Genealogical Reconstruction & Stolen Generations: Healing The Fractures Of The 1905 Aborigines Act

1. The Legislative Machinery of Family Destruction

The enactment of the Aborigines Act 1905 (WA) established one of the most draconian legislative systems of racial surveillance and forced family separation in modern history.^[1] Section 8 of the statute declared the Chief Protector of Aborigines to be the legal guardian of every Aboriginal child in Western Australia to the exclusion of their natural parents, continuing until the age of sixteen or twenty-one.^[2] Under this absolute statutory mandate, Chief Protector A.O. Neville executed a systematic policy of biological absorption and social engineering. Police officers, acting as 'Protectors', forcibly removed thousands of Bibbullmun infants and children from their families, destroying birth records and transporting them to state-run settlements such as Moore River and Carrolup.^[3]

2. Archival Violence & The Erasure of Moort Lineages

The institutional machinery of the 1905 Act inflicted severe archival violence upon Bibbullmun genealogy.^[4] In departmental registries, children's ancestral names were replaced with colonial numbers or generic European surnames, while mother-child connections were systematically obfuscated in official files to prevent parents from tracking down their stolen offspring.^[5] Letters written by desperate mothers pleading for the return of their sons and daughters were confiscated and filed away unanswered in departmental archives.^[6] This bureaucratic secrecy severed ancient Moort (kinship) knowledge, creating widespread intergenerational dislocation and fracturing sacred custodial links to clan estates (kalla-boodja).^[7]

3. Community-Driven Genealogical Reconstruction & Archival Justice

In response to this generational erasure, Bibbullmun families and Indigenous archival scholars are leading monumental genealogical reconstruction projects.^[8] Working through community organisations and specialized archival units, researchers conduct forensic investigations across state archives, baptismal registers, mission files, and police station journals.^[9] By cross-referencing colonial paper trails with surviving elder oral histories and private family photograph albums, researchers piece together severed family trees, restoring lost kinship lineages and reuniting long-lost branches of the Stolen Generations.^[10]

4. Archival Justice as the Foundation of Sovereignty

Genealogical reconstruction is not merely a personal healing journey; it is a foundational pillar of sovereign nation-rebuilding.^[11] In modern native title proceedings and regional corporation governance, demonstrating biological descent from an ancestral owner who lived at the time of British sovereignty is an absolute legal prerequisite. By reconstructing their family lineages, Bibbullmun descendants defeat the settler state's historical attempts at biological assimilation, proving continuous demographic and custodial survival across two centuries of colonial assault.^[12]