How Did The Stolen Generation Affect Australia

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The Stolen Generations is one of the most infamous events in Australia's history. It was a time of grief and suffering for Indigenous Australians. Young Indigenous children and babies were stolen from their families by the Australian Government in an effort to breed out the Indigenous race. To this day families of the Stolen Generations are still affected by this traumatic period.

The effects the Stolen Generations had on Indigenous Australians were very bad, not only for the people who were stolen, but their families as well. According to the website Creative Spirits, when the people who were stolen grew up, they had trouble starting their own families because they were separated from their parents at such a young age and didn't know how to be a parent. They had issues trusting people because they didn't have their family to trust, for example Aboriginal elder Prof Lowitja O’Donhoghue has a tendency to hold something of herself back from everyone but a selected few. Having been brought up in an institution she never had a family in the
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Bill Simon who was taken at the age of ten, says that many boys suffered from depression because they were told by the government workers and their foster families that their parents were dead, even though they weren’t (Source: Creative Spirits). According to Creative Spirits the young Indigenous Australians also suffered from loneliness. They were never with their families and they couldn’t make friends because they were treated terribly by everyone. They also had low self esteem because the people who were supposed to take care of them treated the them like dirt and they didn’t have their parents to give them confidence about themselves. These are just some of the many mental effects the Stolen Generations had on the Indigenous people of