Bringing-Them-Home-Report-Web

That’s also impacted on my own life with my kids. I have three children. And it’s not asthough I don’t love my kids. It’s just that I expected them to be as strong andindependent and to fight for their own self like I had to do. And people misinterpretthat as though I don’t care about my kids. But that’s not true. I do love my kids. But it’snot as though the Church provided good role models, either, for a proper familyrelationship.Confidential evidence 548, Northern Territory: Western Australian woman removed at 4years in the 1950s and placed at a north-west Catholic orphanage and then at Beagle BayMission.Hunter and other researchers noted how Europeans devalued the paternal role inparticular, in common with most other aspects of the traditional male role.Indigenous men generally lost their purpose in relation to their families andcommunities. Often their individual responses to that loss took them away from theirfamilies: on drinking binges, in hospital following accidents or assaults, in the gaol orlock-up, or prematurely dead.[This has] a significant impact on child development. For Aboriginal boys, the compromiseof traditional and contemporary role models resulting from the father’s absence or functionalunavailability has a damaging impact on the development of male identity (Hunter 1993page 231).Forcible removal affected community life in another way, too. To escape ‘thewelfare’ and avoid their children being taken some families exiled themselves fromtheir communities and sometimes hid their Aboriginal identity.Because forcible and seemingly arbitrary separation was so widespread and because thegovernment used the threat of separation to coerce Aboriginal adults, most Aboriginal peoplelived with the fear of separation structuring their lives. Some tried to protect their familiesfrom separation by continually moving; others called themselves Maori or Indian; others cutoff all ties with other Aboriginal people, including family members (Link-Up (NSW)submission 186 part III on page 3).This almost as effectively removed children from community ties and culture;‘social removal and nil contact with Aboriginal people was also achieved by the veryreal fear of removal and the severance of family ties’ (quoted by Link-Up (NSW)submission 186 part III on page 67).I didn’t know anything about my Aboriginality until I was 46 years of age – 12 yearsafter my father died. I felt very offended and hurt that this knowledge was denied me,for whatever reason. For without this knowledge I was not able to put the pathway ofmy own life into its correct place. When I did find out, for the first time in my life Iunderstood why I had always felt different when I was a young man.Man whose Aboriginal father lived as a white, quoted by Link-Up (NSW) submission 186part III on page 65.My grandfather wanted us to deny our Aboriginality so that we wouldn’t be takenaway. He used to say that none of his kids would live on a mission. We weren’t allowedto say that we were Aboriginal, and we weren’t allowed to mix with the Aboriginalpeople in the country town where we lived … I didn’t find out until Mum passed on that