Comments on Profile Post by Thad E Ginathom

They Took The Children Away.

And he taught the world that it happened.

Heck... How many songs get an International Human Rights award!

I can't even think about it with dry eyes.

Sadly, I only heard of him, the song, the history, a few months ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IL_DBNkkcSE

For those unaware, the song is about the Australian govt. policy up to the 1970s of taking indigenous children from their parents, sending them to mission schools, "orphanages" etc., with the aim of destroying indigenous culture.

Still de facto happening today to some extent. Indigenous kids are much more likely to be removed from their families by social services, jailed for juvenile offences etc.

Right. I have thought of it as being "colonial," but I guess Australia would have been long-since independent.

The past has a way of poisoning the present. (And the British monarch is still officially our head of state).

This happened up and down the Americas as well, it’s a function of colonial settler states and eradication of indigenous cultures is an ongoing process in those states.

If not colonial, then colonial legacy, yes.

Back in the 1950s the Brits (I am one) shipped out children from their own orphanages, nominally for adoption, but many of them became cheap labour on farms, etc.

Unmarried mothers risked spending their lives committed to a mental-health "hospital." (Asylum was the term then).

I was born in 1952 to an unmarried mother. I was not privileged to be born into a good, middle class family: I was damned lucky to be adopted by one.