Dialogue: Only the words were truly stolen

I am returning to the tale of Australia's "stolen generation" because something interesting arrived in the mail.

It was a paper by a Victorian QC, Douglas Meagher, who was lead counsel for the Commonwealth in the Northern Territory test case brought in the name of two part-Aborigines who had been raised in missionary hostels.

Much of the case was based on the findings of an official inquiry completed in 1997 by a fellow jurist, Sir Ronald Wilson.

By that time books and feature articles had been Pilgerising the subject and newspapers were beginning to treat the stolen generation as a matter of fact.

The Wilson Report was no exception. Mr Meagher was personally astonished by one claim that a child had been stolen during a visit to Melbourne on an Aboriginal holiday scheme. He knew that scheme.

The report says the girl was adopted by her hosts without reference to her parents. But 56 pages later the report contains, without a cross-reference, an extract of the girl's evidence in which she mentions that her parents died while she was in Melbourne.

The Wilson Inquiry did not seem to think their deaths mitigated the national guilt and found it necessary to add, "She never saw her parents again."

The report was tabled in Parliament and, in the way of these things, lent enormous authority and apparent respectability to the stolen generation thesis.

Sir Ronald was not at all keen to see his work tested in a court of law. It is interesting to wonder why. Mr Meagher's paper offers no more than dismay that a fellow jurist should cast doubt on judicial process.

In any case, less cautious lawyers issued writs in the High Court for 722 children who had been placed in the care of missionaries, plus 15 of their mothers and 1367 children of the children. The test case was brought in the name of two of the 722 - Lorna Cubillo, by then aged 60, and Peter Gunner, 51.

The claims against the Commonwealth were wild. It was said to be federal policy until well into the 1960s to remove all half-caste children from their mothers as soon as possible after birth, for the purposes of breeding out half-castes, providing domestic and manual labour for whites and protecting the primacy and integrity of the Anglo-Saxon community.

The Wilson Report called it "a crime against humanity."

The court looked past the polemic the inquiry had accepted and called evidence from those cast into the roles of victims and villains.

It established that the numbers of half-caste children in the territory's five missionary-run hostels were always well below the number attending schools, which denied the proposition that all half-caste children were systematically removed.

Evidence at the trial established that many of those in the hostels were placed there by their parents for the school term and went home for the holidays. The few who did not were welfare cases.

From 1953, court orders were required before children could be removed on grounds of neglect. The records suggested that they, too, were almost always removed with the consent of their parents.

Furthermore, the hostels were staffed by Aborigines as well as whites. Parents, relatives and tribal elders were free to visit and many did. The children attended ordinary schools.

Until 1988 there were no serious complaints from those who had attended the hostels. Their reunions were well attended. Many - including Mrs Cubillo - had long exchanged Christmas cards with staff members.

In fact, says Mr Meagher, after some of the elderly missionaries from her hostel had given evidence, "Mrs Cubillo embraced them outside and appeared to reminisce happily."

She had been the subject of one of the first books on the stolen generation, a book the Wilson inquiry accepted uncritically.

In court Mrs Cubillo was cross-examined about passages attributed to her. Some she acknowledged, others she denied, of some she was no longer certain.

The poor woman was in court because away back in 1994, after the book was published, all who had been in the hostels were invited to a conference in Darwin where a lawyer gave a written legal opinion that they had been wrongly taken from their parents under a policy of "cultural genocide."

The whole case proceeded on those perversions of language that are characteristic of our time.

In places such as the United Nations, where well-meaning people write articles of human rights and charters for indigenous people, they have actually defined assimilation as a form of genocide.

They approve the term holocaust for colonisation. They would call Parihaka a massacre.

These people are not liars, setting out to deceive us, any more than those they accuse of kidnapping children were ever doing any such thing.

What is going on, I think, is that people want to express the agony of culture loss and they have no forceful words for it. So they are willing to wildly distort the meanings of words such as stolen and genocide, to give their case the impact it deserves.

They believe they are serving a truth higher than the plain facts that will be found by forensic process. That is probably why Sir Ronald did not want his report tested in court, and why reports of the Waitangi Tribunal would face a similar fate here. Words and facts are sacred; their meanings should not be bent for any cause. These people owe us an apology.