Never Forgotten Claire G. Coleman I am haunted by a quote; it rattles around in the corners of my mind never leaving and always informing my work. Forgetting where it was from, I searched for documentary evidence of the words. I needed to know it was not a figment of my imagination. One day, I knew, I would need to prove these words were said. Those words appeared, eventually, in Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families 1800 – 2000, by Anna Haebich [Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000]. In 1904 the Traveling Inspector of Aborigines in the Kimberly, James Isdell, said of Aboriginal women whose children had been stolen by the protectors: “they forget their children in 24 hours and as a rule [were] glad to be rid of them”. He was not the only coloniser to harbour such sentiment; similar statements can be found elsewhere by anyone willing to look. Belief that Aboriginal women were bad or careless mothers was used regularly to justify the genocidal policies that led to the stolen generations. Australia does not like thinking of genocide. When we think of genocide our minds go to Nazi Germany, or the Khmer Rouge; faraway places and their war crimes, crimes against humanity by people we can dismiss as “bad”. We do not generally, remember the genocide in Australia, we cannot accept genocide as home grown. When I say “we” here I am referring to the nation of Australia, not me, not other Aboriginal people. Aboriginal people are aware of genocide because we are survivors; and it can be argued that in Western Australia, where I was born, the hammer fell hardest. When I am thinking of genocide my mind goes to A. O. Neville who stole children, who controlled every aspect of my ancestor's lives, who banned Aboriginal people from the city centre of Perth at night for decades; who was “Chief Protector of Aborigines” in Western Australia from 1915 to 1936. It was Aboriginal women who fought to survive, fought to keep culture alive, fought to keep their children. In 2016 the creator of the Aboriginal Flag, Luritja man Harold Thomas, won the National Aboriginal And Torres Strait Islander Art Awards with a work in the style of European History paintings. In Tribal Abduction [2016] the police are tearing a child from his mother's arms as she fights and even bites them in desperation. A nun rushes in to wrap the naked child in a white shroud. Thomas, a descendent of a stolen generation mother and a stolen generation child himself, painted a truth that shows the lie of Idsell's statement in stark relief. In reality oral history tells us of Aboriginal mothers looking for their stolen children all their lives. The wailing of a mother is represented in the song Brown Skin Baby [1970] by Yankunytjatjara man Bob Randall. Randall sings of the eternal mourning of a blak mother whose mixed race brown baby had been taken by the police and the unending trauma of the stolen children. Randall was the brown-skinned baby who never saw his mother again. Singer Shellie Morris, like Bob Randall, grew up away from her Aboriginal family, not having a chance to learn her culture; then sought out her family as an adult. Perhaps her best-known song is Swept Away [2000], a piece of soaring vocal virtuosity, emotionally evoking the moment of returning to Country and lost family. A listener can feel the return to family in the flight of voice; we can be there with Morris as she holds family who have missed her. It is a continuing conceit of Australia that children were taken from their families for what colonial forces believed was “their own good”; and that Aboriginal mothers abandoned children to the authorities. The evidence stands thoroughly against that sentiment. We should never doubt that the stolen generations practices did more harm than good and that mothers, whose children were taken, sought for and mourned their stolen children all their lives. The love of a mother for her child cannot be broken. .