Most Australians know about the Stolen Generation. The current Sydney Theatre Company production of the play Stolen shows very effectively how intergenerational trauma was felt not only by the children who were taken but by their parents, grandparents and wider kinship group, and how that pain and grief rarely subsided throughout a lifetime.
Stolen depicts the stories of Jimmy, Ruby, Shirley, Sandy, and Anne: five members of the Stolen Generations whose lives are drastically altered by their experiences in a social and political system that sought to erase their cultural identity.
Their stories are based on real-life accounts told to Muruwari playwright Jane Harrison. Five talented Indigenous actors enact the 19th /20th century policy, in which those in power took at least 10,000 mostly lighter-skinned children and inserted them in white society, with the aim of making the Aboriginal race die out.
Watching the tragic stories depicted in this play, it is frankly unbelievable that colonisers were allowed to remove Indigenous children from their parents “for their own good”. But it was not only permitted – it was enshrined in law that they should.
Some of those children forgot their birth parents entirely and were traumatised when their family truth was revealed, some never forgot their birth family and could not adjust to life without them. Many were physically and sexually abused in children’s homes, others were ‘employed’ as unpaid servants to white families, while their mothers, fathers and other family members strove to believe that their kin had been given a better life in white society.
As one character bluntly states: “They say time heals but that’s a load of bullshit. No-one’s ever called me ‘Mum’.”
The five actors in this play do a brilliant job within a set that comprises a huge iron bed of the kind you might find in a children’s home, a giant filing cabinet representative of the bureaucracy involved in the enactment of the policy and a large pile of suitcases that heartbreakingly brought to mind a similar pile of discarded valises on display in what is now the Auschwitz Museum in Poland.
In the case of many of the stolen children, there was not even the opportunity to pack a bag as they were abducted on their way to school or pulled from their hiding place whenever the ironically named ‘Welfare’ came calling.
As one boy who was just two when he was ‘stolen’, distressingly says: “I waited and waited for my mum to come take me home. I was just a little tacker.”
Written in 1997, this production of Stolen is sensitively directed by Wilman Noongar man, Ian Michael. Having been performed all over the world, it remains a moving piece of theatre that perhaps every Australian should see.
At its conclusion, after playing part of Kevin Rudd’s 2008 ‘Sorry speech’, the stage is strewn with a simple banner: “Sorry means you don’t do it again.”
Stolen
Sydney Theatre Company
Until 6 July, 2024
