“Uncle Larry Walsh was two-and-a-half years old when he was taken. A toddler standing before a magistrate, made a criminal before he had even learned to speak his own name.
A child marked by the law, sentenced to a life without family, without the certainty of knowing where he belonged.
He recalled the day his life was changed: on 24 May 1956, while his mother was in hospital giving birth to his younger brother, he and his two sisters were taken from their home. Later, he learned that authorities had come and taken not only them, but a group of other children-all at once, like a sweep. As Melbourne prepared for its glittering turn in the spotlight as the host city of the Olympics, children were being snatched with impunity from loving families. Their stories would remain largely unheard for decades.”

@bookstodon #Australia #Victoria

“To this very day, not one law enforcement official has been charged over the death of an Aboriginal person. The colony started as it meant to go on.
This was how control was maintained. Not just by the mounted police or the gun, but by the quiet, bureaucratic sanctioning of violence.
A poisoned meal, a raid at dawn, a report filed away whose careful phrasing obfuscated the reality. Aboriginal lives were statistics; their deaths inconveniences noted in passing. The colony moved forward, indifferent to the blood that greased its wheels.
In the twenty-four years since Henty and Batman had staked their respective claims on Gunditjmara and Kulin land, so much had changed. By the time of the colony's founding as Victoria in 1851, its First Peoples numbered just 2,000, their population having been 15,000 at the point of contact in 1834.”

@bookstodon #Australia #Victoria