ABSTRACT
Between the late 1800s and mid 1970s the Australian Government removed children of mixed-descent, and sometimes black Aboriginal children as well, placing them in white missionary institutes to train them to be of service to the white society. This generation of children, wrenched from their natural habitat to be turned into beings that fit the white-colonial concept of civilization, is known as the Stolen Generation. This paper looks at select life writings by such children – first-hand accounts, recorded either when the victims were young, or recalled and written down at a later stage. Using the theoretical framework of trauma in literature the paper studies the psychologies, poetics, politics, and ethics of these narratives, while briefly discussing twentieth and twenty-first centuries efforts to understand history, memory and trauma. These are not stories that children want to tell, but they must. These are not stories that children want to hear, but they must.
