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Mr X
123 Fake Street
Hillsville
Ph. (12)34567891
1/2/3456
The Editor,
A Newspaper,

Dear Sir/Madam,
Between 1910 and 1970, according to the Bringing Them Home Report, at least 100,000 Aboriginal children were taken forcibly or under constraint from their families by police or welfare officers. The majority of these children were less than 5 years old. There was rarely any legal process. To be Aboriginal was enough to be taken. These people are recognized as the ‘Stolen Generation’. The main purpose of taking them was to ‘assimilate’ Aboriginal children into European society over one or two generations by denying and destroying their Aboriginality.

One view was that the principle of the various laws relating to the removal of Aboriginal children from their parents arose from a practical need to give protection for neglected, abused or abandoned mixed-descent children. It asserted that mixed-descent children were not wanted or welcome in some Aboriginal groups and communities, for example, in the 1920s, a report by Baldwin Spencer made it known that many mixed-descent children born during construction of The Ghan railway were abandoned at early ages with no one to provide for them. This incident and others spurred the need for state action to provide for and protect such children.
Although the stated aim of the "resocialisation" programme was to improve the integration of Aboriginal people into modern society, a study conducted in Melbourne and cited in the official report found that there was no tangible improvement in the social position of "removed" Aborigines as compared to "non-removed", particularly in the areas of employment and post-secondary education. Most notably, the study indicated that removed Aboriginal people were actually less likely to have completed a secondary education, three times as likely to have acquired a police record and were twice as likely to use...