Ask yourself one simple question:
Do we as West Australians have the courage to look without pre-judgement at our own State’s history and face the reality of what it tells us?
That’s the challenge Yokai and award-winning West Australian documentary film maker Frank Rijavec lay before us with their perfectly pitched production, Genocide In The Wildflower State.
The documentary clinically lays out the evidence for the assertion in its title and it does so in disturbingly understated style.
It draws upon the widely available official public documents, and on the spoken experience of those who outlived the policy and are among us today. They are the survivors of what we now call the Stolen Generations and, in broad terms, we might think we know their story. After all, it is now 27 years since the Bringing Them Home Report was tabled in the Australian Parliament and its 689 pages told a massive story of dispossession, maltreatment and loss — in the name of ‘doing good’.
In Western Australia the true rationale for the policy was more openly stated.
Genocide in the Wildflower State draws directly from a mountain of evidence that a statewide, full-scale attempt was made to completely rid Western Australia of its mixed- race Indigenous people, to eliminate them through carefully managed and controlled breeding – to ‘breed out the colour’. There was nothing hidden or secretive about the agenda being pursued.
It was a policy rooted in the related 19th century theories of social Darwinism and eugenics, the same thinking which found its full horrific expression in the ideology of Nazi Germany.
In Western Australia, it was embraced in the attempt to resolve irredeemably the contest over land that colonial expansion forced, and the question of how to justify the devastating impact on Aboriginal people and their ancient culture.
That the policy ultimately failed was not through lack of sustained effort.
It was State-driven, Church-backed, and popularly embraced, and it was vigorously pursued for nearly a hundred years. From its beginnings in the last half of the 19th century, it remained in place until well into the second half of the 20th century. Its impact was enormous and lives with us today.
This was a brutal, sustained effort to ‘breed’ Aboriginal people out of existence so that, eventually, no trace of them, not even a memory of them, would survive. The Indigenous people of Western Australia and their culture would be completely wiped from the face of the Earth.
It was not a holocaust as we might conceive of it after the Nazis – although there were plenty of massacres, too – but, by any reckoning, this was a full-scale attempt at genocide.
Genocide in the Wildflower State shows us the evidence lies in the historical records. It’s in the official policies and laws enacted by the Parliament of Western Australia; in the speeches and correspondence of members of that Parliament in support of those laws; and in the words and actions of those whose job or zealous mission it was to put those laws into effect.
Most tellingly, the terrible reality of what happened is offered to us in spoken words by those who survived it all and still live to tell their story.
Genocide in the Wildflower State takes just one hour to watch, but it brilliantly and disturbingly reveals a shocking, ghastly truth which, once seen, can help to explain so much of what we see around us today and what remains still to be done.
Alan Carpenter is a former journalist, politician and Premier of Western Australia (2006-2008)