Aborigines Protection Board) was abolished. Poor record keeping, the loss of records and changes to departmental structures have made it almost impossible to trace many connections. Almost every Aboriginal family has been affected in some way by the policies of child removal. Taking children from their families was one of the most devastating practices since white settlement and has profound repercussions for all Aboriginal people today.
In 1995, the Commonwealth Attorney General established a National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families, to be onducted by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC). The Inquiry report, Bringing them home, was tabled in the Commonwealth Parliament on 26 May 1997, the day before the opening of the National Reconciliation Convention.
Bringing them home made 54 recommendations. Former High Court Judge, Sir Ronald Wilson, chaired the HREOC Inquiry. After Bringing Them Home was released, he told an audience in Canberra that: Children were removed because the Aboriginal race was seen as an embarrassment to white Australia. The aim was to trip the children of their Aboriginality, and accustom them to live in a white Australia.
The tragedy was compounded when the children, as they grew up, encountered the racism which shaped the policy, and found themselves rejected by the very society for which they were being prepared (UTS and UNSW Faculty of law, 21 August, 2010, www) The Inquiry found that between one in three and one in ten Indigenous children were removed from their families under past government policies, but could not be more precise due to the poor state of records.
