Australia to formally apologize to Aborigines

Aboriginal leaders generally welcomed Wednesday’s pledge to issue a formal apology.

“Older people thought they would never live to see this day,” said Christine King, whose group the Stolen Generations Alliance was consulted by the government about the apology.

Others still want compensation. Michael Mansell of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Center wants the government to set aside $882 million for compensation.

Russell grew up in Sydney with parents of Scottish and Irish backgrounds. She says her father beat her and sexually abused her. Russell’s mother once scolded her for bringing an Aboriginal girl home to play, calling them “dirty” people.

She recalls having vivid dreams of an Aboriginal woman who sat on a rock and said, “Come back to your culture.” Confused by the dream then, she now believes it was her ancestors beckoning her.

For Russell, the first hard evidence that she was adopted came after her mother died in 1959 and her aunt sent a letter saying she did not belong in the family and was no longer welcome.

She began scouring hospital records, birth and marriage registries and even shipping logs to try to discover her true identity, but clues were few.

Change in adoption law opened records
In the mid-1990s, changes to the law made it easier for adopted children to access birth records and Russell discovered her true heritage: She was born to a 13-year-old Aboriginal girl named Joyce Russell, from whose arms she was taken on the day of her birth on Sept. 4, 1935.

A group called Link-Up, established to reunite families of the stolen generations, helped Russell trace her birth mother to a nursing home in Easton, Pa., and a nervous reunion between mother and daughter was finally arranged in 2001.

“I was trying to be really strong and not cry,” Russell recalled. “It was a bit of a shock when they brought her up because the resemblance between me and her was really strong. She kept grabbing my hand, she kept walking with me everywhere. She wouldn’t let me out of her sight.”

At first the elderly woman didn’t realize who the younger woman was, and welfare workers asked gently probing questions to try to prompt her memory, mentioning Mari Russell’s birth date and the hospital she was born in.

“She started crying, and then she got so angry and she was sobbing,” Russell said. “She said ‘I had a baby girl and they took her away from me. Why did they do that? Why did they do that?”’

“I said to her, ‘It’s OK mum, I’m that little girl.”’

Russell spent two weeks with her mother in Pennsylvania. Joyce Russell died last month at the age of 84, and her daughter was bringing her ashes home for burial.

For Russell, the apology is a positive step but will never replace what she and so many others lost.

“We missed out on our culture, our language, our history,” she said. “You can never get back those lost years, you just can’t.”

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