1st Edition
A Rape of the Soul So Profound The return of the Stolen Generation
A Rape of the Soul So Profound began when a young researcher accidentally came upon restricted files in an archives collection. What he read overturned all his assumptions about an important part of Aboriginal experience and Australia's past. The book ends in the present, 20 years later, in the aftermath of the Royal Commission on the Stolen Generations. Along the way Peter Read investigates how good intentions masked policies with inhuman results. He tells the poignant stories of many individuals, some of whom were forever broken and some who went on to achieve great things. This is a book about much sorrow and occasional madness, about governments who pretended things didn't happen, and about the opportunities offered to right a great wrong.
Acknowledgments
Preface
Prologue: The Stolen Generations: Who are we ?
1.The oral evidence
2.The written evidence
3.The Stolen Generations
4.'Like being born all over again': the establishment of Link-Up
6.At the edge of the firelight: coming home, partly
7.Calling in the accounts
8.Sorry business
9.In the courts: 'In the middle of the ocean, drowning'
Bibliography
Endnotes
Index
Biography
Peter Read coined the phrase 'the stolen generation', first used by him as a title for a magazine article. In 1981 Peter Read helped create Link-up, an organisation to bring Aborigines who had been abducted back to their parents. It went on to become a major force leading to the Stolen Generation enquiry. On the way Peter wrote many influential publications, including The Lost Children (1988), Charles Perkins: A Biography and Lost Places (1997).
