The Stolen Generations: How Child Removal Became Law in Australia

For tens of thousands of years, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples raised children within complex kinship systems grounded in land, law, and community. This video traces the origins of the Stolen Generations — not from the moment children were taken en masse, but from the ideas, assumptions, and laws that made removal possible. Beginning before British colonisation in 1788, we follow the gradual shift from coexistence to control, from informal interference to formal legislation. Through missions, protection boards, and early child welfare laws, Indigenous families were stripped of authority over their own children — often without consent, explanation, or legal recourse. By the early twentieth century, child removal was no longer an exception. It was a system.