WHEN Sue Gordon was four, in the late 1940s, the authorities took her from her aboriginal community in outback Western Australia, put her on a train to Perth and handed her over to a Christian charity home. As a mixed-race child, she grew up as one of Australia's “stolen generations” ordered to obliterate her aboriginal heritage. Now 64, and a juvenile-court judge, Ms Gordon has just finished assessing an equally controversial government takeover of aboriginal lives. And she is surprisingly impressed.

After a report in June last year revealed widespread aboriginal violence and child sexual abuse in the Northern Territory, John Howard, the former conservative prime minister, ordered police and the army to take control of 60 remote indigenous communities. Aborigines make up 29% of the federal territory's population, compared with 2% nationally. Mr Howard's measures included compulsory health checks on children, confining the spending of welfare money to food and clothes, and the suspension of the communities' rights to grant permits to visitors.

Critics at the time blasted the “emergency intervention”, as it was called, as a draconian return to the white paternalism that aborigines had fought for generations. But after visiting more than half the 73 communities eventually involved, Ms Gordon has found good progress in cutting violence and sexual abuse: alcohol and pornography have been banned, more children are going to school and police patrols have left more women feeling safer.

After Ms Gordon's report, Kevin Rudd, the Labor leader who succeeded Mr Howard in November, has undertaken to continue the A$900m ($864m) intervention exercise with another A$300m—but not indefinitely, as Mr Howard had planned. Since Mr Rudd's formal apology in February for past injustices, there is now pressure on aborigines to take advantage of the big-brother approach and secure self-reliant futures free from government.

Most of the Northern Territory communities stemmed from the land-rights movement of the 1970s, which allowed white Australia to absolve its guilt for kicking the original inhabitants off those lands. Government services did not follow the award of land, but alcohol, unemployment and social breakdown did. Ms Gordon is “aghast” at arguments that the communities should now be closed altogether and their people shipped out, just as in the bad old days. She accepts, though, that their survival can come only from developing their own economies with help from the private sector.

This is starting to happen already in resource-rich regions such as Western Australia. Andrew Forrest, whose company, Fortescue Metals, is making a fortune from that state's iron ore, has formed a trust to help mainly indigenous children. Mr Forrest told a recent forum in Kalgoorlie, a gold-mining city, that mining firms could eradicate aboriginal poverty by helping to create 250,000 jobs in the next decade. That may be optimistic. But Ms Gordon herself has set the example. She has raised almost half of the A$5m needed to buy the land where she lived in a charity home 60 years ago. She plans to build a place where she and other surviving inmates can care for each other in retirement.