ABSTRACT
In the very first year of the colony of New South Wales, in acts that were to symbolise what followed, Arthur Phillip ordered the capture and imprisonment of two Aboriginal people. His motives were complex, but among them was the hope that if these men could be kept separate from their ‘primitive’ society they could be educated and civilised and act as emissaries to black society to bring about its change. For 210 years, Aboriginal children have continued to be removed, in astonishingly large numbers, for similar reasons. This chapter looks at the history of the process of child removal. The separation of Aboriginal children has been justified by mentally labelling them as ‘needing to be separated from their communities’, though which children precisely were in that category varied from one period to another. So a century after the invasion, separations were justified on a second distinction drawn by the categorisers between ‘full blood’ and ‘half-caste’ Aborigines.
