Aboriginal Children on the Move: The Case of the Stolen Generation

Radoslaw Siewierski, University of Wroclaw

The term “the Stolen Generation” (also known as “the Stolen Children”) is used to refer to the Aboriginal Children who between 1910s-1970s were forcibly taken away from their families and put in various host families or special establishments started by the government. The aim of such dire actions was assimilation: the culture, customs, languages of the children were supposed to be eradicated and the European ones inculcated instead. When they grew up – and if they survived – some of those children decided to write books about their childhood experiences and ordeal. The literature of the Stolen Generation is still not very popular nowadays, let alone widely analysed. Some of the works concerning the subject are Narrative Lives and Human Rights: Stolen Generation Narratives and the Ethics of Recognition by Kay Schaffer (2004) or Marin Renes’s The Stolen Generation, a Narrative of Removal, Displacement and Recovery (2011), but those are just two out of very few examples. The aim of this project is to analyse Doris Pilkington’s Under the Wintamarra Tree and Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence and, secondly, compare the author’s story (presented in the former) with her mother’s story (described in the latter). Finally, to show what roads the heroines of both stories had to go through as children: in both literal and metaphorical sense.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 239. Childhood and Settler Colonialism