FORCED TO FIGHT FOR A LIFETIME

"Do we all have to die for governments to be rid of this?"

Journalist KYLIE LANG

DORELLE Downs doesn’t want an apology for the “barbaric crime” that literally ripped her beloved son Michael from her womb and denied them 23 precious years together.

She wants action by the state government to change the statute of limitations so victims of the heinous forced adoption policy can claim compensation.

Mrs Downs, 71, is disgusted with the response of Queensland’s Attorney-General Shannon Fentiman after The Courier-Mail revealed the horror many women – and their children – have been living because of the removal practices that ran from 1951 to 1975.

Last Saturday Ms Fentiman said the government would “look at” a redress and “of course we have had an apology”, referring to the 2013 apology by then prime minister Julia Gillard to the more than 150,000 people affected.
But Mrs Downs, of Miriam Vale south of Gladstone, is sick of rhetoric.

“An apology means nothing without redress,” she said.

In March, the Victorian government committed $4m to design a redress scheme, including an immediate $500,000 hardship fund providing payments of up to $10,000 to mothers in “exceptional circumstances” such
as terminal illness or financial distress.

“If Victoria can do it, why can’t Queensland?” Mrs Downs said. “Many of these women have now passed on, some at their own hands.

Do we all have to die for governments to be rid of this?”

As it stands, Queenslanders cannot pursue compensation for forced adoption more than three years after it happened.

Mrs Downs has been fighting for more than a decade – with fellow victim Margaret Hamilton, of
Warwick – to have the statute of limitations changed.

It was in 1970 at age 19, while working as a governess at a sheep station in Quilpie in western Queensland, that Moorooka-raised Mrs Downs became pregnant.

“I called my mother and she said, ‘well, you can’t come home’; she was ashamed and worried what the neighbours would think, and I was sent to the Anglican-run St Mary’s home for unmarried mothers in Toowong. “I thought it was somewhere they’d help you look after your baby: how wrong I was.”
On August 23 of that year, Mrs Downs gave birth in the Royal Women’s Hospital in unduly painful
circumstances.

“They cut me, an episiotomy without any anaesthetic, and ripped my baby out and took him straight out of the room,” she said.
“I later found out he was a boy, with crooked little fingers like I have, and I named him
Michael.” Mrs Downs said the nurses refused to let her see her son.

She held out for 10 days in a hospital ward with mothers who’d miscarried before the pressure from social workers to sign the adoption papers became too much.

“Governments, churches and institutions lied and deceived us,” she said. “We weren’t told we had 30 days in which to revoke adoption ‘consent’.”

Traumatised, Mrs Downs moved to New Zealand in 1972 – “because I couldn’t stand to be in Australia without him” – and later adopted two children with her then husband.

“I tried several times to get Michael back,” she said. In 1993 when Mrs Downs was still trying to track down her son, Michael was also trying to find her.

“One day he called and said, ‘I think you could be my mum’. “I asked, ‘have you got crooked little fingers?’ and he said yes and I said, ‘you’re mine’.”

In 2018, Michael, now 52, successfully petitioned the Supreme Court to have the adoption order discharged, his surname reinstated to Mrs Downs’ maiden name, and for her to be recognised as his mother.

But nothing can, or ever will, replace those stolen childhood years.

“I regularly wonder how life would have been different for us both if he had not been kidnapped from the womb. It was a barbaric crime, and governments have had decades to rectify the wrongdoing.

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It hasn't been a 1 way street with these policies.

But of course that doesn't suit the victimhood narrative of other groups.

And you wonder why everyone thinks antifa are fascists.

...Yes, aboriginals stole white kids as well. 

Honestly we need all boomers to be dead, they did this and insist it was OK.

The frequent claim that Australian Aboriginal culture is the oldest continuous culture on Earth, measured at 50,000 years, is a curious one. First, it is incorrect. This title belongs to the San people, who have existed for at least 150,000 years in southern Africa. Second, it is curious that this claim is used as proof of the value of traditional Aboriginal culture. Curious indeed, since the claim, which is a claim of conservatism par excellence, is frequently made by those who themselves subscribe to a view that culture should be dynamic, embracing change, in other words progressive. The question arises of how this strange alliance between white political progressivism and indigenous cultural conservativism came to exist and how it continues.

The favourable view of indigenous peoples has been an old companion of progressive politics. It arose after the discovery of the New World, with ideas such as Rousseau’s “noble savage” fascinating the intelligentsia of his day. This fascination extended to the reading public, who developed an insatiable hunger for stories of the otherworldly virtues and vices of people untainted by civilisation, as found in, for example, Melville’s Typee and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. These texts attracted readers not only by their descriptions of a people utterly unlike those in the Old World but also as means by which these authors placed their own civilisation in a new light. To this day, this hunger for the exotic continues, albeit under conditions of severe scarcity—those untainted by civilisation only exist in isolated pockets and the people once featured in those famous novels adopted modern lifestyles long ago.

I am a Nazi