🎧 Chapter 2 – Part 2: Missions, Mistrust & The Stolen Generation

Francis reveals the machinery behind Australia's cultural disintegration of Aboriginal life: the missions, the forced removals, and the Assimilation Policy that created the Stolen Generations. We hear how children were taken from their families — often under the guise of help — and raised in white-run institutions, forbidden to speak their language or connect to their ancestry.

With quiet power, Francis recounts the deeply personal and cultural impact of this era. He explains how mixed-race children were targeted most, separated from their mothers by force, while stories of desperate families hiding children or disguising them in tar bring the reality into sharp focus. Francis shares how his own family escaped that fate — thanks to his mother’s whiteness and his father’s bush skills — but the trauma remained all around him.

Through memory and testimony, this episode offers a window into a silenced war of assimilation, challenging listeners to see beyond the myth of peaceful settlement and confront the painful truth of how Aboriginal cultures were dismantled from the inside out.