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253 chapter 8 Historical Reckoning with Indigenous Child Removal in Settler Colonial Nations Residents of the small city of Melbourne, Florida, woke on Thanksgiving Day 1988 to discover that a grisly murder had occurred in their midst. An assailant had brutally raped and strangled Barbara Ann Barber, a successful interior decorator, in a back alley. Three days later police captured her alleged killer, James Savage, a twenty-six-year-old Australian Aboriginal homeless man who had spent nine out of the last ten years in American juvenile detention centers and jails for crimes ranging from armed robbery to sexual assault to car theft.¹ The crime horrified the central Florida town as well as the Australians who learned of Savage’s background in August 1989. Savage had been born to fourteen-year-old Beverley Moore, an Aboriginal woman who had grown up in Deniliquin on the New South Wales border with Victoria, not far from the homeplace of Margaret Tucker and her family. Beverley Moore was part of a community of about one hundred Aboriginal people who had fled the government-controlled mission near town and built a village of tin huts on the Edward River. She and the other children called themselves “river rats.” When she was just thirteen , Moore had become lovers with Frank Whyman, another river rat, and soon she was pregnant. Her grandmother, from Swan Hill, Victoria, insisted that she have the child at a Salvation Army hostel for unwed mothers in North Fitzroy, an inner-city suburb of Melbourne, near where Mollie Dyer and other activists would start the Aboriginal Child Care Agency a little more than a decade later. Moore named her son Russell and hoped to raise him herself, but the Aborigines Welfare Board removed Russell just four days after his birth and placed him with Reverend Graeme and Nesta Savage, a white missionary 254 | historical reckoning with indigenous child removal couple. Board authorities then applied unrelenting pressure on Moore to give her son up for adoption. She finally signed adoption consent forms about two weeks after Russell’s birth. Within two more weeks, however, she regretted her decision and took steps to revoke her consent, which adoption laws permitted. The board, however, threatened “that if she persisted she might, as a minor, face police action because she was in a sexual relationship” with Russell’s father.They warned her that they might take her four brothers and sisters from their family and place them for adoption if she insisted on keeping her son. “Blackmailed” by authorities, as she put it, Moore reluctantly withdrew her revocation of the adoption consent. She later had four more children with Whyman, and the couple legally married in 1971.² The Savages formally adopted Russell, renamed him James Hudson (after a nineteenth-century English missionary in China), and moved on to a variety of missionary postings, from Western Australia to California and then to Florida. Up to his adolescence, the Savages regarded their adopted son as a “perfectly normal child.” But Savage experienced intense problems soon after the family moved to Florida when he was eleven. He longed to know about his heritage and birth family at the same time as he experienced acute racial prejudice at school, in church, and even, allegedly, within his own home from his adopted father. At fifteen Savage started drinking and committing crimes, landing him in various institutions for the next ten years of his life. By his late teens, Savage “had no place to call home. He lived under bridges, in deserted buildings and houses and would break into other houses just to find food, clothing and any money that would help him to ‘survive.’” By the time he was twenty his adoptive parents had returned to Australia without him.³ Authorities wrote up a dozen disciplinary reports against Savage while he was incarcerated, and when he became an adult they transferred him to a maximum-security prison, where he spent several months under twentyfour -hour lockdown in solitary confinement. In 1988 he attempted suicide in prison and landed in the psychiatric wing for four months. There he told a doctor “he was rejected all his life. His adoptive parents rejected him. . . . He never had a satisfactory relationship with a single human being.”⁴ Later that year the state of Florida reduced Savage’s sentence by 233 days and released him as part of an effort to reduce overcrowding in the state’s prisons. [3.149.243.32] Project MUSE (2024...

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