Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The Stolen Generations
At the turn of the century, the lives of many Aboriginal people became more wretched. The
colony's 1893 Education Act empowered the parents of white schoolchildren to bar any
Aboriginal child from attending their school, and it was not long before Aboriginal people
were completely excluded from state-run classrooms. The following decade, the govern-
ment embarked on a policy of removing so-called 'half-caste' children from their parents,
placing them with white families or in government institutions. The objective of the policy
was explicit. Full-blood Aboriginal people were to be segregated, in the belief that they
were doomed to extinction, while half-caste children were expected to marry whites,
thereby breeding Aboriginal people out of existence. These policies inflicted great suffer-
ing and sorrow on the many Aboriginal people who were recognised in the 1990s as 'the
stolen generations'.
