Shirleene Robinson

The question of genocide and indigenous child removal: The colonial Australian context

Most academic debate about the stolen generations of Aboriginal children in Australias past has focused on the twentieth century, when government agents directed official attention to the removal of Aboriginal children from their family groups. This article focuses on the earlier colonial period in Australia, from 1788 to 1901, when generations of Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their Aboriginal family groups. Aboriginal children were popularly considered to be more “controllable” or susceptible to assimilation than Aboriginal adults. Consequently, by the late nineteenth century, government officials in various Australian colonies encouraged the removal of Aboriginal children from their families and their retraining in manual labour. This idea of containing an “Indigenous threat” by removing and retraining Aboriginal children clearly guided the “Stolen Generation” policies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This paper examines the unity of colonial Australian discourse about Aboriginal child removal and makes some observations about the scale of Indigenous child removal in the colonial era. It argues that the use of a conceptual framework centred around genocidal discourse provides the most effective way of understanding the motivations behind Indigenous child removals in Australias past.

Children, childhood and youth in the British world

Age was a critical factor in shaping imperial experience, yet it has not received any sustained scholarly attention. This pioneering interdisciplinary collection is the first to investigate the lives of children and young people and the construction of modes of childhood and youth within the British world.

Regulating the race: Aboriginal children in private European homes in colonial Australia

Abstract This article focuses on the incorporation of Aboriginal children into European families on a private basis in the colonial era. While state-based missions and reserves were central sites where Aboriginal children were placed, other Aboriginal children were privately placed with European families during the colonial era. This article explores the shifting reasons for this practice. It finds that Aboriginal children who entered European families away from the control of the state came under the control of Europeans through a variety of ways. Initially, Aboriginal child removals were conducted during the course of violent frontier conflict or involved children who had been impacted by introduced European diseases. Smaller numbers of Indigenous children were taken as objects of curiosity. As the nineteenth century progressed, however, it became increasingly common for settlers to take Indigenous children for labour purposes. The article argues that the white middle-class family was positioned as a site for “civilising” children, where the moral regulation of childhood was conducted. This article adds a new dimension to colonial understandings about the role and structure of the family. It also expands understandings about Indigenous child removal in Australias past.

The unregulated employment of aboriginal children in Queensland, 1842-1902.

European colonists employed significant numbers of Aboriginal children in a diverse range of occupations in the Moreton Bay District after 1842. The Queensland government, however, did not pass leg...

Homophobia as party politics : the construction of the 'homosexual deviant' in Joh Bjelke-Petersen's Queensland

The way in which Jon Bjelke-Petersen and his Country Party/National Party government defined homosexuality as morally deviant in order to gain electoral advantage, thereby incorporating the policies of homophobia into governance is discussed. The Goss Labor government after assuming power from Bjelke-Petersen decriminalized male-to-male sexual intercourse for those aged over 16 years; and the gay and lesbian liberation movement made considerable gains in Australia during the 1970s and 1980s.

Negotiating Difference Across Time: The Temporal Meanings of the Sydney Mardi Gras in Lesbian and Gay Life Narratives

ABSTRACT This paper examines the temporal meanings of the annual LGBTI pride event, the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. Drawing on findings from a large-scale oral history project, the paper explores ways in which Australian lesbians and gay men place Mardi Gras within life narratives. Three temporal frameworks were commonly used by our interviewees. First, Mardi Gras acted as an annual temporal marker through which to plan a year. Second, changing personal understandings of Mardi Gras were used by interviewees to position themselves within the life course. Third, the shifting meanings of Mardi Gras were deployed as a means of narrating broader historical changes in the LGBTI community. We argue that, although lesbian and gay identities might now be considered increasingly mainstream and even “ordinary”, each of these temporal frameworks represents the continued differing experiences of time and space between homosexual and heterosexual lives.

Introduction: The World in Miniature

Outside Buckingham Palace in London, a celebratory vision of the ‘British world’ is embodied in stone. On a central pedestal, a venerable Queen Victoria resides on her imperial throne, flanked by statues of Truth and Justice. A winged Victory, together with figures of Courage and Constancy, rises above, while the reverse of the pedestal displays Motherhood in the tender image of a seated woman — a youthful Victoria, perhaps? — sheltering three infants. Four bronze lions (a gift from New Zealand) stand guard at Victoria’s feet, alongside Naval and Military Power, in muscular yet effortless repose, and associated fountains and reservoirs. Across the water, some distance beyond, a series of concentric gates and allegorical statues by British sculptors depict imperial dominions.1 These outlying figures are all notably youthful, the Australia statues especially so. Animals accompanying each national child further emphasize the apparent rawness of the imperial offspring. Canada nurses a seal and a bulging net of fish, South Africa tackles an ostrich and monkey, West Africa escorts a cheetah and Australia coaxes a large ram and kangaroo. Such associations contrast with the stateliness and settled bearing of Victoria and her immediate companions, whom the callow youths presumably hope to emulate. Forever petrified as children, and positioned to face their ‘Mother Queen’, the dominions orbit the imperatrix.

Resistance and Race: Aboriginal Child Workers in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Australia

In 1903, in Oxley, a suburb located on the outskirts of the Queensland capital of Brisbane, a 14-year-old Aboriginal girl named Mulla set fire to her employer’s curtains.1 At the time that this incident occurred, Mrs Sturmpels, Mulla’s employer, did not suspect her of the act. Later though, Mulla informed police officers that she had indeed set fire to the curtains and that she had done so deliberately on account of the appalling abuse she had received from Sturmpels, who used to beat her with a stick.2 Mulla was fortunate in receiving support from official quarters, a rarity for Aboriginal people who came before the legal system at this time.3 She was removed from her employer, and Gus Forrest, the Sub-Inspector of Police for South Brisbane, told the Queensland Home Secretary that since the case had come before the Court, Mulla had ‘behaved very well’, performed ‘her work in a very satisfactory manner’, and ‘with kind treatment would make a very good servant’.4 Mulla’s dramatic act of defiance provides an illustration of the inventive strategies of resistance Aboriginal children deployed against their masters in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Australia. Tactics included running away from employment, stealing, ‘playing up’ and destroying the property of employers. By investigating strategies of resistance and their impact, this chapter explores the complications and limitations of indigenous childhood agency in a colonial British world setting where strict racial hierarchies operated.

Young and Free: [Post] Colonial Ontologies of Childhood, Memory and History in Australia

threads to the next, readers can build a bigger picture of how important infrastructures such as regional councils, shelters, community legal services and health services can be for making sense of one’s self, developing a sense of belonging, and finding the means from which to create better support systems for gender and sexually diverse Aboriginal people. Situating the stories of singular lives within the wider context of the political climate in which both queer and Aboriginal identity get negotiated is extended in section two, “An Emergent Public Face”. The first essay in this section is an elaborated version of an essay that was based on an interview with Rodney Junga Williams, who was a health and HIV rights activist and advocate. The specificity of culturally appropriate health and sex education also underscores the importance of “ordinary people, family and friends” in developing support networks and inventing political and community responses to HIV/AIDS on the run. Other essays in this section touch on the importance of storytelling through theatre and the very public debates over Aboriginal and gay identity in the tabloid press. The final section “Looking Out of the Mirror—Essays” is academic in nature and does a marvelous job of tying singular stories to the broader context and messy history of engaging in decolonising work. Sandy O’Sullivan weaves her own personal and professional stories into an enthralling reading of “genderplay, gender variance and sexualities beyond reproductive or family formation” in museum exhibitions, which has prompted me to revisit a few of these spaces myself. The other two essays in this section focus more on method and ways of knowing. Oscar Monaghan’s essay in particular will make an excellent addition to any gender sexuality and diversity reading list, as it thinks through the concepts of homonationalism and homonormativity within the specificity of a Settler colonial context. I read this book in two sittings, which stands testimony to its accessibility and captivating content. This is a book that is relevant to the truth telling of Australia’s history, especially with regard to how the borders of gender and sexually diverse bodies relate to the national borders; the book should be read far and wide. I cannot do justice to the detail of the stories, the moments of heartfelt solidarity when hearing about grassroots organizing and the establishment of so many support networks around the country. While there is certainly a lot of sad content and a lot to get angry about, there are also moments of laughter and the joy in recognising some common queer experiences; this includes such examples as hating the alphabet soup, relating to a Cher song and blending activist causes with partying. This book is ground breaking. Buy it—and the royalties go to The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander HIV Youth Mob (ANTHYM). It is necessary and rewarding reading, which has the potential to alter how we pursue both queer and Aboriginal activism, policy and academia.

Australian Lesbian and Gay Life Stories: A National Oral History Project

ABSTRACT Lesbian and gay Australians have lived through extraordinary social change over the past six decades as attitudes towards homosexuality have shifted significantly. This article explores a collaborative project with the National Library of Australia, which was the first nation-wide oral history project to investigate the impact of these changes in the intimate lives of different generations of gay men and lesbians. Sixty men and women across Australia were interviewed as part of the project. This article outlines the methodological framework and the particular challenges and opportunities presented by an oral history project that involves members of the lesbian and gay population. It notes the increased opportunities to live an ‘ordinary’ life available to many lesbian and gay individuals and the way this was reflected in interviews.