It’s not often you get to give bear hugs to the wife of the Prime Minister, but Therese Rein must have been black and blue yesterday, receiving the thanks of indigenous elders at the launch of a book about the Stolen Generations.
Hundreds of people turned up in the pouring rain to the Redfern Community Centre, inside the infamous Block, to hear Ms Rein and Bill Simon launch his book, Back on the Block.
Bill lived at the Kinchela Boys Home in regional NSW for eight years after he and his two brothers, David and Murray, were ripped out of his mothers arms in 1957, when he was only 10 years old. At the launch, he read from the scene describing the day the police came to take them away, bringing the audience to tears.
Ms Rein described the book as searing and very hard to read.
“He reflects at the beginning just how hard it was to tell this story and have it recorded. Bill’s story is one that must be told and retold so that we don’t forget.”
The boys’ treatment was “distressing, disturbing, frightening, unjust and enraging. The shock, the bewilderment and the terror of the children, of the babies, is palpable,” she continued, her voice quavering.
“The helplessness of his mum as the children were taken away is just appalling. It makes my heart weep and I’m sure it made her heart weep.”
However, the book also contains “a message of hope, reconciliation and redemption” as Bill reached a turning point in his life, she said.
Bill Simon spoke eloquently about his life, saying that “my story is for the brothers and sisters of the stolen generation to help them heal and (for non-indigenous people) to help them understand their own history. Thank God for the blessings on my life, and thank you Therese for making this a deadly launch!”
Although Ms Rein’s pre-Kiliminjaro fitness program is strictly off-limits to the fourth estate, Crikey can exclusively reveal that she looked fantastic in a black top and skirt, set off with rather foxy black suede boots.
At the end, the local indigenous a cappella group Mirror Child sang a song about the day of the apology to the Stolen Generation. It started with the line “Thank God for Prime Minister Rudd” with a chorus of “Moving Forward”, sung about twenty times, which made me think they were a dead cert for the PM’s Christmas party this year. Rousing a cappella choruses of “working families” and “education revolution” would probably go down a treat, followed up with a sing-along “shake of the sauce bottle.”
I hung around trying to interview Ms Rein at the end, but she was involved in a sort of all-in scrum of thanks and reconciliation that had a minder hovering nearby to ensure no actual bones were broken. “Gee, you wouldn’t see Janette Howard doing that, would you?” one observer noted; on that uncharitable note, we departed. Moving Forward.
You wouldn’t have got Mrs Bucket within kilometres of such a gathering…Kirribilli, chardonay, cannapes and little finger at appropriate angle thankyou very much for the former PM’s wife. Wonder if she is knocking out a batch of scones for Johnnie in their retirement.
The thing is that NSW DoCS is continuing to take children away from their parents on the hint of a whiff of suspicion these days, due to craven fear of a negative headline in the Daily Tele. DoCS and the entire ‘child protection’ court system are known in child protection circles as being devoid of logic and deeply and hypocritically inconsistent in their judgements from case to case, taking great pains with trivial cases while letting much more severe cases go unchecked in the community. The cases in front of DoCS that they know about and the social profile of abuse, neglect and risk of harm that is taking place in communities are almost completely disjunctive sets.
They frequently void their own legislative precept, supposedly enshrined in the Act, of removing children as an option of last resort, often making it the option of first resort. Placing children at least with other family members as recommended in the Act becomes immaterial. They still show up at households at 2 am with the police in tow to remove children from their families or familial foster carers. Scratch the surface and listen to some of the unhappy ‘clients’ of DoCS and you start to get a very disturbing picture of Kafkaesque state interference indeed.
It makes the heartwarming event described above rather pointless. Somewhat artless and trusting indigenous people have been used for political end again.