May 2025 marks the 30th anniversary of the establishment of the national inquiry into the forcible removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families.

Conducted by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, the inquiry’s final report was called Bringing Them Home. It demonstrated the extent and trauma of First Nations child removal practices across Australia over more than a century.

Our archival research paints a dramatic picture of how the Howard government set out to minimise the impact of the report, despite the genuine outpouring of national grief.

The 1990s in Australia was marked by an unprecedented national focus on the impact of colonisation on Indigenous Australians. This was part of a global trend using truth-seeking models to examine contemporary and historical injustices.

The decade included a number of landmark events:

The establishment of a human rights inquiry investigating the Stolen Generations in 1995 promised a reckoning with this largely unknown history.

However, the election of the Howard government in 1996 had an immediate effect on the nation’s trajectory towards “coming to terms” with its past.

After some early resistance, cabinet eventually agreed to make a whole-of-government submission, broadly outlining its Indigenous affairs priority:

to address current disadvantage in health,........

© The Conversation