 Official government estimates are that in certain regions between one in ten and one in three Indigenous Australian children were forcibly taken from their families and communities between 1910 and 1970.Numerous 19th and early 20th-century contemporaneous documents indicate that the policy of removing mixed-race Aboriginal children from their mothers related to an assumption that the Aboriginal peoples were dying off.Given their catastrophic population decline after white contact, whites assumed that the full-blood tribal Aboriginal population would be unable to sustain itself, and was doomed to extinction.