Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows Rosie Fraser, a member of the Stolen Generations, talking about her life. She recalls meeting her sister Beverley for the first time since they were separated in early childhood. Photographs of Rosie’s wedding and of her four children are shown as Rosie explains that her uncertainty about her identity led her to search for and find her birth mother. Their tearful reunion is re-enacted, and Rosie talks about her continuing pain. She says it is still painful for her to talk about these issues.

Educational value points

• Rosie describes the continuing effects on her life of being removed from her Indigenous family by the Western Australian Child Welfare Department in 1961 and made a ward of the state at the age of 2. Despite her awareness of her achievements in her own marriage and family, Rosie speaks about her ongoing struggle to come to terms with her feelings of loss, sadness and disconnection as a result of being removed from her family.

• The clip highlights the emotional effects of separation on all family members by using close-ups of anguished faces and the sobbing of the mother and daughters when they are reunited. The pain is shared by each of them and Rosie says that the reunion does not remove the pain. She says that she and her mother ‘can never have a proper mother and daughter relationship’, although she cares very deeply for her mother. The image of a fence reflects the barrier Rosie describes.

• The clip stresses the importance of identity in the life of a child who was removed. Rosie reflects on what she had achieved in her life by 1979, the year that she decided to search for her parents. She says that at the age of 21 she had already had four children and that the love, affection and trust within her marriage had grown. However, she says ‘part of me was still missing’. She says that her search for her parents was because she ‘wanted to know in some way who I was’.

• Footage of a contemporary interview with Rosie Fraser is combined with re-enactments and photographs of past events to bring her story to life on the screen. The film’s director Debbie Carmody uses these techniques to allow the viewer to enter into Rosie’s world in an intimate way and through her story to better understand the experiences of the Stolen Generations. The film from which the clip is taken is called Rosie and relates to Rosalie Fraser’s book Shadow Child (1999).