Bringing-Them-Home-Report-Web

derogatory and racist language, so that the true quality of administration can always beunderstood.With respect to support and counselling the Inquiry was struck by the contrastbetween the care and funding commitment devoted to adoption reunion counselling andthe inadequacy of support for Indigenous family reunions where adoption was notinvolved. All governments now provide a counselling service in conjunction with accessto adoption information.… the process of obtaining information, searching and making contact with family can precipitatemany intense emotions. Counselling, support and assistance is available from AIS [AdoptionInformation Service] to assist in dealing with these feelings and the issues of loss and grief(Victorian Government interim submission page 25).Only Victoria and Tasmania have extended the same service to ex-wards of the Stateincluding Indigenous people. Yet the trauma involved in tracing and reuniting withfamilies can be far more significant for children who were forcibly removed. Often theyremember the removal process, remembering parents to whom they were unable to saygoodbye or remembering a last glimpse of a frantically distraught parent. They may havebeen told their parents didn’t want them or were dead. Often they were institutionalised.Institutional and foster care almost always involved denigration of Aboriginality andoften brutality and abuse.For some clients, especially those who were taken from their families as children, the wholeprocess of finding family and establishing cultural links is extremely traumatic for them and theirfamily (Queensland Government interim submission page 70).The role of Indigenous-controlled family tracing and reunion services is thereforecritical.The effect of seeing information which has been kept confidential, because it is privateinformation, or because it was the practice in some States to document every governmental actionand ungenerous remark of an administrator, can be devastating. Sympathetic counselling,especially by other Aboriginal people who have themselves been adopted or institutionalized,such as the Link Up staff, ought to be available to Aboriginal people who gain access to recordsof their family. We should be mindful of the emotional hurt which can be caused. (RoyalCommission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody National Report Volume 2 page 78).The availability of family reunion and tracing services – commonly referred to as‘link-up’ – is the subject of the following chapter.Evaluation – government objectivesOur evaluation takes as its first framework the objectives of government recordagencies in permitting Indigenous people to access their personal and family records. Arethe agencies fulfilling their own objectives with respect to those records?