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Australian Aborigines have renewed their calls for an official apology to members of the Stolen Generation, following a landmark payout to a man taken from his family when he was a baby.
Bruce Trevorrow, 50, was this week awarded $525,000 ($586,620) by the South Australian Supreme Court to compensate him for a lifetime of problems, including depression, alcoholism and the loss of his cultural identity. The court found that the State Government had removed him from his parents without their consent in 1957.
Trevorrow is one of about 100,000 mainly mixed-race children who suffered that fate, as a result of official assimilation policies that were abandoned in 1975. Members of the Stolen Generation have been seeking compensation since 1997, when a national inquiry found that many of them had experienced long-term psychological effects. Trevorrow is the first successful litigant.
The size of the award astonished observers, and was welcomed as a breakthrough. Lawyers predicted a flood of similar claims, while Aboriginal leaders repeated their long-standing call for an apology, in the name of past governments.
Trevorrow was taken to an Adelaide hospital with stomach pains when he was 13 months old. Hospital staff falsely recorded that he was an orphan, and was neglected and malnourished. Two weeks later he was given to a white woman who became his foster mother. Trevorrow did not see his real mother again for 10 years, by which time his father was dead.
The court heard that he had been treated with tranquillisers and anti-depressants since the age of 10.
- Independent
