The literature on Australia’s Stolen Generations and genocide has focused on the twentieth century but forcible child removal was integral to colonization from its beginning in in 1788. This historical analysis chronicles the abuse and deaths of stolen children at colonists’ hands during the nineteenth century through the rubric of the United Nations Convention on Genocide in 1948. This is a history of private kidnapping along spreading frontiers, sanctioned by colonial authorities, and government projects for “Christianizing and civilizing” the children in isolated missions. Both reasons for removing children provided labor for colonists and cleared Aboriginal families from their lands. Despite critics in Britain and the colonies and opposition from Aboriginal families these practices continued into the twentieth century and contributed to the foundations of the modern “Stolen Generations”. The Australian Federal Constitution (1901) left Aboriginal people under the control of state governments. New laws extinguishing citizenship and economic independence increased family poverty and vulnerability of all Aboriginal people, including those of ‘mixed’ descent. Forcible removals to draconian institutions and menial labor for life became normalized for many children until the mid-twentieth century. The enormity of these crimes committed against Aboriginal children and their kin prompts the question, what restorative effects the Genocide Convention might offer their descendants? This chapter traces this history, focusing on the colonies of New South Wales, Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania), Queensland, Victoria and Western Australia.

Chapter 2 addresses early Christian justifications for organised violence and demonstrates the inherent risk of links between religion, politics, and violence. It then examines early justifications for colonisation, where conceptions of non-Christian inferiority justified expansion and transatlantic slavery. In that context, the chapter assesses the emergence of closed institutions run by church and state actors as a key development in how social orders responded to those individuals and groups that were deemed a problem, based on religious and secular motivations. The chapter concludes by documenting the available evidence and estimates of historical abuses available for harms that can today be recognised, if controversially, as gross violations of human rights.

Chapter 9 argues that apologies offer the most direct and explicit mechanism for states and churches to reframe and narrate historical-structural abuse. It argues that although apologies may address institutional or state failure to prevent historical abuses, or the illegitimacy of historical practices, few apologies take the further step of problematizing the claim by states and churches to have the legitimate power and authority to structure lives and society using violent, coercive, or dominating values and means. In doing so, they limit the capacity of the apology to impact underlying structures of power and authority in society or challenges to their fundamental self-identity or founding myth.

The term ‘protection’ in Australia is closely associated with the practices and institutions of assimilation imposed upon Indigenous people through much of the twentieth century. These practices and institutions were backed by laws that granted state governments wide-ranging powers of control over Indigenous lives, purportedly for their own good. The multi-generational impacts of assimilative policies continue to resonate for Indigenous communities today. Yet apart from the legal regime of assimilation that defined Indigenous policy through the mid-twentieth century, protection has a longer and more complex history in Australia, as it does globally. This chapter traces Australia’s history of protection, from its nineteenth-century origins as a program designed to build Indigenous people’s status as British subjects, to its twentieth-century expressions as a legally-empowered system of state guardianship. While the history of protection is one of legal authority, it is also a history of Indigenous political action.

This chapter introduces nursing and midwifery students to the history and current state of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders’ health. It considers the deficit discourse that is often used to describe Indigenous health, which negatively contrasts Indigenous health with the health of non-Indigenous Australians. The chapter emphasises the importance of understanding the history of Indigenous health, both from pre-colonisation and in the years following. It discusses the recent Uluru Statement from the Heart and the history of the Stolen Generations, and examines the effects on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health. The chapter discusses the current health gap that exists between First Nations people and non-Indigenous Australians, and how the Closing the Gap initiative aims to improve Indigenous health outcomes to the level of non-Indigenous Australians. The chapter portrays health as a social justice issue and encourages a human rights approach to health. It concludes by detailing the personal stories of two First Nations nurses to demonstrate the positive effect Indigenous nurses and midwives can have on the health of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

From its publication, the powerful affective charge of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s best-selling antislavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly (1852) crossed national and cultural borders, and had an enormous impact on the abolitionist debate. Australian audiences retained considerable sympathy for UTC’s depiction of slavery, however, such audiences generally failed to recognise the parallels between the plight of African-American slaves, and of Indigenous Australians. Nonetheless, UTC was sometimes evoked to draw attention to the tragedy of Aboriginal child removal under assimilation policies, now known as the Stolen Generations. UTS also reveals how metropolitan domestic ideals were applied to an expanded imperial world, a sentimental investment in the home and family that was the basis for the colonial project of assimilation. UTC’s colonial application raises again the long-standing debate between those who argue that literature helps to cultivate a more compassionate society, and those who believe that empathy masks complicity with oppressive practices. I argue that despite the manipulation, re-working and stereotypical devices that limit the impact of sentimental narratives, we must distinguish between diverse contexts of reading and social action, and their political malleability, focusing on their relationship to contemporary political discourse.