Andrew Bolt: Other side to the ‘stolen generations’ story

The ABC has portrayed Australia as “racist” and “monstrously evil”, but the broadcaster has failed to report the full story.

Trashing Australia as racist is unfair and dangerous. So in 2005, I challenged “stolen generations” activists to name even 10 children stolen by racist officials just for being Aboriginal.

None could. Professor Robert Manne tried three times, but would include, for instance, Rob Riley, a boy abandoned by his mother; Topsy, a 12-year-old with syphilis; Dolly, a heavily pregnant 13-year-old found working for slave wages; and Harry, sometimes kept on a chain in a backyard.

But last Wednesday, the ABC’s 7.30 still falsely claimed “as many as one in three Indigenous children” were stolen, and interviewed one, academic Eileen Cummings.

Cummings is now lead claimant in a class action by Shine Lawyers to win $100,000 of compensation for each of up to 5000 members of the “stolen generations”.

The daughter of an Aboriginal mother and white father, she told the ABC she was four years old and living on a cattle station when a white man asked if she wanted a ride on his truck.

She was then taken to a Methodist-run children’s home on Croker Island where “none of us felt loved … none of the missionaries ever showed us any (love).”

Stolen Generations Aboriginal Corporation chairwoman Eileen Cummings. Photograph: Che Chorley

Years later, then training to be a kindergarten teacher, Cummings asked her mother: “You know why they took me?”

Cummings said her mother did not know. And the ABC did not give any reason.

Yet just a few minutes of checking in the ABC’s own library would have shown it there is another side to this story of a monstrously evil Australia.

In 2014, the ABC itself reported the death at 101 of Margaret Somerville, who’d never married because she devoted much of her life to caring for Aboriginal children at that Croker Island home – including Eileen Cummings herself.

The ABC back then recorded another of Somerville’s former wards, Connie Cole, recalling her as “the most wonderful woman that I ever come across”.

Louise Neave told the Northern Territory News: “Those early missionaries did everything in their power to make us as happy as they could. They were young women who loved us as their own children … I thank them, with love.”

In fact, Somerville was so admired that a film was made of her and shown on SBS. The official preview shows some of Somerville’s former wards praising, thanking and hugging her.

Why didn’t the ABC mention any of that? Because it wanted the Croker Island missionaries to seem cruel and racist?

True, none of this proves Cummings was not stolen from a loving mother for no reason.

But you might wonder why many girls Somerville raised now sound so grateful – and here’s a possible explanation which the ABC also failed to report.

In 2001, Margaret Somerville gave an interview which you can hear on the National Library website.

There is a possible explanation which the ABC has failed to report.

In it, Somerville admitted she didn’t visit the Aboriginal camps she describes, and is no authority. But she spoke to children who came from them, and welfare officers who rescued them.

She said all children sent to her had white fathers who, she implied, had abandoned them: “There was no idea of taking away full-blood children. They had parents.”

But with the “part-Aboriginal” children, “it wasn’t the case of taking them from a loving family at all”.

“They were very needy children. And that’s why the government in the very first place took them away – because they had no future in the Aboriginal camp.”

She said the welfare officers in her time removed children only with the parents’ consent, and often left the part-Aboriginal boys because they could become stockmen.

“The danger was for the girls who would just become the chattels of stockmen or white men, some of them were promised (to older Aboriginal men) at an early age, but mainly they would perhaps drift into town and become prostitutes.

“They were just public property or belonged to some feller… There was no life for them whatever.”

In fact, “we did hear stories of brown-skinned, part-Aboriginal children being killed at birth because the Aboriginal didn’t want them around”.

You don’t hear such hard facts on the ABC.

Somerville ended her interview saying she was glad she could help the girls, “and that today we still have a very good relationship and that they can put their arms around me and say thank you, thank you for what you did”.

But on the ABC last week, not a word of that.

Why can’t it tell the full truth about our past, including the goodness? Why just the poison?