We need to get our land back, get every kid out of the prison system and end Black deaths in custody. Don’t you think I’d be saying “Yes” if this powerless body had a say in any of those things? Djab Wurrung Gunnai Gunditjmara Senator Lidia Thorpe explains her opposition to the Voice to Parliament.
Stolen Generations
Tens of thousands of people joined Invasion Day protests around the country on January 26.
Close Don Dale NOW! activist Natalie Hunter has denounced that “our kids are crying out for help and it is falling on apathetic ears”. Stephen W Enciso reports.
Fifty people marched to protest government policies that make it legal for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children to be stolen from their families, writes Rachel Evans.
US-based singer-songwriter David Rovics wrote this song on hearing of the arrest of long-time human rights activist Stephen Langford, who was charged with defacing the Governor Lachlan Macquarie statue in Sydney's Hyde Park.
Aboriginal children are currently being removed at five times the rate they were in 1997, the year when the Bringing Them Home report was brought down by the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families.
About 100 people joined a snap protest outside New South Wales Parliament on November 7 to oppose the state Coalition government’s attempt to allow for a new generation of forced adoptions.
A group of activists from Grandmothers Against Removals (GMAR) and the Socialist Alliance gathered in front of NSW Parliament on February 9 to protest on the 10th anniversary of the national apology from former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
The following is a statement issued by participants of the StandUp2017 conference that concluded with a rally in Mbantua (Alice Springs) on June 26.
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Rosalie Kunoth Monks: “You better believe it, when the Intervention first hit in 2007 community councils were decimated.”
Matthew Ryan: “Trying to get the government to listen to us, is like a brick wall.”
Twenty years after the original Bringing Them Home report was released, Aboriginal children are still being taken from their parents — in greater numbers than before.
Commenting on the impact of Bringing Them Home — which documented evidence about the Stolen Generations of Aboriginal children — Murri elder Sam Watson told Green Left that “it is beyond dispute that Aboriginal children were removed in significant numbers”.
“Every single [Aboriginal] family was affected,” Watson said and this “dated back to the first years of European invasion”.
About 200 people marched from Hyde Park to the NSW State Parliament on February 13 to demand an end to the forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families and for Aboriginal control of Aboriginal child welfare. They chanted, "What does Sorry mean? You don't do it again!"
The march, organised by the Sydney branch of Grandmothers Against Removals (GMAR), was held on the ninth anniversary of former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's apology to the Stolen Generations.
Without anywhere that is home, Aboriginal people have been without a physical space to reinvent themselves and their culture in modern Australia.
Since colonisation, Aboriginal people have been internally displaced from their country. The doctrine of terra nullius — a land without people — was established under British colonial government and persisted in Australian law until 1992.
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