigenous people to deal with each other, but would seem very unlikely to change relations between Indigenous peoples and the Australian state. Years of hearing about Reconciliation and calls for governments to make amends with Indigenous peoples for the great crimes of Australian history have left me frustrated and despondent. This is partly because the current Federal Government does not seem driven to constructive action, and partly because reconciliation would seem to entail something more tangible than ‘performances’ of redemption and sorrow. When moves for a public forum for apology to the Stolen Generations were first made I struggled with the usefulness of the idea. It may be a good first step to acknowledge that horrible wrongs have been done, to express sorrow that such things have happened – and it is certainly better than (the still very common) outright or partial denial. Social justice, however, does not come from the confessional, and concepts such as an apology and Reconciliation can have diametrically opposed meanings in practice for different people. What has it meant for the Prime Minister of Australia to express personal sorrow? What have the formal apologies of other political leaders in Australia actually meant? Apologies of this nature are not to be made at all lightly. I am of the opinion that an apology to the Stolen Generations needs to take into account a web of interrelated events and political aspirations linked to the invasion of this continent. I take the apologies of State political leaders and the Federal Opposition with reservation. Former Prime Minister Paul Keating, in announcing the Federal Government’s acceptance of the Native Title decision, made magnanimous admissions of guilt on behalf of the Australian state, including special mention of the Stolen Generations. Yet within the same speech he initiated the major acquisition of Aboriginal lands with the Native Title Act. In the first instance, this did little more than guarantee the title interests of non-Indigenous invaders and their descendants. It seems that nothing is returned or acknowledged to Aboriginal people without something more significant being taken. The symbolic politics of being seen to be righting the historical wrongs has to go much further if this ritual is not to be repeated. The persistence of colonialist practices in Australian government structures and policies that pertain to Indigenous Australians is an issue yet to be addressed. In this environment, apologies are accompanied by repetitions of those same or related abuses. In early 1994, Aunty Maureen Watson of the Brisbane Council of Elders spoke of the situation of the German people and government who, having apologised for the Holocaust, made guarantees that it would never happen again. She made the point that this has never happened in Australia, and with increasing political conservatism, it seems unlikely that laws against the denial of historical atrocities would be considered in this country. In relation to the realities of past government policies towards Indigenous peoples and the Stolen Generations, it is clear that many people are outraged and welcome the chance to say so. If people took the implications of apology seriously, they would realise that merely saying sorry is not enough. Even while the act of apologising raises the issue of compensation, this politically significant step is a necessary one. The possibility of an apology has introduced the opportunity for Australians to think about the tragedies of our nation’s past and our inherited responsibility for these events, and for the benefits we have gained as a result. It has also provided an opportunity for individuals involved in the removals to think carefully about their involvement and to make amends for their individual actions. It cannot be, however, a substitute for the great recompense that is due Indigenous peoples, and merely serves as a starting point. References Hanson, Pauline. "Equal Justice for All". Queensland Times 6 Jan (1996): 14. Lloyd, Rachel. "I’ll Never Say Sorry: Pauline’s Back!" New Idea 10 Feb (2001): 14 Transcript of the Prime Minister, The Hon John Howard MP, Interview". BBC Television, Central London. 20 June 1997.

The issue of a national apology to the Stolen Generations by the Federal Government has for some time been central to cultural and political debate in Australia. Responses to the Bringing them Home report-the text that generated a national audience for narratives of child removal-including the mechanics of apology, have come to substantially generate the terms of the Australian reconciliation debate. The desire for the performance of official sorrow has come to dominate arguments about racial atonement to the extent, as several of our contributors note, that more material achievements may have been neglected. This is not to endorse Prime Minister Howard's prioritisation of 'practical' reconciliation, in which the only specific policy the government is prepared to advocate is the provision of basic rights to Indigenous people, but to recognise some of the limitations of the apology focus. The continuation of deliberations about whether or not non-indigenous Australians should express sorrow has the potential to feed into a lengthy history of anxious white Australian self-definition. Reconciliation, and the sorrow which may or may not constitute it, therefore becomes the latest in an endless series of attempts to ascertain Australia's national identity - this time informed by a moral responsibility for historical wrongdoing. In his article, Jen Kwok suggests the potential for the concept of reconciliation to become safely amorphous, expressing the fear that an interest in reconciliation can be acquired for the sake of appearance. In this way, the narrative of a nation reconciled through a governmental process helps to inform ongoing constructions of whiteness. While Australia's initial ten-year period of reconciliation has officially ended, the issue of a Federal Government apology has not. Prime Minister Howard's version of an apology-the personal sorrow that never becomes official-seems part of the conservative parties' deliberate obfuscation of the importance of official recognition of indigenous concerns, in the same way that a treaty is dismissed as unnecessary. In this issue, Lynette Hughes takes the conservatives' refusal to acknowledge the need to apologise as a starting point for deliberations on the worth of the concept, with a timely focus on Pauline Hanson's unapologetic re-entry onto the centre of the political stage. If Hanson's emergence in 1996 was notable for her grouping of otherness-'Aborigines' and 'Asians'-as threat, this was a simple identification of two forms of difference, in indigeneity and non-white migration, that have been historically constructed as imperilling white Australia. Guy Ramsay takes up an historical connection between two such groups: Chinese and Indigenous peoples of North Queensland during the latter half of the nineteenth century. This community of Others was seen as a significant threat to the 'codes' and 'norms' of white behaviour, as legislation was introduced to restrict the immorality and vice necessarily attached to racial mixing. In our feature article, Peta Stephenson also analyses the reasons why the common experience of Australian racism by immigrant and Indigenous people has not forged significant bonds between the two groups. Beginning with a letter written by members of the Vietnamese community in response to the Federal Government's ongoing refusal to apologise to the Stolen Generations, Stephenson traces some of the current reasons for the lack of interaction between those theorised as Other in settler-indigene and Anglo-Ethnic conceptions. Despite, or perhaps because of, the historical proofs of the mistreatment of migrant groups, there is reason to suggest continuity in the behaviour of settler nations towards non-white peoples. Rita Wong's examination of the Canadian government's treatment of recent refugees to Canada provides similarities with Australia's own human rights record in this area. This impulse to criminalise refugee seekers is certainly one shared by both nations. The racialisation of the refugees in the media and government rhetoric implies that the persecution of Asians in Canada is not only an historical event. A further relevant international comparison to the Australian situation is evident in South Africa, where issues of reconciliation and apology for historical misdeeds have gained great societal prominence. Despite the limitations of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, there was an intimacy to the discourses of apology made possible by the presence of 'perpetrator' and 'victim' in the same room: institutional space was provided by the Commission for the confessions of the perpetrators of human rights violations. These personal reconciliations intensify the focus on the apology to the 'victims' of human rights violations, and emphasise the personal accountability of those who perpetrated such acts. From her article on the workings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Andie Miller's conclusion suggests that the official impulse to reconcile-a feature of both Australia's and South Africa's version of national redemption-cannot produce results that are acceptable to all elements of society. Likewise, an emphasis on personal investment in an 'apology' is apparent in the contributions of Kwok and Hughes in this issue. Even now, the reconciliation issue remains the locus of much angst and self-reflection. Having a gathering such as Australia Deliberates: Reconciliation for the 21st Century -- which was screened mid-February 2001 by the ABC -- aptly demonstrates the range of complex societal changes which need to take place. More to the point, the concept of reconciliation must move, as Jackie Huggins argues, from being a deed to becoming a plan ("Australia Deliberates"). References "Australia Deliberates: Reconciliation for the 21st Century". ABC. 17 February 2001.

This “postcard” examines the development of Kinchela Boys Home Aboriginal Corporation’s (KBHAC) Mobile Education Centre as a mobile “site of conscience” as well as a place of Indigenous resistance and truth-telling in White Australia. KBHAC’s Mobile Education Centre is a whole of community experiential learning facility and aims to educate children, young people, and communities (Aboriginal and non-Indigenous) through three levels of engagement drawing on a range of resources: oral testimony, archival footage and artifacts, animated film, visual images, and interactive materials including an online portal. The Mobile Education Centre represents one example of decades of advocacy of survivors to raise awareness about Kinchela Boys Home and the experiences of Stolen Generations survivors. This postcard tells the story of KBHAC’s Mobile Education Centre and situates it within the context of ongoing efforts to reclaim the former Kinchela Boys Home site, located on Dunghutti Country, Mid-North Coast, New South Wales. In doing so, this article seeks to document the story of a mobile site of conscience which seeks to educate about past harms and the intergenerational impacts of genocidal laws and policies while creating a space for truth-telling that supports the process of post-traumatic growth and intergenerational healing.

IntroductionThe role, function, and future of the Western public intellectual have been highly contested over the last three decades. The dominant discourse, which predicts the decline of the public intellectual, asserts the institutionalisation of their labour has eroded their authority to speak publicly to power on behalf of others; and that the commodification of intellectual performance has transformed them from sages, philosophers, and men of letters into trivial media entertainers, pundits, and ideologues. Overwhelmingly the crisis debates link the demise of the public intellectual to shifts in public culture, which was initially conceptualised as a literary and artistic space designed to liberate the awareness of citizens through critique and to reflect upon “the chronic and persistent issues of life, meaning and representation” (McGuigan 430). This early imagining of public culture as an exclusively civilising space, however, did not last and Jurgen Habermas documented its decline in response to the commodification and politicisation of culture in the 20th century. Yet, as social activism continued to flourish in the public sphere, Habermas re-theorised public culture as a more pluralistic site which simultaneously accommodates “uncritical populism, radical subversion and critical intervention” (436) and operates as both a marketplace and a “site of communicative rationality, mutual respect and understanding (McGuigan 434). The rise of creative industries expanded popular engagement with public culture but destabilised the authority of the public intellectual. The accompanying shifts also affected the function of the curator, who, like the intellectual, had a role in legislating and arbitrating knowledge, and negotiating and authorising meaning through curated exhibitions of objects deemed sacred and significant. Jennifer Barrett noted the similarities in the two functions when she argued in Museums and the Public Sphere that, because museums have an intellectual role in society, curators have a public intellectual function as they define publics, determine modes of engagement, and shape knowledge formation (150). The resemblance between the idealised role of the intellectual and the curator in enabling the critique that emancipates the citizen means that both functions have been affected by the atomisation of contemporary society, which has exposed the power effects of the imposed coherency of authoritative and universal narratives. Indeed, just as Russell Jacoby, Allan Bloom, and Richard Posner predicted the death of the intellectual, who could no longer claim to speak in universal terms on behalf of others, so museums faced their own crisis of relevancy. Declining visitor numbers and reduced funding saw museums reinvent themselves, and in moving away from their traditional exclusive, authoritative, and nation building roles—which Pierre Bourdieu argued reproduced the “existing class-based culture, education and social systems” (Barrett 3)—museums transformed themselves into inclusive and diverse sites of co-creation with audiences and communities. In the context of this change the curator ceased to be the “primary producer of knowledge” (Barrett 13) and emerged to reproduce “contemporary culture preoccupations” and constitute the “social imagery” of communities (119). The modern museum remains concerned with explaining and interrogating the world, but the shift in curatorial work is away from the objects themselves to a focus upon audiences and how they value the artefacts, knowledge, and experiences of collective shared memory. The change in curatorial practices was driven by what Peter Vergo called a new “museology” (Barrett 2), and according to Macdonald this term assumes that “object meanings are contextual rather than inherent” or absolute and universal (2). Public intellectuals and curators, as the custodians of ideas and narratives in the contemporary cultural industries, privilege audience reception and recognise that consumers and/or citizens engage with public culture for a variety of reasons, including critique, understanding, and entertainment. Curators, like public intellectuals, also recognise that they can no longer assume the knowledge and experience of their audience, nor prescribe the nature of engagement with ideas and objects. Instead, curators and intellectuals emerge as negotiators and translators of cultural meaning as they traverse the divides in public culture, sequestering ideas and cultural artefacts and constructing narratives that engage audiences and communities in the process of re-imagining the past as a way of providing new insights into contemporary challenges.Methodology In exploring the idea that the public intellectual acts as a curator of ideas as he or she defines and privileges the discursive spaces of public culture, this paper begins by providing an overview of the cultural context of the contemporary public intellectual which enables comparisons between intellectual and curatorial functions. Second, this paper analyses a random sample of the content of books, newspaper and magazine articles, speeches, and transcripts of interviews drawn from The Australian, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Sydney Institute, the ABC, The Monthly, and Quadrant published or broadcast between 1996 and 2007, in order to identify the key themes of the History Wars. It should be noted that the History War debates were extensive, persistent, and complex—and as they unfolded over a 13-year period they emerged as the “most powerful” and “most disputed form of public intellectual work” (Carter, Ideas 9). Many issues were aggregated under the trope of the History Wars, and these topics were subject to both popular commentary and academic investigation. Furthermore, the History Wars discourse was produced in a range of mediums including popular media sources, newspaper and magazine columns, broadcasts, blogs, lectures, and writers’ forums and publications. Given the extent of this discourse, the sample of articles which provides the basis for this analysis does not seek to comprehensively survey the literature on the History Wars. Rather this paper draws upon Foucault’s genealogical qualitative method, which exposes the subordinated discontinuities in texts, to 1) consider the political context of the History War trope; and 2) identify how intellectuals discursively exhibited versions of the nation’s identity and in the process made visible the power effects of the past. Public Intellectuals The underlying fear of the debates about the public intellectual crisis was that the public intellectual would no longer be able to act as the conscience of a nation, speak truth to power, or foster the independent and dissenting public debate that guides and informs individual human agency—a goal that has lain at the heart of the Western intellectual’s endeavours since Kant’s Sapere aude. The late 20th century crisis discourse, however, primarily mourned the decline of a particular form of public authority attached to the heroic universal intellectual formation made popular by Emile Zola at the end of the 19th century, and which claimed the power to hold the political elites of France accountable. Yet talk of an intellectual crisis also became progressively associated with a variety of general concerns about globalising society. Some of these concerns included fears that structural shifts in the public domain would lead to the impoverishment of the cultural domain, the end of Western civilisation, the decline of the progressive political left, and the end of universal values. It was also expected that the decline in intellectuals would also enable the rise of populism, political conservatism, and anti-intellectualism (Jacoby Bloom; Bauman; Rorty; Posner; Furedi; Marquand). As a result of these fears, the function of the intellectual who engages publicly was re-theorised. Zygmunt Bauman suggested the intellectual was no longer the legislator or arbiter of taste but the negotiator and translator of ideas; Michel Foucault argued that the intellectual could be institutionally situated and still speak truth to power; and Edward Said insisted the public intellectual had a role in opening up possibilities to resolve conflict by re-imagining the past. In contrast, the Australian public intellectual has never been declared in crisis or dead, and this is probably because the nation does not have the same legacy of the heroic public intellectual. Indeed, as a former British colony labelled the “working man’s paradise” (White 4), Australia’s intellectual work was produced in “institutionalised networks” (Head 5) like universities and knowledge disciplines, political parties, magazines, and unions. Within these networks there was a double division of labour, between the abstraction of knowledge and its compartmentalisation, and between the practical application of knowledge and its popularisation. As a result of this legacy, a more organic, specific, and institutionalised form of intellectualism emerged, which, according to Head, limited intellectual influence and visibility across other networks and domains of knowledge and historically impeded general intellectual engagement with the public. Fears about the health and authority of the public intellectual in Australia have therefore tended to be produced as a part of Antonio Gramsci’s ideological “wars of position” (Mouffe 5), which are an endless struggle between cultural and political elites for control of the institutions of social reproduction. These struggles began in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s over language and political correctness, and they reappeared in the 1990s as the History Wars. History Wars“The History Wars” was a term applied to an ideological battle between two visions of the Australian nation. The first vision was circulated by Australian Labor Party Prime Minister Paul Keating, who saw race relations as central to 21st century global Australia and began the process of dealing with the complex and divisive Indigenous issues at home. He established the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation in 1991; acknowledged in the 1992 Redfern speech that white settlers were responsible for the problems in Indigenous communities; and commissioned the Bringing Them Home report, which was completed in 1997 and concluded that the mandated removal of Indigenous children from their families and communities throughout the 20th century had violated their human rights and caused long-term and systemic damage to Indigenous communities.The second vision of Australia was circulated by Liberal Prime Minister John Howard, who, after he came to power in 1996, began his own culture war to reconstruct a more conservative vision of the nation. Howard believed that the stories of Indigenous dispossession undermined confidence in the nation, and he sought to produce a historical view of the past grounded in “Judeo-Christian ethics, the progressive spirit of the enlightenment and the institutions and values of British culture” (“Sense of Balance”). Howard called for a return to a narrative form that valorised Australia’s achievements, and he sought to instil a more homogenised view of the past and a coherent national identity by reviewing high school history programs, national museum appointments, and citizenship tests. These two political positions framed the subsequent intellectual struggles over the past. While a number of issues were implicated in the battle, generally, left commentators used the History Wars as a way to circulate certain ideas about morality and identity, including 1) Australians needed to make amends for past injustices to Indigenous Australians and 2) the nation’s global identity was linked to how they dealt with Australia’s first people. In contrast, the political right argued 1) the left had misrepresented and overstated the damage done to Indigenous communities and rewritten history; 2) stories about Indigenous abuse were fragmenting the nation’s identity at a time when the nation needed to build a coherent global presence; and 3) no apology was necessary, because contemporary Australians did not feel responsible for past injustices. AnalysisThe war between these two visions of Australia was fought in “extra-curricular sites,” according to Stuart Macintyre, and this included newspaper columns, writers’ festivals, broadcast interviews, intellectual magazines like The Monthly and Quadrant, books, and think tank lectures. Academics and intellectuals were the primary protagonists, and they disputed the extent of colonial genocide; the legitimacy of Indigenous land rights; the impact of the Stolen Generation on the lives of modern Indigenous citizens; and the necessity of a formal apology as a part of the reconciliation process. The conflicts also ignited debates about the nature of history, the quality of public debates in Australia, and exposed the tensions between academics, public intellectuals, newspaper commentators and political elites. Much of the controversy played out in the national forums can be linked to the Bringing Them Home: National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families report Stolen Generation inquiry and report, which was commissioned by Keating but released after Howard came to office. Australian public intellectual and professor of politics Robert Manne critiqued the right’s response to the report in his 2001 Quarterly Essay titled “In Denial: The Stolen Generation and The Right”. He argued that there was a right-wing campaign in Australia that sought to diminish and undermine justice for Aboriginal people by discounting the results of the inquiry, underestimating the numbers of those affected, and underfunding the report’s recommendations. He spoke of the nation’s shame and in doing so he challenged Australia’s image of itself. Manne’s position was applauded by many for providing what Kay Schaffer in her Australian Humanities Review paper called an “effective antidote to counter the bitter stream of vitriol that followed the release of the Bringing Them Home report”. Yet Manne also drew criticism. Historian Bain Attwood argued that Manne’s attack on conservatives was polemical, and he suggested that it would be more useful to consider in detail what drives the right-wing analysis of Indigenous issues. Attwood also suggested that Manne’s essay had misrepresented the origins of the narrative of the Stolen Generation, which had been widely known prior to the release of the Stolen Generation report.Conservative commentators focused upon challenging the accuracy of those stories submitted to the inquiry, which provided the basis for the report. This struggle over factual details was to characterise the approach of historian Keith Windschuttle, who rejected both the numbers of those stolen from their families and the degree of violence used in the settlement of Australia. In his 2002 book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One, Van Diemen’s Land 1803–1847 he accused left-wing academics of exaggerating the events of Aboriginal history in order to further their own political agenda. In particular, he argued that the extent of the “conflagration of oppression and conflict” which sought to “dispossess, degrade, and devastate the Aboriginal people” had been overstated and misrepresented and designed to “create an edifice of black victimhood and white guilt” (Windschuttle, Fabrication 1). Manne responded to Windschuttle’s allegations in Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History, arguing that Windschuttle arguments were “unpersuasive and unsupported either by independent research or even familiarity with the relevant secondary historical literature” (7) and that the book added nothing to the debates. Other academics like Stephen Muecke, Marcia Langton and Heather Goodall expressed concerns about Windschuttle’s work, and in 2003 historians Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark published The History Wars, which described the implications of the politicisation of history on the study of the past. At the same time, historian Bain Attwood in Telling the Truth About Aboriginal History argued that the contestation over history was eroding the “integrity of intellectual life in Australia” (2). Fractures also broke out between writers and historians about who was best placed to write history. The Australian book reviewer Stella Clarke wrote that the History Wars were no longer constructive discussions, and she suggested that historical novelists could colonise the territory traditionally dominated by professional historians. Inga Clendinnen wasn’t so sure. She wrote in a 2006 Quarterly Essay entitled “The History Question: Who Owns the Past?” that, while novelists could get inside events through a process of “applied empathy,” imagination could in fact obstruct the truth of reality (20). Discussion The History Wars saw academics engage publicly to exhibit a set of competing ideas about Australia’s identity in the nation’s media and associated cultural sites, and while the debates initially prompted interest they eventually came to be described as violent and unproductive public conversations about historical details and ideological positions. Indeed, just as the museum curator could no longer authoritatively prescribe the cultural meaning of artefacts, so the History Wars showed that public intellectuals could not adjudicate the identity of the nation nor prescribe the nature of its conduct. For left-wing public intellectuals and commentators, the History Wars came to signify the further marginalisation of progressive politics in the face of the dominant, conservative, and increasingly populist constituency. Fundamentally, the battles over the past reinforced fears that Australia’s public culture was becoming less diverse, less open, and less able to protect traditional civil rights, democratic freedoms, and social values. Importantly for intellectuals like Robert Manne, there was a sense that Australian society was less able or willing to reflect upon the moral legitimacy of its past actions as a part of the process of considering its contemporary identity. In contrast right-wing intellectuals and commentators argued that the History Wars showed how public debate under a conservative government had been liberated from political correctness and had become more vibrant. This was the position of Australian columnist Janet Albrechtsen who argued that rather than a decline in public debate there had been, in fact, “vigorous debate of issues that were once banished from the national conversation” (91). She went on to insist that left-wing commentators’ concerns about public debate were simply a mask for their discomfort at having their views and ideas challenged. There is no doubt that the History Wars, while media-orchestrated debates that circulated a set of ideological positions designed to primarily attract audiences and construct particular views of Australia, also raised public awareness of the complex issues associated with Australia’s Indigenous past. Indeed, the Wars ended what W.E.H Stanner had called the “great silence” on Indigenous issues and paved the way for Kevin Rudd’s apology to Indigenous people for their “profound grief, suffering and loss”. The Wars prompted conversations across the nation about what it means to be Australian and exposed the way history is deeply implicated in power surely a goal of both intellectual debate and curated exhibitions. ConclusionThis paper has argued that the public intellectual can operate like a curator in his or her efforts to preserve particular ideas, interpretations, and narratives of public culture. The analysis of the History Wars debates, however, showed that intellectuals—just like curators —are no longer authorities and adjudicators of the nation’s character, identity, and future but cultural intermediaries whose function is not just the performance or exhibition of selected ideas, objects, and narratives but also the engagement and translation of other voices across different contexts in the ongoing negotiation of what constitutes cultural significance. ReferencesAlbrechtsen, Janet. “The History Wars.” The Sydney Papers (Winter/Spring 2003): 84–92. Attwood, Bain. Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005.Bauman, Zygmunt. Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post Modernity and Intellectuals. Cambridge, CAMBS: Polity, 1987. Barrett, Jennifer. Museums and the Public Sphere. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2010. Bloom, Allan. Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.Bourdieu. P. Distinctions: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. R. Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1984. Bringing Them Home: National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families. Commonwealth of Australia. 1997.Carter, David. Introduction. The Ideas Market: An Alternative Take on Australia’s Intellectual Life. Ed. David Carter. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2004. 1–11.Clendinnen, Inga. True Stories. Sydney: ABC Books, 1999.Clendinnen, Inga. “The History Question: Who Owns the Past?” Quarterly Essay 23 (2006): 1–82. Foucault, Michel, and Giles Deleuze. Intellectuals and Power Language, Counter Memory and Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ed. and trans. David Bouchard. New York: Cornell UP, 1977. Gratton, Michelle. “Howard Claims Victory in National Culture Wars.” The Age 26 Jan. 2006. 6 Aug. 2015 ‹http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/pm-claims-victory-in-culture-wars/2006/01/25/1138066861163.html›.Head, Brian. “Introduction: Intellectuals in Australian Society.” Intellectual Movements and Australian Society. Eds. Brian Head and James Waller. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1988. 1–44.Hohendahl, Peter Uwe, and Marc Silberman. “Critical Theory, Public Sphere and Culture: Jürgen Habermas and His Critics.” New German Critique 16 (Winter 1979): 89–118.Howard, John. “A Sense of Balance: The Australian Achievement in 2006.” National Press Club. Great Parliament House, Canberra, ACT. 25 Jan. 2006. ‹http://pmtranscripts.dpmc.gov.au/browse.php?did=22110›.Howard, John. “Standard Bearer in Liberal Culture.” Address on the 50th Anniversary of Quadrant, Sydney, 3 Oct. 2006. The Australian 4 Oct. 2006. 6 Aug. 2015 ‹http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/john-howard-standard-bearer-in-liberal-culture/story-e6frg6zo-1111112306534›.Jacoby, Russell. The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe. New York: The Noonday Press, 1987.Keating, Paul. “Keating’s History Wars.” Sydney Morning Herald 5 Sep. 2003. 6 Aug. 2015 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/09/05/1062549021882.html›.Macdonald, S. “Expanding Museum Studies: An Introduction.” Ed. S. Macdonald. A Companion to Museum Studies. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. 1–12. Macintyre, Stuart, and Anna Clarke. The History Wars. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2003. ———. “The History Wars.” The Sydney Papers (Winter/Spring 2003): 77–83.———. “Who Plays Stalin in Our History Wars? Sydney Morning Herald 17 Sep. 2003. 6 Aug. 2015 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/09/16/1063625030438.html›.Manne, Robert. “In Denial: The Stolen Generation and the Right.” Quarterly Essay 1 (2001).———. WhiteWash: On Keith Windshuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History. Melbourne. Black Ink, 2003.Mark, David. “PM Calls for End to the History Wars.” ABC News 28 Aug. 2009.McGuigan, Jim. “The Cultural Public Sphere.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 8.4 (2005): 427–43.Mouffe, Chantal, ed. Gramsci and Marxist Theory. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979. Melleuish, Gregory. The Power of Ideas: Essays on Australian Politics and History. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2009.Rudd, Kevin. “Full Transcript of PM’s Apology Speech.” The Australian 13 Feb. 2008. 6 Aug. 2015 ‹http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/full-transcript-of-pms-speech/story-e6frg6nf-1111115543192›.Said, Edward. “The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals.” ABC Alfred Deakin Lectures, Melbourne Town Hall, 19 May 2001. Schaffer, Kay. “Manne’s Generation: White Nation Responses to the Stolen Generation Report.” Australian Humanities Review (June 2001). 5 June 2015 ‹http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-June-2001/schaffer.html›. Shanahan, Dennis. “Howard Rallies the Right in Cultural War Assault.” The Australian 4 Oct. 2006. 6 Aug. 2015 ‹http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/howard-rallies-right-in-culture-war-assault/story-e6frg6nf-1111112308221›.Wark, Mackenzie. “Lip Service.” The Ideas Market: An Alternative Take on Australia’s Intellectual Life. Ed. David Carter. Carlton, VIC: Melbourne UP, 2004. 259–69.White, Richard. Inventing Australia Images and Identity 1688–1980. Sydney: George Allen and Unwin, 1981. Windschuttle, Keith. The Fabrication of Australian History, Volume One: Van Diemen’s Land 1803–1847. Sydney: McCleay, 2002. ———. “Why There Was No Stolen Generation (Part One).” Quadrant Online (Jan–Feb 2010). 6 Aug. 2015 ‹https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2010/01-02/why-there-were-no-stolen-generations/›.

Since the colonisation of Australia, the relationship between western settlers and Aborigines has been characterised by inconsistent policies, ranging from segregation to relocation to assimilation. Yet no event seems to elicit such a profound reaction as the Stolen Generation. While it has only become the product of discussion in recent decades, it is now deeply embedded in Australian consciousness, with a multitude of films, scholarly publications and memoirs inspired by it. One such film is Rabbit-Proof Fence, directed by Phillip Noyce and based on the nonfiction book Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington Garimara. Set in 1931, the film describes the experience of three half-caste girls, Molly, Gracie and Daisy, who are forcibly removed from their family and community in Jigalong and taken to the Moore River Native Settlement, their consequent escape and three-month journey home. But what are some of the methods utilised to portray the many issues surrounding the Stolen Generation and what are their effects?

Introduction In October 2007, the federal Coalition government legislated that all eligible migrants and refugees who want to become Australian citizens must sit and pass the newly designed Australian citizenship test. Prime Minister John Howard stated that by studying the essential knowledge on Australian culture, history and values that his government had defined in official citizenship test resources, migrants seeking the conferral of Australian citizenship would become "integrated" into the broader, "mainstream" community and attain a sense of belonging as new Australian citizens (qtd. in "Howard Defends Citizenship Test"). In this paper, I conduct a genealogical analysis of Becoming an Australian Citizen, the resource booklet that contains all of the information needed to prepare for the test. Focusing specifically on the section in the booklet entitled A Story of Australia which details Australian history and framing my research through a Foucauldian perspective on governmentality that focuses on the interrelationship with truth, power and knowledge in the production of subjectivities, I suggest that the inclusion of the subject of history in the test was constituted as a new order of knowledge that aimed to shape new citizens' understanding of what constituted the "correct" version of Australian identity. History was hence promoted as a form of knowledge that relied on objectivity in order to excavate the truths of Australia's past. These truths, it was claimed, had shaped the very values that the Australian people lived by and that now prospective citizens were expected to embrace. My objective is to problematise this claim that the discipline of history consists of objective truths and to move beyond recent debates in politics and historiography known as the history wars. I suggest that history instead should be viewed as a "curative science" (Foucault 90), that is, a transformative form of knowledge that focuses on the discontinuities as well as the continuities in Australia's past and which has the potential to "delimit truths" (Weeks) and thus heal the fatal impact of an official history dominated by notions of progress and achievements. This kind of cultural research not only has the capacity to influence policy-making in the field of civic education for migrant citizens, but it also has the potential to broaden understanding of Australia's past by drawing on alternative stories of Australia including the ruptures and counter stories that come together to form the multiplicity that is Australian identity. Values Eclipsing History The test was introduced at a time when the impact of globalisation was shifting conceptions of the conferral of citizenship in many Western nations from a notion of new citizens gaining legal and political rights to a concept through which becoming a naturalized citizen meant adopting a nation's particular way of life and embracing a set of core national values (Allison; Grattan; Johnson). In Australia, these values were defined as a set of principles based around liberal-democratic notions of freedom, equality, the rule of law and tolerance and promoted as "central to Australia remaining a stable, prosperous and peaceful community" (DIC 5). The Howard government believed that social cohesion was threatened by the differences emanating from recent arrivals, particularly non-Christian and non-white arrivals who did not share Australian values. These threats were contextualized through such incidents as asylum seekers allegedly throwing children overboard, the Cronulla Beach riots in 2005 and terrorist attacks close to home in Bali. Adopting Australian values was promoted as the solution to this crisis of difference. In this way, the Australian values promoted through the Australian citizenship test were allotted "a reforming role" whilst migrants and their differences were targeted as "objects of reform" (Bennett 105). Reform would be achieved by prospective citizens engaging freely in the ethical conduct of self-study of the history and values contained in the citizenship resource booklet. With some notable exceptions (see e.g. Lake and Tavan), inclusion of historical content in the test received less public scrutiny than Australian values. This is despite the fact that 37 per cent of the booklet's content was dedicated to Australian history compared to only 7 per cent dedicated to Australian values. This is also remarkable since previously, media and scholarly attention over the preceding two decades had agonised over how British colonisation and indigenous dispossession were to be represented in Australian public institutions. Popularly known as the history wars, these debates now seemed irrelevant for regulating the conduct of new citizens. The Year of the Apology: The End of the History Wars? There was also a burgeoning feeling among the broader community that a truce was in sight in the history wars (cf. Riley; Throsby). This view was supported by the outcome of the November 2007 federal election when the Howard government was defeated after eleven years in office. John Howard had been a key player in the history wars, intervening in decisions as wide ranging as the management of national museums and the preparation of high school history curricula. In his final year as prime minister, Howard became involved with overseeing what historical content was to be included in Becoming an Australian Citizen (cf. Andrews; Hirst). This had a lasting impact as even after Howard's electoral defeat, the Australian citizenship test and its accompanying resource booklet still remained in use for another two years as the essential guide that was to inform test candidates on how to be model Australian citizens. Whilst Howard's test was retained Kevin Rudd made the official Apology to the Stolen Generation as one of his first acts as prime minister in February 2008. His electoral victory was heralded as the coming of "a new intellectual culture" with "deep thinking and balanced analysis" (Nile). The Apology was also celebrated in both media and academic circles as the beginning of the process of reconciliation for both relations with indigenous and non-indigenous Australians as well as "reconciling" the controversies in history that had plagued Howard's prime ministership. In popular culture, too, the end of the history wars seemed imminent. In film, the Apology was celebrated with the release of Australia in November of that same year. Luhrmann's film became a box office hit that was later taken up by Tourism Australia to promote the nation as a desirable destination for international tourists. Langton praised it as an "eccentrically postmodern account of a recent frontier" that "has leaped over the ruins of the 'history wars' and given Australians a new past" and concluded that the film presented "an alternative history from the one John Howard and his followers constructed" (12). Similar appraisals had been made of the Australian citizenship test as the author of the historical content in the resource booklet, John Hirst, revealed that the final version of A Story of Australia "was not John Howard's and was organised contrary to his declared preference for narrative" (35). Hirst is a conservative historian who was employed by the Howard government to write "the official history of Australia" (28) for migrants and who had previously worked on other projects initiated by the Howard government, including the high school history curriculum review known as the History Summit in 2006. In an article entitled Australia: The Official History and published in The Monthly of that very same year as the Apology, Hirst divulged how in writing A Story of Australia for the citizenship resource booklet, his aim was to be "fair-minded and balanced" (31). He claimed to do this by detailing what he understood as the "two sides" in Australia's historical and political controversies relating to "Aboriginal affairs" (31), known more commonly as the history wars. Hirst's resolve was to "report the position of the two sides" (31), choosing to briefly focus on the views of historian Henry Reynolds and the political scientist Robert Manne on the one side, as well as presenting the conservative views of journalists Keith Windshuttle and Andrew Bolt on the other side (31-32). Hirst was undoubtedly referring to the two sides in the history wars that are characterised by on the one hand, commentators who believe that the brutal impact of British colonisation on indigenous peoples should be acknowledged whilst those on the other who believe that Australians should focus on celebrating their nation's relatively "peaceful past". Popularly characterised as the black armband view against the white blindfold view of Australian history, this definition does not capture the complexities, ruptures and messiness of Australia's contested past or of the debates that surround it. Hirst's categorisation, is rather problematic; while Windshuttle and Bolt's association is somewhat understandable considering their shared support in denying the existence of the Stolen Generation and massacres of indigenous communities, the association of Reynolds with Manne is certainly contestable and can be viewed as a simplistic grouping together of the "bleeding hearts" in discourses surrounding Australian history. As with the film Australia, Hirst wanted to be "the recorder of myth and memory and not simply the critical historian" (32). Unlike the film Australia, Hirst remained committed to a particular view of the discipline of history that was committed to notions of objectivity and authenticity, stating that he "was not writing this history to embody (his) own views" (31) but rather, his purpose was to introduce to new citizens what he thought captured "what Australians of today knew and valued and celebrated in their history" (32). The textual analysis that follows will illustrate that despite the declaration of a "balanced" view of Australian history being produced for migrant consumption and the call for a truce in the history wars, A Story of Australia still reflected the values and principles of a celebratory white narrative that was not concerned with recognising any side of history that dealt with the fatal impact of colonialism in stories of Australia. Disrupting the Two Sides of History The success of Australia was built on lands taken from Aboriginal people after European settlement in 1788 (DIC 32). [...]The Aboriginal people were not without friends […]. Governor Macquarie (1810-1821) took a special interest in them, running a school for their children and offering them land for farming. But very few Aboriginal people were willing to move into European society; they were not very interested in what the Europeans had to offer. (DIC 32) Despite its author's protestations against a narrative format, A Story of Australia is written as a thematic narrative that is mainly concerned with describing a nation's trajectory towards progress. It includes the usual primary school project heroes of European explorers and settlers, all of them men: Captain James Cook, Arthur Phillip and Lachlan Macquarie (17-18). It privileges a British heritage and ignores the multicultural make-up of the Australian population. In this Australian story, the convict settlers are an important factor in nation building as they found "new opportunities in this strange colony" (18) and "the ordinary soldier, the digger is a national hero" (21). Indigenous peoples, on the other hand, are described in the past tense as part of pre-history having "hunter-gatherer traditions" (32), whose culture exists today only in spectacle and who have only themselves to blame for their marginalisation by refusing the help of the white settlers. Most notable in this particular version of history are the absent stories and absent characters; there is little mention of the achievements of women and nation-building is presented as an exclusively masculine enterprise. There is also scarce mention of the contribution of migrants. Also absent is any mention of the colonisation of the Australian continent that dispossessed its Indigenous peoples. For instance, the implementation of the assimilation policy that required the forcible removal of Aboriginal children from their families is not even named as the Stolen Generation in the resource booklet, and the fight for native land rights encapsulated in the historic Mabo decision of 1992 is referred to as merely a "separatist policy" (33). In this way, it cannot be claimed that this is a balanced portrayal of Australia's past even by Hirst's own standards for it is difficult to locate the side represented by Reynolds and Manne. Once again, comparisons with the film Australia are useful. Although praised for raising "many thorny issues" relating to "national legitimacy and Aboriginal sovereignty" (Konishi and Nugent), Ashenden concludes that the film is "a mix of muttering, avoidance of touchy topics, and sporadic outbursts". Hogan also argues that the film Australia is "an exercise in national wish fulfillment, staged as a high budget, unabashedly commercial and sporadically ironic spectacle" that "offers symbolic absolution for the violence of colonialism" (63). Additionally, Hirst's description of a "successful" nation being built on the "uncultivated" indigenous lands suggests that colonisation was necessary and unavoidable if Australia was to progress into a civilised nation. Both Hirst's A Story of Australia and his Australia: The Official History share more than just the audacious appropriation of a proper noun with the film Australia as these cultural texts grant prominence to the values and principles of a celebratory white narrative of Australian history while playing down the unpalatable episodes, making any prospective citizen who does not accept these "balanced" versions of historical truths as deviant and unworthy of becoming an Australian citizen. Our Australian Story: Reconciling the Fatal Impact The Australian citizenship test and its accompanying booklet, Becoming an Australian Citizen were replaced in October 2009 with a revised test and a new booklet entitled, Australian Citizenship: Our Common Bond. The Australian Citizenship Test Review Committee deemed the 2007 original test to be "flawed, intimidating to some and discriminatory" (Australian Citizenship Test Review Committee 3). It replaced mandatory knowledge of Australian values with that of the Citizenship Pledge and determined that the subject of Australian history, although "nice-to-know" was not essential for assessing the suitability of the conferral of Australian citizenship. History content is now included in the new booklet in the non-testable section under the more inclusive title of Our Australian Story. This particular version of history now names the Stolen Generation, includes references to Australia's multicultural make up and even recognises some of the fatal effects of British colonisation. The Apology features prominently over three long paragraphs (71) and Indigenous dispossession is now described under the title of Fatal Impact as follows: The early governors were told not to harm the Aboriginal people, but the British settlers moved onto Aboriginal land and many Aboriginal people were killed. Settlers were usually not punished for committing these crimes. (58) So does this change in tone in the official history in the resource booklet for prospective citizens "prove" that the history wars are over? This more conciliatory version of Australia's past is still not the "real proof" that the history wars are over for despite broadening its categories of what constitutes as historical truth, these truths still privilege an exclusive white perspective. For example, in the new resource booklet, detail on the Stolen Generation is included as a relevant historical event in relation to what the office of Prime Minister, the Bringing Them Home Report and the Official Apology have achieved for Indigenous Australians and for the national identity, stating that "the Sorry speech was an important step forward for all Australians" (71). Perhaps then, we need to discard this way of thinking that frames the past as an ethical struggle between right and wrong and a moral battle between victors and losers. If we cease thinking of our nation's history as a battleground between celebrators and mourners and stop framing our national identity in terms of achievers and those who were not interested in building the nation, then we recognise that these "war" discourses are only the products of "games of truth" invented by governments, expert historians and their institutions. In this way, official texts can produce the possibility for a range of players from new directions to participate in what content can be included as historical truths in Australian stories and what is possible in productions of official Australian identities. The Australian Citizenship Review Committee understood this potential impact as it has recommended "the government commit to reviewing the content of the book at regular intervals given the evolving nature of Australian society" (Australian Citizenship Test Review Committee 25). In disrupting the self-evident notion of a balanced history of facts with its evocation of an equal society and by exposing how governmental institutions have used these texts as instruments of social governance (cf. Bennett), we can come to understand that there are other ways of being Australian and alternative perspectives on Australian history. The production of official histories can work towards producing a "curative science" that heals the fatal impact of the past. The impact of this kind of cultural research should be directed towards the discourse of history wars. In this way, history becomes not a battlefield but "a differential knowledge of energies and failings, heights and degenerations, poisons and antidotes" (Foucault 90) which has the capacity to transform Australian society into a society inclusive of all indigenous, non-indigenous and migrant citizens and which can work towards reconciliation of the nation's history, and perhaps, even of its people. References Allison, Lyn. "Citizenship Test Is the New Aussie Cringe." The Drum. ABC News. 4 Dec. 2011 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/news/2007-09-28/citizenship-test-is-the-new-aussie-cringe/683634›. Andrews, Kevin. "Citizenship Test Resource Released." MediaNet Press Release Wire 26 Aug. 2007: 1. Ashenden, Dean. "Luhrmann, Us, and Them." Inside Story 18 Dec. 2008. 4 Dec. 2011 ‹http://inside.org.au/luhrmann-us-and-them/›. Australian Citizenship Test Review Committee. Moving Forward... Improving Pathways to Citizenship. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2008. Australian Government. Australian Citizenship: Our Common Bond. Belconnen: National Communications Branch of the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, 2009.Bennett, Tony. Culture: A Reformer's Science. St Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1998. DIC (Department of Immigration and Citizenship). Becoming an Australian Citizen: Citizenship. Your Commitment to Australia. Canberra, 2007.Foucault, Michel. "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History." The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. 76-100. Grattan, Michelle. "Accept Australian Values or Get Out." The Age 25 Aug. 2005: 1. Hirst, John. "Australia: The Official History." The Monthly 6 Feb. 2008: 28-35. "Howard Defends Citizenship Test." The Age 11 Dec. 2006. Howard, John. "A Sense of Balance: The Australian Achievement in 2006 - Address to the National Press Club, 25 January." PM's News Room: Speeches. Canberra: Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. Johnson, Carol. "John Howard's 'Values' and Australian Identity." Australian Journal of Political Science 42.2 (2007): 195-209. Konishi, Shino, and Maria Nugent. "Reviewing Indigenous History in Baz Luhrmann's Australia." Inside Story 4 Dec. 2009. 4 Dec. 2011 ‹http://inside.org.au/reviewing-indigenous-history-in-baz-luhrmanns-australia/›. Lake, Marilyn. "Wasn't This a Government Obsessed with Historical 'Truth'?" The Age 29 Oct. 2007: 13. Langton, Marcia. "Faraway Downs Fantasy Resonates Close to Home." Sunday Age 23 November 2008: 12. Nile, Richard. "End of the Culture Wars." Richard Nile Blog. The Australian 28 Nov. 2007. Riley, Mark. "Sorry, But the PM Says the Culture Wars Are Over." Sydney Morning Herald 10 Sep. 2003: 1. Tavan, Gwenda. "Testing Times: The Problem of 'History' in the Howard Government's Australian Citizenship Test." Does History Matter? Making and Debating Citizenship, Immigration and Refugee Policy in Australia and New Zealand. Eds. Neumann, Klaus and Gwenda Tavan. Canberra: ANU E P, 2009. Throsby, David. "A Truce in the Culture Wars." Sydney Morning Herald 26 Apr. 2008: 32. Weeks, Jeffrey. "Foucault for Historians." History Workshop 14 (Autumn 1982): 106-19.

The forced removal of Indigenous children has been a site of historical debate in Australia since the 1980s. This paper explores these debates and discusses the political nature of Australia’s national history, and the correlation between child removal and the legitimacy of the nation.

Sally Morgan’ s novel My Place explicitly portrays the resistance of Aborigines subalterns against the prevailing social, economic, cultural and political issues. Focusing on identity, hybridity, ethnicity, and racism, the paper argues how Aborigines undergo social injustice, racial distortion, class disparity and adversarial displacement by Neo-colonialism. Investigating the Aborigines’ academic endeavours, genealogical suppressive destitutions, groundbreaking reattachment, matrilineal links, it is hypothesized that My Place foregrounds the contemporary status of modern Aboriginal Woman. Illustrating the Aborigines’ altruistic patriotism and excruciating their sufferings during Neo-colonialism in the novel, it is spotlighted how lost generation and stolen generation and extortive afflictions imposed on the Aborigines by the Whites in Australia have shaped the formers’ collective socio-cultural and political consciousness.

Sally Morgan’s novel My Place explicitly portrays the resistance of Aborigines subalterns against the prevailing social, economic, cultural and political issues. Focusing on identity, hybridity, ethnicity, and racism, the paper argues how Aborigines undergo social injustice, racial distortion, class disparity and adversarial displacement by Neo-colonialism. Investigating the Aborigines’ academic endeavours, genealogical suppressive destitutions, groundbreaking reattachment, matrilineal links, it is hypothesized that My Place foregrounds the contemporary status of modern Aboriginal Woman. Illustrating the Aborigines’ altruistic patriotism and excruciating their sufferings during Neo-colonialism in the novel, it is spotlighted how lost generation and stolen generation and extortive afflictions imposed on the Aborigines by the Whites in Australia have shaped the formers’ collective socio-cultural and political consciousnes

Sally Morgan’ s novel My Place explicitly portrays the resistance of Aborigines subalterns against the prevailing social, economic, cultural and political issues. Focusing on identity, hybridity, ethnicity, and racism, the paper argues how Aborigines undergo social injustice, racial distortion, class disparity and adversarial displacement by Neo-colonialism. Investigating the Aborigines’ academic endeavours, genealogical suppressive destitutions, groundbreaking reattachment, matrilineal links, it is hypothesized that My Place foregrounds the contemporary status of modern Aboriginal Woman. Illustrating the Aborigines’ altruistic patriotism and excruciating their sufferings during Neo-colonialism in the novel, it is spotlighted how lost generation and stolen generation and extortive afflictions imposed on the Aborigines by the Whites in Australia have shaped the formers’ collective socio-cultural and political consciousness.

Sally Morgan’ s novel My Place explicitly portrays the resistance of Aborigines subalterns against the prevailing social, economic, cultural and political issues. Focusing on identity, hybridity, ethnicity, and racism, the paper argues how Aborigines undergo social injustice, racial distortion, class disparity and adversarial displacement by Neo-colonialism. Investigating the Aborigines’ academic endeavours, genealogical suppressive destitutions, groundbreaking reattachment, matrilineal links, it is hypothesized that My Place foregrounds the contemporary status of modern Aboriginal Woman. Illustrating the Aborigines’ altruistic patriotism and excruciating their sufferings during Neo-colonialism in the novel, it is spotlighted how lost generation and stolen generation and extortive afflictions imposed on the Aborigines by the Whites in Australia have shaped the formers’ collective socio-cultural and political consciousness.