South Australia v Lampard-Trevorrow [2010] SASC 56

The decision, State of South Australia v Lampard-Trevorrow [2010] SASC 56, was the first successful Stolen Generations case. Bruce Trevorrow was taken from his family, without consent, when he was 13 months old and placed with a white family who responded to a newspaper advertisement offering Aboriginal children for adoption. In doing so, State officials abused power that they did not have. Bruce successfully sued the State of South Australia for negligence, false imprisonment, misfeasance in public office, breach of fiduciary duties, and breach of procedural fairness. His success was largely due to the existence of colonial documentary evidence that was unusually available, as well as the admission of testimony from Indigenous witnesses and expert socio-legal evidence at trial. The State appealed this decision, with the Supreme Court upholding the trial judge’s findings on all counts except for false imprisonment and breach of fiduciary duty. Justice Kirsten Gray provides a dissenting judgment regarding false imprisonment. The rewritten judgment places Indigenous voices at the centre. In the commentary, Terri Libesman emphasises the importance of the intentional torts in vindicating rights to be free from unlawful interference by the executive, the significance of upholding these rights to protect common law constitutional values, and the institutional and personal responsibilities to reject racist behaviour.