Took the Children Away

Archie Roach was two or three years old when government agencies took him and his brothers and sisters from their family and placed them in an orphanage. He was one of the Stolen Generations, Aboriginal children forcibly removed under a policy that ran from about 1905 into the 1970s. After two unhappy foster placements he was raised by Alex and Dulcie Cox, Scottish immigrants in Melbourne, whose daughter taught him guitar. At fifteen he was contacted by his sister Myrtle, who told him their mother had just died, and he spent the next fourteen years on the streets. In the late 1980s, living in Melbourne with his partner Ruby Hunter, Roach wrote his first song at the urging of the elder Henry "Uncle Banjo" Clark. It told his own story in the first person. He sang it on community radio and an Indigenous current affairs program, and early in 1989 Paul Kelly invited him to open a concert. The audience met the song with stunned silence, then shattering applause. With Kelly's encouragement it became the centrepiece of Roach's 1990 debut album, Charcoal Lane. It won the first Human Rights Achievement Award ever given to a songwriter, and it arrived just as the country was beginning to look hard at what had been done. Roach later sang for the Human Rights Commission's inquiry into the Stolen Generations. In 2013 the song entered the National Film and Sound Archive's Sounds of Australia registry, a lasting record of a truth Australia had long kept quiet.