Where did the ideas come from for Angela?
Angela was written six years after “Gracey”. Again, I never intended to keep the story going. However, when the report about the “stolen” generation was published, I took a special interest. One afternoon, I heard Sir Ronald Wilson on the radio. He described what had happened as genocide. I was very angry to hear him say this. Genocide is what the Nazis did to Jewish people and what Pol Pot did in Cambodia. That wasn’t what happened in Australia, surely. I obtained a copy of the report “Bringing Them Home” and read it. This led me to read another report titled, “For the Benefit of the Child,” about what was done in NSW. After reading these, I had to admit that Sir Ronald was right. It was government policy to see the aborigines and their culture die out in this country and they wanted to speed up the process by separating the children from their parents so that this “inferior” culture could not be passed on. In some cases, children were taken away by force. In others, they were relucta
