Were the “stolen generations” really stolen?

Keith Windschuttle says “no”. Roger Sandall reviews the third volume in Windschuttle’s The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. Sandall indicates one of the reasons why it is important to know the truth:

It is disagreeable reading about frontier conditions on the outskirts of ranches and remote country towns, about the alcoholism and violence, the promiscuity and disease, the child abuse. But it is essential to set down these things, precisely because the regiment of academics who created the myth of Australia’s Stolen Children try hard not to mention them. In their eyes it is tasteless and insensitive to do so—and no doubt much else besides. Yet these pathologies are the blindingly obvious reason for child removal. Not racism. Not cultural genocide. These horrors constitute the suppressio veri that requires the complementary suggestio falsi of “racism” to explain why children were separated from their parents. Their suppression also constitutes the lie at the heart of the so-called Stolen Generations.