Aboriginal truths
From Mr Bob Ellis Sir: Michael Duffy (The world's next white pariah', 15 April) saying that 'only' ten per cent of Aboriginal children were forcibly separated from their parents is like me say- ing that 'only' 0.04 per cent of Australians born since 1890 died at Gallipoli and that the Gallipoli 'generation', the Anzac 'gen- eration', was therefore a very tiny one and undeserving of too many of our tears or of a special holiday of marching and remem- brance. The ten per cent figure may be numerically correct, but to every child you must add a mother, a grandmother, an aun- tie, an uncle and a sibling anguished and weeping; you pretty soon find that 30 per cent of all Aborigines were traumatised by a policy of legal kidnapping and 95 per cent shocked and terrified by it.
The question then arises: ten per cent of whom? Of all Aborigines born before 1972 when the forced separations had ceased? Or has he included those born since? Of course he has. For, if he hadn't, the number of children taken when the policy was in force would then climb (even in his dodgy figures) to 20 per cent and the number of directly traumatised family members to 60 per cent; a tidy few, some tens of thousands of disrupted families, and that would ill serve his ugly, noisome argument that peo- ple as poor and few as this don't matter.
Bob Ellis
Palm Beach, New South Wales, Australia
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