THE "stolen generations" myth has made us leave Aboriginal children to be bashed, raped and killed. In fact, it's hurt more children than were ever proved stolen just for being Aboriginal.

I've often been told mine is a "racist" position, but perhaps the deniers will at least listen to Adam Giles.

Giles rejects being racially typecast as the "first indigenous Chief Minister" of the Northern Territory, but his heritage does license him to say what desperately needs saying.

He says he's astonished only one Aboriginal child in the NT has been adopted in the past decade.

"You mean to tell me when we've got all these alleged cases of chronic child sexual abuse, children running around on petrol, going on the streets at night sexualising themselves in some circumstances, and there's only one permanent adoption, for fear of Stolen Generation? That is not standing up for kids."

That, he says, must change.

The worst about Giles' comments is that they're called "controversial" by the media.

"Controversial?" Taking a raped child to safety and giving them a loving home is controversial? Shouldn't it be controversial to leave them?

Apparently no, which is why the "stolen generations" theory is deadly.

The "stolen generations" were best defined by Professor Robert Manne: Children of "mixed-descent" rescued "not from harm ... but from their Aboriginality" by authorities who wished "to help keep White Australia pure".

Many activists put the number of these "stolen" children at 100,000 since 1910. Manne later estimated 25,000.

I've repeatedly challenged Manne and other activists to name just 10 such children. No one has managed. Manne tried three times, but produced cases that didn't fit his own definition - even children evacuated in war-time from areas threatened by Japanese bombing.

In his last list he included the 167 children rescued between 1900 and 1905 by the Queensland Protector, Walter Roth.

But those cases included a fatherless 12-year-old girl with syphilis, a 13-year-old who was seven months pregnant and working on a station for no wages and a boy who was chained in a backyard by white employers when he was "bad".

Were such children really "stolen" to "breed out the colour"? Was it not true of them as it was of Aboriginal educator Nancy Barnes, who wrote of being raised in South Australia's Colebrook Home and declared: "We are referred to as the 'stolen generations'. I consider myself saved."

But although we don't know of 10 stolen children, we do know of many victims of the myth. A decade ago the Victorian Government was told child abuse involving Aboriginal children had soared, but the Community Services Minister responded: "The solution is not to continue to take disproportionately high numbers of Koori children into care ... "

That's right. Remove fewer of them ...

The New South Wales Child Death Review Team found this same fear of removing Aboriginal children from danger.

It investigated why Aboriginal children of drug addicts were 10 times more likely to die under the noses of welfare officers than were children of white addicts and blamed the "stolen generations".

"A history of inappropriate intervention with Aboriginal families should not lead now to an equally inappropriate lack of intervention for Aboriginal children at serious risk."

PERHAPS the most ghastly case occurred in 2006, when social workers removed an Aboriginal girl from her loving, but white, foster family, saying the family was repeating the stolen generations. The girl, who'd been pack-raped at seven, was returned to her community at Aurukun and was pack-raped again.

How many more horror stories do you want?

In 2007, welfare officers found a 12-year-old girl crying on the floor of her Darwin home, but were told by her (part-Aboriginal) foster carers she was scared she'd be taken away.

So they left her. She died the next day in the dirt outside with a litre and a half of pus in her leg, covered with ants and hallucinating about "fairies in the trees".

In 2003, five-month-old Mundine Orcher died in Brewarrina after what the coroner called a "systematic attack" while in the care of relatives - and a day after a Department of Community Services officer dropped off a fridge and washing machine.

A DoCS report had advised that the "indigenous community needs to be treated, in child protection terms, with constant sensitivity to the historical impact of ... the stolen generations".

But the Ombudsman warned such concerns could easily overshadow the needs of the child.

It is ghastly. I can name more dead children, betrayed by the "stolen generations" myth than Manne can name children truly stolen.

So praise Giles for saying what needs saying - and hope it's said by someone who might finally be heard.

Originally published as Why this man must be heard