ABSTRACT
Imagining may be used, like the stolen generation, as a simile or metaphor for representing a mental form or image, or something non-existent or not present to the senses.1 When we conjure up questions about the past we use our imagination, but this process is simply an historiographical tool, or what historians use to do history, but it is not to be understood as history itself! Aborigines do not imagine their children and they do not imagine a colonial past which, in many ways, was created by the agents of imperialism, thereby changing the relationship with their heritage. This chapter begins by discussing the impact on Aborigines of Lerepinta (the area from Heavytree Gap, south to Aputula and west to Lake Amadeus and the Gibson Desert): the coming of the Commonwealth administration, the telegraph line, the railway, pastoralism and, finally, the causes of what white people called the ‘half-caste problem’ and the effects on the children swept up in the revolution caused by the population explosion. This is a story of their history and their suffering.
