On the tape an Aboriginal mother pleads through sobs for the chance to breastfeed her baby over the weekend. “We’ll see what we can do,” a caseworker tells her. The mother’s appeals give way to plaintive weeping as the officers’ voices grow distant. The baby’s cries grow distant, too, as the child is taken with them. The recording, made secretly on a phone one recent Friday in a rural New South Wales home, makes plain what former prime minister Kevin Rudd said on the separation of children from their parents: “The sheer brutality of the act of physically separating a mother from her children is a deep assault on our senses and on our most elemental humanity.”
via The next Stolen Generation | The Saturday Paper.
via The next Stolen Generation | The Saturday Paper.
