Ten Doors Down

by Tickner, Robert;

  In the case of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander mothers whose children were stolen from them, very different government policies prevailed to the adoption policies I have written about in the preceding pages. These other policies gave rise to what we as Australians know to be the Stolen Generations. Their litany of suffering was chronicled in the Bringing Them Home report of the Australian Human Rights Commission.

  The public call for this inquiry was one of my most important actions as a minister, and was advocated at a time during which my own life was in such huge turmoil because of the adoption reunion process. It was at a time when my own birth mother was living in a precarious emotional state, as she sought to come to terms with being reunited with her own son after 41 years of separation. And it was at a time when I was right in the middle of the process of meeting my birth father, his wife, Lola, and my sisters and brothers.

  My own adoption reunion, and my personal life more generally, frequently overlapped with my public life in the Indigenous-affairs portfolio. Thus, the personal overlapped with the political, and I have to believe that overlap helped to positively shape and reinforce the public policy outcomes — at least in a modest way.

  There is always a challenge as a government minister in the Indigenous-affairs portfolio to adhere to the principles of cabinet government, while still fulfilling your obligations and the expectations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, who see the minister as their advocate in government and in public debate. I fully admit that I pushed the boundaries of that relationship the whole time I was minister. In order to achieve changes and advances in public policy, I had to frequently speak out on issues in order to win the hearts and minds of the public and thus, by getting the community behind me, to help influence the shaping of public policy. I did this on all the big issues of the day: the establishment of the reconciliation process; the fight for a just Native Title Act; the establishment of the Indigenous Land Fund; the creation of the office of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner; and, as I will describe here, the creation of the Stolen Generations Inquiry.

  My interest in what happened to the Stolen Generations went way back. I had first become aware of the issues when I worked as a volunteer for the Aboriginal Legal Service in the early 1970s, soon after my graduation as a lawyer. As an adopted person, I was naturally drawn to this issue, but at first had no idea of the extent to which the policies of separation had become an enshrined practice of government across Australia.

  In June of 1978, I went on a holiday to the Northern Territory with my mother and father, driving up in the family car to Central Australia. During that trip, I bought a book in a service station that changed my life. A Bastard Like Me by Charlie Perkins told the story of Charlie’s life up until that time. Charlie had risen to lofty heights in the public service, while still retaining the mindset of an agitator — a mindset that I came to know and respect in my own extensive direct contact with him over future years. Little did I know that within six years of my having read the book, I would be calling out to Charlie Perkins from inside a paddy wagon in front of the New South Wales Parliament House, having been arrested for allegedly pulling down the Parliament House fence in an Aboriginal land rights demonstration.

  It was Charles Perkins’s description in his book of the experiences of his people in Central Australia that moved me so deeply:

  If tribal people were living around the towns, on cattle stations or near settled places, permanently resident there, the police would just whip them off, no trouble. Children were the main victims of this division of families. The troopers would ride up and say, ‘All right, get the half-caste kids!’ Like rounding up the lambs from the rest of the sheep, they would separate them, put them in a truck and off they would go. These kids were brought up in institutions across the Territory. That is why a lot of us have hang-ups. How else could it be? You miss the love of a mother and all the other things that go with it, the family circle. As a young kid, four or five years old, dumped with a lot of strangers, you can be emotionally scarred for life.

  I can remember how reading this for the first time affected me. There was not the slightest hint of my own personal situation in this; I was empathising with the loss that had been suffered by others, and not by me. But the memory of Charlie’s book stuck with me as I left my secure academic position and went to work for the Aboriginal Legal Service on a full-time basis in late 1978, where I would stay for the next six years until I was elected to the House of Representatives in the by-election in March 1984. Another work that increased my awareness and understanding of the Stolen Generations was Professor Peter Read’s landmark work The Stolen Generations, which has received justified praise. Peter’s book was published in 1981, and, the year before, Peter and a friend of mine, the late Oomera (Coral) Edwards, had established the first Link-Up organisation — a service to help the Stolen Generations trace their families.

  I was deeply involved in all the big issues in the Indigenous-affairs portfolio during the 1980s, when I was still a backbench member. Then, following the 1990 federal election, Bob Hawke appointed me as the minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander affairs, and one of my first major challenges in that role was to coordinate the national response to the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. During that time, Lowitja (Lois) O’Donoghue, the chair of the board of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, confided in me that she had been one of the children taken from their mothers.

  One of the outcomes of our work on this Royal Commission response was that national and coordinated funding was provided for Link-Up organisations Australia-wide. As a result, the level of public awareness and public understanding of the Stolen Generations issues expanded enormously, and valuable work could be done in communities with the new funding.

  Later, in 1992, I was sitting beside Paul Keating in the Redfern sun when he stepped forward to make the now famous Redfern Park speech. In that speech, he stated simply, ‘We took the children from their mothers.’ These words were a brief but powerful acknowledgment of what had occurred, words that resonated around the world.

  I was very conscious at the time that there were calls for some kind of further inquiry into the practices and policies that had led to the Stolen Generations, including calls from the Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care (SNAICC). Unfortunately, there was no interest elsewhere in government for such a further inquiry, and there was not enough ongoing pressure on the government for this to occur.

  By 1994, the government was starting to feel the toll of the battles that had been fought for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander rights during that term of government. It was with this background that, on 3 October 1994, I went to Darwin for a magnificent event organised by Aboriginal people, which I think helped to change the course of Australian history. The conference in Darwin was called the Going Home Conference. It was a big event of some 600 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who had been affected by the government policies of removal of children from families. They came together to discuss compensation, access to archives, and related issues.

  I went to that event with a steely resolve to show some leadership on the issue of the call for a public inquiry, which I thought could be of enormous value to the nation and provide some relief and justice for those who had suffered so much. I told the trusted team in my office of my proposal to support the call for an inquiry, and they worked on some ideas with me, but I did not talk in advance to any other minister, or even to my colleagues in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community (including Lowitja O’Donoghue), as I wanted it to be a surprise. My ministerial-office colleagues and I developed the idea that a useful vehicle for a potential inquiry could be the Human Rights Commission, and we decided that I would write to the attorney-general on this issue and directly take up the idea with the commission. We prepared a media release, and every line
of it was workshopped to make sure we got it right.

  I knew that I was sticking my neck out when I rose to speak at the Darwin conference, but I remember being very sure that what I was doing was right.

  I issued my media release, in which I said of removing Indigenous children from their families that ‘although the practice has been long discredited there are many matters associated with it which remain unresolved and in need of attention’ and that ‘there would be considerable merit in a comprehensive analysis of matters associated with the practice’. Such an analysis, I said, ‘would be useful in giving the wider community a better understanding of the massive human hardship inflicted on Aboriginal people by family separations … and the consequences which continue to be felt’.

  I concluded by saying that a national analysis of the practice of family separations ‘may well have an important role in the process of reconciliation between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and the wider community, but how it could be conducted and by whom remains to be determined’. I promised to hold discussions with the attorney-general Michael Lavarch, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner Mick Dodson, and the state and territory ministers for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander affairs. I issued letters to them contemporaneously with the Darwin speech.

  Michael Lavarch, who was then the attorney-general, is a highly principled person, who I admire greatly, and he was very supportive of the proposal. He took the opportunity for advancing the idea in the government’s ‘Justice Statement’ in May 1995, and, with his agreement, I announced that the President of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Sir Ronald Wilson, together with Mick Dodson, would head a national inquiry into the formal practice: the Stolen Generations Inquiry.

  I do not intend to write here about the political developments that occurred subsequent to the tabling of the final report of the commission, which was titled Bringing Them Home, and which was finally released in 1997, during the period of the Howard government. It was and remains a matter of genuine sadness to me that Prime Minister Howard did not issue the apology that was called for in the report. I have praised John Howard for his role on other issues, including gun control and independence for Timor-Leste, but on this one, I think he made a mistake. Other recommendations in the report got lost as the political focus and pressure for an apology became the cause célèbre of many in the nation.

  When the apology was finally given by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, it was supported by the opposition leader, Brendan Nelson, and carried with the support of substantially the whole parliament. It was a great day for Australia.

  I was given a ticket to attend the apology by the staff of the minister for Indigenous affairs, Jenny Macklin. Arriving late on a flight from Melbourne, I finally made it to the last remaining place I could find — a remote seat in the very back row of the gallery, three storeys up, behind some glass panelling. The seat was made better by the fact that I bumped into my former flatmate, and former deputy chair of ATSIC, Sol Bellear, and we savoured the moment together on that very back bench of the public gallery.

  The commentator Robert Manne wrote in 2001, ‘No inquiry in recent Australian history has had a more overwhelming reception nor, at least in the short term, a more culturally transforming impact.’ I never had the slightest doubt about the impact the inquiry would have on our country; I knew the outcome would be a huge step forward in coming to terms honestly with our own history as a nation.

  So how many Indigenous mothers and families had been impacted by this practice instituted by governments throughout much of the 20th century? The Bringing Them Home report finishes saying, ‘Nationally we can conclude with confidence that between one in three and one in ten Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families and communities in the period from approximately 1910 until 1970. In certain regions and in certain periods the figure was undoubtedly much greater than one in ten. In that time not one Indigenous family has escaped the effects of forcible removal … Most families have been affected, in one or more generations, by the forcible removal of one or more children.’ There, in plain words, is the horrific scale of the damage of these policies to many thousands of mothers, children, and their families.

  For those who wish to know and understand more about what occurred, I commend the many fine histories of the Stolen Generations that have been written or the Bringing Them Home report itself. In that report, a quote from the submission by the New South Wales Link-Up organisation to the inquiry illustrates why the government’s past treatment of Indigenous people has been so cataclysmically painful and damaging to them:

  We may go home, but we cannot relive our childhoods. We may reunite with our mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, aunties, uncles, communities, but we cannot relive the 20, 30, 40 years that we spent without their love and care, and they cannot undo the grief and mourning they felt when we were separated from them. We can go home to ourselves as Aboriginals, but this does not erase the attacks inflicted on our hearts, minds, bodies and souls, by caretakers who thought their mission was to eliminate us as Aboriginals.

  At no time have I ever believed that there was some kind of parallel, or in any way comparable, life experience between those of Aboriginal people separated from their families and the experiences of adoption in the wider Australian community. There were huge differences, which must be confronted and understood by us all if we are to come to terms honestly with the true history of our country. That reality is that the Stolen Generations were separated from their families because of their race, as the driving force of social policy, and that policy was directed at the first people of this land, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people of our country. The work I did in my time as minister and beyond to help bring us to confront and understand this fact was one small part of an enormous and wide-ranging effort by many, many people and organisations that is still ongoing today. I was privileged to find myself in a position as government minister where the influence I had was able to help in some small part to further this effort.

  12

  Meeting on the Sydney Opera House steps

  Despite the setback caused by the two photographs I sent to Maida, events began to move forward to our reunion. For this, we had Sandra to thank, as she continued to wrap my mother in kindness and empathy.

  On 15 January 1993, I met with Sandra at the Parramatta office of the Department of Community Services, and she gave me an update on developments. She explained Maida’s state of mind following the Lansdowne Street coincidence and other revelations from the letter I had written to her in Forster. Despite her heightened fragility, I was advised that Maida had agreed to meet me.

  I was overwhelmed by the prospect of finally meeting my mother, and longing for it to happen — although at the time I was also drowning in the relentless pressures of my electorate and my ministerial responsibilities as the election loomed closer. Adding to these feelings, there was now another dimension to my quest to meet with Maida as soon as possible. After learning about her suffering, I’d become convinced that I had to fulfil my obligations to her as her son. That may sound strange, but it was how I felt. She had brought me into the world; she had given me my life. I owed her my very existence, and I was determined that she must suffer no more. I had an intuitive but resolute sense of responsibility and gratitude towards her.

  I knew the appalling statistics about the failure of adoption reunions, and the factors that could contribute to that. They just made me all the more determined to make this work, no matter what. Sandra had told me I could write another letter to Maida, which she would pass on. This time, along with the letter, I included some clippings and flowers from the native plants in our garden at Stanwell Park. I hoped the flowers would somehow send the message that I wanted very much for her to enter my life and become part of my world.

  Today I heard the
wonderful news that we are to meet next week. I am writing this brief note in one of Sandra’s little rooms [rooms that I knew my mother knew well] to enclose just a few more photos, and also some flowers from the garden at Stanwell Park. I admit that I likely care more about the garden than the house we live in.

  I went on to tell my mother that I could not wait to meet her — ‘how jumping over the moon and happy I am’ — and I emphasised that she didn’t have to be worried about anything.

  If we want to cry we will cry for a while and then perhaps some more. If we want to have a quiet time for a while we will do that. Have no doubts you are doing the right thing — no doubts whatsoever!

  Your idea of meeting on the Opera House steps is perfect. Sandra suggested 11 am and this is okay by me. I will keep the day free and we will be together for however long we feel appropriate. Exciting isn’t it? How will we cope until then!

  I would like you to pass on to Greg my very warm affection and I look forward to meeting him when you are both ready. I hope, and Jody hopes, that he will play an important role with you in the future lives of Jack and Jade, and us too of course.