INFOKARA RESEARCH ISSN NO: 1021-9056

Homeless in Homeland: Trauma of the Stolen Generation in Jane Harrison’s Stolen Dr. S. Devika* Abstract European settlement of Australia resulted in large-scale displacement of the original inhabitants, the Aborigines, who were dispossessed of their land, culture, language and means of subsistence, and rendered refugees in their own homeland. In the post-colonial era, Aboriginal writers use the pen as a powerful tool to expose the ravages of colonialism, to lament the decimation of native culture, and to depict the saga of dispossession, displacement and destitution that left a deep scar in the psyche of the natives. Playwrights like Jack Davis, Wesley Enoch, David Milroy, Eva Johnson, Jane Harrison, and others reveal the double edginess of colonialist interventions and represent different aspects of Aboriginal life such as alienation, loneliness and withdrawal in their plays. This paper will analyse Jane Harrison’s play Stolen to discuss the anxieties of displacement, homelessness and abuse of Aboriginal people of mixed race parentage, the Stolen Generation, etched into the text. Keywords: Aboriginality, Jane Harrison, displacement, homelessness, ‘Stolen Generations, The Aborigines who had existed on the Australian continent for several millennia before the advent of Europeans were a composite group distinguished by way of life, customs, rituals, language and religion. Each had its distinct culture and identity, its repository of stories and songs, its peculiar system of faith and beliefs, its way of life circumscribed by topography and climate, and above all, its own unique language and parlance. Following European settlement of Australia, which was “premised on the logic of extermination” and involved “the invasion and dispossession of Indigenous lands and resources, and the permanent removal of Indigenous people from their lands and the extinguishment of their sovereignty, self-determination and culture,” as Patrick Wolfe argues (cited in Haebich 20), there was large-scale displacement of the Aborigines, who were shepherded into camps or reserves or settlements, where they were rendered refugees in their own homeland. In the post-colonial era, contemporary native writers expose the double edginess of colonialist interventions and rewrite the story of European settlement, highlighting the decimation of native culture, the loss of language and identity, and the strategic dispossession, displacement and destitution that brought the natives to their knees. Aboriginal writing calls for a revision of Australian history as well as the notion of what constitutes Australian culture and identity. Playwrights like Jack Davis, Wesley Enoch, David Milroy, Eva Johnson, Jane Harrison, and many others, spurred by the agenda of decolonising the Aboriginal theatre, use the stage as a platform to voice a variety of issues concerning Aboriginal life such as marginalization, alienation, and withdrawal from the mainstream. “The breadth of individual voices represented and expressed within Indigenous Australian playwriting defies any kind of generalisation. They come from all over Australia, from Koori, Murri, Nunga and Noongar writers, from men and women, from urban and rural communities and individuals. Together, they represent the unexpected and intangible elements and variety of contemporary Indigenous Australian cultures” (Casey and Craigie 6). They have been instrumental in raising awareness about issues that affect the life and condition of Aboriginal Australians. Aboriginal people of mixed race parentage, variously and derogatorily labelled ‘half-castes’, ‘crossbreeds’, ‘quadroons’, and ‘octoroons’ constituted the Stolen Generations, so called because they were children forcibly separated from their families by the Australian government and sent to institutions or foster homes in the period between 1910 and 1970. “Families were assessed according by Child Welfare staff accustomed to conventional working class homes, and failure to meet standards could lead to removals. There were instances of officers colluding with hospital staff to force adoptions and taking hospitalised children into state care without consulting their parents” (Haebich 25). According to the report of the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) called Bringing Them Home, “between one in three and one in ten Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families and communities” (cited in Whitlock 198). Peter Read, a key figure in Stolen Generation historiography, estimates that between 50,000 and 100,000 indigenous children were stolen from their families and sent to orphanages or foster care. Narratives of Stolen Generation children are embedded in life writing by Aboriginal women such as Sally Morgan’s My Place, Donna Meehan's It Is No Secret and Rosalie Fraser's Shadow Child: A Memoir of the Stolen Generation, and in works such as Margaret Tucker's If Everyone Cared, Ellie Simon's Through My Eyes, Ida West's Pride Against Prejudice, Evelyn Crawford's Over My Tracks and Doris Pilkington's Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence. Such narratives tend to focus on individual stories, often presented in the form of monologues. All of them “reveal shocking instances of racist oppression and violence, physical and sexual abuse, physical dislocation, loss of language, land and culture” (Schaffer 5-6).

*Asso. Prof. and Head of the PGDepartment of English, HHMSPBNSS College for Women, Neeramankara, Thiruvananthapuram.

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Jane Harrison is an Australian playwright and novelist of indigenous Muruwari descent, whose works focus primarily on Aboriginal life and culture, especially of the Stolen Generation. Her plays such as Stolen, Rainbow’s End, On a Park Bench, Blakvelvet, and The Visitors highlight the issues and concerns of indigenous Australians. Her play Stolen, first performed in 1998 and depicting the traumatic lives of five indigenous people who are representatives of the Stolen Generation, “introduced many non-Indigenous Australians to the impact of the policies of child removal” (Casey and Craigie 4). The central characters narrate the stories of displacement, spiritual homelessness and quest for home that their lives embody. This paper discusses the anxieties of displacement, homelessness and abuse of the Stolen Generation etched into the text of the play. To the colonial settlers, the Aboriginals were savages and their culture, primitive; and Aboriginal families were incapable of bringing up their children to be citizens of modern Australia. Hence, it was imperative to rescue children from their families and put them in institutions or White foster homes to be civilised in the ways of the Whites: The settler society sought “to ‘breed out’ Aboriginal physical and cultural characteristics by isolating ‘lighter-skinned’ children in separate institutions and directing them as young adults to marry partners of like appearance” (Haebich 24). Successive Australian governments went ahead with the plan to separate Aboriginal children, especially half-caste children, from their families in order to sever the children’s connection with their family, culture and land in order to facilitate assimilation, which was the key colonial policy adopted to deal with the Aboriginal populations that survived the genocide in Australia. In Stolen, the central figures Sandy, Ruby, Jimmy, Anne, and Shirley are ‘half castes’ taken from their families and placed in a children’s home, the stage setting of which doubles up, symbolically, as a prison cell too. They move back and forth in time, alternating between past and present, child and adult, in the course of which they tell the story of their ‘stolen’ lives – the story of displacement – steeped in nostalgia, longing for home and family, anger, anxiety, depression, and an all-pervasive sense of hopelessness. For the displaced children, the Cranby Children’s Home is a hazardous space in terms of diet, discipline and, above all, emotional wellbeing. The exchange between two characters is indicative of the rotten state of the institution as a whole: SANDY: Oh. Do ya get more to eat than the rotten food here? JIMMY: Christ, anything’d be better— (6) The policy of assimilation put forward by the Australian government indicates “that all aborigines and part aborigines are expected to eventually attain the same manner of living as other Australians and to live as members of a single Australian community enjoying the same rights and privileges, observing the same customs and influence by the same beliefs, hopes and loyalties as other Australians” (cited in Haebich 24). Assimilation ensured conformity. It promised equality. But in reality, the promised equality remained a dream: “Assimilation did not resolve inequality and injustice but created a new legacy of poverty, welfare, poor health and early deaths that left families still vulnerable to removal of their children” (25). Removing children from their families to be assimilated “cut transmission of knowledge and culture down the generations, and contributed to elimination of local populations by preventing their reproduction” ( 21). Adoption was part of the assimilation agenda of the settler society in Australia. As Swain writes, “In the Stolen Generations narrative, adoption is located most clearly within the discussion of assimilation, the policy that, from the early twentieth century, promoted the absorption of Aboriginal people into the Australian population” (208). Young Aboriginal women were persuaded, compelled, and, even lied to in order to gain their consent to give up their children for adoption. “Young women who had themselves been subject to removal were almost powerless in the face of such pressure” (212). The helplessness and regret of these young women are reflected in Stolen in the words of Shirley, a stolen child who becomes a mother whose children are, in turn, stolen: “I didn’t get the chance to be a mother to Kate and Lionel…and now I’m going to be a grandmother! … But this time, this time... [She wipes away a tear.] This time I’m going to hold my baby and never let her go” (2). Ruby was taken away from her illiterate mother under false pretences to be sent away to a Children’s home: “They made your mum sign a bit of paper…They said that she’d signed you up for adoption” (31). At the home, she is intermittently picked up by White families for a weekend holiday, only to be returned sexually abused and shattered. There was a marked preference among White adoptive parents, who were also stakeholders in the entire process of assimilation through adoption, for a child that could be taken for their own. Hence it was not uncommon to see advertisements seeking “fair, blue- eyed children” for adoption (Swain 206). Harrison alludes to the discriminatory and racist practice of looking for a neat adoption in a poignant scene where children line up before prospective adoptive parents “in the right order of lightest to darkest,” standing “expectantly, straightening their clothes and looking eager” (6). Though Jimmy, who looks for deliverance from the institution, preens himself to become the chosen one, it is Ruby who gets picked because “in the bright light she looks white” (ibid).

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“Assimilation determines conformity to the dominant culture while it erases others (Haebich 21). Hence, adoptive parents, like state-run institutions, raise an Aboriginal child as White. Typically, in Stolen, Anne’s adoptive parents provide her with the best opportunities of the dominant culture: “The day Mum and Dad brought me home they gave me a doll that had white hair” (7). The parents are determined to give her “the best of everything… a good education... A sense of security... And a good upbringing...” (ibid). Yet they reveal their unconscious antipathy towards Aboriginality when they justify to Anne the reason for the non- revelation of her mother’s Aboriginal identity until her teenage: MOTHER: No one need ever know. ANNE: I know. And I want to know why you didn’t tell me about this before. MOTHER: [sobbing] The shame... (14) The process of separation of children from their families was effected by a system that recognized the rights of neither the mothers and the families nor the children themselves. The Welfare Department forcibly took aboriginal children, especially half-castes, from their parents with the much-publicised three- pronged agenda of saving them from doom, converting them into white citizens, and tackling the larger threat to racial stability in settler Australian society. In Stolen, Jimmy’s mother issues a warning, symptomatic of the culture of fear that persuaded Aboriginal families during the period in question: “Be good or the Welfare’ll take you. Don’t hang ’round the streets or the Welfare’ll take you. Don’t get into no trouble or the Welfare’ll take you” (27). The context of Sandy’s capture exposes the devious manner in which the stealing was carried out: Mum didn’t steal it or nothin’ like that—she wasn’t shoved in jail or anything. And it’s not what you’re thinking, she didn’t chuck it at someone and kill ’em… It was just when they finally caught up with us, a can just like this little old one was sitting way at the back of the cupboard—past its use-by date—so they said she was an unfit mother and they took us kids away. All because of a use-by date. The bloody Welfare, who gave us the rotten can in the first place. A can of peas. (20) Harrison thus reiterates the fact that the separation was often enforced on the flimsiest and the most suspect of grounds. Indigenous families fought the authorities in various ways to keep their children, employing “a range of strategies from armed resistance, political negotiation, letter writing and impromptu concealment, sometimes denying their own identity to keep their children safe” (Haebich 22). Sandy’s aunt in Stolen confesses: “Sandy stayed a while with us. The Welfare came one day and I said, ‘Quick! Hide in with Jake!’ So he hid in Jake’s kennel” (4). Jimmy recalls that “If any cars came to the Mish we’d hide like that! [He makes an action to show how quickly they would disappear. He laughs.]” (27). The grief of capture and separation is couched in Jimmy’s blunt words: “… one day I was in the back yard and a police car came and Mum was scream at me to hide, but they took me and Mum was yelling—“ (ibid). Writing letters to the Welfare Department “meant parents could negotiate with authorities in their own words … and they wrote thousands of emotional and often despairing letters seeking the return of their children or even just a scrap of treasured information about them” (Haebich 22). In Stolen, Jimmy’s mother writes, “I am writing again to let you know that we would like our son Willy to come back home now. My husband has a job that’s steady ... I have written to the lady that took Willy, … but she has not replied. It would be good if Willy could come home now, before Christmas” (26). Her letters elicit no response from the authorities, which makes her a representative of thousands of mothers and families whose enquiries are ignored and who live in perpetual agony over the fate of their stolen children. The only instance of a happy ending in the play follows Shirley’s relentless pursuit through persistent telephonic calls about the children separated from her at birth – “After all these years to get used to it, it still hurts” (19) – when she is reunited with her children after twenty seven years. In the absence of a nurturing family and a homeland one can identify with, the Stolen Generation suffer deep trauma. Raphael et al note, “Stressors experienced by these children included intense separation distress; searching behaviours; multiple grief, which was chronic and often unresolvable; emotional and behavioural disturbances in childhood, which arose naturally from their distress; dislocation stressors from loss of home and place; denial and stigmatisation of their Aboriginality and cultural heritage; and loss of identity” (cited in Cunneen and Libesman 8). Nostalgia for home and longing for parents are an important part of the Stolen Generation trauma. According to Shelley Mallett, “the term home functions as a repository for complex, interrelated, and at times contradictory socio-cultural ideas about people's relationship and one another, especially family, and with places, spaces, and things” (cited in Memmott 60). Aboriginal psychologist Joyleen Koolmatrie explains the situation of Stolen Generation persons who have been removed from their families at childhood: “You're been taken away from a place of belonging, a country that's important to you, that's got your dreaming story. That's got your food sources, all your laws in it.... You're taken away from your aunties, your uncles, your nephews your nieces; your grandmothers and grandfathers, great-grandfathers looking traditionally back” (71).

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In Stolen, the spiritual homelessness that resulted from the separation from kith, kin and country, and an insecure lifestyle in various institutions and homes in their formative years is best exemplified in Sandy, who is “always on the run” (4) searching for home, “that bit of red desert” since the age of seventeen: “Never spent Christmas in the same town twice.… thought I’d settle down. Maybe get myself a family... But the coppers moved me on, moved me on” (25-26). The effect of the trauma is evident in the dysfunctional and dispirited state of characters like Ruby and Jimmy who are traumatised by their separation from home. Ruby’s trauma is compounded by violence and sexual abuse in the foster home and outside. The saga of unspoken abuse and exploitation by Whites continues till her descent into insanity. Jimmy is also a victim of abuse. His thoughts, words, feelings and dreams are chockfull of the desire to meet his mother. As the hope of meeting his mother recedes, a sense of emptiness pushes him to become “a thug and a thief” (34) and ultimately drives him to suicide. A phenomenon widely observed in Australia among adopted Aboriginal children raised as Whites is identity crisis resulting from the tension of a vacillating engagement between foster family and Aboriginal family. This dilemma is symbolised in Anne when her Koori family makes a claim on her – “you have to come back to us—it’s where you belong, girl” (28) – and her foster family, that has given her a home, an education and a future, is reluctant to let her go – “Don’t you appreciate all we’ve done?…Are you going to just throw away everything we have taught you?” (ibid). When her allegiance is tested in this manner, she hurls an accusation at the society at large: “You blackfellas … want me to be reunited with my family, learn to love them, andmove back home, all of us living happily ever after…You whitefellas want my adopted parents to become loving and tolerant of my black family and invite them around…What about me? What do I want? I don’t know. I don’t know where I belong anymore” (34). At this juncture, Anne’s becomes the voice of the confused Stolen Generation, torn between birth parents and adoptive ones, the past and the present, and indigenous and non-indigenous identity, and ironically, traumatised by a sense of disconnect with both. Thus, Aboriginal playwright Jane Harrison in her work Stolen, published a year after the controversial Bring Them Home report, substantiates the testimonials and narratives in the report through the lives of the five central characters, Jimmy, Shirley, Sandy, Ruby and Anne who, in varying degrees, undergo the horrors of displacement following separation from family during childhood, institutionalisation, abuse, ill-treatment, violence, trauma, loneliness, alienation, despondency, behavioural problems and dysfunctionality. Attribution of criminality, marginalisation, rejection and social stigmatisation are the lot of those who fail to erase traces of Aboriginality. Yet, the play ends on a positive note with Shirley’s words that “Tamara has a mother and a grandmother. And that’s all that matters” (35) and Sandy’s cry of jubilation, “I don’t have to hide. I’m going—home. And I’m gonna catch that fish!” (36). As yet another instance of revisionist rewriting of colonial interventions, the play enjoys a significant place in Postcolonial Studies vis- à-vis indigenous writings that have emerged from Australia. Reference [1] Casey, Maryrose and Cathy Craigie. A Brief History of Indigenous Australian Contemporary Theatre. Australian Script Centre, 2011. https://australianplays.org//BlakStage_Essay _ ABriefHistory_DUPL_1.pdf. Accessed 12 Oct. 2019. [2] Cunneen, Chris andTerry Libesman. “Removed and Discarded: The Contemporary Legacy of the Stolen Generations.” Australian Indigenous Law Reporter, Vol. 7, No. 4 (2002), pp. 1-20. Jstor.org. Accessed 06 Oct. 2019. [3] Haebich, Anna. “Neoliberalism, Settler Colonialism and the History of Indigenous Child Removal in Australia.” Australian Indigenous Law Review , Vol. 19, No. 1, Thematic Edition: Indigenous Children’s Wellbeing (2015/2016), pp. 20-31. Jstor.org. Accessed 02 Oct. 2019. [4] Harrison, Jane. Stolen. Currency Press, 2006. [5] Memmott, Paul. “Differing Relations to Tradition amongst Australian Indigenous Homeless People.” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, Vol. 26, No. 2 (SPRING 2015), pp. 58-72. Jstor.org. Accessed 04 Oct. 2019. [6] Schaffer, Kay. “Stolen Generation Narratives in Local and Global Contexts.” Antipodes, Vol. 16, No. 1 (June 2002), pp. 5-10. Jstor.org. Accessed 14 Oct. 2019. [7] Swain, Shurlee. “‘Homes Are Sought for These Children’: Locating Adoption within the Australian Stolen Generations Narrative.” American Indian Quarterly , Vol. 37, No. 1-2, Special Issue: Native Adoption in Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia (Winter/Spring 2013), pp. 203-217. Jstor.org. Accessed 11 Oct. 2019. [8] Whitlock, Gillian. “In the Second Person: Narrative Transactions in Stolen Generation Testimony.” Biography, Vol. 24, No. 1, Autobiography and Changing Identities (winter 2001), pp. 197-214. Jstor.org. Accessed 08 Oct. 2019.

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