Bringing-Them-Home-Report-Web

apply in cases where the destruction of a particular culture and its family institutions wasbelieved to be in the best interests of the children or where the child removal policieswere intended to serve multiple aims?Through much of the period beginning around the middle of the nineteenth centuryand persisting until the repeal of overtly discriminatory legislation in the 1960s, a keyobjective of the forcible removal of Indigenous children was to remove them from theinfluence of their parents and communities, to acculturate them and to socialise them intoAnglo-Australian values and aspirations.Other objectives included education of the children to make them ‘useful’ and‘worthy’ citizens, their training for labour and domestic service, their protection frommalnutrition, neglect or abuse, the reduction of government support for idle dependantsand the protection of the community from ‘dangerous elements’.A O Neville, Western Australia’s Chief Protector (1915-40), believed he could ‘donothing’ for ‘full-bloods’, who were thought to be dying out. However, he could absorbthe ‘half-castes’.The native must be helped in spite of himself! Even if a measure of discipline is necessary it mustbe applied, but it can be applied in such a way as to appear to be gentle persuasion … the end inview will justify the means employed (quoted by Haebich 1988 on page 156).Neville’s successor eventually came to have reservations about this policy andpractice.… with caste Aborigines, the emphasis on their ‘whiteness’ instead of acknowledgement of theirAboriginal heritage postulates in my opinion that we have helped to destroy in them a pride oforigin which should have been our Christian duty to protect and preserve (WA Commissionerfor Native Welfare Middleton, 1952 Annual Report page 5).The debates at the time of the drafting of the Genocide Convention establish clearlythat an act or policy is still genocide when it is motivated by a number of objectives. Toconstitute an act of genocide the planned extermination of a group need not be solelymotivated by animosity or hatred (Lippmann 1994 pages 22-23).The continuation into the 1970s and 1980s of the practice of preferring non-Indigenous foster and adoptive families for Indigenous children was also arguablygenocidal. The genocidal impact of these practices was reasonably foreseeable. Dr SarahPritchard persuasively argues that a general intent can be established from proof ofreasonable foreseeability and that such a general intent, as contrasted with the specificintent when the objective was to absorb Indigenous people, is sufficient to establish theConvention’s intent element (1993; see also Kuper 1985 pages 12-13).Genocide continued in Australia after prohibitionHow early can Australian policies and practices of removing Indigenous children beconsidered as breaching international law? The Convention, adopted in 1948 and ratified