Open hearts: the Catholic church and the stolen generation in the Kimberley.(Kimberley, Australia )(Essay)

I make this contribution today in the hope that those who have suffered at the hands of unjust government policies, policies in which the Church has assisted at times, will come to know that their deep sorrow finds a listening heart in the Church.

To those who have suffered personal deprivation and hurt in Church institutions because of the effects of this policy, the Church of this Diocese unreservedly apologises. Further, She regrets the great suffering that continues in the hearts of some people and extends to them a compassionate wish for peace and reconciliation.

This statement is part of the submission made in August 1996 by Bishop Christopher Saunders, Bishop of Broome and the Kimberley (in the north-west of Western Australia). He was addressing the Bringing Them Home Inquiry into the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families. This was the searching inquiry, commissioned in 1995 by the Labor federal government, and administered by HREOC, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. The first instruction to the Commission was to:

 
   trace the past laws, practices and policies which resulted in the 
   separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from 
   their families by compulsion, duress or undue influence, and the 
   effects of those laws, practices and polices. (1) 

The generally used term for these children is 'stolen generation', but the more precise term is 'the separated children', used by HREOC to include not only children who were taken by the police, but also those who were, for various reasons, sent to a mission for care or schooling and who very often lost contact with their parents and were unable to repair the broken parent/child bond after years of separation. In the Kimberley region of Western Australia in the late 1980s, one-quarter of the elderly people and one in seven of the middle-aged people reported having been removed in childhood. (2)

The Indigenous people of the Kimberley missions, and the missionaries themselves, travelled a long, rocky and treacherous road from the foundation of the Mission at Beagle Bay in 1891 to Bishop Saunders' acknowledgement of the injury and lasting damage to the children separated from their parents, damage that has at times continued through the generations.

Physically, it was a grievous journey for the separated Indigenous children, often taken by force or by stealth from the bush in the isolated East Kimberley to coastal Broome or Beagle Bay. It was a journey forced by the powers of police, Inspectors and 'Protectors', or the mixed motives of the missionaries. Politically, it was a journey imposed by the automatic assumption of white superiority and power, which produced policies of dispossession, family break-up, segregation and assimilation of Aboriginal Australians. And the Catholic missionaries in the Kimberley, as in other parts of Australia, indeed in colonies around the world, were, although with the highest motives, dutifully guided by the philosophy of the dominant group.