Schools must mend fences (on left wing brainwashing of children)

I AM often asked to talk at schools and almost always ask students three questions about a film that lies about the "stolen generations".

Second: "Have you been shown the movie as a great piece of film-making, or as a history lesson?"

Answer: in every case as history. You know, like you learn America's history from John Wayne movies.

And third: "How many of you have checked whether the film is actually true, by, say, reading the book on which it's based?"

And that alone is reason enough for me to agree with historian Keith Windschuttle, who this week called for Rabbit-Proof Fence to be banned from our schools for being "grossly inaccurate".

Lies are being taught as truth, and until the teachers know the difference, it's mischievous and damaging to so deceive young children about their country's past.

No, he doesn't want the book banned.

He wants schools to stop showing the movie to children and telling them it's a true story.

As the movie is significantly different from the book changing quite a few details to make the actions of the people involved seem far worse than they were, it's hard to see how the film can be portrayed as a true story - even if the book is accurate (and while there are some doubts about some details in the book, it seems to be pretty close to the historical record - close enough that any differences can be explained as simple errors caused by the passage of time, rather than being a deliberate attempt to mislead.)

Why does it matter? If you were an Australian conservative you wouldn't need to ask that question - over the last twenty or so years, there has been a concerted effort by the Australian left wing to rewrite Australian history to portray European settlement in the worst possible light. One of the common claims made is to allege that there was a deliberate genocide against the indigenous population. Claims of massacres that never happened, for example.

There were some atrocities, and there was definitely institutional racism at work at times. Many wrongs were done to indigenous Australians. But it was not as bad as these revisionists seek to make out for their own political reasons.

One of the biggest lies is the claim that is referred to as the 'Stolen Generation' - that supposedly 100,000 aboriginal children were taken away from their families simply so the government could try to destroy indigenous culture. This simply did not happen - there probably were some cases where that did occur, but the numbers were much smaller. There were other cases where children were taken away, but they were taken away because they were being abused or neglected, not because they were black.

None of the black armband brigade who claim 100,000 aboriginal children were taken, can name more than a handful of cases.

I was orphaned when I was nine years old and wound up as a ward of the state. I wound up being sent to boarding school - to the school generally regarded as the best school in Australia (Prince Charles started there at the same time I did, sent over by his parents to complete his schooling in Australia). There were two aboriginal boys at the school with me at the same time for the same reason. Both of them get called members of the Stolen Generation - they were given a high quality education at the nation's best school, rather than being left to fend for themselves in a bush camp... and this is a bad thing?

Why does it matter? Well, part of the reason it matters is because there are genuine injustices against Aboriginal Australians. Those living out in the bush of the Northern Territory and Western Australia especially are living in communities of abject poverty, where alcohol abuse is virtually universal and neglect and sexual abuse of children is commonplace. Schools like mine (the one I attended, and the one I teach at now) are willing to help try and correct this for future generations by offering full boarding scholarships (at $40,000 a year or thereabouts) to take some of these children out of those hellish environments and give them the best education available - an education most Australian families would love to be able to afford for their children. But when we make the offer, we get accused of "trying to create a new Stolen Generation." Some parents accept it - but when they do, they often find themselves being isolated from their own community as traitors - traitors for trying to get their kids educated, so they don't have to live in a tin humpy off the government dole like mum and dad do.

Aboriginal girls who are being sexually abused are being left in the care of their abusers because "we don't want to steal any more children." This stolen generation myth is killing aboriginal kids today. Right now. And leaving many more in hellish conditions.

There are plenty of decent indigenous families whose kids are loved, cared for, and perfectly fine where they are. But there's a lot that aren't - and part of that is because historically, Australia screwed up and didn't treat these people they should have been treated, didn't let them vote, didn't treat them as human until 1967. Indigenous Australians have every right to have real anger against some of the stuff that was done to them. But we want to fix it, and lies like Rabbit-Proof Fence are stopping us from doing it.

The book is probably pretty accurate. The film doesn't match the book. If the book is a true story, the film can't be.

Yet, I'd say at least 95% of Australian secondary school kids have been shown it at school over the last five years and been told by their teachers - "This is a true story."

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