Why Weren't We Told?

A companion to the multi-award-winning documentary film Genocide in the Wildflower State, this book offers a deeply moving and disturbing expose of the often denied and dismissed reality of racist state thinkingIn springtime stunning wildflowers bloom along roadsides leading to the many Native Missions and State institutions in Western Australia that once served effectively as concentration camps for thousands of Aboriginal children they called half-castes who were forcibly removed from their parents by the state government under its infamous 1905 Aborigines Act.These were places used for systematic programs of biological absorption, for breeding out the colour of our people of mixed descent. At the root of these practices and policies were racial theories of eugenics, carried out in Western Australia well before Nazi Germany. They aimed to achieve a White Australia.After World War 2 until the early 1970s, thousands more of our children continued to be taken to be forcibly assimilated into white settler society. A federal inquiry in 1997 called it for what it was genocide.In this book, supported by the best historical research, Stolen Generations Survivors and their descendants give personal testimony to the untold grief and intergenerational trauma caused by this vast racial system.A companion to the multi-award-winning documentary film Genocide in the Wildflower State, this book offers a deeply moving and disturbing expose of the often denied and dismissed reality of racist state thinking, and the resulting misery families experience today. It gives voice to Survivors urgent calls for redress and compensation for these grave wrongs.