Australian Trials of Trauma: The Stolen Generations in Human Rights, Law, and Literature

In recent years, there have been numerous calls for the field of trauma studies to expand beyond its European and North American origins. It is especially important, as the insights of trauma theory are extended to a wider range of geopolitical sites and conflicts and into resistant fields such as law, that critics attend to the ways in which the discourse of trauma travels, how it is used or resisted in specific national or local contexts, and with what cultural and political effects. To explore these issues, I offer a case study of Australian responses to the Stolen Generations in human rights, law, and literature—fields in which trauma theory has significant purchase. The term "Stolen Generations" refers to children of mixed descent who were removed from their Indigenous mothers and communities with the aim of assimilating them into white Australian culture. Children were sent to institutions run by churches or government missions, where they received limited education and were trained as domestics or station hands. Removal typically curtailed the children's relations with Indigenous family and culture, since they were prevented from speaking their language and participating in cultural traditions. Many children faced difficulties integrating into white Australian society; they and their mothers often experienced lifelong feelings of loss.

In the 1990s, the Stolen Generations became something of a litmus test for how Australia would respond to its postcolonial legacy of violence, trauma, and injustice. As Dominick LaCapra has observed, for nations such as postapartheid South Africa and post-Nazi Germany—and, I would add, post-settler Australia—"the problem for beneficiaries of earlier oppression is how to recognize and mourn the losses of former victims."¹ One of the most significant efforts to acknowledge Indigenous losses was a 1996 national inquiry conducted by the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, which investigated the policies, practices, and effects of child removal from the early twentieth century up until the 1970s. The publication in 1997 of the commission's final report, Bringing Them Home, was a major event in the moral life of the nation, bringing to public attention the nation's record on the treatment of Indigenous people and racial injustice. There followed national and community reconciliation events, such as Sorry Day, Stolen Generations test cases in the courts, and numerous productions in the arts.

From the perspective of the materials I consider, the challenge for trauma scholars today is not only to explore how literature bears witness to trauma. It is also to consider how and when authoritative institutions and players—Indigenous people and their advocates, judges and human rights commissioners, literary authors and the like—knowingly draw on the discourse of trauma to frame events and responses to them. In the first two sections of this article, I analyze the national inquiry and Cubillo v Commonwealth (2000) as cases in which the policy and practice of child removal was on trial. The national inquiry, conceptualized within a human rights framework, interpreted child removal as a traumatic experience that required healing and reparations. By contrast, Cubillo acknowledged the personal suffering of the applicants but denied the case for damages. Cubillo constituted a repetition rather than a resolution of trauma, and left members and supporters of the Stolen Generations feeling deflated. In the third section, I read Gail Jones's novel Sorry, which engages with trauma theory, as a reflection on the failure of the beneficiaries of colonialism to take responsibility for historical injustice. In concluding, I draw on Shoshana Felman and Lauren Berlant's opposing claims about trauma, law, and justice to consider the implications of this interdisciplinary Australian case study for the international field of trauma studies.

In this article, then, trauma theory comes into play both as a discourse to be analyzed for its effects and a tool of analysis. Kirby Farrell, who has pioneered a cultural approach to trauma, notes that when trauma moves out of the clinical domain and into culture its explanatory powers come to the fore.² My analysis of trauma as a discourse is informed by his observation that "whatever the...