ABSTRACT
In 1996 Kwementyay1 Gunner and Lorna Cubillo, members of the ‘Stolen Generations’, launched a compensation claim against the Commonwealth. The term ‘Stolen Generations’ usually refers to those Aboriginal people who were removed from their families and communities, under assimilationist or protectionist policies of Australian governments in the mid decades of the twentieth century.2 Those removed were placed into institutions, and typically were children of mixed Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal descent, referred to in government policies of the day as ‘half-castes’, ‘quarter-castes’, and so on, depending on how much Aboriginal ‘blood’ their parentage was said to have conferred on them.
