Dear Andrew,

Yesterday I
promised to send you some of the names of the “half caste” children who were
removed to Yarrabah and to Mapoon by Walter Roth, the Queensland Protector. As
I pointed out to you, the children were generally given only “Christian” names
by the colonial authorities. Here’s a sample:

1901: “Ivy”(8), “Willie”
(11), Walter (7), “Arthur” (4), “Maria”
(13), “Norman Carr” (quadroon, between 2 and 3), “Edie” (10), “Carrie” (6),
“Nora Mackenzie” (4), “Annie” (10), “Minnie Cooma” (12), “several children of
various ages, dependants of Underwood “, “Annie Noble” (14), “Nellie” (10), “Mary”, “Mabel” and “Daisy”,
“Lucy” (10), “Rosie (8).

1902: “A little aboriginal
girl” (4); “Harry Brown” (12); “Dolly” (about 13); “Dora” (about 10); “Lily”
(5); “Flora” (about 8); “Lucy” (11); “Lucy” (12); “Rosie Murray” (about 10);
“Lena” (age not stated); “Paddy” (about 7); “Lily” (5); “Jessie” (6); “Sammy
Mathers (about 5); “Harry” (12); “Ida”
(about 7); “Rosie” (6).

1903: “Billie”, “Norman”,
“Topsy” and “Nancy” “four little half-caste children in the blacks’ camp”;
“Topsy” (about 8); “Archie” (13); “Maud” (5 or 6); “Maudie” (10); “Jessie”
(half-caste little girl”); “Charlie Coates”; “Jock” (4 or 5); “Ada Lyall” (11
or 12) ; “Maggie” (8 or 10); “Walter” (about 14—he’s the case I wrote about in
the Quarterly Essay); “Martin” (4); “Minnie” (about 9); “Topsy” (about 6);
“Daisy (about 13); “Lucy”, “Georgie” and “Lucy”
from Tate; “Rosie” (about 10) and a boy “Davey” from Rifle Creek.

The list goes on
and on for later years. I’ll stop at
this point. If you want to find more of
the same, all you have to do is to find the printed parliamentary papers for Queensland, available at
the Borchardt Library at La Trobe
University and in the Victorian State Library,
I would think.

You say in the Herald Sun that these are names I’ve
“now found”. Another untruth. For several years I’ve had the names of many of the children sent
to the mission stations of Queensland and to
the “half caste” homes in the Northern
Territory and Western Australia. Indeed
I offered to send to send a sample of these names to Peter Blunden in an email
on 1 November 2004 after one of your many attacks (where you said that I could
name only two stolen children!). He didn’t respond.

Peter Read has
seen the files of 5000 stolen children in New South Wales, many of whom were
despatched to the Kinchela and Colebrook
homes. (See his Rape of the Soul So Profound.) These files have been closed to researchers in recent years. As
you are aware, more than 500 removed Aboriginal children gave evidence to the
HREOC inquiry. They gave evidence on condition they their names were withheld.
In his book, The Lost Children, Peter
Read interviewed thirteen removed indigenous children. You can find their names
if you bother to read that book. Similarly, about half of the indigenous men who
committed suicide in prison whose cases were investigated by the Deaths in
Custody Royal Commission had been removed from their parents. Their names are
available to someone who wants to know. So are the names of some of the removed
children who gave testimony to the Federal Government-funded Oral History
project, which led to the book, Many
Voices. There are now quite a number of books written by stolen Aboriginal
children, like Margaret Tucker’s If
Everyone Cared, Rosalie Fraser’s Shadow
Lives and John Moriarty’s Saltwater
Fella.

By the way, if
you’re interested in the question of the number of removals, the ABS study I
mentioned on radio is called the National
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Survey
(1994). On the basis of this survey
Ron Brunton acknowledged that 12,500 removals had taken place. His figure did
not take into account Aboriginal children removed since 1900 who had died
before the 1994 survey.

Yours sincerely,

Robert Manne

This letter has been edited to comply with our word limit but Manne’s full response is on the Crikey website.