How has Jane Harrison used Stolen as her vehicle for promoting her ideas about social justice?
Jeremiah Joseph Ms Townend Page of
Stolen, by Jane Harrison, is written to educate people as to how the Stolen Generation affected Aboriginal’s lives. Harrison uses several methods to portray typical paths through life that Aboriginal children of the Stolen Generation faced. Therefore it is imperative to examine Harrison’s use of characters, style, action and setting description as her vehicle for promoting her ideas about social justice. These are that every person should be treated equally.
The Stolen Generation is a term used to describe children of Aboriginal descent that were forcibly removed from their Indigenous Aboriginal families by Australian governments throughout the late 19th century and the early 20th century. Their removal was part of a plan to integrate half Aboriginal and half European children into European society. Social Justice is the equal division of human rights and opportunities between race, gender and religion. Harrison integrates these two to show the inequalities experienced by families and their children during the Stolen Generation.
Harrison uses setting frequently throughout the play as symbols for the things that Aboriginal children of the Stolen Generation face throughout their lives. During the play, each character carries a suitcase with them as Harrison employs this to emphasise the “baggage” (line 7 Pg x) that the Aboriginal children of the Stolen Generation had to carry with them throughout their lives. The five main characters of the play also sing children’s songs as each of the children come back from their outing on the weekend. This emphasises the children’s age at the beginning of the play and their loss of culture and identity as the play progresses. Harrison uses this to show how the children coped with abuse and she incorporates darker themes within the lyrics as the play progresses, “What did he do to ya? / I promised not to tell” (lines 12 – 13 Pg 15). This further highlights the children’s loss of innocence. Harrison also uses these songs to highlight Aboriginal culture, emphasising that it is impossible to erase. Furthermore, the ringing of the bell in Stolen underlines how strict, and in some cases brutal, children of the Stolen Generation were treated when adopted or fostered into European homes. Similarly the hospital beds present in the play signified the regimented way in which the children were treated, as each hospital bed does not allow you to move inside of it. The beds were also moved throughout the performance to show each of the children did not have a place to rest; they were always on the move. The fact that the beds were moved throughout the whole performance was a message to show how Aboriginal’s of the Stolen Generation never had a place that feels like home. Finally, Harrison uses a filing cabinet as an authoritative message to illustrate how the documents controlling the children’s lives were not available to the children. This highlights how most Indigenous Aboriginals were almost always kept in the dark about their biological, Aboriginal families. This shows that even in this day many Aboriginal people still have not been able to regain lost information about family members. This illustrates the beginnings of what the children of the Stolen Generation had to face.
