The Stolen Truth

14aug07


BRUCE Trevorrow, a part-Aboriginal now living in Bairnsdale, was stolen from his parents after being raced to hospital on Christmas Day 1957.

Yes, stolen.


Over the next few years the little boy was mentally destroyed. Said an Aboriginal woman who tried to foster him in his teens, it seemed he'd never known love.

That loss near drove him mad and broke him, and it was for such suffering that Justice Tom Gray of the South Australian Supreme Court last week awarded him $525,000.

The media reports all hailed this as a breakthrough not just for Trevorrow himself: " `Stolen Generation' Aborigine wins test case", was a typical headline.

But is this – the first court case won by a member of the so-called "stolen generations" – really proof at last that what I've so often called a "myth" is true?

The opposite, perversely.

Trevorrow won not by proving there was indeed a government policy to steal black children from good homes for racist reasons.

He won it by actually proving there was not – or at least not in South Australia.

First, a reminder of what "stolen generations" means.

Historian, Professor Peter Read, who invented the phrase, said it refers to the 100,000 or so children our governments allegedly stole in an "attempt to put an end to the Aboriginal people of Australia".

Political scientist, Professor Robert Manne, the myth's greatest propagandist, says these were actually 25,000 children, stolen by governments that "wished, in part through the child removal policies, to keep white Australia pure".

Insisted Manne: "It was not from harm that the mixed-descent children were rescued, but from their Aboriginality".

So, was there really a government policy to steal Bruce Trevorrow from his parents just because he was black? Just to keep white Australia "pure"?

Here's what Justice Gray found really happened.

It was Christmas 50 years ago when Joe Trevorrow left his hut of scrap iron and sacks on the Coorong to ask his neighbours – relatives of his partner, Thora – to drive his sick baby to Adelaide's children's hospital.

They had a car; he didn't.

Neither Joe nor Thora – who'd stormed off to Tailem Bend after a family argument – went with their child, or visited him in the two weeks he was kept in hospital.

Who knows what Thora's relatives told the doctors, but the hospital's notes say the baby, Bruce Trevorrow, was a "neglected child – without parents", suffering from "malnutrition" and "infective diarrhoea"'.

The notes add: "The other two children are neglected. Mother has cleared out and father is boozing."

This is the baby that just two weeks later was given to an Adelaide family, which were told its mother had "gone on a walkabout".

Unforgiveably, Joe and Thora were never asked for permission to give away their baby. And they were lied to when, six months later, Thora wrote to the Aborigines Protection Board, the official guardian of all Aboriginal children, asking to know when she'd get Bruce back, "as I have not forgot I got a baby in there".

The reply, from the APB's Marjory Angas, claimed Bruce was "making good progress but as yet the doctor does not consider him fit to go home".

What Bruce's parents did not know is that it seems to have been Angas herself who'd already given away their baby – and that she'd done this against the law.

As Gray ruled: "Mrs Angas may have been well-intentioned . . . but was well aware, or ought to have been aware, that the removal of the plaintiff from his family, and his placement with the Davies family, was undertaken in circumstances that were understood to be without legal authority, beyond power and contrary to authoritative legal advice."

That illegality, said Gray, was why Bruce Trevorrow deserved a payout.

The picture the judge paints over many pages is compelling: South Australia never had any laws – or policies – authorising anyone to steal Aboriginal children for racist reasons.

Gray noted, for instance, that in 1923, as South Australia passed a law to help neglected Aboriginal children, the then treasurer assured Parliament: "The dictates of humanity forbid the state to deprive mothers of their infant children in cases where their mothers desire to keep them."

The treasurer added: "(T)he provision in the Bill (to remove older children) is designed only to be used in cases where an illegitimate child is ill-cared for by its parents."

But there was a hitch.

In 1949, the Crown Solicitor confirmed that the law did not let APB officials take Aboriginal children from their parents.

That was the job of the Children's Welfare and Public Relief Board, which looked after children of all races, but wasn't so keen to remove neglected Aborigines. It found them hard to help.

In that standoff, Aboriginal children seem to me to have been less in danger of being stolen than left to rot.

Justice Gray gives examples – like the baby brought to Port Augusta Hospital in 1955 in "an advanced state of malnutrition". Her mother was shown how to look after her child, yet it came back again "in a shocking state".

Despite the pleas of doctors to take her into care, this baby was not "stolen", but sent back home to God knows what fate.

In 1958, the year after Bruce Trevorrow was taken, the APB's secretary described the tragedy he confronted.

"I feel sure that a higher mortality rate is evident among Aboriginal children than those of other descent," he wrote to a colleague.

"Unfortunately, there is a considerable amount of undernourishment, malnutrition and neglect . . .

"In fact, quite frequently (Aborigines) do not seem to worry whether the child is fed or not." Yet "there is not a high proportion of aboriginal children who are wards of the state, simply because our legislation does not provide that neglected children can be removed".

Still, his officials couldn't always stand by and do nothing. Admitted the secretary: "Again in confidence, for some years without legal authority, the Board have taken charge of many Aboriginal children, some are placed with Aboriginal institutions, which by the way I very much dislike, and others are placed with foster parents . . .

"As often as possible we arranged for this type of child to be adopted, necessarily of course, with the authority of the parents."

How many children had the APB removed? Some 300 over the years, taken because they were – Gray found – "thought to be neglected". Note: not because Australia had to be kept "pure".

This practice seems to have stopped by the end of the 1950s. So why did Marjory Angas, in 1957, decide to steal Bruce Trevorrow?

So, if there wasn't a policy to steal black children for racist reasons, does Angas show that APB officials still had racism in their hearts?

Angas is dead, and cannot defend herself. But Gray suggested she was just "relatively inexperienced" and "unwittingly prejudiced" against the baby's parents.

Gray didn't explain that "prejudice", but assumed it from such scraps as a letter Angas wrote in mid-1957 in an inquiry into Joseph's daughters by his first wife.

"We understand (Joseph) is illiterate and an habitual drunkard," Angas wrote.

"Conditions in this camp are reported as most undesirable for children." What's more, Joseph had no job and Thora often had to beg for help for her children.

Gray has ruled that almost all of this is false. Joseph may have drank, but was no drunk, and he often worked.

"The children were adequately clothed and fed . . . Thora was a loving mother who cared for children and the home." She hadn't "cleared off " for good.

What's more, Gray found that the doctors who thought Bruce had suffered from malnutrition had probably been confused by his weight loss from diarrhoea.

In fact, Gray even praised Joseph and Thora as "good parents", who raised their three remaining children so well they "learnt to cope with life's adversities and flourished".

Had Bruce been left with them, the judge bravely suggests, he could well have flourished too.

Certainly, it's impossible to think the boy could have done worse.

His new family loved him, but at three he was already losing hair in what now seems an early sign of depression. At eight he was stealing, and soiling his pants nearly every day in the walk back from school.

His adoptive mother, under some apparent mental stress herself, often threatened to send him away. Psychologists were called in, and at 10 he was introduced back to his real mother, Thora (Joseph had died).

After a couple of hurried visits, he was asked to decide which family to choose. He didn't really know. No wonder he turned out a wreck, chronically anxious. But back with Thora and several boisterous and older half-brothers and sisters, he seemed overwhelmed.

After several tense months, he stole from his teachers and was beaten up so badly by an enraged Thora that a policeman had to take him away for his safety. She didn't want him back.

So by 11, Bruce found he was not wanted by either of his two families. He stayed for most of the rest of his youth in institutions and on tranquilisers and anti-depressants. Not surprisingly, his adult life has been deeply troubled, marred by booze, crime and even jail.

It is easy for us now to moralise about how wicked Marjory Angas was to even think of taking Bruce from his parents.

But should Gray have been quite that glowing of the parenting skills of Thora, and so sure she'd have raised her baby so much better?

Angas acted unlawfully, immorally and unwisely, but she may have had some reason to think Bruce was better off adopted.

Consider: Thora, it seems, was indeed set to clear out when Bruce was taken, despite what the judge said. Just four months later, she'd left her family and married a wife-bashing drunk.

A welfare officer later reported she was living with her children in a shack in "shocking circumstances" and, when she was reunited with Bruce, she gave him up within a year.

It was in that same year that one of her other sons was sent to a boys' home after Thora was convicted of failing to send him to school.

And Joseph? One of his children by his first marriage went to a home for young offenders and another was jailed. His two sons with Thora had their own battles with booze and the law.

When Thora walked out, Joseph left his two young sons with a local woman who was, police warned, too old for the job and had "mental troubles", which could "endanger the lives" of the boys.

Nothing was done to help them until months later, when the woman told police to send the boys to an institution – which Joseph refused to allow.

There's more – not enough to excuse the taking of Bruce, but enough to make the cautious wonder how a young boy, already slightly brain damaged and sensitive, would have coped with being left where he was.

Was Angas so wicked – so racist – to want better for him, however terribly her dumb gamble turned out?

I excuse nothing, of course. A tragedy as monstrous as this is hard enough to understand, let alone to judge.

But when the eager look at this case and shout, "Aha! Proof of the stolen generations! Of a plot to destroy Aborigines!", I know enough to know they know little.

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bolta@heraldsun.com.au