Australian Trials of Trauma:

Abstract

In recent years, there have been numerous calls for the field of trauma studies to expand beyond its European and North American origins. It is especially important, as the insights of trauma theory are extended to a wider range of geopolitical sites and conflicts and into resistant fields such as law, that critics attend to the ways in which the discourse of trauma travels, how it is used or resisted in specific national or local contexts, and with what cultural and political effects. To explore these issues, I offer a case study of Australian responses to the Stolen Generations in human rights, law, and literature—fields in which trauma theory has significant purchase. The term “Stolen Generations” refers to children of mixed descent who were removed from their Indigenous mothers and communities with the aim of assimilating them into white Australian culture. Children were sent to institutions run by churches or government missions, where they received limited education and were trained as domestics or station hands. Removal typically curtailed the children’s relations with Indigenous family and culture, since they were prevented from speaking their language and participating in cultural tradi-tions. Many children faced difficulties integrating into white Australian society; they and their mothers often experienced lifelong feelings of loss.In the 1990s, the Stolen Generations became something of a litmus test for how Australia would respond to its postcolonial legacy of violence, trauma, and injustice. As Dominick LaCapra has observed, for nations such as postapartheid South Africa and post-Nazi Germany—and, I would add, post-settler Australia—“the problem for beneficiaries of earlier oppression is how to recognize and mourn the losses of former victims.”