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'The heartfelt story of a woman's fierce determination to bear witness to the wrongs inflicted upon her childhood friends, purely because of their skin colour. With searingly honest self-reflection, Webster pieces together stories of families and lives brutally ripped apart.' -Leah Kaminsky.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have been protecting country since time immemorial. One way they have continued these traditions in recent times is through service in the Australian military, both overseas and within Australia. In Defence of Country presents a selection of life stories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ex-servicemen and women who served in the Australian Army, Navy and Air Force after World War Two. In their own words, participants discuss a range of issues including why they joined up; racial discrimination; the Stolen Generations; leadership; discipline; family; war and peace; education and skills development; community advocacy; and their hopes for the future of Indigenous Australia. Individually and collectively, the life stories in this book highlight the many contributions that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander servicemen and women have made, and continue to make, in defence of country.

When Doris Kartinyeri was a month old, her mother died. The family gathered to mourn their loss and welcome new baby home. But Doris never arrived to live with her family _ she was stolen from the hospital and placed in Colebrook Home, where she stayed for the next fourteen years.

In this paper, we compare reparation policies in Australia and Argentina. We analyse the difference between the reparations given by their respective governments to the Argentinian victims of the ‘Dirty War’ and to the ‘Stolen Generations’ in Australia. The aim of this paper is to compare the experience of victims in Argentina and Australia in relation to reparations to demonstrate that using only one type of reparations, either material or symbolic, is unsatisfactory for victims and does not repair the harm done. We also argue that the timing and the context in which reparations are offered can play a role in the victims’ satisfaction with the governments’ reparation policies.

This paper will examine the ways in which the prevailing representation of the legal practices and institutions related to the management and control of Indigenous families and children in Australia shifted over time from “welfare” to “cultural genocide,” and how that shift can be better understood by drawing on Norbert Elias’s understanding of civilizing and decivilizing processes. Policies and practices which were understood from the 19th century onwards to be aimed at promoting the welfare of Indigenous children in the interests of increasing civilization came to be regarded from the 1980s onwards as essentially violent and indeed barbaric. This was due to them being a social engineering project for the gradual and systematic annihilation of Aboriginal cultural identity, to the point of being consistent with the definition of genocide in the UN Genocide Convention, albeit as “cultural genocide.” However, the term remains heavily contested, with views divided between those who think genocide should be restricted to deliberate physical killing, and those arguing for a more expansive conception of what constitutes the destruction of human life. I will argue that a turn to Elias’s conception of civilizing and decivilizing processes helps to clarify what underpins the opposition between these two approaches. After examining the concepts underpinning the legal mechanisms used first to intervene into Australian Indigenous family life and then to pursue holding the responsible authorities to account through “Stolen Generations” litigation, the paper argues for a more nuanced conception of the ways in which civilizing and decivilizing processes interweave with each other in changing ways over time, generating a need to engage with the concept of a “meta-civilizing process.”

Collective forgetting and denial of injustices perpetrated against Indigenous people have a long history in white Australia. This was evident in public response to the 1997 Bringing Them Home Report, concerning the systematic removal of generations of Indigenous children from their families. Emotions of shock, anguish and guild, as well as angry denial, suggested a long held secret finally exposed. Yet on numerous previous occasions, some quite recent, exposure had provoked similarly passionate debate. This paper addresses this puzzling phenomenon by drawing on recent research on forgetting, ignorance, and race to understand how these social processes help to construct dominant identities and histories that include and exclude, and that normalize unequal treatment to the point that dominant groups fail to recognize the discriminatory conditions of others or understand their own role in producing them. Several historical case studies document how knowledge of child removals emerged into public awareness and controversy and then subsided back into forgetfulness and ignorance, leaving issues of injustice against the Stolen Generations unresolved. The paper argues that, despite an emotive national apology to the Stolen Generations in 2008, this may also be the fate of the Bringing Them Home Report.

The book includes six case study chapters, each of which tell the story of the development of a different Australian memorial. The background to each of these projects is a heart-breaking story of loss and trauma, but many of the stories of the memorial development are stories of resilience, and of unlikely friendships and connections.

Colonial Genocide has been seen increasingly as a stepping-stone to the European genocides of the twentieth century, yet it remains an under-researched phenomenon. This volume reconstructs instances of Australian genocide and for the first time places them in a global context. Beginning with the arrival of the British in 1788 and extending to the 1960s, the authors identify the moments of radicalization and the escalation of British violence and ethnic engineering aimed at the Indigenous populations, while carefully distinguishing between local massacres, cultural genocide, and genocide itself. These essays reflect a growing concern with the nature of settler society in Australia and in particular with the fate of the tens of thousands of children who were forcibly taken away from their Aboriginal families by state agencies. Long considered a relatively peaceful settlement, Australian society contained many of the pathologies that led to the exterminatory and eugenic policies of twentieth century Europe.

Focusing on Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s 2008 apology to the Stolen Generations, this article asks: can colonial-settler states obtain forgiveness through political apologies? The article first defends Jacques Derrida’s observation that political apologies resemble the Christian practice of confession. In doing so, it subsequently draws on Michel Foucault’s (1979) detailed treatise on confession in order to assess the potential for absolution. For Foucault, the process of engaging in exhaustive truth-telling of sin before a demarcated authority provides a route to such atonement. By contrast, any potential unburdening of sin is lost when there is either no adequate authority to coax the confession or if the confession is less than full. The problem for the settler state is that it is predisposed to re-evoking the imaginary of the settler nation and Westphalian sovereignty in the very process of apologising. Consequently, there is no scope to submit before a higher sovereign body and any truth-telling is necessarily partial. As such, the central argument is that forgiveness for the settler state must remain elusive. The political opportunities arising from this for Indigenous peoples are discussed in the final section.