Australia's so-called Stolen Generations narrative has become one of the great dogmas of modern national identity, untouchable, sacrosanct, and rigorously enforced in our education, politics, and public institutions. Yet scratch beneath the surface of the popular myth, and what emerges is a far more complex, contested, and uncomfortable truth, one that has been deliberately flattened to serve a political agenda. The conservative publication Quadrant, led by historians like Keith Windschuttle, has long argued that the child removal policies from 1910 to 1970, far from constituting "genocide," were overwhelmingly acts of welfare, misguided perhaps, but not malicious. The tragedy is not that children were removed; the tragedy is how that act of protection has been retrofitted into a racial weapon used to indict white Australia.
At the heart of the critique is the reality that many of these children were mixed-race, born of Indigenous mothers and non-Indigenous fathers, often under situations of exploitation, abandonment, or social breakdown. These children, referred to in historical records as "half-castes," occupied an ambiguous place in both white and Aboriginal societies. In many tribal contexts, they could not be properly incorporated into the traditional kinship systems, and in some cases, they were outcast or even subject to infanticide. "Yeller fellers," as some were called, were not universally accepted or protected in Indigenous communities. This was common knowledge at the time, especially in frontier regions and among older Australians whose memories are conveniently excluded from contemporary policy debates: The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume Three: The Stolen Generations 1881–2008 (2009).
The removal of these children was often driven not by racial malice but by a grim moral realism. Authorities believed, often with good reason, that failing to intervene would leave the children exposed to poverty, violence, or cultural limbo. And it was not only Aboriginal children who were removed. Thousands of white children, like my mother (1922), were taken from broken or abusive homes under the same legal frameworks. The welfare state did not discriminate when it came to dysfunction. The difference is that white Australians haven't been offered apologies, memorials, or $80,000 cheques for their suffering.
The Bringing Them Home report of 1997, which gave institutional momentum to the "Stolen Generations" label, chose emotion over evidence. It relied heavily on unverified oral testimony while neglecting archival records, and it applied the term "genocide" in a way that defies legal, historical, and moral sense. Assimilation was the flawed ideology of the time, but it was driven by the belief, common across all Western colonial societies, that Aboriginal people were destined to vanish, and that mixed-race children deserved a place in modern Australia. That belief was paternalistic, not genocidal.
The real tragedy is not the removals themselves, but what we've done with their memory. They have weaponised welfare. A policy born of protection, rightly or wrongly, has been reframed as a racial crime to extract guilt, power, and money from contemporary Australia. Reparations schemes now reward people based on ancestry alone, often without clear evidence of removal or harm. In Tasmania, 40% of claimants were rejected from their own Stolen Generations scheme for lacking verifiable Indigenous ancestry. Meanwhile, the rest of the population, those who endured the same state institutions, the same trauma, the same scars, are told their pain does not count.
The cultural shift is unmistakable. What was once a policy dilemma has become a profit stream. In the new Australia, identity is currency, and victimhood is investment. With the explosive growth of self-identification, particularly in urban, middle-class circles, there is legitimate concern that race is being reinvented as a vehicle for career advancement, social leverage, or compensation. Quadrant has warned of this for years: once you untether Aboriginality from history and hardship, and tie it instead to financial incentive, you invite opportunism.
Let's be clear: some removals were wrong, even cruel. Some children were taken from loving families and placed in cold institutions. But so were many white children. If we are going to talk about intergenerational trauma, we must do so honestly. We must also ask: who is allowed to remember? Who gets to grieve? Who gets paid?
The current orthodoxy holds that Aboriginal trauma is unique, sacred, and compensable, while non-Aboriginal trauma is forgettable. This double standard is corrosive. It divides the nation into oppressors and victims, based not on actions but on ancestry. That is not reconciliation, it is racial separation.
The time has come to push back against this moral economy of inherited guilt. The truth is that child removal policies, however flawed, were driven by welfare logics that applied across the board. Mixed-race Aboriginal children were removed not to erase a people, but to save children from hardship, neglect, or cultural alienation. The authorities did not have the luxury of knowing whether each child was welcome in their community, they had to act based on general risk. That is not genocide. That is governance.
It's time to stop apologising for doing what was thought best at the time, and to stop paying for the sins of those who believed they were saving children. We must defend a vision of Australia where history is told in full, not cherry-picked for grievance, weaponised for gain, or revised for ideological comfort. And most of all, we must reaffirm that all Australians, black, white, and in-between, deserve equal compassion, equal memory, and equal justice.