Why Weren't We Told?

Why Weren't We Told? is a companion to the multi-award-winning documentary film Genocide in the Wildflower State. This book offers a deeply moving and disturbing exposé of the often denied and dismissed reality of racist state thinking.

In springtime, stunning wildflowers bloom along roadsides leading to the many church missions and state institutions in Western Australia that once served effectively as concentration camps for thousands of Aboriginal children. Children they called 'half-castes', who were forcibly removed from their parents by the state government under its infamous 1905 Aborigines Act.

These institutions were part of a systematic program of both cultural eradication and 'biological absorption'; aimed at 'breeding out the colour' of our people of mixed descent through reproductive control over several generations. Driven by governments determined to ensure the dominance of the white settler population, the program was imbued with racial theories of eugenics, put into practice in Western Australia even before Nazi Germany, with the aim of achieving a 'White Australia'.

After the Second World War until the early 1970s, thousands more of our children continued to be taken to be forcibly assimilated into white society. A federal inquiry in 1997 called it for what it was—genocide.

Supported by the best social and historical research, Stolen Generations Survivors and their descendants give personal testimony to the untold grief and intergenerational trauma caused by this vast racial system.

Why Weren't We Told? is a companion to the multi-award-winning documentary film Genocide in the Wildflower State and offers a disturbing exposé of the often denied and dismissed reality of racist state thinking, and the resulting misery and hardships our people experience to this day.

It gives voice to Survivors' urgent calls for truth, justice, redress, and healing regarding these grave wrongs.