Bringing-Them-Home-Report-Web

When you look at a family tree, every person that is within that family tree is born into aspiritual inheritance. And when that person isn’t there, there’s a void. There’s somethingmissing on that tree. And that person has to be slotted back into his rightful position withinthe extended family. While that person is missing from the extended family, then that familywill continue to grieve and continue to have dysfunctions within it. Until the rightful personcomes and takes their spiritual inheritance within that family (Kevin Booter, NSWAboriginal Mental Health Worker, evidence 527).The loss of so many of their children has affected the efficacy and morale ofmany Indigenous communities. Evidence to the Inquiry referred particularly to theway in which the child-rearing function of whole communities was undermined anddenied, particularly where all children were required to live in mission dormitories.Psychiatrist Professor Ernest Hunter documented how removal on missions in theKimberley region of Western Australia undermined the confidence of families anddiluted their ability to rear their children.Parental roles and adult authority were compromised as the responsibility for education anddiscipline was claimed by Europeans (Hunter 1995 page 379).… you can say parenting can be undermined absolutely in those instances where a child isphysically removed. It can be undermined to a degree in settings where there’s sequestrationsuch as dormitorisation, but you could say that parenting is undermined universally in asociety where parental roles – particularly Aboriginal paternal roles, male roles – areundervalued generally.[The] mission agenda [was] intrusion into family structure and intrusion into the kind ofdynamic relationship between sacred and family roles because you can’t undermine onewithout undermining the other …I think there’s a problem blaming the problems with alcohol and social distress on theremoval of kids … However, it certainly is tied in with the broader process of underminingparenting roles and undermining family structure … (evidence 61).Hunter documented how Kimberley Aboriginal parents responded when thegovernment station managers and missionaries relinquished their control over thechildren with the growth of self-management progressively from the mid-1970s.It was anticipated that Aboriginal adults would reassert their role in the discipline and controlof children … Aborigines [in Jigalong, for example] … had relinquished a significantdimension of that function to European mission control, defining it as ‘whitefellow business’.When it became redefined as ‘blackfellow business’ a conflict arose (1993 page 229).The anticipated reassertion of parental control did not occur. The adults hadexperienced discipline as children but not nurturing. It had been a model of disciplinereliant on physical chastisement, something unacceptable in traditional child-rearing.With their own methods denigrated and largely lost to them and European methodsunacceptable, there seems to have been a discipline vacuum.