In springtime along the sides of the roads leading to the many infamous Native Missions bloom the finest wildflowers in WA. Their delicate beauty contrasts with the sinister purposes once served by these concentration camps for stolen Aboriginal kids. These were the places used for a systematic program of human ‘biological absorption’. For ‘breeding out the colour’ of our mixed-race people. To achieve a ‘White Australia’. WA practiced eugenics well before Hitler. Many infants also died under state care.

Legally empowered by the 1905 Aborigines Act, for over sixty years the WA Government forcibly took many thousands of our children from their families and incarcerated them in institutions like Moore River Native Settlement and in dozens of complicit church missions throughout the state. What occurred in these places met the UN definition of the Crime of Genocide (Bringing Them Home Report 1997). In 2008, the then Prime Minister Rudd formally apologised to our people for this terrible injustice, but nothing has happened after that.

Today WA remains along with Queensland, the only two states not to have established a government redress scheme to support and compensate our Survivors.

The untold grief and intergenerational trauma caused by this vast racial system, and what should be done today to redress the wrongs is the story that is told in the documentary film Genocide in the Wildflower State.

Directed by award-winning filmmaker Frank Rijavec (Exile and the Kingdom), narrated by acclaimed actor Kelton Pell (The Heights, Mystery Road: Origin) and produced by Yokai and the WA Stolen Generations Aboriginal Corporation, Genocide in the Wildflower State uses the spoken accounts of Stolen Generations survivors and their family members together with archival images and historical documents to produce a deeply moving and disturbing exposé of the often denied and dismissed reality of past race supremacist state thinking and the misery families see today.

Extras

Frank Rijavec is a filmmaker and Media/Communications Researcher whose work encompasses development of community-based, participatory media, and documentary production for education and public television. 


 
 

 

 

Interview with Jim Morrison

Jim Morrison is a senior Noongar man, a Traditional Custodian from WA’s southern coast who has passed his strong Aboriginal values to following generations of his extended family. His mother, father and their 21 siblings were all stolen and separated as children.

Interview with Steve Mickler

Steve Mickler is former Head of School, School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry at Curtin University until December 2020. Before his academic career, he worked in Aboriginal affairs in the Northern Territory and Western Australia, including with the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission and the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.

 

Interview with Frank Rijavec