Andrew Bolt: Why few will seek the truth in ‘Stolen Generations’ story

There are now even fewer people who dare question claims of “stolen generations survivors” for fear of being smeared as racist.

The ‘stolen generations’ is now treated by politicians and teachers as a sacred fact. Picture Gary Ramage

What changed? Two decades ago, lawyers signed up 700 Aborigines in the Northern Territory who claimed they’d been stolen from their parents.

They then mounted the first test case to prove there’d been a “stolen generations” and get compensation. And failed completely when the truth came out in court.

Yet nothing can stop the “stolen generations” story, now taught as true in our schools.

Legal firm Shine Lawyers is trying again, this time signing up 800 Aborigines in the Northern Territory for a class action to again demand compensation from the federal government.

And again the ABC is treating allegation as truth, calling the 800 claimants “survivors and descendants” of the “stolen generations”, and interviewing claimants with zero scepticism.

It’s as if the Federal Court case of 2000 had never happened. As if anything challenging the damaging and deadly “stolen generations” myth must be racist.

You will hear a lot of emotive claims in the media as this latest class action hits the court, and very little questioning by journalists or politicians of claims that racist white officials stole children from loving parents just because they were Aboriginal.

So let me remind you what happened to the first case, which the ABC pushed just as credulously.

Peter Gunner with Lorna Cubillo after the case in Federal Court in 2000.

Lawyers back then picked out presumably the strongest cases from the 700 they had — the claims of Peter Gunner and Lorna Cubillo, now both dead. But this is what the Federal Court actually found, after checking the evidence.

Cubillo was not “stolen”. Officials took her to a Darwin home and school after finding her at a bush ration camp when she was 8, with her (white) father gone, her mother dead, her grandmother dead and the aunt she called “mother” working at a station a 65km walk away.

Gunner was not “stolen”. His mother signed a document agreeing — after two years of pleas from a patrol officer — to send her son from their desert home to the St Mary’s hostel in Alice Springs to get an education.

Witnesses who’d also signed up for compensation and gave evidence in this case had their own claims fall apart after questioning,

Stanley Scrutton, who’d claimed he’d been stolen, was shown records from St Mary’s which recorded his stockman father putting him on a three-year waiting list, and later paying a pound a week for his board.

Bruce Trevorrow was found to have been stolen by a social welfare worker.

Wally Gardiner, who’d claimed he’d been stolen, agreed he’d never known his parents, and his grandfather — who owned camels — actually left him behind at a school.

Daniel Forrester, who’d claimed to be stolen, admitted his mother also sent him to St Mary’s “for an education” but argued it was “without my consent”.

At the end of the case, Justice Maurice O’Loughlin cautioned: “The mere fact that a part-Aboriginal child was placed in an institution does not, without more, justify that person claiming that he or she is a member of the stolen generations.”

But in the years since, that is exactly what has happened.

People claimed to have been stolen after actually being abandoned, rescued from abuse, or sent to school.

Activists even claim that Aboriginal children removed today from danger are “stolen”.

In fact, every “stolen generations” claimant who has sued in court has lost — except for Bruce Trevorrow, who was found to have been stolen, against the rules, by a social welfare worker who thought he’d been neglected and abandoned by his parents in hospital.

Yet the “stolen generations” is now treated by politicians and teachers as a sacred fact –— Australia’s great moral crime. Evidence of “genocide”

Daniel Forrester says his mother sent him to St Mary’s ‘for an education’ but argued it was ‘without my consent’.

The result has been horrific: judges, magistrates and coroners have all warned that Aboriginal children have been left in danger by social workers too scared of repeating the “stolen generations”. I’ve written about some of them: children who were then killed or gang raped, or left to die of neglect.

But I asked at the start: what’s changed?

The answer is: something serious. There are now even fewer people who dare question claims of “stolen generations survivors” for fear of being smeared as racist.

And there are many more people — including judges, I fear — who think justice is less about truth and more about “healing”, “believing the victims” and “sending a message”.

So no wonder Shine Lawyers think it’s worth trying again. Yes, maybe their claimants have stronger stories to tell than the 700 in the first case.

But I suspect their real hope lies in having almost no one left who cares about evidence.

Or truth.