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Fractured faith and stolen childhoods
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The Byron Shire Echo Volume 36 #51 • June 1, 2022
AA versus scary plodder
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ife under Labor communism, week one: Great leader elect, Albo, unfurled Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags on the podium and waved his wand to release an imprisoned young Sri Lankan family. Mum, dad, and two little girls returned to the small community of Biloela, in central Qld. The Nadesalingam family were cruelly locked up by the former regime for purely political purposes, despite Biloela residents welcoming them as their own. Albo then immediately jumped on his Nimbus 2000 and flew off to the Quad and met world leaders. Upon his return, Albo attended Sydney’s Belvoir St Theatre, thereby signalling to the inner city elites that Labor PMs enjoy culture, unlike every Liberal PM before him. The former Liberal PM, meanwhile, was booed at the footy, and is yet to vacate Kirribilli House in Sydney. Boooo. His grand finale was destroying his party. Horray! By Monday, there was a win for Australian foreign diplomacy, after China dumped its plan to make security pacts with our Pacific Island neighbours. Coincidentally, new Foreign Minister, Penny Wong, had been dispatched to Fiji. Showing interest in countries with much smaller economies who live close by was never a strong suit of the previous government. And this leads us to Peter Dutton. As a seat warming placeholder plodder until a real Liberal leader emerges, ol’ Spuddo is the best the loony Libs can muster. The former Qld cop told the nation at his press conference, without the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags as a backdrop, that he will work for inclusiveness. He then says he is just a big softy, and will commence legal action against anyone who says otherwise. Spud sued refugee advocate, Shane Bazzi, over deleted mean tweets – yet lost. Dutton has demonised ‘African gangs’ for his own political gains, was voted worst Health Minister by Australian doctors, and walked out on then-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s apology to the Stolen Generations.
He says he did that because he didn’t feel Australia had done enough to close the gap for Indigenous people, and we should do more before we apologise. If only there was a government, in charge for the last nine years, that could have done more. He also blamed the ABC for its reporting, saying ‘I’m not as bad as the ABC might sometimes report’. Nope, boof head is much, much worse. As Home Affairs Minister, he dehumanised, tortured, brutalised and denied basic medical care to the most vulnerable people on the planet. His wife keeps having to remind us he’s not a monster. Meanwhile, David Littleproud replaces Barnaby Joyce as the new leader of the federal Nationals Party. The Nationals have finally rejected the leadership of a drunken, red faced hypocrite, who left his wife and children to start another family with a staff member. As colourful as Joyce is, clowns really do belong in the circus, and should not be in charge of making laws. Fun fact: David Littleproud was one of only four MPs to vote ‘No’ in the final vote on gay marriage in the House of Reps in 2017. Does any of this matter? Not really – In the context of Davos (www.weforum.org) and the control that globalists have over ‘sovereign’ countries like ours, politics is just a Harry Potter script with a few clowns thrown in. Hans Lovejoy, editor
recently watched a documentary that dealt with the horror of mothers and their children who were incarcerated in the institution, run by the Bon Secours Sisters, a religious order of Catholic nuns in the township of Tuam, in Galway County in Ireland. The mothers were young single Irish girls, who had committed the ‘crime’ of having a baby out of wedlock. The documentary filled me with horror and sadness and left me horror-struck at the reported level of human abuse, callous indifference and decadence. The Bon Secours Mothers and Baby Home harboured a secret, which was only discovered and exposed through the tireless research and dedicated work of amateur historian Catherine Corless. Corless’s research led to the discovery that 796 children had died at the home, and while she discovered death certificates, alarmingly she was unable to locate actual burial records of the children. Sadly, acts of physical and sexual abuses and inhumanity have scarred human history since the beginning of time. Nowhere has this abuse been more pronounced, and felt more profoundly, than the manner and scale of the brutality that children have suffered, some even murdered, whilst incarcerated in institutions administered by the church and with the apparent apathy of the state. Suspicions about the Tuam Mothers and Babies Home first emerged in 1975, when the skeletal remains of children were discovered in a pit by two young boys who were playing in a field close to the home. But it was almost 40 years later, in 2012, that the tireless research conducted by Corless revealed the full extent of the fate of mothers and their babies at the home. Following the publication of her research in 2014, and after weeks of speculation, the Irish government ordered a Commission of Investigation into Ireland’s mother and baby homes.
The Byron Shire Echo
Volume 36 #51 June 1, 2022 Established 1986 • 24,500 copies every week The Echo acknowledges the people of the Bundjalung nation as the traditional custodians of this land and extends respect to elders past, present and future. Disclaimer: The Echo is committed to providing a voice for our whole community. The views of advertisers, letter writers, and opinion writers are not necessarily those of the owners or staff of this publication.
www.echo.net.au Phone: 02 6684 1777 Editorial/news: editor@echo.net.au Advertising: adcopy@echo.net.au Office: Village Way, Stuart Street, Mullumbimby NSW 2482 General Manager Simon Haslam Editor Hans Lovejoy Deputy Editor Aslan Shand Photographer Jeff Dawson Advertising Manager Anna Coelho Production Manager Ziggi Browning
Nicholas Shand 1948–1996 Founding Editor
Professor Bob Morgan Announcing the investigation Edna Kenny, then Irish Prime Minister, said that the mothers and babies had been treated as ‘an inferior sub-species’. The final report of the Commission of Investigation was released in 2021 prompting the government of Ireland to declare that it would issue a formal apology for ‘the appalling level of infant mortality’ discovered and identified in the report. The order of the Bon Secours Sisters apologised, simply stating ‘We did not live up to our Christianity when running the Home.’ Another scandalous and disturbing matter covered by the documentary, involved what can only be referred to as child trafficking. Children from the Tuam home were adopted out, often illegally, to families in the USA and elsewhere. Some of these children, now grown adults, have since reunited with siblings that they never knew they had. Similar child abuses have also been reported in Canada, particularly in respect to First Nations and Indian children, while in the US genocidal measures designed to eradicate Indians are captured in the statement attributed to Army Officer, Richard Henry Pratt who said, when establishing the Carlisle Indian School, that it was necessary to ‘Kill the Indian to save the man’. Acts of human rights abuse and atrocities also punctuate Australian history. The Forgotten Australians is a term that was coined in the context of the 2003–4 Australian Senate ‘Inquiry into Children in Institutional Care’. The report stemming from the inquiry identified that an estimated 500,000 children
– Finley Peter Dunne 1867–1936
emigrated, or perhaps more correctly, were transported to Australia during the 20th century. As with many of these children, their childhood had been stolen and they were subjected to abuses, the pain and scars of which they undoubtedly carried throughout their lives. In 2009 then Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd issued a formal apology to the children raised in institutional care. Aboriginal people in Australia also continue to battle the intergenerational trauma stemming from the experience of their children being forcibly taken from them, an act that has become known as the ‘Stolen Generations’. This and other acts of depravity, undergirded by eugenicsinspired policies and practices, serve as Australia’s eternal shame. In February 2008, Kevin Rudd also nobly issued a formal apology to the Stolen Generations, but little has been done since to ease the lingering pain and trauma. It is beyond the scope of this piece to explore, in detail, the motivation for such abuses, but a tragic aspect of this shameful history is that it was allowed to exist with the apparent sanction of church and state while people stood silently, averting their gaze, allowing evil to flourish. There is no greater evil than the abuse of innocent and defenceless children. Innocent parents and loved ones are left to endure endless pain and trauma rendering their search for closure fragile, incomplete and ever elusive. Surely humanity is better than this? Q Professor Bob Morgan is a
Gumilaroi man from Walgett western NSW, and is an Aboriginal educator/researcher.
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