ABSTRACT
In the 1970s, the author interviewed a number of Aboriginal people who had been separated, but the author listened to them as individuals without thinking about the effect on Aboriginality as a whole. In 1980 the author began working on a thesis about the Wiradjuri people of New South Wales and obtained permission to research the records of the Aborigines Protection Board. The first records he examined were those of the State Wards 1916–28, the one-page case summaries of the first 800 Aboriginal children removed from their families after the 1915 amendment to the Aborigines Protection Act which enabled the Protection Board to move against the communities. White people have never been able to leave Aborigines alone. Children particularly have suffered. Missionaries, teachers, government officials, have believed that the best way to make black people behave like white was to get hold of the children who had not yet learned Aboriginal lifeways.
