When Australia was colonized in 1788, the Aboriginal people had their land, culture, and heritage taken from them. The Aborigines were not only stripped of their land and rights but were also abused and discriminated. Since then there have been many attempts by the white population to address the problems that indigenous people faced in our society. Many attempts underwent such as reconciliation, affirmative action, mandatory sentencing, the development of indigenous legal rights, and the Stolen Generation. These were just some of the many successful and unsuccessful attempts that took place in Australia over the last century. Success in these efforts refers to whether or not the policy or action made a positive influence or difference to the indigenous people of Australia. There has been some success in these attempts to address indigenous problems. However, many of the policies and actions, while having positive goals in mind, turned out to be unsuccessful and detrimental to the indigenous community.
One of the first ever attempts to address some of the problems indigenous people faced was in the form of policy, which nowadays is known as the Stolen Generation. Australian governments, as a practice and as a policy, removed part-Aboriginal children from their mothers, parents, families and communities, often by force. In around 60 years, over 100,000 Aboriginal children were taken from their families. Some of these children were taken at birth, some at two years of age, some in their childhood years. The babies and children were sent either to special purpose institutions, or in later years especially, to foster homes. In the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century, the educated opinion in Australia was generally that the full-blood tribal Aborigine represented a dying race, doomed in the fullness of time to extinction. .
To help the Aborigine race survive, Aboriginal children were taken from their parents and transferred into the white society to grow up in.
