WA Takes a Step Forward on the Long Way Home for Stolen Generations
In this Revive feature story, Uniting Church members of the Bringing Them Home WA committee shine a light on the recent announcement by the WA State Government to introduce a Stolen Generations Redress scheme, what it means for survivors and their families, and how the Uniting Church community can continue to support First Nations justice.
Article by Dr Alison Atkinson-Phillips, Rev Mitchell Garlett and Geoff Bice first published in the August 2025 edition of Revive magazine.
On Monday 26 May 2025, representatives of Yokai – Healing our Spirit, were scheduled to meet with Premier Roger Cook. The meeting was in the afternoon, following the traditional Sorry Day event at Wellington Square, where survivors, their families and friends, and many non-Aboriginal people come together to acknowledge the pain and suffering caused by policies of child removal. The morning was filled with yarning and listening to the stories of Stolen Generations survivors, and silence, to remember those who have passed away since the previous year’s gathering.
At that meeting, Yokai learnt that a Stolen Generations redress scheme would be announced by the Premier at the Reconciliation Breakfast the next day. The following afternoon, they and other representatives of the Stolen Generations stood alongside the Premier as he held a press conference, explaining to the rest of Western Australia what he had told them just the day before: that Aboriginal people who had been removed from their parents before July 1972, and who were still alive on the day of the announcement, would each be eligible for a payment of $85,000.
The announcement comes after more than 28 years of advocacy and activism led by Aboriginal people, and is a very belated response to Recommendations 3 and 14 of Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Forced Removal of Aboriginal Children from their Parents, tabled in Federal Parliament 26 May 1997. For some, this has been the fight of their lifetime. The Premier recognised that no amount of money would ever be enough (although the same amount 25 years ago would have been better!), but for most Stolen Generations survivors, the money represents concrete recognition of past wrongs, and offers a moment when we as a society and a church can move to the next steps of reparations and righting the wrongs of the past for a better tomorrow.
Yokai: Healing our Spirit is the trading name for the member-led organisation WA Stolen Generations Aboriginal Corporation, founded in 2016, which developed out of and now works in partnership with Bringing Them Home WA (BTH WA), founded in 2001. While Yokai now has a paid CEO and some operational staff, for many years these organisations have operated on the ‘smell of an oily rag’, with a lot of volunteer effort and a little bit of in-kind support from organisations like the Uniting Church, which provided secretarial support to Bringing Them Home WA from 2001 until 2022.
The WA Government’s redress commitment is a significant win for Stolen Generations survivors that brings some real-world assistance and meaningful acknowledgement of a lifetime of pain and suffering. It is a hard fought win that should be celebrated. However, it is sadly too late for many who have already passed and has raised many questions over how the remit of the package was decided upon.
Unfortunately, the announcement follows a now familiar pattern of Government action without proper consultation. Yokai is one of only a very small number of organisations in WA that are equipped to support Stolen Generations survivors, and continues to be under-staffed and under-funded. By agreeing to stand alongside the Premier during that announcement, Aboriginal members of Yokai and BTH WA immediately made themselves visible endorsers of the Government’s announcement and were perceived as being involved in the process. Sadly this was far from the case and has led to a deluge of phone calls from their community, who expected them to be able to answer questions about what was happening. The reality was that the announcement came without much of a follow-up plan.
Most distressing for survivors and families are the limitations around who is eligible. While it is good that living survivors are prioritised, Aboriginal child removal affected almost every family in this state.
Only about 4,000 living survivors will receive the compensation, but 50% of Aboriginal people in WA are descended from Stolen Generations. Child removal was only one part of the Aborigines Protection Act policies that denied Aboriginal people the ability to own property and build wealth on their own land. $85,000 is not a big amount of money, but it might be enough to support children or grandchildren of Stolen people to put down a deposit on a home, giving them access to intergenerational wealth, rather than intergenerational poverty.
Noting that Recommendation 4 of the Bringing Them Home Report states that, “reparation be made to all who suffered because of forcible removal policies including:
- individuals who were forcibly removed as children,
- family members who suffered as a result of their removal,
- communities which, as a result of the forcible removal of children, suffered cultural and community disintegration, and
- descendants of those forcibly removed who, as a result, have been deprived of community ties, culture and language, and links with and entitlements to their traditional land.”
The aspect of the announcement that has drawn most criticism from Aboriginal people is the cut-off date. 1972 is the date the legislation to allow child removal was repealed in State Parliament, but policy change does not immediately translate to changes on the ground, and many people removed after that date lived alongside those removed beforehand well into the 1980s. The stated reasons for child removal may have been changed but Aboriginal children were still taken to the same places, run by the same people, and treated the same way – denied their families, culture, language and Country. For example, Tony Hansen, co-chair of BTH WA was removed as a toddler in the early 1970s (but before 1972) and sent to Marribank Mission, near Katanning. He did not return to his family until he was 16. While he is one of those removed within the Redress scheme dates, many of his Mission brothers and sisters are not.
The Uniting Church has an uneasy involvement in this story. While we like to remember that our former Moderator and national President, Sir Ron Wilson, was one of the co-authors of Bringing Them Home (and a founding member of BTH WA), what is less comfortable is the knowledge of our involvement in child removal policies. This included running sites like the Mogumber Mission and Sister Kate’s Home where stolen children were taken.
In 1997 the National Assembly of the Uniting Church apologised for their role in the removal of children, and in 2007, the land at Treasure Road, previously the site of Sister Kate’s Home, was handed over by the WA Synod – partly to a survivor group and partly to the Uniting Aboriginal & Islander Christian Congress WA, beginning the journey of what is now Beananging Kwuurt Institute – named to mean “new dawn, new heart”. This handing back of land is one of the key recommendations of Bringing Them Home, but like the apology and the redress payments it is only part of the picture.
Over the past decade, the Uniting Church has also been required to make payments to individuals who were subject to specific abuses during their time in our care, following on from the recommendation of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. It is important to recognise that these payments to people who suffered in ‘care’ are very separate from the newly announced Stolen Generations redress scheme, which recognises the social and cultural harms and trauma done by child removal, not the specific abuse experienced while people were in childhood institutions or ‘missions’.
Aboriginal people know all too well that Government is not going to make everything right; it’s up to us as a church and community to do what we can.
All the writers of this article are members of the Bringing Them Home WA Committee, and all of us do this at least partly on behalf of the Uniting Church. Geoff began his involvement as Secretary on behalf of the Social Justice Unit, following on a long tradition going back to Barry Preece in the early 2000s, and now continues that role as a volunteer. Ali re-joined the committee in October last year as Deputy Chair, taking up the baton from Rosemary Hudson Miller who had supported BTH WA in a range of ways since its inception. Mitchell represents Congress on the committee, and regularly offers Welcome to Country at Bringing Them Home WA or Yokai events, a role he is culturally authorised to do despite his relative youth.
However, having three people represent the church on BTH WA Committee is not the answer to ‘what can the church do’. While there are many people across the Uniting Church who remain very involved in supporting First Nations justice issues, the need for change is still pressing and the understanding across congregations remains limited. Redress for Stolen Generations survivors is only a small part of dealing with the impacts of colonisation and our Covenanting commitment as a Church calls us to prioritise our shared journey for a better tomorrow for all First Nations people.
What can Uniting Church members do?
- Congregations can support Congress and Beananging Kwuurt Institute (BKI) as part of Covenanting.
- All congregations can develop their own Covenanting Action Plan, using the guide available from unitingchurchwa.org.au/social-justice/first-peoples/
- Individual members and Congregations as communities can educate themselves more about the Stolen Generations – the Bringing Them Home report is still available to read online, and the Healing Foundation has many resources.
- 94% of the 56 Recommendations of Bringing Them Home remain unfulfilled. Write to your local politician and ask them why.
- Genocide in the Wildflower State, a documentary produced by Yokai, will soon be available to stream online via SBS On Demand. Please consider making a donation to Yokai or to BKI if your congregation holds their own screening.
