Where does this fit into a folk music website?

Welcome, Greycap, and I'm pleased you're with us. The thread has "Folklore" as its descriptor and started in anticipation of the 40th anniversary of the event in the thread title. As you may have gathered from several of the earler (and even the currrent) postings, there is a gap between the popular perception of events and the documentary evidence. That gap is reasonably described, correctly, as "Folklore".

Not only that, Sandra has posted the link to "Took the Children Away", one of the better known songs and the product of one of Australia's better known songs relevant to the folklore of such behaviour. Sandra has excellent resources on such things and beat me to it; she'll also, probably, beat me to a link for "My brown baby" which deals with similar events.

While not necessarily relevant to your question I offer another couple of comments. The lead up to the 1967 referendum was an amazingly emotional and engaging event that affected even whiteys who had no "visible" contact with Aborigines or Torres Strait Islanders and the ripples from the arguments went right through the folk scene as well as the rest of society. Yesterday's "Sorry" was, across the whole country, an extraordinarily emotion-charged event and there are already stories coming out of it that will certainly become part of the country's folklore.

As an example, I met a person (a Scot) at work who had arrived in Australia 4 days ago and. although he'd had no backgrounding, was swept up by the people around him. We wondered whether we could think of any equivalent event in Britain or North America that similarly and emotionally engaged "the whole of the population during its actual occurrence." The only British examples we could think of were Churchill's wartime speeches but, although they were brilliantly effective and delivered in Parliament, the population heard about them only after the event. The only US event we could think of was Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech (on Pennsylvania Ave?) or JFK's original Inauguration speech but I have no recollection of either of these being witnessed "live" by crowds across the whole of the country. Others may be able to think of better examples but that would properly be a topic for a different thread.

The lead-ups, the events and the reactions are all, in the case of this thread's title part of Folklore.

Cheers, Rowan