ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that a comparative reading of Stolen Generations and Holocaust memoirs of childhood can generate unique and challenging insights into the complex affective, material and psychological legacies of assimilation of children across racial and ethnic divides. In the Australian context, the maternal trope has been ubiquitous in shaping the cultural memory of the Stolen Generations. While the overwhelming emotional pull of the removal scene is with the mothers and children, it is worth noting that there are two non-Indigenous witnesses in this scene: the depot manager Hungerford, and the fence worker. If the marketing for North American and European audiences rhetorically and visually linked the Stolen Generations to the Holocaust and the global refugee crisis, in Japan the historical and political connotations of the film were downplayed in favour of a sentimental framing. In a context in which healing is largely conceptualised as being reunited with lost family, stories about estranged family relations can be impossible to tell.
