Australia to pay hundreds of millions in reparations to Indigenous ‘stolen generations’

SYDNEY — Eileen Cummings was 4½ years old when a man pulled up in a truck at the cattle ranch where she lived in Australia’s remote Northern Territory, offering her a ride.

It was 1948 and it would be 15 years before she saw her mother again.

Between 1910 and 1970, government officials here rounded up children, especially those of mixed White and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ethnicity, and sent them to boarding schools and church-run missions. An official inquiry has estimated as many as one in three Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families nationwide.