Lisa Hill has an amazing blog promoting Australian literature. She ensures many voices are heard especially those of Aboriginal authors, also books that throw light on Australia’s shameful past.
The illegal removal of Aboriginal children is one issue that needed to be acknowledged, condemned and apologies made.
The media, politicians and public talk about The Stolen Generation but it is only through the personal narratives and explanations of the history in a book such as Cameron Raynes’, The Last Protector, the illegal removal of Aboriginal children from their parents in South Australia, that we will even begin to understand and appreciate the grave injustices visited upon Australia’s indigenous population.
Reading this book made me angry, and like other books revealing Australia’s Black history, it should make other readers angry too. The Last Protector, the illegal removal of Aboriginal children from their parents in South Australia shows that even when legislation deliberately curtailed administrative power to prevent the removal of Aboriginal children from their families, the Chief Protector in South Australia flouted those laws anyway.
Cameron Raynes is a name that may be familiar to readers: he has turned his hand to fiction and his book The Colour of Kerosene and Other Stories, and his recent YA novel First Person Shooter have been offered as giveaways on this blog. But The Last Protector arises from his PhD on what the blurb calls ‘the moral subtext’ of Aboriginal oral history, and it has the imprimatur of Julian Burnside QC who wrote in the foreword:
This book is the history of a…
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Up the Creek with a pen ... 