Archives of Sorrow: An Exploration of Australia's Stolen Generations and their Journey into the Past

Abstract

We primarily see the archive as a storehouse of memory and fact, as the place from whence history issues forth. However, the archive is much more than this; it is a site of memory and a place of trauma and pain. It is a place of sorrow and loss for many, where unpacified ghosts with unfinished business await, yielding stories and letters different from expectation, a site where loss is localized and realized. It is also a space of confrontation, where expectations are denounced as lies, and where the truth assumes a different colour. This article examines the role of the archive in the lives of Australia's Stolen Generations (Aboriginal Australians who were removed from their families and institutionalized from 1910 until the mid-1970s), and argues that returning to the archive is both an attempt to confront and negotiate past traumas and one's relationship to unknown worlds. Through the use of an ethnographic case study, I will detail the important links between returning to the archive and ideas of healing, and moving forward.

Keywords:

• Australia
• Stolen Generations
• Archive
• Trauma
• Healing

Notes

While the nomenclature, “Stolen Generations”, has been disputed by some, it is the term by which those individuals who suffered under removal policies have come to describe themselves. The collective term, lost generations, which was coined in the early 1980s by historian Peter Read, to describe those who had been removed from their families, was transformed into Stolen Generations. Because of my informants close identification with this term, and its important historical significance, I will use it throughout this article to describe those who were removed. I will also use the term in the plural to denote the transgenerational impact of the policies. I will not engage with the debate on whether the word “Stolen”, is an accurate way to capture what happened to Indigenous Australians. I do wish to posit, however, that “Stolen”, does not just describe the manner in which Aboriginal children were removed from their families, but more acutely, captures the idea that, in being removed from their families, Aboriginal children had many things stolen from them, such as family, language, and Aboriginal lifeworlds

On a personal level then, my own voyage into the archival space to rediscover my grandfather and grandaunts’ fate in an equally disturbing system of containment and institutionalization in Ireland began to mirror my research participants’ journeys, thus allowing me a more profound emotional as well as philosophical understanding and connection to what the archival space was offering up to those negotiating loss and pain.

Recommendation 1 of the BTH (1997) report argued: “That the Council of Australian Governments ensure the adequate funding of appropriate Indigenous agencies to record, preserve and administer access to the testimonies of Indigenous people affected by the forcible removal policies who wish to provide their histories in audio, audio-visual or written form”.

My work focused on the actual interviews which are a collection of recorded interviews with not only members of the Stolen Generations, but also those involved in the removals, ironically known as “protectors”, parents who lost children, and also those who adopted them.

Of the seven people I met with three were Indigenous and four were non-Indigenous.

Giving voice of course acquires a literality when we reflect on the digitization of projects like the Bringing Them Home Oral History Archive, thus opening up other avenues of discussion around the idea of the digital archive and its relationship to future interpretation and meaning.