How the State of Western Australia removed thousands of Aboriginal children from their families… Excerpt from 1958 Annual Report of the WA Child Welfare Department showing numbers of children charged with the offence of being ‘destitute and neglected’. From early in the century until 1954, Aboriginal children, mostly of mixed descent, were removed by the Department of Native Welfare under the 1905 Aborigines Act and its later versions. From 1954, the majority of removals were ‘mainstreamed’ and conducted under the Child Welfare Act 1947. For an analysis of the overriding forced social assimilation agenda behind the mass removal of mixed-race children on charges of ‘neglect’ see Beresford and Omaji, particularly Chapter 2 ‘Creating the Poverty of Aboriginal Children’, in their book Our State of Mind: Racial Planning and the Stolen Generations, Fremantle Press, 1998.
Figures represent children of all backgrounds. Overwhelmingly, the Aboriginal children were committed to internment in dozens of institutions and missions. For them it meant a childhood of heartbreak, abuse and forced assimilation.