Perhaps the proposed Indigenous Voice to Parliament would be a less divisive issue if the dark tales of WA’s institutionalised children were better understood.
The short film A Crying Shame adds to the harrowing testimonies of neglect and abuse perpetrated on First Nations children who were ripped from their families between 1910 and the 1970s.
For the first time, five survivors of abuse at Sister Kate’s Aboriginal Home in Western Australia reveal what happened there.
Produced and directed by Murdoch University filmmaker Dr Glen Stasiuk, the film weaves together the stories of Aboriginal children that grow up at the Anglican institution in Perth’s southeast. The children at Sister Kate Clutterbuck’s Queen’s Park home were put there from 1933 because they had light skin, deemed “half-caste” by WA’s Native Welfare authorities who wanted to “breed out the black”. Back then, WA legislation allowed for some of the worst intervention into Aboriginal families in the nation.
Through theatre, poetry and storytelling, the survivors explain how they were stolen, lied to about being abandoned and kept from family. The abuse was pernicious and its legacy passes still down the generations.
This lasting fallout is one of the reasons why WA still has the nation’s highest rate of Indigenous incarceration.
In 2020, 74 per cent of inmates at WA’s only children’s jail – Banksia Hill Juvenile Detention Centre – were Aboriginal youth, according to state government figures.
Poignantly, this film comes in the wake of riots at Banksia Hill in May, in which dozens of children sparked a 12-hour standoff with armed officers while trying to escape. As a result, 17 youths were controversially transferred to a maximum-security prison on Perth’s fringe. Banksia Hill Detention Centre has been described as filthy, overrun and in actue crisis by the state’s Inspector of Custodial Services, Eamon Ryan.
A Crying Shame is one of four films in Murdoch University’s Kambarang Indigenous Film Festival on October 12. It also features documentaries about the men and boys who were held prisoner at Wadjemup, or Rottnest Island – now more widely known as a holiday resort off Perth’s coast.
The event includes the musical video Risen, which was a project from Sister Kate’s Home Kids Aboriginal Corporation. The corporation is now a place for healing and remembrance for the kids that grew up in the home and other Stolen Generation groups.
Another of the films, Survivors of Wadjemup has this week been nominated as a finalist in the 2023 Australian Independent Film Festival, while the other short films are up for awards at home and abroad.
This festival is a much-needed platform for Aboriginal truth-telling. Just two days later, Australians will vote in the referendum on whether to enshrine an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament in the constitution.
The Voice would give Indigenous people a way to advise the government on laws and policies that affect their communities.
It’s hard to think of a more shameful episode of misguided policy than what happened to the Stolen Generations. If there had been an Indigenous voice in Parliament at that time, this brutal history may have been different.
Films like A Crying Shame, Risen and The Survivors of Wadjemup allow First Nations People to tell their truth and be heard. It is up to all of us to listen.
