The Stolen Generations of Australia: Narratives of Loss and Survival

Abstract

Australian texts for the young run the gamut of representational approaches to the removal of Indigenous children. Early colonial texts treated child removals as benign acts designed to rescue Indigenous children from savagery, but from the 1960s Indigenous writers produced life writing and fiction that pursued strategies of decolonisation. This essay plots the history of Stolen Generation narratives in Australia, from the first Australian account for children in Charlotte Barton's A Mother's Offering to Her Children to Doris Pilkington Garimara's Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, Philip Noyce's film Rabbit-Proof Fence, and pedagogical materials that mediate the book and film to children. Garimara's book and Noyce's film expose the motivations of those responsible for child removal policies and practices: to eliminate Indigenous people and cultures and to replace them with white populations. Many pedagogical materials deploy euphemistic and self-serving narratives that seek to ‘protect’ non-Indigenous children from the truths of colonisation.