Stolen Generations

The Stolen Generations refers to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children who were forcibly removed from their families by Australian federal and state government agencies and church missions under acts of their respective parliaments. Removals of children classified at the time as "half-caste" occurred mainly between approximately 1905 and 1967, though mixed-race children were still being taken in some places into the 1970s. Government estimates suggest that in certain regions between one in ten and one in three Indigenous Australian children were forcibly removed between 1910 and 1970.

The policy emerged from 19th- and early 20th-century assumptions that Aboriginal peoples were dying out, and that mixed-race children could be assimilated into white society. Colony of Victoria legislation in 1869 and 1886 was among the earliest to permit removal of mixed-race persons from Aboriginal reserves. Similar legislation followed in Queensland (1897), the Northern Territory (1918), South Australia (1934), and Western Australia (1936), among others. Officials such as Western Australia's Chief Protector of Aborigines A. O. Neville and Northern Territory Chief Protector Cecil Cook publicly supported assimilation of mixed-race children into white society.

Under these laws, Aboriginal protectors and police or other government agents had wide powers to remove children from their mothers and communities. Children were placed in government or missionary institutions, or fostered, and trained for assimilation into Anglo-Australian society; use of Indigenous languages was often punished. Record-keeping of children's actual parentage, birth dates, and places was frequently poor. The exact number of children removed is disputed: the 1997 Bringing Them Home report estimated "at least 100,000," while academic Robert Manne has argued a lower estimate of 20,000–25,000 over six decades is more likely.

The Bringing Them Home report, produced by the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families (which commenced in May 1995 and heard testimony from 535 Aboriginal Australians), found that among 502 inquiry witnesses, 17% of female witnesses and 7.7% of male witnesses reported having suffered sexual assault while in an institution, at work, or with a foster or adoptive family. It also documented poor conditions, severe discipline, excessive child labour, and poor education in these institutions, and concluded that the removal policy constituted both systematic racial discrimination and genocide as defined by international law.

Following the report's 1997 release, several state and territory parliaments issued formal apologies, and the first National Sorry Day was held on 26 May 1998. On 13 February 2008, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd delivered a formal apology to the Stolen Generations on behalf of the Australian Parliament, which passed unanimously in both houses. Subsequent legal cases, including Bruce Trevorrow's 2007 South Australian compensation award, and state and territory redress schemes established between 2006 and 2022, have provided varying levels of compensation to survivors. Debate continues among historians, politicians, and legal scholars over terminology and whether the removals meet the legal definition of genocide, a question the High Court addressed in Kruger v Commonwealth.